To explore the subconscious and expand our universes inside our mind. To have fun and live out experiences with the reader. Or to just clear your mind from the present and reality. Write because you want to, and because you like to, and also because you need to. Write for the future generations who might one day read your work and connect with you after we’re long gone. Write because you feel the need to make a decent paragraph so the words look good on the page. Write because you gotta just say something even if you don’t know what to say. Just don’t post it on facebook because that’s gonna be on there forever.
summary: Come Away O, Human Child follows the protagonist, Aisling, from age 12-17. As she grows up, she struggles with the trials of having divorced parents, crushing on your best friend, and leaving gifts for faeries that may or may not be protecting her. written in second person
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You are 12, and you can hear the rain pounding against your windows, your parents screaming across the hall. You hate when they fight like this- their anger seems to fill up an entire room like a poisonous gas and you can feel it leaking under the cracks in the floorboards, under the door to your room. You are pressed by anxiety, sitting on your bed curled up against the wall. You wish, somehow, that you could fix this. Or barge into their room and tell them to stop, to just stop, but then you’d probably start crying and that's the last thing you want them to see.
You are too old for fairytales, but you find yourself going downstairs anyway. Filling a bowl with milk, adding raspberries and strawberries from the grocery store. A flower you stole from the school garden and pressed between a stack of books until it flattened out, dried as a corn husk. You carry it out into the rain- barefoot in the last week of April.
The dark earth sticks to your toes and you know you’ll have to sneak inside, but it doesn’t matter. You already feel better, just standing outside in the rain, breathing in the fresh air that somehow tastes green on your tongue. Like wet moss smells in the forest. You leave the bowl under the drooping leaves of the lilac bush- even though you were taught to leave it on the porch. You don’t want your parents to know that at age twelve, you’re still leaving out gifts for the faeries.
It feels small, and insignificant, but you don’t know what else to do.
The next day the rain has cleared, and the grey clouds have burned away to reveal the soft, robins egg tint of the sky. The whole world seems to have turned green and blue overnight, the grass dark and lush and dappled with droplets of water. When you check under the lilac bush- raindrops or dew dripping onto your clothing, mud staining your jeans- you see the bowl has been turned over. Underneath, you lift it up to find a fresh hawthorn branch, thick with red berries.
When you are fourteen, the same branch hangs upside down on the wall of your childhood bedroom. It hasn’t dried. When you touch the snapped end of the branch with your fingertips they always come away damp. The berries have never shriveled, never dried up and fallen against your floorboards to roll under your bed and be forgotten. They are so red they look like tiny rubies, or blood fresh from a wound.
You always want to touch the branch. To hold it in your hand like it’s a wand, to use it to cast some sort of spell to erase the past three years of your life. You wish you could start over- cleaner and kinder. Maybe if you had done your math homework, or actually taken off your goddamn muddy boots, God, Aislin, or loved your parents more, maybe then your dad would still live here.
When you were young- really young, you used to swim together in the pond down the road. It fascinated you in the summers of your girlhood, the deep green water calling like a mystery waiting to be solved. The water felt like silk sliding over your skin, like someone telling you a delicious secret. Your tiny toes would sink into the mud, but the sensation of it never disgusted you. You felt somehow held in the earth.
Now, you don’t go because your mother has always hated the pond. You still love to swim. You miss falling asleep, your limbs still cool and heavy from the pond water, the murky smell of it transfering from your skin to your sheets.
Your Dad lives across the state from you, a three hour drive from the familiarity of your hometown. You don’t visit often because of this- once or twice a month even though legally, your Dad is supposed to see you more. He never presses your mom about it and you don’t either because you hate the drive there, and you hate that he still feels like home somehow. He was the one who asked for the divorce. He was the one who moved away, and you are bitter with yourself for the swells of joy you feel when you see him. You feel that he betrayed you by giving up- that both of them betrayed you.
His house is out in the middle of nowhere- He rents a cottage on the property of a large farm estate. If it belonged to anyone but your Dad, you’d say you love it. There’s ivy crawling up the brick front of the house, and in the spring daffodils shoot up in abundance all through the fields surrounding the cottage. There are cows and sheep across the road, and you love them.
You’ve always had a soft spot for animals.
This summer, you’re visiting your Dad for a week. You are fifteen, and June has rolled in with summer thunderstorms and heat lightning in the afternoon. Clouds that look like whipped cream dot the sky. Your Dad spends most of his time inside- He works as a transcriptionist, and a graphic designer. It means you see him in front of the computer a lot, headphones over his ears, eyes trained on the screen as you creep downstairs in time for a late breakfast. The sound of his fingers on the keyboard follows you out the door.
You try to spend as much time outside of the house as you can- which means you’re walking on the farm, crashing through the underbrush of the woods surrounding the property. You brought a disposable camera with you, and you stop every now and then to take photos. The sheep in the field, a butterfly landing in the crowded patches of queen anne’s lace scattered hecticly throughout every field.
It feels good to be alone out here, like you’re a little kid again playing hide and seek in the backyard. You stay out as long as you can stand in the summer heat, only coming back to the house to escape the late-afternoon thunderstorms. You spend these sprawled across the bed that’s supposed to be yours, in a small, cozy room on the second floor with a circular window. Closing your eyes, you listen to the sound of the rain pattering against the window, and it is almost peaceful here.
Every night before you fall asleep, you crack open the window to let in the night breeze. You always leave something you found during the day- a stone with a circle bored into it from the stream, black-eyed susans you picked in the back pasture, wild blackberries so ripe they burst under your fingertips. You look out the window, and catch glimpses of glowing eyes in the dark.
In the morning, your gifts are always gone.
On the day you leave your Dad’s house, you wake up to find a stone on your windowsill, resting on a delicate bed of ferns. It is smooth, almost luminescent, and when you hold it in the palm of your hand, it makes you shiver. You know, somehow, that it was meant for you. A gift of sorts, from the ever present watchers in the woods.
It gives you the unsettling feeling of being seen, but you feel somehow protected.
You wrap it in your oldest, softest tee-shirt and take it home with the rest of your things.
You keep leaving things out for them, even when you get home. Ramekins of milk and honey. Fresh fruit. Wildflowers when you can get them, or roses you bought on sale at the grocery store. Perfectly round pebbles, or poems copied in your slanted handwriting. You keep leaving, and like clockwork- they keep taking, and taking.
You wonder what they look like. If they’re small and dainty like the storybooks, with dragonfly wings and and tiny, rosebud mouths. Or if they’re like the barn owls you see when you leave the house early on the weekends, biking to the diner at dawn to meet your best friend. Otherworldly, watching over you.
You’re hopeful, desperately so, that a lifetime of trinkets will be enough. You keep a poem taped to your mirror- a reminder each morning as you fuss over your dark hair, agonize over the tilt to your mouth that always makes you look like you’re frowning. You read it in school this year, and the implication stirs in your mind like something other stirring in dark water. Something powerful coming alive in the darkness, a night-blooming flower.
Come away, O human child
You’re in your car, alone, seventeen years old, drumming your fingers against the dashboard. It is dusk, and you can spot the glowing eyes of a cat under a bush, watching you from its hiding place. The lemony soap your mother made you keep in the console of your car makes the air smell of stale, strange citrus. You turn the dial up on the radio, the slow croon of the singer’s voice filling the empty air.
You are waiting. Your best friend had stuck a note in your history textbook, along with a four leaf clover she’d found and pressed somewhere. Camilla has a knack for finding them, whenever you’re outside together- sitting in the park, on the quad at your tiny quaker school during lunch, lying in her backyard, using your jackets as blankets.
Her note read: night picnic. Pick me up @ 8?
It was that simple. You had been doing this together since you could drive- before that even. In the park across the street from her house you would sneak out blankets and snacks. Chips, or leftover pastries that her mom made. A bottle of wine nicked from the garage- Her parents were caterers. They wouldn’t miss an extra bottle, especially not one of the cheaper ones.
Lately though, you had taken to driving to the reservoir, crawling up on the hood of the car to try and count the stars or re-name the constellations. You feel safe with her. Comfortable, easy. The scent of the lilac perfume she wears is familiar as the scent of your own laundry detergent.
There’s a knock on the car window, and you startle.
Of course it’s only Camilla, the night breeze whipping a stray piece of her strawberry-blonde hair over her mouth. She smiles at you, and you unlock the door of the car so she can climb in.
“Hey,” She’s wearing a linen skirt and a ragged t-shirt that hikes up her waist as she sits down in the passenger seat. A macrame bag swings from her shoulder. “Sorry I’m late- I could barely get away from The Witch.” She rolls her eyes- this is what she calls her mother when they’re fighting. The Witch. The rest of the time it’s ‘Mom’ or behind her back, ‘Eileen.’ I’ve never understood how she uses her mother’s name so casually. Eileen needs me to go to the grocery store. Eileen’s trying to make rose sorbet. Eileen won’t shut up about pride and prejudice again. I should get her a cardboard cutout of Colin Firth for christmas.
“Get anything good from her?” You ask, fiddling with the radio knob.
“Leftover biscuits,” Camilla says, and you made an appraising noise. “And strawberries. No wine because you’re driving. And she’s too antsy for me to get into the garage tonight.”
You shrug. You’re not particularly interested in getting buzzed. Her company is enough.
“Reservoir?”
“Sure,” She’s picking at the chipped blue polish on her fingernails, an anxious habit.
You wonder if it's just Eileen that has her riled up, or something else. Camilla isn’t good at talking about herself, talking about any of her feelings. Most of the time you don’t mind but on some nights, she feels terribly far away. Distant and chilly, like a stranger.
You make wreaths of rosemary and lavender, and hide them under her bed at sleepovers. At home, you have your own, ringed around a pink candle, a point of rose quartz. You wonder if she’s ever noticed the scent of it. You wonder if it's done anything at all.
You start the car, and drive way from her house, the headlights bathing the night in two golden cones.
The biscuits leave crumbs on your jeans, and the strawberries stain your fingers red but Camilla has cheered up, and you feel bright with joy. In the car, she sang along to 80’s music from a CD she made you in sophomore year. It had been stuck in the CD player for months- so you had heard it countless times, but it never lost its appeal. Apparently it hadn’t for her, either.
Her voice when she sang was raw and lovely. You wouldn’t be able to watch her, even if you wanted to. Sometimes, it felt like she burned your eyes. Like you were looking at the sun. You liked her best that way though- when she was so happy, so bright, you felt like you were made of tinder and she was a candle flame.
Her knee brushes against yours, and you shiver. You’re not sure if it’s the cool hood of the car under the cover of night, or her bare skin pressing against your jean-clad kneecap that does it to you. Your sweatshirt is in the car, and suddenly you want to pull it over your head and hide your arms inside it, make yourself as small as possible.
Camilla is talking to you about a poet she just discovered somewhere on the internet, how his work is visceral and beautiful and you’re interested in what she has to say- but something in the dark trees catches your eye. You’re just barely in the woods, parked to look out at the water, the night empty around you like a cup to be filled. There’s that flickering movement between the trees, and it could be a squirrel, or a racoon, but you know it’s not.
They follow you now, it’s been long enough. They are hungry for gifts, and you are hungry for miracles.
You slip a few strawberries into your hands. Camilla doesn’t notice, or doesn’t mention it. She knows by now that you are always thieving small, strange objects. Shells when you visit the beach, empty pasta-sauce jars full of sand. Clover flowers, crow feathers, snake skins.
“I have to pee.” You lie, and Camilla frowns. “I’ll be right back.” You take her pinkie in yours and squeeze it, a gesture of childhood. She squeezes back.
“You’re going in the woods?”
“Nowhere else to go out here.”
She eyes you with something like worry. “It’s dark out.”
“I’ll be careful,” You say, climbing off the hood, unlocking the car to grab your sweatshirt. You throw it onto the hood so you’ll have it when you come back. “Promise.”
She watches you go and you can practically feel it, her eyes burning holes in your shirt.
Walking into the woods- even at night, even by yourself- is like coming home. It is early enough in the year that no insects stirr the night air, but late enough that you are comfortable in your tee-shirt. As you step over roots and fallen trees, the moon as your flashlight, you think of how you’ll have to check your legs for ticks later. You can hear whispers in the trees, like the sound of branches sighing together in the wind. If you look in your peripheral vision, those glowing eyes are following you.
You keep the water in your line of sight to keep yourself from getting lost, and eventually when you find a clear patch of moss, you crouch and leave the strawberries. You want to wait. You want to see them, the faeries, but it’s no use. Every time you’ve tried to wait for them, you’ve fallen asleep. In the grass of your backyard, in the forest at your father’s house. When you wake up there are daisy chains around your wrist. You wonder what it’s like, to be touched by something made of magic. You’ve never been conscious to find out.
Back at the car, Camilla has stolen your sweatshirt. The arms are too long for her, and only her fingertips are visible with that iris-colored nail polish. The night breeze is playing with her hair, making it ripple like she’s underwater. She doesn’t notice you at first, creeping out of the trees, your feet quiet over the fallen leaves from autumns past.
“Thief,” You call to her, feigning annoyance. Secretly you’re pleased to see her wearing it. The idea of her in your clothes sends a zing of pleasure down your spine.
“Whatever,” Camilla says. She gives you one of her halfway-grins, the kind that means she’s trying not to smile. “You abandoned me. I think it’s fair.”
You defend your lie. “I needed to pee!”
She rolls her eyes at you, and you frown back at her. You wonder if she knows somehow, that you weren’t off in the woods to use the bathroom. Are you that transparent? It doesn’t matter. She would confront you about it if she suspected anything. You climb up onto the hood of the car, and scooch in close to her. She did steal your jacket, after all.
The late-spring air has grown chilly, and you rest your head against her shoulder. You stay like that together for a long while.
It is the full moon, and tonight you are leaving out more gifts than usual. All week, you’ve collected flowers from the park, the woods, Camilla’s neighbourhood as you walked together bemoaning the struggles of high school. You press half of them, and the other half you boil down into a bitter-smelling tea. Your mother wrinkled her nose when she came home from work, took a glance into the pot on the stove, and promptly decided not to ask.
It was probably better that way.
You sweeten the tea with honeycomb you bought at the farmers market, but you don’t dare to try it. It’s not for you. The smooth stones you’ve found down by the creek have been polished, and you left tiny drops of lavender oil on each one. Feathers from songbirds you’ve found have been arranged into strange, miniature crowns. You leave it all under the lilac bush- the tea, the feathers, the stones, and blackberries in a dish of milk. It’s the same place you left them gifts the first time, all those years ago.
The night air is humid, and pleasantly warm. A night breeze stirs the leaves, carrying the scent of something sweet. You feel watched, your neck prickling in unease. Sometimes, when you do this, you can feel their presence. Their hunger. Almost no one believes in faeries anymore- almost no one gives gifts. You hesitate under the weight of their scrutiny, you can feel it pressing down on your shoulders, and then you give an extra gift.
Something you’ve never given before.
It is a lock of your dark hair, tied in place with a piece of twine. Finally, finally a piece of yourself after all these years.
“The past beats inside me like a second heart.” - John Banville
He was estimated to have four months to live. Although it was diagnosed as terminal, there was no stage given. In fact, there wasn’t even a distinction of the form his cancer took.
Although completely unknown to science at the time, the malady was oddly simple as far as cancers go - rogue cells would uniformly build up around his many individual body parts and tissues, eventually forming a film, then a coat, then an impermeable barrier.
The effects of the cancer itself were objectively identifiable, but the mechanics behind it were absolute nonsense to the medical community. Its growth rate fluctuated seemingly at random, and even sometimes receded with the same lack of discretion.
Russell’s conflict with his biological nemesis was not a battle, but a war of unfeeling attrition. This war was not a merciful one, and ended his life without honor or decency at the age of 28, on Wednesday, May 4th, 9:46 PM.
The moment he passed away, all traces of the mysterious cancer vanished from his corpse.
He was not the last person to die of this illness. Nearly half a century later, the world still lives in fear of remembering anything.
My bedroom steeped in showered sunshine
All at once, formed by endless water.
Beautiful, I’d say, but it needs more flowers;
Those senses I had gave it a flow.
Reminded of the tallest, tenuous tree
Hidden away once more, cursed misbegotten night.
Following a path I cannot take into the night.
So far, far away, but at least I have my sunshine.
It’s so bright, I can’t take it! Like tasting tasteless water
Grey rocks crack open to the roots of ugly flowers.
To us, time is finite. Still I wail at the gnashing flow...
Maybe those unwilling should see the forest for a tree.
An Irish fellow walks over to tell me of a tree
From his homeland that somehow dreams at night!
Myth and magic is a wonderland of sunshine
Given to acolytes of fable that never drink water.
I love them, they give me great reasons to pick flowers.
(Despite a soul trailing behind me in decrepit flow)
Countless, boundless muddied rivers flow
On every silt-stained bank grows a proud tree.
Drained by deep darkness amidst every night,
Fed by fargone fatness during morning sunshine.
Boiling calm so deep underneath is simply trickling water
That never comes. It is only supped by mossy flowers.
To forget putrid sweetness and the heady visionous flowers
Is a terrible burden. I am now clotted under unsanguine flow.
Yet I am so safe as a husk of the once-proud tree
Of myself. Home is a calm night
Yearning for something irresistible, a glorious sunshine
It cannot begin to reach. My solace is those heartfelt drops of water.
An unfathomed depth in a deep sea, deep without water.
Those down there that cry and scream are only heard by flowers
On the surface. Vibrancy is their profession and its flow
Wells into the sharpest pinpricks. The thousand-mile tree
Remembers this, stout into a lulling dulling night.
Greatness passed on, but now we can appreciate its sunshine.
Seasons cannot flow forever onward, and growth too is claimed by night.
This tale was told to me by flowers and a tree,
Spun by water and sunshine.
