Through the Orchard

In one corner of the garden, two rust and bleached wood benches turn in to face a crumbling, bubbling fountain. The flowers grow about them, and clamber slowly upwards over the dusty, sun-red bricks, but in the wall there is a doorway, and beyond the doorway is the dark.

As your eyes focus slowly in the musty, dust-strewn gloom, you could, if you looked closely, see the door that's holding back the soft and echoed sound of falling water just before you, but no doubt your attention would be easily draw up over the brick-laced stairs and into the hazy light of springtime beyond, where the breeze that lingers cool and fresh smells sweet with blossom, fruit and ripened grass.

Should you walk up and into the orchard, the air is full of evening, and the sky is full of dusk. The trees are full of blossom, and the pale moon hares gallop through the grass.

Keep walking, dreamer. Nearly there.

Keep walking through the orchard and past its centre where a cherry tree grows rich and red as plums, decked out in the pale pink of blossom. It grows grander and far taller than its cousins all around it. Walk past the low, iron rail fence that circles it. Keep walking.

On the outskirts of the orchard, there are wide and shallow, pale steps where grass has grown between the slabs. On climbing them, you find that on one side of you is a white marble rotunda, a temple wrought in pillared stone, billowing white muslin and wreaths of laurel leaves, that sings so softly with the sound of distant seas. Its beauty is endearing, but it cannot hold you for too long, for on the other side of you there is a tree that hangs its hands protectively over the velvet grass beneath it, its branches strung with lights that glimmer in the twilight.

There are two figures stretched out there beneath it against the grass and eastern silks. You know me well enough for recognition to be easy, but the other there is, thus far at least, a stranger to you. He is dark haired and with the deepest and most brooding eyes. As handsome as a wild stag. A pale silk shirt gathers hungrily about his throat, and wrists, and waist, and riding boots reach over blackened breeches. There is something in his aura, something in his very essence that seems to make the air itself quiver though with thunder, that seems to make your knees turn weak. There is something there that makes every breath of air around him shiver apprehensively with passion, power, and anticipation.

This is my Oberon...

...And I am telling him about Selene.

“This mortal girl,” he says, his voice like raw silk on skin as he strokes my hair the way a mortal man may stroke a favourite pet. “Knows more than most, I'll give you, but she is no danger to your life, my girl.”

He turns his head towards me. His breath against my skin. A mere whisper. I shudder close against him.

“She is so little more than a child playing with the dark,” he tells me. “Making shadows with her hands. You were quite correct not to recoil from her. You must react with strength. It's true that you must follow what she says, but, my girl, you will soon learn the faerie's craft of the creative interpretation of whatever she may tell you.”

A soft sound something like a laugh catches in his throat.

I smile into his shoulder.

“Now sleep,” he tells me.

And I do.

On the Night of the Full Moon

In the meadow beneath the wheeling stars, Eshin sleeps before the camp-fire that cracks and flutters in the fragrant, singing moonlight – filled with nightjars and wild flowers and whispering trees, all cast in tinted silver. The warm light of the fire turns his skin to glowing amber and his hair to fronds of golden bracken painted in an autumn sunset. There is a peace in him that stills and awes the mind, but I cannot sleep beside him...

... My mind too occupied elsewhere...

And so I rise from the seeding grass and heady flowers, and I walk into the night. I pass into the meadow...

... And out of all remembering...

... And into the velvet woods, rapt in the eerie moonlight and carpeted with daffodils and the silver-violet, starlit bluebells. The pollen hangs like anticipation in the cool air of nighttime: fragrant and intoxicating, calling me away from worry, away from bitter heartache and to the tender comfort of the waxen embrace of darkness. The grass and flowers are rich as velvet between my toes, and the nightingales are the forest's siren song...

... I pass deeper beneath the lazy, groping fingers of the trees where phantoms drift and mist creeps tentatively between the heads of blowsy bluebells...

A clearing. The grass grown long and wild, unkempt and untempered by the interfering hand of man but for the sky-washed, dusty purple of the altar stone, half-eaten by the grasses at the centre of the clearing, and reflecting back the hungry light of an already swollen moon.

Something moves me with all the deliberacy of a puppeteer. I am heavy and tired by the starlight. I stretch out against the altar... And I sleep.

I am woken by the gentle pressure of hushed voices like the ocean on my ears. I rise as the dreamer must surely rise from sleep, to see a face above me. She is far older than I believe I ever was, with raven hair and a raven's dress. She is crowned by the crescent moon. She smiles. There are others gathered near her, like shadows trying unsuccessfully to conceal themselves in darkness. I hear them. I feel them. I feel the pressure of their minds...

“I am in the Waking World,” I say, before I have chance to find my faerie voice, the voice that says: 'I am above you. I do not concern myself with mere statements, child. What I speak is my demand and you shall obey me, mortal!' I shall regret not finding that voice then, I know it too well even now.

“Yes,” she says, this woman, this moon-crowned, raven queen. “Tell me your name, faerie.”

I am compelled to answer.

“I am the lady Rosalie,” I tell her before I am indignant: “Now tell me, dreamer, what is yours?”

“I am Selene,” she tells me. “And you will do my bidding one year and one day from this silver-sculpted night... Although perhaps we may also become friends with time.”

“Selene,” I say to her, smiling to find my faerie voice at last. “It is not I shall do your bidding, but you yourself, and what is more you shall do mine besides... Although perhaps we may also become friends, with time.”

She smiles back. She does not seem concerned, but then... neither am I.

On Dyscrasia

I suppose that really it is only fair to stop playing at least one of my little games with you and offer up some sort of explanation as to what, exactly, may just be going on. Let me say first, however, that expecting any sort of consistency out of myself or anybody else that wanders in the World Between is foolish to the point of making you every bit as mad as we are. We faeries are not too fond of honesty, and even when we can bring ourselves to tell the truth, we prefer to make an enigma of our words – allowing a degree of imagination and forcing an amount of concious thought upon our readers. The same is true of me as is well true for the rest of faeriekind, maybe even a little less than most.

However, I do feel that the matter of Dyscrasia at least requires a few words to explain it, for it is something that you shall no doubt encounter often in the reading of my tales. As I am sure you are already aware of the nature of those like Eshin (who exists without me) and the Shadow Girl (who exists within) who are both a part of me, but not exactly myself either, then the nature of Dyscrasia should be an easy one to grasp. After all, you mortal men have had the knowledge of the four humours: Sanguine; Melancholic; Choleric; and Phlegmatic, for several thousand years. Although the knowledge has long since been dismissed as mere alchemy (and, while I know well someone that would argue for the cause of such medical, magical science, he shall have to wait for now), once everyone knew well what happens when the balance of those humours was disrupted in what was called 'Dyscrasia': Sanguinity would bring on a wild passion, coloured cheeks, high fever and good humour; Melancholia brought on a depression of the spirit and darkness of the soul; Cholera would bring sharp temper and an excess of energy and strength; and Phlegmatia would make the sufferer turn shy and cold and logical. Now, while that knowledge has long passed into heresy and folklore for your kind, for mine it is still very much alive. Indeed, we could not deny it even if we wished, for we are fickle creatures existing in a constant state of flux, and our humours are no different. So, while it is true that for the most part we exist in some sort of equilibrium, there are those times when all balance is disrupted.

This disruption brings about a sudden change of character which leaves us so utterly transformed in thought and in appearance that even our dear friends may well not recognise us until the balance reasserts itself. And so it is that every faery you shall ever meet has five very different faces: One that exists from an disequilibrium in each of the four humours; and one that is a combination of them all the the closest we may ever come to a normal, stable state. However, far from being fearful of the change of seeing it as some kind of sickness as your mortal children would, we faeries revel in it. It is yet another part of living, and therefore we exist to take some pleasure from it. And so, when the first shiver of Dyscrasia appears, we rush to find our clothing chests and play dress up like children with ourselves and with our minds. What fun! And, after all, no matter what goes on, it never lasts more than a day or two...

The Gypsy & The Cad - Pt. I

A Dyscrasic Tale of Sanguinity for Rosalie and Lostway

The cad was riding westward
One cold February morn
From the bed of some young maiden
Whose looks had faded with the dawn,
And he was nursing at his sore head
And his family’s waxen scorn,
When he spotted a young Roma girl
Sitting down amidst the corn.

The girl was dressed in red and black
With a veil o’er her hair –
All bells and beads and olive skin,
Eyes ardent, black, and rare –
And perhaps it was the wine last night,
But he’d ne’er seen one so fair,
And she charmed him with a smoky smile
As he reined in his mare.

So he jumped down into the grass
And took her by the arm,
Then greeted her and kissed her hand
To win her with his charm.
“Oh, sir,” she purred. “You must aid me,
Or I’ll surely come to harm.”
“But why, my dear?” he said to her.
“Explain, and pray, be calm.”

He sat down in the corn with her
And took her by the hand.
“The wolf,” she said. “Has tortured me
And chased me from my land.
Oh, sweet gentleman,” she charmed him.
“You must aid me best you can!”
And she ran her fingers o’er his cheek,
Her skin warm and dark as sand.

“How may I?” he soon answered,
Won by her enamoured eyes.
“For I have no sword to slay it,
Though if I did, then I should try.”
“You do not need a sword,” she said.
“Just take me with you as you ride,
For there’s a barrow close to here
Where Oberon resides.”

“My dear, sweet girl,” he told her.
“I fear you quite out of your mind,
For Oberon’s the Faerie King:
We could not find him if we tried.
And even if we could,” he said.
“Then I’d rather be struck blind,
For it’s not for mere mortals
To go calling on his kind.”

“My boy,” she said. “What’s wrong with you?
Have you forgotten who we are?
We have not met like this before,
But I’ve seen you from afar.
You’re young,” she said. “That must be it:
He’s not their king, but ours,
And he alone can arbitrate –
Come now, it is not far.”

He stood up stiffly from the corn
Still reeling from the slight,
But although his head was spinning
He knew somehow she was right,
And he had so many questions,
But it did not seem polite,
And, anyway, words failed him,
He’d drunk far too much last night.

So he helped her slowly to her feet
And onto his white mare,
And he mounted up before her
And drew close as he would dare.
She wrapped an arm about him,
Brushed her fingers through his hair
And kissed him softly on the throat
As they rode away from there.

They rode for what felt like an age.
They rode the whole day long,
Until the sky was filled with dusk –
The air with evensong –
And with her sleeping on his shoulder,
He did not feel so strong
To see the barrow in the twilight
Where Oberon belonged.

He woke her gently from her sleep,
As they approached the mound
At the gateway to the kingdom
Of the lost, the mad, the drowned,
And she took his hand to comfort him,
But did not make a sound
As they slipped into the hillside
And were swallowed by the ground.

Of Guides and Glittering Flames

“I have something vitally important to tell you,” Eshin whispered in his usual dreams-and-glitter voice.

It was nighttime, and we were lying in the meadow that stretched out listlessly beneath the rose garden. The grasslands, and the woods beyond them were filled with sound: owls and cicadas and nightingales, their voices blending into one another beneath a shifting canopy of stars and the crackling rasp of our campfire that painted everything drawn near it in the sunset hues of autumn. Beyond, the grasses and the treetops, the flowers and the distant mountains, were all cast in silvered moonlight: ghost-like shapes drawn in chalk against the night.

I shifted, my head rested in his lap and my eyes resting on the fire. I turned until I was looking up at him and could reach out with an amber hand to twist the locks of his fire-golden hair.

“What is it?” I asked, although my voice felt loud and clumsy in the bonfire-tempered hush.

The flames danced apprehensively against his eyes. He took my hand in his, and the warmth of his skin reminded me of the chill held in the sharp, night air. I shivered, and he pulled me closer to him, drawing the frail, cobweb blanket up about my shoulders.

“I need to tell you,” he said again. “That everything will be all right.”

I felt, for a moment, as though he had struck the delicate keys of my soul with his elegant hands, and now my whole world reverberated with the shock of it. I looked away, gazing back into the fire, looking at anything but him. I tried to find my most convincing disaffected voice.

“Will it?”

My tone quivered. I couldn’t stop it. Once again, my voice had conspired to betray me.

Eshin gave me his most sympathetic smile and rubbed my back as though to warm me.

“I know that everything inside you is frightened and confused, my Rosalie,” he told me with compassion. “You forget, I see it because I am you, and it is because you are me that you will listen when I tell you this: With time the tempest caught inside of you will fade into a gentle rain, and not long after that everything you see, and hear, and feel, and count on will soon soften and make sense to you. They will comfort you instead of horrifying you, and the World Between will soon resolve itself into a harmony of colour and of light. Do you trust me, Rosalie?”

I swallowed hard and gazed into the fire, still far too human to dismiss such silly thoughts and feelings as the ones that ravaged at the corners of my desperately bewildered mind. Eshin caught up my hand in his, and urged again:

“Do you trust me, Rosalie?”

I nodded, and in that instant all of Eshin’s previous intensity broke like a wave that’s run ashore. He smiled, and lay back casually into the grass.

“Then everything,” he said so carelessly. “Will be all right.”

The Shadow Girl's Story

We all stepped out of the void, and to the void we must return…

I awaken in the shadows at the corners of the garden. I awaken in the darkness between the petals of the dying rose. I awaken in the gloom at the back of your mind when, at four o’clock in the morning, you wake suddenly: your heart pounding and your breath coming in short and desperate gasps, while your lover slumbers selfishly beside you.

These places are my home.

I am fear. I am the crippling terror that sneaks and skulks the wind-ridden trees. I am despondency. I am despair. I am the wall of darkness: the moment of dread on the edge of the abyss that comes with the final, breathless seconds of consciousness and life.

I have been tricked into this garden – this awful, painful place. And now the whole world hurts me.

When I rise in the morning, the smell of rotten flowers suffocates me. The hateful sunlight pains my ice-frosted eyes to tears, and I must raise a languid hand to shield myself from the pain and anguish of it all. It burns me. It tries to roast me in my skin and leave me here: nothing but a desiccated husk, a memory of life among the sugar-rotten roses.

I long for nighttime, for its careful, considerate silver light that touches without burning – like pale, rain-waxen flesh against my own.

When I sleep, I dream of the purity of deserts: the red sands wrought rose-silver by the moon, the wheeling heavens vacant and inviting high above me. I ache for the silence and the clarity of things that exist in the static-singing space between that which lives and what is dead: the viscous-growing cacti; the vultures, and the solemn-sung coyotes that feast on what is passing…On what has now all ready passed. Things that make their lives from death.

I yearn – like a young, naive girl may yearn to have her lover – for the distant, storm-raked mountains, where wind howls and rain crackles like dead leaves. Where the chill is absolute and crippling, and the only echoes left of life are the calcium-wrought fossils of the things that come up here to die – their hollow sockets staring blankly without feeling, reflecting what is yet to come… The windows to an extinct soul.

The crow croaks hoarsely with regret…

The thunder rolls…

My thoughts so often wander out of this torturous existence of noise and of decay and of painful, painful sunlight, struggling away from the shackles of existence and drifting like a ghost (Oh! What wishful thoughts those are!) down to the ocean, where the thunderous waves wear the whole world slowly down to dust. Where the white gulls scream and cry and wheel like falling angels. Where life is arduous, and hope is hard to come by. Where the heavy stamp of our mortality is pressed down hard in every single stone, and carved into the stormclouds with a bloody, rusted knife.

I dream of these places, but dream is all that I can do – chained down with ropes of flesh.

We all stepped out of the void… Only I can know how much it wants us back.

As Above, So Below

Just as it is in your world, everything in the World Between has consequences and nothing – and I mean nothing – ever goes unnoticed.

‘Unnoticed by whom?’ I hear you ask.

Well then, I shall say this: unnoticed by the powers that you mortal girls and boys may call your gods, but who we in the World Between (being as we are essentially practical and arrogant creatures) prefer to call the raw forces of Creation, both in our world and in yours.

At the end of the day, the difference is mainly one of semantics anyway.

My point in all of this is that, whichever higher forces called me to this garden (I say ‘whichever’, but, truth be told, I know exactly who he is and with time so shall you), they presented me with what you may well call a Guide, and although Eshin is really part of my own spirit clad in flesh, the label suits him well enough, and even were it not to, he’s far too good of nature to complain.

However, providing me with Eshin did bring about one rather unfortunate consequence that my mentor had not seen wax on the horizon. And so it happens that, while Eshin is with-out me, there is someone or something else that waxed within me by way of counterbalance. Something that is given voice, and voice enough to interfere.

You have met her here all ready, although you may not know it.

She speaks with a voice very much like mine, and yet also very much her own. And just as fair, sweet Eshin exists to keep me in the light, she is always there to whisper of the darkness. She is the constant threat of lamentation like the rumour of a storm in autumn air.

She has no name to call her own, but I know her as The Shadow Girl.

Eshin – A Prelude

The first time that I saw him, I was standing on the boundary where the glasshouse meets the garden, with a basket of cut lavender hooked absently over my arm. Beyond the summerhouse, the land rolls lazily away over a lush, grass-covered bank – the gentle, lilting waters of the stream pressing an uneven line into its swell beneath the shady spread of an ancient oak – and down into a summer’s meadow filled with wild flowers.

The storm of days before had long since given way into the pure stillness of a welcome, sun-drenched afternoon, and as I looked across the garden, the sun was warm as heated gold upon my skin.

He was walking in the meadow with his hands lost in his pockets – a hazy smudge of white and gold against the flowered green. I knew I should be frightened by his presence, that I should be bothered somehow by the first sight of someone else lost deep within my paradise, but somehow I simply could not manage it. Somehow, I looked at him and all I felt was love.

He was walking closer to me now – white linen shirt open at the neck, waves and curls of gilded hair drifting on his cheeks, intertwined with poppies, carnations and cornflowers as blue as his dream-filled eyes. Those eyes were so desperately distant as he walked towards me, gazing out across the valley towards the indistinct shadows of the mountains.

I knew his name, and before I had the time to wonder where that knowledge came from, I found it on my lips:

“Eshin…”

My voice was little more than a breezy whisper, lost easily beneath the birdsong, bee-flight and bubble of the stream, but in that instant he looked up at me. He caught my gaze and I felt a dreadfully ecstatic wave of peace wash over me like blossom-fall.

He smiled, and before I knew what I was doing, I had set my basket down into the grass and I was walking down the bank towards him.
Perhaps an hour later, and not another word has passed between us two. Now we are lying on the grassy bank beside the stream, just out of reach of the shadow-hands cast down upon the grass by the canopy of oak leaves. The languid peace of everything soaks us like sunshine, warming us and painting us shades of idle gold. I am playing with his doll-like curls of wheat-gilt hair, and he does little more than look at me with vague and careless eyes.

Finally, the sound of horses calling sweeps up to us through meadow grass and gives me all the strength I need to speak again, although my voice is temperate as the stream.

“Who are you?” I say, although now the question drifting through my mind is given voice, it doesn’t seem important. And so I find myself adding: “What are you doing here with me?”

“You know my name,” he answers, his voice as distant and as dulcet as his eyes. “I heard you say it once before, or rather, I felt it as you spoke it.”

He turns away enough to roll lazily onto his back, his hands linked loosely behind his head and one knee bent off of the ground. Lying in the grass with a poet’s poise and elegance.

“My name is Eshin,” he says, as though I had forgotten. “And I am you, my Rosalie. I am a part of you made flesh. And I am here to comfort you. I am here to help you through the dark.”

Our Narratress Introduces Herself

By now, dear reader, I should think that you are awfully curious as to who I am exactly, or rather, who it is I claim to be. Well then, allow me to resolve any confusion that may have crept into your mind.

In this place, they call me ‘The Lady of the Autumn Flowers’, but once… once I had a mortal name, and once upon a time, I was very much like you.

Now, however, I have become a part of what we call ‘The World Between’: a place where waking reason has no meaning, a place where you prepare yourself to give up your body and your sense so that you may one day understand what both those things may mean, and so that you may better understand the world in which you live.

My little slice of the World Between is the Rose Garden – a place that you already know almost as well as I. There are many other secrets hiding in the World Between, and if you travel with me long enough then I have no doubt in my mind that you shall see a few of them. In the Time to Come, I shall take you with me to court with ancient Faerie Kings and Queens. We shall dance with animals made flesh around the fires in the fields, pick tiny shells out from the fathoms far beneath the ocean, and braid alpine flowers into our hair high up among the clouds themselves. I shall take you with me as I call on dear friends and quarrel with those who set themselves against me, you shall meet those who teach and guide me as well as those placed in my care, and you shall learn that I – like you – can laugh and cry and love and hope and hurt as well as anyone.

And maybe, just maybe, I shall let you walk with me into your own world and play what games we will with the minds of mortal girls and boys.

Forget what your Waking World has told you… You are stepping into the World Between – A place of dreams, of magic and of madness and of moonlight…

My name is Lady Rosalie, and I am utterly enchanted to meet you.

The Summerhouse

This octagonal mesh of iron and glass…

The door and lower panes of this place are painted with a climbing rose - all greens and reds, thorns and leaves and flowers.

I turn the handle…and step inside.

I hang my dripping sunhat by the door.

In here, the air smells of turned earth and rosewater, incense and candlewax and sweet, ripe fruit.

The door swings shut behind me.

A rattle of metal and glass…

The summerhouse is filled with little terracotta pots and small, chipped teacups that have been set to catch the rain that falls in fat and noisy drops. Shelves of pressed flowers and tiny seedlings. Candles and lavender. Strings of beads and shells and mirrorglass. The floor scattered with a thousand hand-sewn cushions.

On a wicker table, a basket brims with strawberries, beside an open book of poetry (left half-remembered and momentarily unattended) and a cup of hot, black tea steaming thoughtfully into the storm-chilled air.

The rain rattles on the glass. Lightning illuminates the clouds and makes them look like a smoke-painted stained glass window that's been rendered on the sky…

A couch or divan hidden beneath a thousand cushions rests lazily beside the table. Still shivering and soaked, I lie down. I wrap myself in patchwork quilts and doze among the drying flowers until I too am dry and tender once again.

When I wake, the day has long since faded. With the waning of the sky, this place has filled itself with a different sort of light. A thousand candles drip their wax onto the table and the floor. Their flames unashamedly naked, or enfolded in lanterns made of painted glass, they paint the room in a honeyed wash of warmth and changing colour. On the shelf, a jar of captured fireflies shifts and glows with living light.

The summerhouse casts its stained glass light into the gardens, calling ethereal, fluttering ghost moths towards it as the rain gives way to clear-crystal night: the high, dark clouds crossing the starscape far, far above my small, glass house.

An owl hoots in the valley. The garden is filled with the song of nightjars and crickets.

The nighttime smells of lavender and honey…

The feather-down around me is soft and warm and comforting. The garden shifts and shapes itself around me like a quilt.

I smile.

I am home.

Welcome to the Rose Garden

A summer's storm is breaking all around me, and the air is washed clean with birdsong and with thunder. The garden has long since become Nature's battleground, where the ivy and the rose join forces to contend against the honeysuckle and the clematis for possession of the ruined walls, the sagging trellises and the long-forgotten arbours. Cornflowers, poppies and wild jasmine stretch themselves out languidly upon the earth, overflowing from the hollow shells of former flowerbeds. The brambles and the ferns creep silently through the long, seeding grasses. The rain-soaked air is heavy and fragrant with shimmering, golden drifts of pollen.

I run through the garden, wet through and laughing at the rain, my dripping sunhat in one hand and my eyes constantly distracted by the quivering silver of the sky. The ground is forgiving underfoot but for the occasional thistle clinging to the path, but the long, wet grass lashes at my legs as I push myself on with a dreamer's logic through the fast-falling storm.

Deeper in the garden, I can hear the sound of running water. To my left, the wall is more complete. It holds back a hillside with its stubbornness, but it cannot hold back the silver stream that glimmers and glints in the rain-light, falling over the dust-weathered bricks and into a pool at their feet before weaving its way into the garden. As I cross over a small, red bridge, I can see the tadpoles and the tiny fish that swim and swarm in the water. A heron stands drowsily amidst the reeds and ruined statues, beside a weeping willow tree that sways and sings with windchimes.

The gravel clustered together in the memory of a path cracks like split coals beneath bare feet…

A bullfrog croaks.

The sky above me spiders and trembles with raw lightning.

The rain runs down my spine and makes me shiver.

At the back of the garden are the remains of one final, fast-dissolving wall, and beyond it the ground falls away steeply over rocks and scrub down into a vast valley that waxes moonlight-on-water pale in the rain.

Far, far below, a river slithers through the valley floor, and beyond it, there are small, scattered snatches of woodland and great, smoke-coloured mountains stretching up impossibly high in the rain haze against a storm-wracked sky.

The windchimes shiver…

In the valley, horses shelter from the rain, wrought impossibly tiny by the sheer scale of it all. A whinny catches in the funnel of the mountains and rides the wind up to my garden. That same wind brings with it the smell of the woods and weary mountains: pine needles and leaf litter; gorse and heather and stormfall.

The summerhouse is closer now: a lattice of glass and metal, flowers and paint…

It is time to step out of the rain.

Of Ruined Walls and Wildflowers

In the heart of the forest, a high, wrought iron fence stretches out beneath the trees and the pouring summer rain. Beyond it, the world of birdsong and fragrant pine gives way. A small path meanders lazily up a blank clothed in tall grass and wild flowers: overgrown, little more than a fresh-washed strip of hard-baked earth between the lazy blossom.

I stand on tiptoe to peer through the bars…

The thunder rolls…

At the crown of the bank, there is some kind of garden. Once, it looks as though it may have been something that was delicate and carefully tended by tender, loving hands (something that was apart from the world that lies around it, something… private), but now the red bricks that once enfolded it have weathered and crumbled down to ruin: the slumped remnants of a wall; a scattering of rough, rain-polished, red ochre-coloured pebbles; a stray scrap here and there of powdery, honey-coloured mortar.

The garden has grown wild…

The black metal bars of the railing before me sing out like well-struck crystal in the rain as I walk along beside it and run my storm-slick fingers along its rungs.

At last, I find the gate into the garden: wrought iron, twisted into a metal painting of a climbing rose within its arching frame.

I take the rusting key from my dress pocket…

I turn it in the lock…

The gate protests with centuries of disuse as I press myself against it. Slowly, it shudders open.

The sky is perfect silver-grey…

I step into the garden.

The Dreamer's Key

In my dream, I see myself as clearly as I may see you standing here beside me, although I do not dare remove myself from the hemisphere of my own perception. Perhaps it would be better to say that I am aware of myself: that I am certain of drawing a distinction between my waking self and the self that stands amidst the pines.

My hair is long and loose - the colour of sunlight on fresh conkers - beneath a large, straw sunhat. The fresh-falling rain streams off the wide, slack brim and makes the ivy-coloured ribbon tied about it flap and click as I run through the forest in this sudden summer storm.

I am wearing a white, muslin dress: sleeveless and long skirted and so, so simple that it is almost girlish. The cloth is wet and cloying as the fog or ocean foam, it sticks to my calves and ankles as I run as though it wants to trip me. There are deep, secret pockets cut into the skirt (the kind where children may collect and hoard their stash of string and shells and soft, pressed flowers), but all I find in mine is a large and rusted iron key that's turning cold and slick and coppery in all this rain.

The lightning spreads across the hidden sky and turns my pine needle canopy into a backlit skin, spidered with tiny veins of forest green…

For a moment, I feel as though I am beneath the pelt of the wood, beneath the skin of the very earth itself. I feel as though I am a wanderer in the body of some living thing far greater and more awesome than I could ever fathom inside my simple, nearly human mind.

The peals of thunder sound like church bells...

My dress sticks against my skin...

I hitch up my skirts... And I run deep into the trees.

A Dream Beneath the Fragrant Pines

I dream…

The door of my home stands closed before me: interlocking teeth of wood and metal, bared and barring me from the path I know must lie beyond. I reach out a single languid, lazy hand and push against it. With the creak of ancient, resigned hinges, it gives way…

I step into the forest…

The pine trees seem to stretch forever against the hazy, unseen sky: their lower branches bare; their weathered bark as warm as weathered hands; their needles forming and interwoven latticework of fragrant green far, far above my head and a carpet of sharp, forgiving umber velvet beneath my eager feet.

The birds and insects call out to one another through the space between the trees. A warm breeze whispers its secrets across the forest floor. The sun sinks low and paints the dusty forest haze with its subtle tones of gold. The bracken curls about itself with apprehension.

The day itself hangs in the balance…

The thunder rolls…