My good friend and former colleague H.L. Liptak has another published story out, this one at Enchanted Conversation: A Fairy Tale Magazine.  The story is called “That Rains May Come,” and is a moving fairy tale about a young woman, Elizabeta, struggling to sustain her mother, her farm, and her pigs during a brutal, unrelenting drought.

Helen is a gifted writer, as I’ve noted before, and it is always a great pleasure to see one of her pieces in print (and—I hope she doesn’t mind me sharing this bit of information—to see her being paid for her writing, as she was with “That Rains May Come“).  She writes well in several stories, but she seems very much at home in the fairy tale genre.

The story focuses on Elizabeta’s desperate search for the first eight drops of rainfall in the new year, which—according to ancient legend—have the power to revive crops if collected.  Elizabeta’s pigs become as thin as paper cutouts, and her mother grows weaker and sicker, but Elizabeta continues her search.

One day, she stumbles upon an aggressively acquisitive man with an adorable donkey.  Naturally, this enigmatic figure and his faithful steed will play an important role in the resolution of the story.

I won’t say more, lest I ruin the story, but it’s well worth taking the five or ten minutes to read it—and to savor it.  It’s a beautiful little fairy tale with a good moral, and it’s a pleasurable read because, well, Helen is a great writer!

Happy Reading!

—TPP