Eye of the Beholder

This is my response to the six sentence word prompt of MUNDANE, by girlontheedge. We have returned to Faerie this week, where the fickle nature of the Fae is shown, when they choose to give Casey exactly what she wants. Poor Casey.

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When Casey stepped into the ring of mushrooms and demanded visitations, she crossed into another world where she had experienced wonders beyond compare; she seen the greenest of all grasses, waterfalls that ran in rainbows, and flowers so beautiful that there were not words to describe them.

When she returned, finding only seconds had passed, she had believed that she had been given the gift she had so rightly deserved. Her art went from average, to extraordinary, as buyers lined up for a chance to bid on her glimpses into the strange new world she nonsensically called “Otherland”. They called her a visionary, and her contemporaries wondered how she could so easily let go of such extraordinary work, as it was said she didn’t keep a single one for herself.

No one saw the toll it was taking, as she frantically filled canvas after canvas, trying to recreate something that hovered just out of reach at the very edges of her memories. She mixed palate after palate, but could never quite recreate the colors she had seen, this world lacking the pigmentation required, and each time she finished and saw the pale imitation she had created, she wanted it out of her sight immediately, it’s very presence mocking her in her failure.

What at first had seemed a gift, now seemed a curse, torturing her for her arrogance, leaving her longing for a place she could not return to, and now unable to see anything but dull lifelessness in the mundane world that surrounded her.