Where Dreams Hide

June 10, 2015

by Eygló

There is something growing on the trees. It’s alive. I noticed the first time I got here, but I still don’t know what it is. It looks as much alive as the trees it lives on.

I can’t remember what I was doing here the first time I came, or how I got here, and I don’t much care. I remember I just wanted to sneak a peek. I knew it was magical and that I wasn’t supposed to be here. It was dark and the darkness made everything look grey and mystical. I was so excited, this was my Narnia, a dark and frightening one.

I walk along the fence, among the trees. They look so old, as if they are antediluvian — and maybe they are? What do I know about this place? What do I know of its history? Of its life before me? Nothing. Or not much. I just know that I found it, and that when I come here to walk among the trees the fog thickens and the wind chimes in the distance sound low and muffled, but can still, always, be heard.

When I get to the trees with the silver leaves, I always stay and just watch for a while. I can almost see the sensibility, feelings, dreams radiating a slight aura around them. The beings on the bark seem to thrive there especially. I always take a long time walking underneath those trees, hoping I can find a leaf that has fallen to the ground.

When I do, I pick it up carefully and go to sit down by the fence. I lean towards it, but it isn’t very comfortable, the wood is old and it needs to be repainted, it’s easy to get splinters if you’re not careful. But it is better than sitting by the trees. They don’t give much support and always seem to squirm away, like a fidgety child that doesn’t like you very much but is too polite, or too shy, to say it.

The silvery leaves that fall to the ground are filled with dreams that aren’t mine. It’s quite wonderful. I sit with the leaf in my hand, feeling the heaviness of it and the rough texture between my fingers and the way it emanates the strongest of emotions. Emotions I have never even felt before come to me, and in my mind's eye I see things, wilderness, landscapes so fantastic that I doubt anything like it has ever existed in the whole wide world. I see wonderful people, evil doers, monsters, men and women who lived long ago, or who never lived at all. I see tales, long and short, told like they are playing right here within me, like they belong to me, like they are my own memories. And they become a part of me. I hide them within me.

I never pick the leaves that haven’t fallen. They aren’t ripe and I know that plucking them, before they are ready, leads to nothing but madness and death. I was warned by someone who used to wander the garden, if a garden is what you can call this place: a garden is kept but this place keeps you, like a rose in the shade. She was an old woman, smaller than a mouse with grey wavy hair and cold eyes. She whispered the secret to the leaves, said that the leafs would claim me if I broke the rules. Then she walked into the garden, plucked a big leaf of one of the silvery maples, sat down by the picked fence and just vanished.

I saw it all, in my mind's eye, from one of the leaves, and I don’t know if she is me or I am her. But I know the same thing will happen to me one day. I don’t fear it. I don’t dread it. I will become a memory here myself, a dream, and I will hide in the garden until I am ready to fall and if I’m lucky someone will pick up that particular leaf, feel the smooth texture underneath her fingers and be overwhelmed by the stories, by the notion that I’ve stored.

And I will always belong to this place, because I am your wildest dream and this is where dreams come to hide.

Spark by Michael Marshall Smith — Spark by Michael Marshall Smith

Eygló was born and bred in Kópavogur, Iceland. She studied literary theory at the University of Iceland before moving to the south of Sweden where she is playing house, taking pictures, writing, reading, running and living, when there is time. She never grew up enough to start drinking coffee, but she does know how to pronounce Eyjafjallajökull and how to do a fishtail braid. Instagram and Site.

The Woods

June 7, 2015

Kate Chandler

The day had been bright at the time Clare had entered into the woods, but patches of light grey cloud had been rolling through the sky all afternoon, and were now starting to darken, slow in pace and collect together into a form that threatened rain. She hadn’t prepared for it, and there were another two kilometres to go before a branch of the trail would open out into a residential street where she could, if necessary, nip into the little heritage general store and have a drink while waiting out a rain shower. She picked up her pace.

Thinking of which of the many types of beverage she’d most like to order at the store if she needed to go in, she walked along mostly oblivious to the environment around her until she was jolted out of her thoughts by what sounded like children’s laughter off to her right. She stopped to listen. There was a small cheer and more laughter. Curious, she went over to the side of the trail and peered through the trees.

At the bottom of a heavily treed bank, there was a slow-flowing stream that she hadn’t been aware of. She must have been following alongside it for a while, yet she hadn’t heard the sound of water, and hadn’t remembered seeing it as a feature on the map at the beginning of the trail, either. The children she had heard were leaping up to grab a large tree branch that was hanging above the stream, and swinging themselves over to the other side. There were three of them, two girls and a boy, around nine or ten years old, she guessed.

She smiled, hit by a feeling something like, but not quite, nostalgia: the scene was such a visceral reminder of her own childhood growing up near woods very similar to the one she was standing in. She checked the sky, and when rain didn’t appear imminent, she decided to climb down the bank a little way and lean against a tree to watch.

After a couple of minutes, there was a small splash as one of the girls landed feet-first at the edge of the stream. She hadn’t fallen, and can’t have got wet more than up to her ankles, but she stumbled along the bank away from her friends as if injured, and sat down heavily with such a forlorn expression that it shocked Clare. Her friends looked a little sad, but not concerned. and they didn’t ask if she was all right or attempt to comfort her. Clare figured that maybe they were used to her sulking out of injured pride. The other girl and boy continued with their play, which was only a little more subdued, and Clare continued to watch them.

A little while later, the boy completely misjudged his swing and fell heavily on his butt in the deepest part of the stream. He quickly got up and waded through the calf-deep water over to where the girl with the wet feet was sitting, and crawled up onto the bank to sit beside her. They both now looked forlorn, but they didn’t speak, and the girl who was still dry continued her play, albeit now with a more serious air.

Clare watched on, fighting a sudden maternal urge to interfere, to go down and comfort the sad children. But as she looked at them, her eyes seemed to be playing tricks on her: the children’s feet were camouflaged to the point of disappearance. The more closely she looked, the more she was convinced that neither of them had feet any more. Disconcerted, she looked at the girl still playing, at the amount of concentration on her face. She looked back at the other two children, and gasped when she saw that the boy now, unmistakably, also had no legs and no lower arms.

Before she was able to properly digest what she was seeing, a loud roll of thunder burst open the sky and a heavy rain began to fall. The girl still playing took one last swing over the stream, briefly hugged her friends, and dashed to a nearby stand of trees, where she somehow made herself small enough to squeeze into a hollow in one of them. The other two children, unable to run, remained sitting on the bank. They now huddled up close, and Clare’s breath hitched painfully in her throat as she watched the pair of them wash out of existence in a matter of minutes.

She stood there, motionless, staring at the spot where the children had been sitting, until she found herself dragging the inside of her sleeve across her eyes to dry them. Pulling herself together, she stumbled down to the bottom of the slope of trees, jumped over the old stream-bed, dry for decades now, and ran straight to the hollowed tree.

The girl wasn’t there. Clare reached into her pocket and took out her keyring with its miniature flash-light, turned it on and stuck her head inside the gap that she used to be able to squeeze her whole body through so easily as a child. Inside, on a natural ledge, she found the small box of mementoes she had stashed there during the summer that she had played daily in these woods with her two friends before the day that a great storm unexpectedly blew through, felling the big tree that they were climbing and trapping them all under the surface of the stream beneath its heavy branches.

Clare gazed thoughtfully out at the woods around her for a few minutes, then took a deep breath and allowed her spirit to be absorbed into the hollow tree.

In 2011, Kate Chandler turned in her badge and scanner gun, leaving an eleven-year career in librarianship to become a Mother and Armchair Philosopher-Psychologist. She enjoys observing, pondering, analysing, writing and curating interesting web links and aesthetically pleasing pieces of art, and sometimes manages to bring these things together to create something that she deems worthy of sharing. UK born and bred, she moved to Vancouver, Canada in 2005, thence to the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, where she currently resides in the sleepy seaside town of Sechelt with her husband and four-year-old daughter. http://kchandler.wordpress.com/

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