A Modest Suggestion

Several months had passed since Esmerelda had found herself unceremoniusly stranded in a valley that the residents called Rivendell. The wider world around it was apparently called Middle Earth. Esmerelda refered to the entire piece of real estate as Coma Country. She was quite certain that she had suffered a severe blow to the head, undoubtedly at the hands of one of the juvenile delinquents who attended South Central. The only thing that kept her sane was the dogged belief that one day she would awaken in a hospital bed with a rat's nest of tubes and wires attached to her. Until then, she had to keep herself occupied somehow and the local inhabitants were the only available form of entertainment.

Esmerelda was, in a perverse way, rather proud of her Coma World. It proved her to be in possession of something she despaired of ever having; an imagination.

Rivendell was populated by a race of beings with pointed ears who called themselves elves and who claimed to be immortal. They were were uniformly tall, willowy and preternaturally beautiful.

Esmerelda attributed the oddly shaped ears to a residual memory of Vulcans and blamed it on being forced to watch too much Star Trek as a child. Her father and brother had always claimed that the stories interested them, but Esmerelda had noted that they both focused on the small screen the most when a scantily clad, green-skinned dancing girl was performing.

The leader of this particular enclave was a gentleman of the pointy-eared persuasion known as Master Elrond Half Elven. He and his wife, Celebrian, their twin sons, Elladan and Elrohir and their daughther Arwen behaved the way that nobility were supposed to behave in all of the fairy tales that Esmerelda had never believed. They were kind, gentle, and displayed a genuine concern for each and every onel of their subjects.

This attitude was also shared by the high ranking advisers, all of whom had pointed ears, all of whom were unbelievably good looking and none of whom appeared to be married. This in spite of a bevy of beautiful, eternally young, pointed eared women who followed them around with wistful expressions.

Everyone was uniformly courteous to Esmerelda as well as to each other, but all of them, from the lowliest of stablehands to Master Elrond Half Elven himself, held an air of everlasting, indefinable sadness.

From her mortal perspective, Esmerelda found this melacholy difficult to comprehend; how could any group of people who had so much going for them could be unhappy? It was not until she had a better grasp of the language that she learned the reasons for it. By dint of much effort and much patient teaching by the inhabitants of Rivendell, she picked up the local language. It was vaguely reminiscent of Welsh.

Life in Coma Country remained peaceful and idyllic until the day Esmerelda made the mistake of asking Master Elrond Half Elven why he was referred to as being half elven instead of one quarter elven or simply elven.

The resulting explanation, which began when the sun was a quarter of the way to its zenith, lasted the entire day. It involved a dizzying number of people, many of whose names began with the syllable Fin. Esmerelda had very quickly become hopelessly lost in the maze of names, dates and events. But Master Elrond Half Elven had been so serious and sincere in his explanation that she did not have the heart to interrupt him. So she made use of the technique she had perfected when cornered by Andrew Fortinbras, the drama teacher at South Central. She smiled slightly, nodded vaguely and half listened for her name while Elrond droned on and on.

It was not until the sun had set and the moon rose high in the sky that Celebrian thought to rescue her.

"Husband, the hour is late. Our guest needs her rest."

Elrond looked around him, surprised that so much time had passed. He apologised to Esmerelda and bade her a good night.

"Please come to bed?" Celebrian asked him without much hope.

"Not tonight," he told her softly as Esmerelda passed them by. "I will study the stars."

Esmerelda noted the disappointment in Celebrian's eyes and the stern set of her jaw and quickly made her way to her own room.


One thing had been made plain to Esmerelda from the long, unlooked for history lesson; there had once been many, many more elves that there were now. It was obvious that most of them were long since dead, slain in some battle ages ago. For whatever reason, they had never replenished their numbers. As a practical person and a biology teacher, she could not quite understand this, although the brief encounter between Elrond and Celebrian that she witnessed gave her a clue. With nothing better to occupy her time, Esmerelda was quite determined to discover the reasons for it.

As this was not the sort of subject that lent itself to casual, everyday discussion, she had to wait until one of her hosts broached it. This finally happened on a winter's evening. Master Elrond, Celebrian and their advisers Glorfindel and Erestor, were in a sitting room. Esmerelda followed them, uninvited. She pulled a chair close to the fire and listened to them speaking in sad, serious voices of events in the outside world.

"There is no doubt that our time here will soon pass and the humans will supplant us entirely, " Master Elrond sighed, his voice heavy with resignation.

"It has already begun," Erestor agreed in the same tone.

"It began long ago," Glorfindel corrected him.

"Excuse me, but why must that be?" Esmerelda heard herself asking.

Four pointy-eared heads slowly turned to face her as though they had been unaware of her presence in the room until the instant she had spoken.

"Because it is the way of things." Elrond finally broke the uncomfortable silence. "The time of the elves will soon be over. We will pass into the West and leave Middle Earth to the Second Born."

"But why is it the way of things?" Esmerelda questioned. When they all looked at her blankly she got to her feet and began to pace before the fire the way she did when delivery a biology lesson. "You're immortal. You seem to be gifted with boundless strength and energy. Why don't you simply have more children?"

The men contrived to look utterly confounded, as though this had never occurred to them until she had mentioned it. Celebrian, on the other hand, seemed to be holding her breath. Her beautiful face was utterly still, a terrible anticipation barely hidden below her outwardly serene expression.

"But that would require...certain...interactions between men and women," Glorfindel said dubiously.

"Oh for pity's sake!" Esmerelda cried. "Have you looked in the mirror lately? Even if you haven't how could you have failed to notice the small troop of hopeful females who follow you around? I imagine there are two or three of them waiting in the hallway as we speak. Go and pick one and get to it. Go on. Out!"

Glorfindel blinked and looked to Elrond for support. The Master of Rivendell nodded briefly towards the door, his expression one of deep contemplation.

By the time he left the room, a small smile had made its way onto Glorfindel's face. Once he had recovered from the initial shock, the idea seemed to hold a certain attraction for him.

Back in the familiar territory of issuing orders, Esmerelda rounded on Elrond. "Well? You have less of an excuse than he did. Why are you still here?"

"We were just leaving, weren't we, dear?" Celebrian purred. Grasping Elrond's arm, she pulled her faintly smiling husband from the room. Watching them go, Esmerelda was vaguely reminded of a cat dragging its prey somewhere private to devour it.

Their departure left Esmerelda alone with Erestor. Celebrian's performance unnerved the prim and proper biology teacher. The wind had left her imperious sails.

"Well," she said. "I believe I will call it a night."

Much to her dismay, the dark haired elf followed her into the hallway.

"May I escort you to your room?" he asked solicitously.

"No. I know the way," Esmerelda said, picking up her pace.

"I'm certain you do," Erestor said, his voice husky with double meaning.

"Look," she said, stopping dead in her tracks and facing him. His face shone like starlight upon still waters. "This is very flattering, but it just won't work. I'm not planning on staying. Why don't you go and find a nice girl with pointed ears and be happy?"

She patted him on the arm in a companionable, encouraging and utterly platonic way and rushed down the corridor, her low, sensible heels thudding softly on the wooden floor.

When she reached her room, Esmerelda slammed the door and leaned against it. After some consideration, she dragged a heavy piece of furniture in front of the door and then closed and barred the heavy window shudders.