Liminal

“A picture is a secret about a secret” Diane Arbus

Sage holds the photo up against the landscape. It had been taken decades before, when she was a child. She wants to recapture the original scene. She hopes it might jog her memory of what really happened, not what she thought happened – what everyone told her had happened. It had not been imagination. It had been real. She is sure of it. 

As they say, however, you can never go home. Who would recognize the torn and hanging screens, laundry on the fences that had not been there then, the cigarette butts, the empty bottles?

She takes new photos. Perhaps comparison to the old photos will help her remember. It had been real. She is sure of it.

Back home she prints the photos out on her home printer. On the wall next to her computer is her favorite quote, a reminder that it had all been real no matter what anyone says.

**

September 9, 1967

Behind the house is my old bicycle path. These days I am the only one who remembers it. Other eyes see only grass mashed but alive, blue stone, and purple weedy flowers saved from the sun by the high watching oaks. The oaks are the only ones who share my secret. The insects are busy with their insect things and the squirrel has to plot his winter stash. The birds who follow their own secret paths are too high to care. I only get there in the summers now as we pass through to my grandparents’ house.Mom doesn’t understand why I always plead to go back. But that’s ok. At least she lets me go look.

In art class today we had to pick a quote to do in calligraphic lettering and then decorate somehow. I chose my favorite quote of all, the one by Roald Dahl, “And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.” Sister Benedict said my lettering is almost perfect and she gave me an A+ because she liked the background drawing of the big oak tree with a gnomish creature beside it.That was easier than drawing Lisssa.Fairy details are small and specific where gnomes are all kind of round and blurry to start with.

**

June 16, 1958

Dear Diary. You are the only one I can tell. Except the oak trees and I don’t really tell them. They’re just nosey and listen in to everything. 

At night the secrets come inside to play, dressed as if for Sunday best. They call to each other and tell the stories that are kept from the day (but not from the trees). I pretend not to listen to their noise because I need to watch the closet door to make sure it stays shut and check under my bed for things that make scratchy noises. It’s just the wind, Mommy says. It’s coming through the window crack and ruffling the curtains. But then she goes away and I know that she has her own secrets.

**

Sage pulls her current journal from its resting place on the shelf to the right of her computer. She shuffles through the photos she had taken and printed out a few days before, searching for anything that she might have missed in person. She had tried to attend to her surroundings but was so distressed by the changes to her old neighborhood that she could have missed anything, especially something as small as a piece of brick to mark a pink quartz rock and broken welk shell that she had stashed somewhere on that path along with a small red box. Maybe Lisssa had gotten angry and moved them. After all, Sage hadn’t been back in years. Perhaps one must continue to appease a fairy’s wants if treasure was to be safely kept over time.

She filled her fountain pen with turquoise blue ink, named Peacock Blue,  her favorite, and began to write.

March 22, 2001

I didn’t find the marker for the treasure. Maybe Mom was right. Maybe it was all my imagination. But I’m noticing that the longer the pictures I took sit, the more detail seems to appear.Perhaps I’m just tired and disappointed and maybe a little depressed. I don’t know why I thought that I might find something after so long.The neighborhood is so different.Even though nothing has been built on the alleyway I used to bicycle on, it is spread with broken glass and rusty cans.There is only dirt where the grass and the pretty weeds once grew. You can’t even see the blue stone, it has been covered over by years of sediment.No surprise there. But the oak tree is still there. I waited to see if it would whisper secrets to me on the breeze but it did not.  And I looked. I took a breath and calmed myself and thought that if I poked around I might find the things I left behind for LIssa. The tree is huge now. There are fallen branches that no one is clearing. I guess between wood rot and rain and snow and so much dirt the markers could still be there just buried farther down than I thought. 

Her curtains rustle and it reminds her of the wind in her childhood bedroom.But this is a new house and there are no leaks around the windows. The room is brightly lit with artificial overhead light and with lamps added to illuminate the corners. She shakes her head. Puts her pen down, closes her journal, and heads to the kitchen to fix dinner for herself and the cat that meets her at the door, ears perked toward the bed, meowing.

“Hey, Dumpling,” she says. “You hungry?” and doesn’t notice the raised hair on Dumpling’s back or the fluffed-out size of Dumpling’s tail. 

**

Lisssa sits in front of a pink quartz globe and watches Sage work around the kitchen. Time means nothing to fairy folk and so decades pass like minutes or centuries.It all depends on attitudes.Lisssa misses Sage, Sage being the only human she has ever gotten close to. Lisssa supposes she could have found a way to follow Sage when her family moved away but she knew she could follow anytime she wished but then she had not.And Sage had moved on and Lisssa had stayed the same as young fairies do for the first few centuries. She watches Dumpling who watches her back. 

**

May 3, 1959

Dear Diary

Last week Lissa told me she would always be with me. That she could see me through her pink quartz crystal ball.And she gave me a piece of pink rock and said it was just like her crystal ball. She said I could always call her with that. So I buried it by her oak tree so she wouldn’t have a problem hearing me if I called.Then Mommy and I had to move because Daddy was trying to take me away and I didn’t have time to go get the pink rock and the shell I put by it and the red box that held the paper we both kissed our promise to be sisters forever. I tried to tell Mommy but she said now wasn’t the time for made up friends.We had to go. And I cried and cried but we went. Diary I did not make her up. And now I will never see her again.

**

December 7, 2028

It would have been Mom’s birthday today. I wish she had managed to live as long as me. There are so many things we could have talked about.

**

Ending 1

Sage keeps her journal on a recorder these days, voice activated since her eyes blur and writing hurts her arthritic hands. Across the room, Lisssa sits in all her silvery splendor, glamoured to look as if her silver hair is gray, to match the lines on her face that aren't really there. They smile at each other and rise together to go into the kitchen for coffee and sweet buns. In the kitchen on the wall by the door is the photo Sage printed out so many years ago. After a week a form had appeared in the print, becoming clearer every day.Lisssa in all her silver radiance, holding a rock, a shell and a red box.

Ending 2

Sage looks at the photos she took so long ago. She has almost convinced herself she sees Lissa in the shadows, but she is older now, and fairies are for fairytales. In the end, her Mom had been right. She closes her photo album and heads to the kitchen for tea. If Dumpling were still around she would have seen Lisssa in the corner shadows, crying.

Ending 3

Sage and Lissa look out over the red rocks of Sedona. Nearby a vortex hums below human hearing - their current mode of transportation. Each wears a small pink quartz stone on a silver chain. 

Later, Sage will record in her journal, “There are so many things people don’t know about this world, fewer yet they are willing to believe.Yearning has its own kind of magic.All you must do is follow its lead.”