I always thought it was a shame that we couldn’t feel the magic atop our own heads, but at least we could see the crowns of the others. There was no reason that we could decipher as to who wore what crown, but I know that mine was garnet set within whorls of nettle wrought in silver (Twitch told me so…it was nice to have someone to trust here; someone solid amidst the wavering turning magic). Once you entered the meadow, you got a crown, and it was always the same forever and ever and always every time you passed through the oaks. Another thing; each crown was unique.
We could not speak each other’s true names in the meadow. The names in our mouths were replaced with the sound of an uprush of the meadow boundary’s oak leaves. And so, my sister and I had taken easily to calling each other by our family-given nicknames–Twitch and Sugar– while the others stumbled about calling ‘you’ and ‘blue coat’ and such.
There weren’t ever any rabbits or birds in the meadow. But sometimes after a thunderstorm, Twitch and I would run to the meadow just so we could sit in the vetch and watch the butterfly deer wake from their naps (they always slept during thunderstorms), eventually stretching their long amber bodies and flitting up on their great colorful wings into the sky. It was better than any acrid fireworks or greasy loud carnival that the town threw.
I don’t know why I’m telling you all of this. I don’t even know your name–not that you could tell me.
Maybe it’s because I’m trying to fill the space with some kind of meaning, this talk about vetch and names and meadow. Maybe I’m telling you all of this so you know something about the magic. So you have an idea how it twists and fades.
Maybe I’m telling you all of this so you know the weight of what it means to me that you’re wearing a crown of thyme and pearled antler. Just like my sister wears.
And it’s odd to see her crown outside of the meadow.
As I remember it, the June Prince always had a pocket full of Tisket seeds. When we were talking, he’d sprinkle some, flicking them between thumb and forefinger onto a hummock of verdant meadow. Rambling gave him the opportunity to sprinkle more, and he often asked me to accompany him on his wanderings. Though I grew up a farmer’s boy with a keen eye for everything from indigo to alfalfa, I can’t say that I remember Tisket flowers when I was growing up. It’d be hard to miss the little but bright starry pink flowers, but after meeting the June Prince, I saw them everywhere.
Common as weeds. Only a delight to those who truly notice.
Something in the back of my mind liked to conjure tales of him being elvish, and if need be, he could twinkle through a patch of Tisket and arrive at his castle of dewlight. There was a kind of magic that limned him, so, perhaps it was true. I never confessed to him these thoughts.
Once, after he told me the story of his nickname, I felt daring enough to ask about the Tisket flower seeds: “Why do you do that? The seed throwing?”
The June Prince faced me soberly, and said, “Simply because I consider them my kingdom. Where I throw them, I can live. Forever.”
His explanation did not much make sense to me back then. To my younger self, it sounded much like how empires and the mystical working of their flags: planted means claimed. Simple. Rather arrogant, I thought, and slightly eccentric.
But now. When I tramp through the meadows and woods, the sighting of Tisket flowers greets me as warmly as the June Prince had (though they could not kiss my bearded cheek as he did on that one summer’s end day).
Where most royalty claims lands with fabric and ink, the June Prince claimed the territory of my heart’s memory with seeds. Someday, perhaps, when I am much too old, I will lay in the wild pink flowers and breathe in the wild meadows as we once did, and he will find me and bring me to his castle of dewlight.
The coin was wanting and the hours variable, but still, the happiest job I ever had was working at a very small shop. At other places (I think of the breadbaker next door and Mr. Zweibeln whose common complaint of ‘too warm bread’ practically sawed through our shared shop wall), someone was always sour, whether that was the customer or the owners or the workers; there was a curdle to the atmosphere no matter how lovely the bread smelled or how rich the coffee was or what fantastic books were at a customer’s fingertips. I’m sure you’ve witnessed these things yourself.
But I cannot bring to mind, no matter how hard I try, to summon sour memories within the shop that I was employed at. Before you ask where such a charmed place exists, I must tell you that I would, but it’s simply not done: The Little Miracles shop is at its best when stumbled upon.
Within, there are labyrinthine shelves of boxes steeped in the scent of darkest vanilla and candlesmoke, and each box contains little squares of carefully considered confections, each of them in something akin to hibernation, waiting to be taken from their cozy little beds.
The customers who arrive are bewildered, their eyes searching the cases for a clue as to why they were drawn in, but the shopkeeper always welcomes them as if they are expected. Ease is followed by charm as the keeper asks the customer what their favorite memories are.
‘Mint and sunlight and a violin’
‘Cicada trills. A checkerboard with pieces all the same color.’
‘Silver rings and peonies and cake and our dog.’
‘Burdock.’
The shopkeeper nods –his time in the shop has endowed him with a knowing– and he directs the customer to an area of boxes, ‘Each is filled with little squares about the size of a piece of fine chocolate.Take any one you wish. But don’t open it here.’
The customer is hesitant. Their gaze flickers from box to shopkeeper and back, and before they can ask the question, the shopkeeper assures them that whatever singular little wax-wrapped parcel they decide to take, it is gratis.
Free.
Just like the everyday miracles that we encounter with the price of a little attention.
Never have I seen a customer return to the ordinary world with a frown. Isn’t that a delight? That I could see all of these customers go into their days with a spark in their hearts?
For this customer the little square in her pocket dissolves and there is a rapturous rush of sparrows from the grasses. For that customer there are a few moments when he watches his dog breathe deep the new summer breeze, scenting rain and rabbits.
Ask me where the little shop is.
Ask me what constitutes an everyday miracle.
I’ll only tell you that they’re there if you look carefully.
If you’re in need of furniture and there happens to be a somewhat-nice-even-though-there’s-a-small-rip-in-the-side floral wingchair sitting half on and half off the brick sidewalk…you’re gonna take it. After a quick sniff and sit, of course. And even though you found it in the old section of Witchton, near the historic Black Gables house, you’ll consider yourself lucky. A prize! It goes with all of your other furniture in the same way that everything you own has the same sort of provenance: questionable. You’ll put it next to the fireplace and across from the hand-me-down brown vinyl couch and the lamp you found on trash day three weeks ago.
That night, I slept soundly.
In the morning, there is a painting on my wall. An actual painting. The frame is gold. I’ve never seen it before. My room-mates shrug when I ask about it, but we all agree it’s quite nice, and perhaps even worthy of being in the Gardner Museum. My room-mates like the ‘new’ chair.
The fifth morning, I wake to a fine cup of apple tea, and maple-crisp scones on my nightstand – which is and has been a cardboard box ever since we moved in. When I thank my roommates for such a nice breakfast, they cast quizzical glances over their cold pizza.
It’s only on Monday when they wake up and there’s a feather carpet in the living room that they really start to get weirded out in a ‘are we in danger’ kind of way (and we bicker about what thieves give instead of take), but being poor, we decide to brush it off and find the positive. So, each day, we play a game called ‘find the new thing.’ On Wednesday, Sidone finds a sunflower petal coat in her closet. She can’t stop smiling. She makes us watch as she spins and all of the petals flutter. Four days later we wake to the smell of cranberry waffles, and find a large copper rooster in our kitchen making them. He addresses us as ‘Highlings.’
When we ask the rooster gentleman questions, he only answers with ‘Highlings.’ It is the only word he knows. But the waffles are crispy-buttery delicious, and so is the chicken and pumpkin pot-pie the rooster makes for dinner. Only after the Rooster climbs out of the window and falls asleep on the roof do we have a discussion about whether a rooster cooking chicken is cannibalism. Points are raised about the rooster being copper, and it is decided that since the rooster didn’t eat any, it is clearly not cannibalism, but it is suspect.
For months new gifts arrive. We are afforded no answers from the gentleman rooster who we have taken to calling Genty. We wonder about fairy godfathers and rich old couples who remember what it was like to live on toast and count coins. The gifts keep appearing.
Our apartment begins to resemble a fantasy magic shop; there is an amethyst kaleidoscope that Tom thinks can auger the future, seven chandeliers made from butterflies hang from the tiny living room ceiling, and books in unknown languages pack our shelves (to the chagrin of Sidone’s cats who rather liked their hidey-holes amongst the books). We have begun to stack things, to make paths through the whimsical chaos. And we have begun to invite people over solely with the intention to share our bounty, to give away whatever confections Genty has made and to de-clutter our living space.
We take baskets of mittens to the town center; an invitation for anyone to please take as many as they would like. It is our general view that the gifts aren’t ours alone.
Eventually, Genty holds a note in his outstretched copper feathers. It is simply addressed 'Highlings.' An invitation, if we like, to join the Wandering Queendom. It also states that we can refuse, but we must do our best to return all of the gifts. We think of the mittens. Tom mentions the waffles.
There is a deadline. One of us must go.
I am now part of the Wandering Queendom. We live in a somewhat-nice-even-though-there’s-a-small-rip floral wingchair. Some see what we could be, and so we are taken someplace warm, someplace safe for a year. We make beautiful things in gratitude for the shelter, and we invite people to share our magic.
It had taken a keen eye and nose and many years, but Merianne could tell when the dream idges had visited her bed. At first, she thought it odd when her room smelled not only of cotton and candle, but also a thread of lilac–even in the darkest of winters. And if she looked quick enough, Merianne could just glimpse the fluid script faintly sliding across her pillow, then skittering away when noticed, much like the shadow of a baby rabbit in the hedges. After days that had worn the shine from her, she was happy to have the spells of the dream idges; spells that would bring forth the beauty and hope from within her and paint gossamer visions across her night’s sleep.
It is the middle of the night and a prickly thought has startled me awake. I shrug on my robe and slippers, and stagger sleepily to the back garden, where I pry apart the warm earth with my fingers and place the thought there, patting the soil atop it.
I will not permit it grow wild in my mind, to send its runners to strangle what is hopeful, but this is not a burial.
For as many days as the thought needs care, I tend to it. I whisper soft good things at its soil and watch as lovely rain patters upon it. See? The world will feed you if you let it.
With care, the prickly seed grows layers around it that make it feel kind and warm and loved, and it grows. Where there was prickle, where there was grit scouring at the soft spots of me, there is growth that is now able to bend toward the sun and reflect the star’s soft spectrum in pearly magnificence.
After forty-seven annual invitations to the party at the manor, Ollace finally accepted the forty-eighth. While all of the rest of the townspeople looked forward to the extravagant goings-on, he had always found something more interesting to do in his own home. After all, he had not read all of his books, and that was important. The party would always be there next year. And when he wished to, he could see bits of the sparks from the silver fizzling fireworks through the trees.
This year was different, though, this year he was going to be seventy-five, and the thought occurred to him that perhaps he would like to see the inside of the manor. Take in the portraits. Nibble on peach tarts. Perhaps he would like to dance, just a little bit. Just once.
And then, sated, he could return to his happy little life without a wandering wonder, nestled in his tweed wing-chair and reading a beloved book, sure that all of the flash simply wasn’t for him. He chuckled to himself, what use was all of that to him?
Ah, what comfort he found in his home! Ah, what music were the familiar lines of prose in his books! Ah, he could not conceive of a richer life than his simple one!
On the way up to the manor, the scent of gardenias floated through the night. Inside, there were towers of sparkling succulent fruit. There were garlands of bells and ivy. There was laughter and merriment and color and flash, and it was spectacular, but all Ollace could find it in himself to do was follow a hall to someplace calm and quiet, something that felt more comfortable; in his overwhelmed state, he found luck, and that lead him to a magnificent library.
There, in a place a lot like his home but much grander, he let his eyes–then his fingers–linger over titles. There were books on subjects he had never read, but was very much interested. There were books about stories he had never even imagined had been written about. He peered through the dim light and had trouble guessing at how many volumes this library held, and wondered how many were unread. It was a thought that smote his heart: the books serving nobody, adventures without adventurers, stories unloved. Another thought pricked at him, and that was how many times he had declined the invitations. How much time could he have spent here?
But he was here now, and an easier breath began to find him. When he finally felt a return to himself, a voice from near the window startled Ollace, “You might be interested in this one.”
Bergit Drembel, the hostess of the party, sat in a wing-chair, her silks still but shining. Over the years, it had become a habit for her to steal away to the library, a curiosity to see who might find welcome there. Ollace stilled like a rabbit, caught, but taking in her beauty, the thought of forty-seven unheeded invitations snipped away at his thoughts. From the side-table, she lifted an enameled case of black that Ollace had mistaken for a paperweight until she snapped it open and graciously handed it to him.
He eagerly began to flip the pages, but the further he went, the more his brow furrowed, for each page was lacking in text but full of colors that blended one to the next. “It’s very…. pretty,” said Ollace in an attempt at politeness. In all honesty, he thought it absurd, and wondered at all of the other volumes in the lady’s library that had things like page numbers and indices and glossaries and maps and perhaps even flourished with a bit of text.
Bergit softly took Ollace’s hand and brushed his fingers across a page, starting at pink and guiding his fingers to orange to plum. A symphony of voices whispered in his ears, rising and falling in rhythms he could not identify but seemingly bone-achingly familiar, each reciting a piece of their own story but melting smoothly amongst the others. He gasped at the magic. Ollace’s eyes met Bergit’s, and he noticed that she was studying him, and was pleasantly surprised at his reaction. After the voices hushed, Bergit said “You are welcome to this library at any time.”
He peered at her over the page of color, a blush. Did she really mean that? He truly hoped she did.
Ollace arrived the next day. And the day after that. Over warm cups of cinnamon honeycreams they read together and found commonalities in each other’s stories. To her delight, he brought books from his own library. Their collections mingled.
Just after his seventy-eighth birthday, Ollace picked up the black book and ran his finger from magenta to lavender, and found he could pick out the different threads of thought, but could not cleanly tease the voices apart, because all of the voices in the chorus belonged to Bergit, just from different ages. Here, she was a young woman, and with a turn of his finger he could hear the old woman that he knew now. He came to understand that this was her journal, and when he listened carefully he found that she had wished for someone just like Ollace for far too many years. It pained him to hear the lilting twist in her voice when she had very nearly given up on the thought of him.
Before he had set out for this town, he had also wished for someone like her, but he set it aside like the worn volume of fairy tales that he could see no purpose for; it was much too precious, much too cloying a wish, much too innocent. There was a thing he learned from fairy tales, and that was this: the world liked to turn sweet to bitter, but he would not allow that. Instead, Ollace was careful to place no importance upon it, so it didn’t matter if his wish was stolen, if it withered, if it turned to motes unnoticed. Instead, he would build a small but unremarkable life for himself and be content.
And so it went for decades.
Ah, all of the declined invitations. Ah, all of the books unread. Ah, all of the lost moments of love that would remain forever unsaid.
Uncle Pickett–not related to anyone around here, everyone just calls him Uncle Pickett–has a glass cabinet full of creamy towers of froth just kinda sagging and leaning into each other. They look like celebration cakes, or at least that’s what most people initially thought, me included, but they’re stacks of doilies. “All got second-hand,” says Uncle Pickett. It’s important to him, the second-hand thing.
I’m told when he first came to town ain’t hardly anyone knew his name, and even after the many teas he hosted at his home, he didn’t talk about his doilies, not that anybody really pressed, but people noticed his collection and surmised that much like how Miss Whitwilliam is fond of cats so she must be in want of cat figurines, well, then, Uncle Pickett must be an admirer of doilies and was in dire need of the happiness that only hundreds of roundels of lace could bestow upon him. When Aunt or Grandma or whomever died, instead of displaying the ghastly sweet doilies in their own homes, the neighbors would drop off paper sacks of them at Uncle Pickett’s door.
We thought they were just frilly little nothings decorated with the cloying flower du jour. But Uncle Pickett pointed out their ubiquity and its importance. “A fine web of connections often crafted while the mind is faraway; a link to here…. and there.” I thought he was just prone to poeticisms of the ordinary, which was alright, because the world needs people who see things differently. But when Miss Whitwilliam died and we were all in mourning, Uncle Pickett set us straight. He invited us over to a supper, and over candlelight, he had us all touch the doily in the middle of the table, a round in a round. In a voice befitting the softness of the candlelight, he called her name…….and Miss Whitwilliam appeared from the mists.
The little looking glass was unremarkable; it wasn’t encircled in gold laurel or hung by a length of green ribbon as was the custom of the time, and there was a certain fogginess that rendered the gazer as if they were looking into a fairy pool, but Cedar was drawn to it all the same. This mirror was the only thing in his uncle’s house that he could stomach, not because it was the most simple object, but because nobody else seemed to want it – everything else had been at best, bickered over, at worst, screeched about by his family from the delphine carpets to the inkblack books to the icefire chandeliers– and so he took it from the wall, said his polite goodbyes and brought it to his little room over the bottle shop. After he found a suitable place and hung it, his fingers traced the arcing light in the bevel. And he found that it sang. A quiet ringing note that was barely audible, but it sang all the same. Cedar wondered back to the street musician who played the goblets, and how the varying levels of champagne within influenced the magic of the music. Cedar ran his thumb around the mirror’s edge in a slow, deliberate crescent, and brought watery chiming notes forth, each beginning to ripple the mirror’s surface, the fog giving way to a shimmering view of the lost lake of mists.
It was a tale she had heard when her legs weren’t so long, a tale that once made her shy from the garden, a tale that now hurtled her thin body across the clipped grass, each pound of her heart a prayer, a hope that they were hungry. Please be hungry… I am my only key. In a great moonlight arc, she dove into the round of black pansies, and she felt their petal mouths closing around her long ears and tiny paws…a darkness…a hum…… And then emergence from the white-blue pansy mouths of the Neverwhen Garden, where she found those who had long awaited her, eager to bestow upon her the Faberge strawberry.
“Here,” the bookseller said while flipping to a page, “is the shadow of the first butterfly that flew through the glass castle.” After the customer’s eyebrows raised, the bookseller opened to a green bookmark. A series of minute dark shapes danced across the page, “And this shadow record is from the breath of a Tinley sparrow while it sang. See? You can follow the little notes, the trills,” the bookseller smiled, “more precious than a page by Vivaldi himself.”
The customer eyed all of the little bookmarks woven through the pages, little gems hanging from ribbons of different colors. His expression began to visibly sour when he noticed that the binding was powder blue and embossed with a pattern of kittens. And was that strawberry cupcakes he smelled? Was it coming from the book? While the bookseller flourished her hands over shadow pages of languid tea curls and the long-lost Queen’s Jewel itself, it occurred to the customer that this might all be a joke. He had traveled days for this book. Rearranged the meeting of the Thornblood Society. The bookseller slowly thumbed open a page marked with a lavender ribbon, but before she could begin to explain the shadow marks – this one was really truly interesting – she heard the shop door bells tinkle the customer’s goodbye.
“Gone so soon?” chuckled the bookseller in what silence remained. She carefully straightened the bookmarks and gathered Phoebe Hobbs’ Book of Shadows in her arm. On the way back to the rare books room, her apprentice called after, “I thought you finally had someone that really wanted it?”
It was a common thing, the inquiring, the wanting. Every few years, someone heard about the book and contacted the bookseller. Each time The Bodleian had hired a new rare books curator, they visited. As did the Redwood Athenaeum, and many collectors of rare and exquisite tomes. But still, the Book of Shadows remained. The bookseller shrugged, “If they can’t handle the whimsy of eight-year-old Phoebe Hobbs, they don’t deserve her more powerful spells from when she was seven.”
At first, it was sighted cresting the hill of Kinnon’s farm. It took three days before the RubyGlass lighthouse drifted into the village, advancing slow as fog on currents undetermined. During the day, it was green and opaque and still as stone. At night, it shown red as an alarm, but nobody cared to determine what that danger might be. It was odd, and that was enough warning to keep a distance.
But where some see warning, Jacob saw invitation. As a glassmaker, he knew that red glass often contained gold, and so while the village was locked safely behind doors, he ventured to climb the dangling lighthouse ladder and found his new heart.
The sky pressed its azure against the leaves which fluttered light and dark fast fast fast. Each daisy petal blurred bright at her eyes, and while she could remember plenty of happy times in these saturated kind of days, it was too much today. On days like these, it was always hard to find the seam. On days like these all of the rush and color spiked brilliant in her head, leaving no room for anything else–not even her favorite song could pass through it without becoming bitter and warped – everything seeming to scream its joy. She squinted and ran her fingernail against the fairy oak, the sound of the scratch causing runs of shivers at the base of her skull. Eventually, she found the seam (it’s much like where wallpaper joins itself, an almost indistinguishable bump in the overwhelming pattern of what others would consider quite beautiful). And she peeled it back, the whole bright day pulled aside like a curtain, and she stumbled through the gap into the mist and fog of the next day, a peace where she could be quiet as the gray world she needed.
Since many animals made her sneeze, and being in want of a companion, she found she could keep a pet cloud. It was scarcely more than a wisp, but it seemed content to live in the niche in her foyer, with a lacquer bowl to nestle in on dreary days, and on sunny days the cloud would feel the rainbow within itself.
For centuries, it was the tradition of the Hellerstern family to be ‘sparkled’ after death, and rested in a place of honor– their family mansion. There, such earthly things as worms could not pulse in their marrow, nor rain fade their bright eyes. There would be no vulgarly baroque caskets lined with lead and silk and shoved into the most common of common things: dirt. Instead, a crystal cabinet cradled their new perfect forms, those of sharply cut diamonds. The light shifting within the jewels seemed to reinforce the notion that Aunt Audalia was somehow still awake, still observing from somewhere in the inner spectrum of her diamond.
Over two centuries, visitors to the mansion gawped at the crystal cases, wondering in whispers about treasure and the measure of greatness. They wondered aloud what a paradise such as this really felt like. ‘Can you imagine?’ they asked each other.
When the last Earth-bound Hellerstern died, and the mansion seemed to sag, Josebal Cutter – the same Cutter family that were the Hellerstern’s longtime servants, the ones who fashioned the diamonds to brilliance – swept all of the jewels into a sack and fled across the dusty fields out of the province. Josebal knew what all of her Cutter ancestors knew: the Hellersterns’ minds were actually mapped into the diamonds, their immortality was shining and brilliant, nearly indestructible.
There was something else Josebal knew. Though she didn’t bear their last name, the Hellersterns were once her family, too. It took longer than she would have liked, but Josebal did find a metalsmith who turned all of the diamonds into a bib necklace for the cost of a sunflower seed. Josebal didn’t flinch when the metalsmith laughed at her for wanting to wear something as useless and common as diamonds. “You know it’s all just sparkly carbon, right?” barked the metalsmith as she walked away, diamonds sliding across her tattered shirt.
The earth’s bones were shifting, great monuments powdered, dust storms ghosted through the rotting-tooth cities. Not all, but much of this was due to the Hellerstern’s shrewd business decisions. Often Josebal thought about what a strange and wicked thing it was that the Hellersterns were powerful enough to wring prosperity from the gardens of the future so that they could guarantee their immortality in their present.
It took Josebal three long years to pull enough information from the immortal diamonds, and another two months to put their clues together and find the family’s hidden paradise of Hellerstern (of course they named it after themselves), where everything was green and golden. The first scent of green caused Josebal rapture. It was a true place, and she could now invite others. That was, of course, after she ground the diamonds down to dust and scattered them across the desert sea.
There was a time that I was once too grown for the small things that made me happy. When my starry coat went missing from the laundry line, I thought ‘good, it was too babyish anyway.’ When I left my blue velvet shoes on the porch to dry after running through the rain-splashed daisies –and they disappeared– I thought ‘I had outgrown them, and perhaps it’s too messy to run through daisies anyway.’ When I told my parents that I mistakenly left my flute in the park, I thought ‘what use is learning to play the notes when being an adult means not playing?’
The fox noticed. Small and fire and curious, it peered at me from the hedge, but I made myself look away. I once had so many happy books about foxes, but I realized in my growing that my interests in animals did not matter.
Many years found me occupied by doing things I thought adults should do; putting aside small brilliant things, hiding simple joys from myself, pressing on with more serious matters. It was an asceticism that I thought displayed wisdom. Sometimes, I would see the fox darting between houses, a flash of fire against the expanse of brick suburbia.
It was when I was much older that I happened to find a pair of green velvet shoes in a fancy shop; they fit me. I wondered if it would be too silly, too childish to buy them. Surely, anything that made me happy like that probably wasn’t good for a serious adult to do. I bought them anyway. They sat in my closet, a brief glimpse of joy before I shut them away again since I could find no appropriate occasion to wear them.
Until.
There was a warm cricket-song night, and I slipped them on to walk the white-garden I had carefully cultivated. It was especially lovely at night – my neighbors had told me so over wine I thought too astringent but sipped anyway– the lilies and roses glowing against the blue hour, a perfumed fairy garden. A series of silver notes rose from the daisy field and floated over the peonies. Since nobody was looking, I began to move about, sweeping my arms wide. It was only when I was dancing in my own garden that the fox appeared, wearing a starry coat, and blue velvet shoes, and playing the flute that I had lost.
Together we danced in arabesques and hops and giggles and ate honey and berries and laughed and wore crowns of daisies upon our heads.
I apologized to the small fox for ignoring her.
I confessed that I thought it was the grown-up thing to do.
The fox considered me, then asked in what used to be my own childish voice, “and are you grown-up now?”
“All of the frames in this museum are merely stringent tradition, a mirage that plagues me in its constancy,” sniffed the gallerist eying the carved wood and gilt. No matter how many times she had said it aloud now, the gallerist had yet to encounter a like mind. After all, most people were culturally conditioned regard frames as a mere device in service to what really mattered: the delicacy, the pretty visions made by mixing powdered jewels in oil and swishing them about to mimic light and shadow and magnificent life rendered on a smooth piece of wood or copper. Most often they were portraits of those that were and now were nevermore.
Everyone remembers the cake that’s here and gone, nobody gives notice to the plate, unless it is filthy or cracked.
The gallerist thumbed the pendant at her collar, a small silver capsule that housed a gilded splinter; it was what remained of a work by Wm. Goodricke.
One day, she would find another frame by Wm. Goodricke, that bastard.
Ages ago, those that crossed the ocean did so with portraits of their loved ones. Since passage was prohibitively expensive for a whole family, there was one chosen to safeguard their surname, and then paintings were made and frames were carved. It wasn’t a cheap bit of magic at all, but it saved room and feeding. Shipwrecks and fire were fervently discussed. Children were calmed with cakes laced with laudanum. The painter worked their oils in a bid for the most realistic rendering down to the wife’s wry smile and the son’s plaid coat. When the painting was complete, the framer bound them so as to constrain their comings and goings… unframed portraits would awaken whenever they so chose, but a ship was not the place to reawaken. The one trusted family member carried them aboard, silent, careful.
On the new shores the frames were split and a family could spring forth groggy– but whole– from a painting to begin a new life away from what troubled them.
For many, this was a blessing.
But even the most benign of tools are found to be weapons by those that figure out how to wield them thusly.
The fearful Jack Westbury, known around The Ditches as Hollow-Eyed Jack, was eventually captured. The justice sentenced him to be painted, and so a rather glum-looking forest scene was painted, and Jack was placed behind a particularly crooked and particularly dead tree. The framer that bound the painting even signed his work: Wm. Goodricke. Many rejoiced. It was a punishment that required little of the taxpayers’ or crown’s money, and was not as distasteful as the crowd-pleasing tortures; surely, this was a kinder way to mete out justice.
More grotesque cases were found to be fit for The Painting, and eventually there were enough to fill out a gallery. Wallpapered in damask with tasseled curtains, this jail held no danger of stench or violence, and so many paid coin to witness not only the criminals themselves, but also to wonder at the skills of the artists and to see the rare but celebrated frame-breaking and freeing of those who had served their time. Most gallery-goers nibbled on thyme cakes and sipped ginger fizzes while guessing at crimes.
One-by-one more galleries were added, and people like the dishonest baker (guilty of padding his breadloaves with sawdust) found themselves hanging in gold among the crowds’ hush. Many took pleasure in the portrait of a rather ugly dog that nipped at people’s heels, relieved they could stroll Cotton Lane without being chased after. A father who had sent their eight-year-old son off with a tin of tea and a kiss in the morning had found his son the next day in the galleries, staring blankly from a lovely lake scene, for the crime of approaching the queen’s swans. The guards sternly reminded him that there were to be no outbursts in the gallery, lest he wanted to stand the same shore as little Henry.
Among the cruel jokes, there arose mutterings about justice, about liberty. A plan was enacted under the belief that cruelty of the system would not reach for the gloved hands of a group of lovely young women.
So, the gallerist and what she would come to think of as her sisters protested. They too, were hanged, bound by a frame crafted by the magic of Wm. Goodricke.
It was then that the public realized a wrong word, might cause them to spend more time in the galleries than they meant to, and so the galleries became vacant. Without the public funding, they closed. A fire took the records, and the nobles – eager to own the rare, the curious – exchanged anonymous money for paintings. Hollow-Eyed Jack was said to reside above the fireplace at a castle in Luxembourg. The baker was spotted at an auction.
Over decades, some frames cracked. Some were simply removed for cleaning or in exchange for something more fashionable, and those that were painted were set blinking out into a world that they knew nothing of. But they were free.
Through luck, the gallerist had found and freed the boy only three years ago. She helped him to learn the ways of the new world, even though she herself was stumbled daily by things that the modern folk found commonplace. And now she spent too many weekends of her young one-hundred-and-twenty year life searching for what might remain of her sisters in little shamble shops and museums and estate sales so that she might do them justice.
