---

“Why can’t we intervene?” The redheaded woman asked her sisters. “Why could we transform the meanness and cruelty into beauty, but be helpless to do anything for this poor innocent creature?” She pleaded desperately, as if she knew the poor child. Orla…from the west; the emotion of the moment overtook her

Her emotion was nearly mirrored by her sister Fiona…from the south…whose passion and creativity sought a solution that was not forthcoming.

The older woman looked down at the sleeping girl and then at her sisters and simply said,

‘An imbalance of power….It was magic that changed the evil man into something good; it always works that way.” She smiled gently at the newest member of their group before looking to the girl below, who had awoken and was weeping into her pillow once again. Calleigh...from the north…she understood the wisdom of the moment...

“But why not her, why not this poor hopeless child?” The fourth woman asked, her own weeping echoing the sad girl's sobbing. Maired…newly from the east…innocent and trusting.

The older woman looked upon the sad girl before urging her sisters to depart, while pointing to the girl on the bed one last time, saying,

“Because this, my dear sweet sisters, is real life.”

---

Four women stood together outside the house where the girl still slept.

Only moments before, the women wept in frustration over the poor girl's sad tears. Calleigh, the oldest looked at her sisters, and her expression changed, as if she had remembered something long forgotten, but really had in her mind all along.

She looked back; the sun’s rays illuminating the sky; its warmth slowly replacing the glare of the streetlight, as if hope had begun to rise.

"Come, dear sweet sisters, we have work to do." She smiled softly with a smile that says, "I know something that you do not, but it isn't a secret; I just have been around long enough to learn this." She looked again at her sisters, who were rapidly diminishing in size. The glow to their clothing was replaced by ordinary shadows and contrast as the fabric of their dresses grew opaque, losing their shimmer.

"What other tasks await us, Calleigh?" Orla, the redhead faced the oldest of the quartet, who appeared to be in her thirties, despite the centuries between that moment and the moment of her birth. "Who can we help, now that this child is beyond our care?"

"Yes, said Maired, the newest member of the four, innocent and wide-eyed, no longer encumbered by doubt and illusion. While "he" had been cynical and sarcastic, she was filled instead with wonder and awe. "If we can't help her, can we at least do something? Maybe sing a song through her window to dry her tears?"

Maired had already begun to understand something important, even if she didn't know she understood. While they couldn't change things for the poor creature who awoke with tear-stained cheeks; they could at least provide comfort.

"We will sing, dear little one, but not now. Soon we will sing, and it won't just be for comfort, but in joy and hope."

"I don't understand," Orla said. "What could possibly bring this poor girl joy if we cannot?"

"Orla, sweet dear Orla, it isn't our place to bring her joy, that is the place of others. We simply do what we can to help those of her race to find it in themselves to help her." Calleigh smiled wisely, remembering when she was new, a babe as it were, feeling that power must be the key. She discovered, and would help her sisters understand that it was not power, but love and compassion and understanding that transformed the hidden into knowledge; weakness into strength, and the doubt and sadness into hope.

"Then what is our part," the newest sister said, wanting so much not to seem too eager, but her enthusiasm was contagious and wonderful, prompting her older sisters to reply in kind, "Yes, what can we do?"

"We, my sweet dear sisters, wait and pray and nudge and suggest and urge those who can help to choose to do so. We are four, and they are four as well. Three love this girl so much that it will just be a matter of direction and guidance.

"Orla, there is a girl who is friends with this child...she needs your help in order to be a help herself. She will need you to show her she can make a difference for her friend, even if it is at the peril of losing her own love for the girl."

"Fiona, you must remind the man who has been a help not to give up, for it his his passion to see this child succeed that will in turn give him what he needs to help her."

"As for me, I know that the one who loves her most feels the most helpless, and she will need to know that her own wisdom is what will give this child courage."

"You, Maired,' she said to the newest, "have the hardest task of all, that of helping the fourth understand, so that he can become better even as he learns to love and accept this girl for who she really is. You, of all of us, will understand and will have the hardest task, since that person who needs to help this girl is the person you once were and shall again become."

Fiona and Orla looked at the oldest in shock, almost horrified that their newest sister would return to her former form, robbed of the chance of immortal service to the lost and hopeless, deprived of the joy of living beyond mortal life to see countless others receive hope. Calleigh looked at them and said simply,

"We must hurry; there is no time to lose.

Maired looked at her sisters, blinking out tears, but the change in her heart already had brought her acceptance of the task at hand and the enormity and responsibility placed upon her shoulders. She wept, but not out of sorrow; she wept from relief and a new-found sense of purpose.

Her form began to change even as they wept with her, and in a moment, Maired no longer stood in their midst, but instead the man who had been transformed the night before. In place of the powerful but gentle woman, a man, nervous but still relieved, given a second chance. A young man...one who only days before had been the first one to shout and tease and curse the poor girl; her own brother Michael

'What about the balance, what do we do to restore that?" Fiona asked, nervous over the possibilities.

"Another will take her place, do not worry, all is as it should be."

---

She woke with a start, fearful as she was every morning. Her door was closed, and no one would know how she had fallen asleep after a fitful night, wearing the nightgown she had found in the box under the stairs. She treasured it so, although one might wonder why. Her mother, wanting to be a liberated woman, had decided quite on her own that she didn’t need a father’s help to raise her child, and she never told her boyfriend about the baby she had carried alone.

The girl rose from her bed and walked into her bathroom. She looked in the mirror, once again expecting something different, as if Shaylee or Eolande, the fairies her aunt told her about when she was small might have come in the night to grant her a wish. “No change,” she thought sadly as she got dressed for the day. The mint-green night gown was replaced by a tee shirt and jeans. The hair was pulled back and the face scrubbed for the day, revealing not Maura or Sinead or even Shawn, but Padraic, or Patrick, as her mother named her. Her name, a name she almost despised, was pretty much all that her mother had left her, abandoning her and her brother Mike to the care of her Aunt Breena.

A knock came at the door.

“Paddy, are you decent, love?” Breena’s voice came from the hallway.

“Sure, Aunt Breena, just a sec.” The bathroom door opened and in place of the girl who had cried herself to sleep the night before, a boy stood facing his aunt.

“Now I want you to promise me somethin,’ darlin’ Will you come to me when the teasin’ gets like it did yesterday.” Breena had overheard Michael, Paddy’s brother, repeating all the nasty insults that the boys in the neighborhood had yelled as they stood in the alleyway the previous day. Michael was almost as bad as his friends when it came to insults, but it hurt beyond hope since he was family.

---

Outside the house, three women stood next to a young man; handsome and imposing, but nervous and sad.

‘You’ll be fine…you’re among your kind now, dear, never forget that.” Calleigh reminded Michael that he was no longer the man he had been the night before. Today was a new day and he had been blessed with the wisdom that persuades and convinces softly, kindly, to bring him to a place where he’d never imagined he’d ever be; to a life he never thought twice about living. No longer cruel and uncaring, he was now kind and understanding.

The task before him was daunting, since in order to convince his family he had really changed, he would have to change on the outside. In order for Paddy to believe that Michael understood he would have to endure the same taunts and cruel treatment that only days before he had given Paddy.

He’d have to become a girl. Not with magic, but by standing alongside his brother as the two became sisters together. Easy enough to manage in an instant with a spell and deep magic; quite another to manage with nothing but imagination, some clothes, and a new-found love for his baby…sister.

Next: A Nervous Day