Faraway Places

She remembers the world.  It seems as if it were a lifetime ago, and everything was so very different. There were traffic lights – there was traffic – and the bustle of engines mixed with buzzing cross-lights, and radios playing, the hum of machinery.

It’s not like that here. The light here is a shade of blue and violet, diluted with white. It’s like a mist that streams down from an invisible sky. The sand is white and coarse. It makes her think of salt. An unseen sun casts such long shadows. These sand-huts that remind her of igloos, the sun turns their shadows from squat, rounded boulders into soft-ended pencils, stretched out across the sand; blue-grey stripes, on a blue-white background.

#

“I’m not everything I said I was,” he told her one evening.

She raised an eyebrow: “you’re not a teacher?”

“That much I am. But the rest…”

“What else have you told me?”

“Not so much told as not told. As not let you see. Not revealed. Not lied, so much as kept the truth all shrouded up in secret.”

She’d had a glass of wine or two with dinner, she felt playful and full of life. These last few dates had gone pretty well, so she just tossed him a flirty little smile, “well go on, then, show me.”

She gasped when he did.

#

She loves him more than she ever thought she could love. More than she knew she loved him back in what she no longer even really thinks of as ‘the real world’. There are worlds and worlds out there, dimensions crowding the universe, and other universes pushing and shoving into the edges of this one. There are times when you can see it, or when you can see the scars. And he’s shown her those scars. Because he is a teacher, a tutor. Revealing the worlds in all their glory is part of his purpose in life.

She returns from the well, a spelled pot balanced on her shoulder. It should be too heavy to carry, but his magic runs through the silver glass and makes it really quite light. She doesn’t really miss running water, or electricity, or TV. Those are things that belong in a dream she grew up having. Then he came. He woke her up from that dream. He turned the colour up on a world she only thought she knew – and then he started showing her all the others.

And now he sits outside his hut, stretching his long middle finger into the sand to draw symbols. These are symbols that fill with light as soon as he draws them. And they begin to multiply, to create their own magic, their own symbols. They take on a life of their own. And as they do so, the sand dimples; tiny shoots start to push up through the white, a greenish-blue; and as he lifts his hand up the shoots seem to follow it, as if he’s moving them with strings. A group of children sit in a circle, watching what he does. Entranced.

#

“I can take you to these places,” he told her. “If you really want to go.”

“Well, what sort of a nutcase wouldn’t want to?”

“They won’t necessarily be safe. Not all of them.”

“That’s okay.”

“And maybe I can’t protect you.”

“Maybe not. But I want to go. I want to see what’s really out there.”

“It’ll change you.”

“Good. Good. You have no idea how much I want to change.”

#

She looks down at herself now, and yes, there are changes. Her skin has bleached and hardened, her limbs are lengthened, her hair is pale but spiced with shades of cherry and nutmeg. She’s swapped out old jeans and loose sweatshirts for a garment a little like a dress that hangs from her shoulder and trails in the sand at two serpent-tail ends. The fabric is a kind of thick, soft linen and it clings to her like Glad-wrap; it folds and swirls like fabrics don’t do where she once came from.

She slides her arms around his waist.

He’s finished for the day now, sending the whooping children away with a rhyme they must solve before the next lesson. He watches them go, a smile of satisfaction spreading across his face. This is what he’s born to do. So much knowledge and power, so much history, all to be passed down to another eager generation. No boredom and misbehaving, no surliness or slouching, none of the antics of schooling such as she grew up with.

The hut is deceptive. Beneath its curved roof it slides down into an underground chamber filled with mosses and mushrooms. There’s a bed in one corner, all grown from soft russet moss, and he takes her there and envelops her in a body that had made her gasp with shock once, but which now is all familiarity and love. He has three fingers on each hand, the middle one much, much the longer; his face is narrow, elongated at the chin. His golden eyes no longer seem wolf-like; they’re round and dappled, they remind her of the old-world moon.

#

There was a time when he took her to a world that was all in flood. He didn’t know what had happened. Perhaps he had messed his timing. There was no time to talk about it, no opportunity to debate. They were on a narrow stretch of rock with massive waves rearing up on all sides, crashing against the stone, frothy with teeth, their blue bodies thrumming with an energy that she thought she could feel.

He pointed towards a larger chunk of rock. She tried to run there, but one of the waves caught her and ripped her away. She can still remember the way its salt rubbed against her skin, the way it rolled her under, and held her down. There were invisible arms, invisible fingers, clinging on to her, intent on drowning her. She was frantically trying to kick at them, trying to free herself, when she saw the greyish bulk of him swimming down towards her. She squeezed her eyes shut as he threw out a spell-fused aura of light. She felt it burn her skin even through the water. She felt his arms wrap around her and drag her to the surface. Her mouth tasted like blood.

The sea had stilled. He was trembling with effort of having used to much of his energy to still it. He was hurting as much as she was. But he rocked her in his arms and whispered over and over “I’m so very sorry, you don’t know how sorry I am.”

She was too drained of energy, to dizzy and dumbfounded, to be able to tell him that it was all right, that everything between them would be all right.

#

“But we can’t stay together,” he had warned her at the time.

“What? No! You’re like my soul mate. You’re the one and only man I was ever meant to be with!” This wasn’t hyperbole. This was as real to her as the carpet she was standing on, as the tabletop her trembling fist was pressed against.

“My world and your world. They’re really not compatible. And I have to go home.”

“But-”

“I should have told you from the start, but I came to feel so much for you. I became so fascinated and focused on you.”

“What you mean is that you love me. That’s what that feeling is. And I love you right back. And I refuse to give you up.”

“I can’t stay.”

“So fine, I’ll go with you.”

“It’s very, very different.”

“I’ve seen different.”

“Only as an explorer.”

“I don’t care. I’ll go.”

“It can’t be forever.”

“We’ll see.”

#

Oh yes, she’d willed it that way. But it begins to seem now that her will can’t be enough. He did warn her. Credit where it’s due. He had warned her. “The world will begin to seem less real to you. It’ll fade, and your old world, your old life, it’ll begin to show through. Your mind will readjust.”

She doesn’t want that. But she can feel it happening. There’s something less distinct about this beautiful village, and its strange, loving people. When she looks into the horizon, she can see grey shadows that no-one else can see. Sometimes she thinks she can see the sky, and it’s not a shade of rust-mixed-into-purple, but a deep, sun-struck blue. A sun that seems too small and yellow.

“We knew this would happen,” he says.

“Don’t you care?!”

“Of course I care.” And that way his face puckers and closes in on itself, that’s a form of crying here; it’s an expression of grief.

“We have magic. The other spell-born. If you worked together in a ceremony…”

“Walk with me,” he says, “out into the desert.”

And so, she does. And after a while she’s not quite sure who it is she’s walking with. A friend, she thinks, or at least he feels that way. A soft and non-threatening presence. There’s no need for words between them, and she senses there never truly has been. And after a while she is walking alone, in peace, untroubled. But there is something up ahead. And beneath her feet a road is forming. Firmly tarsealed, and with white and yellow lines painted on it. The patterns feel familiar. And up ahead, she knows the skyline. She sees around her the long grass and the highway. Some cars are speeding past her. The sign up ahead is a for bus stop. And when the bus stops and she gets on she finds she is wearing a pair of jeans, and there is a green sweatshirt overtop, and in her pocket there’s a wallet, and a bus card inside that.

She knows she wants to travel three zones.

She recognises her stop.

She walks the single block to her unchanged home, and as she fumbles for her keys, she can’t quite remember where it is she went out to, what she’s coming home from, but she sure feels tired, she wants nothing more than to flop down on her bed and take a long nap.

#

She goes for a walk in the park. There’s a light breeze blowing, and the first few autumn leaves are having a dance in the wind. She shrugs her coat around her, feeling the first little frosty knives of winter.

She notices a man standing under one of the trees. There is something weirdly familiar about him, but she can’t trace what it is. And she really isn’t sure what makes her do it, but she walks towards him, smiling as she approaches.

“Good morning,” he says.

She blushes when she speaks – she’s not normally like this: “Hey, I don’t suppose I know you from somewhere? This isn’t a line. You really look familiar.”

He shakes his head, “I don’t think so.”

“Are you sure?”

“As sure as I can be.”

“That’s so weird, because I really thought…”

“I’m Jack,” he holds a hand out to her.

“Gabrielle.”

“Charmed. I don’t suppose you’d care to go grab a coffee?”

And since he seems so nice, and so oddly, securely familiar, and perhaps because of that oddly golden tint to his eyes, she says, “Sure, why not? Let’s do that.”

 

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work