It was the middle of the night and there was a creature at the attic window. A strange creature such as I’d never knew existed. It was only the beginning. (Smoke in the air, ash on the wind.)
I was out of bed and on the prowl for no other reason than sheer restlessness. Everyone else was asleep – the house itself seemed to doze, all sighing eves and settling walls – but the night beyond was awake and alert. I’d crept up to the attic knowing that should I waken anyone I’d get locked in at night again and I sat on the old black steamer trunk that served as a window seat and watched the wakeful midnight.
There was the gravel paved front drive and the broad old maple and the juniper hedge harboring shadows. The grass was coated in frost and bleached by moonlight and the camellia bushes huddled together and whispered above the heads of the slumbering roses and azaleas. The wooden swing that hung from the lowest sturdy branch of the maple – as it had stoically done for the past forty years – swayed gently with pendulum steadiness in the breeze. (The weather was changing, herringbone night-clouds ripple across the sky.) I watch the swing and imagine it represents my heartbeat. I lean my head against the casement – there is the night before me, my lean segment of it in this yard, in this place which has all but imprisoned me. My eyes go dim and I begin to stare without seeing at the swing-heartbeat-pendulum as my thoughts begin to scatter like pages loosed in the wind.
I picture Matilde this morning standing at the kitchen sink skimming the cream off the milk and humming some song from the radio. The chewy smell of yeast from the bread in the oven as I stir and stir my bowl of cold cereal until the flakes go limp. And yet superimposed over this is sunlight and a spicy, honey-and-anise hillside. Barefoot walking, expansive aliveness of freedom. No kitchen. No cream. No walls. No Matilde and her knob of keys around her waist. (I was dreaming. This was only a dream – for a while I would hope this is what awaited me but it didn’t.)
There was a tap at the glass and I come back to myself – or awaken rather, for I was dozing where I sat – and there she was. I didn’t know what to make of her, long, curling, russet, cat faced and fox eared – and apparently floating three stories in the air. She tapped again at the glass with her nose, for she had not limbs whatsoever. (I knew it was ‘she.’ She was almost familiar.) Perhaps I was still half dozing for I lifted the sash with no hesitation. The window is so old that you have to hold it so it doesn’t slam closed immediately. Her furry flank brushed my wrist as she slid past (so soft, so soft) in a cloud of wind and the silk and paper rustle of feathers. For she had not been not been floating after all, there were wings, charcoal black wings with hummingbird swiftness a third of the way down her meter long body. In with her came the smell of wood smoke and sage and icy dampness. I began to shiver in the sudden cold. And perhaps in excitement at the strangeness that had com upon me.
I let the window slide shut and turned to face the creature. I had the impression of copper eyes – intelligent but half feral. (kindred.) she was long and serpentine and plush with red-brown fur. The wings were tiny really, hummingbird size as well as speed, hardly enough to keep her in mid air. She was a dream creature – the imagining of a child that doesn’t yet understand the mechanics of flight, that the wings must fit the beast and that feline, canine and aviary features are never thus blended. I looked back towards the window and the steamer trunk thinking perhaps I would see myself still leaning there dreaming but I wasn’t. I was awake as the night that had roused me from my bed in the first place.
I felt the air shift like a change in altitude or a diminishing storm. When I turned around there was no creature but a girl, hardly older than I it seemed. Pale as moonlight and nude in the shadows a shrouded by a long reddish tangle of hair. Her eyes were quite the same, copper and half wild. Her face was human but not, too many angles and not enough curves.
“Annwyn,” she said, and “We found you. I’m here to help you escape.”
I averted my eyes, embarrassed by her nakedness and dumbstruck by the surreal. My mind spun and skittered like sliding on ice. Escape? To where? Did she know me? Could she give me back the pieces of me I couldn’t find or remember?
“Who are you?” I said – or maybe, “What are you?” I slid out of my robe and held it out to her without looking at her, mumbling “You must be freezing.”
“I’m not,” she said but took the robe and put it on anyway. She looked quite strange in pink terrycloth, it almost made her ordinary. No it didn’t, if anything offset her further into strangeness. She wasn’t human. (Of course she wasn’t human – seconds ago she had been a furry flying serpent. But I wasn’t dreaming.)
She had called me Annwyn. That wasn’t my name, they call me Mary (pious, humble name, Mary meaning bitterness as though I should only expect pain from life.) Yet I didn’t tell her ‘no, you’ve got the wrong attic window, you’ve got the got the wrong orphan girl. Because she, no matter how strange or impossible, seemed familiar. Because she had said the magic word – escape.
“They said you might not remember,” she said. Her voice was lower than you might expect by looking at her, how young, how small she looked. “I hoped it wouldn’t be true. But look at you, look how they’ve changed you. Of course you don’t remember, why else wouldn’t you try to contact us before?”
I did look at myself – and I was so plain and pale and ordinary. Just a human girl or maybe sixteen – not someone who expects visitors who float out of the sky in the middle of the night. And yet, “Remember what?”
“Home. The Valley, the Hill, the orchard, the ruins in the wood. Your kindred. Your name. All of these. Don’t worry, they’ll find a way for you to remember.”
I shook my head but then I remembered the dream I’d had, the hillside, the sunshine. “All right,” I said, “So if that’s true tell me, who am I? Who are you? Why am I here?”
“You’re name is Annwyn. My name is Sula, I’m your sister and you are here because you were stolen from us and held captive by these people.”
That was a good answer. I liked that answer. It was straightforward and compact and it made me feel righteously outraged and vindicated in my every doubt and confusion – it made me feel elatedly martyred. In some ways it was a fair assessment of the situation, if oversimplified, but it barely scratched the surface. Like is said, this was only the beginning.
My memory starts at the age of ten. (The age they guessed I was.) I do have the impression that I remembered more back then, of the time before the farmhouse and Matilde and her family, but no longer do I recall, it faded like a shirt washed too often. Everything before this place is blank. I don’t even remember how I came to be there.
I remember laying on my little bed in my little room at the end of the hall and crying. Or when I wasn’t crying, watching the patch of sunlight from the window creep across the wall and then fade to night and then return in the dawn. This I did for days, for an indeterminate time. I wasn’t crying because I was sad, even though Matilde told me gently that my parents were gone and she would take care of me now, I was crying because my body ached and my thoughts were squashed down and oddly shaped and the world was too sharp and cold and strange. (They had changed me. That changing changed me.) Surely I was grieving. I had only a silhouette in the darkness notion of my parents, or truly anything from my previous life. I was grieving the loss of everything familiar, the loss of even the memory of it.
Eventually I emerged from my room, led by the hand downstairs to sit at the huge, stolid kitchen table and be introduced to the rest of the household, Matilde’s husband and daughters. They would be my sisters now, she said. Danica and Haley they were very fair like I was so at first I thought I might blend in (thought they were round and rosy like their mother and I was plain, thin and dull). They stared with curiosity and wariness as though I was a wild animal that might gentle to them or might turn and attack depending on which way the wind blew. Behind them, leaning back against the kitchen counter stood Kurt, their father, watching the scene with a measured distance, as always. He didn’t like me. He never came near me, not even to punish me like he would his own girls (though they were seldom punished when they misbehaves, they were seldom caught). Perhaps he was afraid of me. He just watched. Relentlessly.
Danica was around my age and Haley two years younger, but I was small, closer to Haley’s size than Danica’. At first I was a fascinating plaything to them. I was lost and confused and I wanted their approval – I was like a dog groveling with it’s belly exposed, absolutely no dignity – I would do anything they asked.
If this creature, if this girl was my sister, did that mean that I too could change my shape and fly away on black wings in the night? Why hadn’t I? When on all those nights and long afternoons that I’d hoped – that I’d dreamed of that very thing?
***
/end part one - this may not be the correct catagory for this story - thoughts? crits? reactions? anyone?
