A thin and ethereal looking imp with cerulean eyes and lucent skin, swings soundlessly on a plank of wood, dangling delicately from an aged oak. The winds whisper softly, kissing her ears as the rest of the world lays in slumber. Shadows sweep over the sky, the harvest moon winking out from behind them, as though the darkness has been slashed and is bleeding. Leaves lie strewn on the ground, like broken promises, lost and fallen hopes and dreams so fragile, like melting freshly fallen snow. Cats and rats creep in corners, where tissue’s turned to bone. She lets her toes skim the grass as her head lolls back, taking in the truths written across the alien night sky. The same sky she has looked into all her life, that now introduces itself as a stranger. It feels as though she is looking at a picture of herself as a child. She knows it is her, but it’s so unfamiliar; an innocent entity that existed a long time ago. An entity that survives only in the stars.
 

*

That particular morning was hot for September. My family had piled into the car and headed south, for we were visiting friends. I had dozed against the window glass, only half listening to my little brother Peter explain about limb regeneration in newts, his new science book open in his lap, his little legs dangling and kicking against the car seat, shoe laces lolling precariously. Of course I knew that humans could re-grow their livers, and even in some circumstances their ribs, but I found myself thinking how wonderful it would be to be able to cut off, or out, any piece of our own anatomy; to be able to grow it back, fresh, new and unspoiled. Of course this is not possible and probably never will be. Time is just not that kind.

 The car was muggy. Most modern families have air conditioning but my family see no need for such luxuries. Mother sat in the front, her turquoise beads clattering together as she gesticulated through a story that made my Father laugh, his bright green eyes shining, with only a hint of despondency. The trip I hoped would do him good. I was thinking that Mother was wearing too much eyeliner, making her usually blotchy eyes look even more tired as it smudged slightly in the heat. I noticed how large Peter’s head looked now he’d had his straw coloured, baby soft down shaved off. I smiled as I considered the titanic brain it was housing, a vast abyss of knowledge that swallowed all in its path. I fell asleep just as the smell of lavender began to waft up my nostrils, and the air began to breathe.

 When we arrived, I glanced around through a sleepy haze. There were so many people, in colourful costumes and with loud dispositions; a kind of gaiety about them that made you think of power, energy. These were people who didn’t care what others thought. I liked these kind of people best.  They approached me and my family like long lost friends, embracing us into their hub. Of course Mother and Father knew them vaguely, but that day I had only heard legends of them. It had unsettled me a little that they seemed to see straight through me, and I wondered how they had come to perceive so clearly. I couldn’t look in the mirror for all I ever saw were details. The trifling and chilling ones that make my throat tighten and my butterflies flutter. But it all depended on how I squinted really.

 ‘You look so well angel.’ They told me, as I was embraced in the warmth of their sweet smoky perfume. I reckoned I looked like hell, but rolled my eyes behind politely closed lids. 

 ‘What a marvellous house.’ My mother had said, her eyes gazing around in awe, her hands reassuringly kneading my shoulders. Peter was pressing his nose up against the glass of a reptile tank in the next room, a little foggy disc by his lips where he had uttered ‘Cool.’and ‘Wow.’. 

 I joined Peter in this room and mooched around it, stroking the surfaces where brass and wooden animals stood, old dusty books beckoned and half melted candles flickered. A golden chandelier hung from the ceiling, its arms dangling multi-coloured beads that cast beams all over the worn, polished wooden floors.
 My father came in, ‘Everyone’s in the kitchen. Come on.’ I noticed he had taken his shoes off and wondered if I should too.

 We followed him out of the room, past a grand staircase and down a warren of a hall, where the walls were adorned with photographs of smiling faces. Some aged and yellow, like they had been dipped in tea, and some so new and shiny it gave you hope the memory would never fade. There were also a few paintings of ornamented, ghostly women whose eyes seemed to follow me out their gilded frames as I tiptoed past. There was something of them that made me sure any moment they may jump out and frighten me, with their wildly static hair and wide knowing eyes. 

 The kitchen was large and bustling. It smelt of apples, spices and freshly baked bread. Every surface and appliance looked about a hundred years old, but sturdy enough to hold up for another few decades at least.

There are people in life who are resigned to living within a set of social rules. Etiquette. A particular way of being that would cause no disturbance nor distaste to those in their surroundings. These were not those kind of people. In my home, my grandparents, my friends and every other I had visited but there, children were encouraged to be seen and not heard. Visitors to engage politely with their host or hostess, but not involve themselves, for this would seem forward. In this kitchen however, there must have been at least a dozen people, all of whom have removed their shoes, some even their socks, had rolled their sleeves up and tucked right into the preparations. My Mother and Father were near strangers, but they carried themselves more comfortably here than I think I had ever seen, even in our own home, which was never quite this boisterous or disorderly.
 
A woman, who I assumed was the lady of the house, dressed in a flowing robe and a shimmering scarf tied around her hoary hair approached me, and kindly guided me over to a low table where a group of youngsters were peeling apples. I lowered myself onto a velvet cushion, the ambers from the fire warming my back, and got to work.

 The word courage has always caused me discomfort. It is a word regularly used in my general vicinity, but really what I feel is nothing of it. I have a cousin who is a field reporter for human rights abuse, and often goes to war torn countries to find herself and her companions in terrible peril. She has been shot at, abducted and spent nights in foreign prisons. Yet she continues to go back; devotion to a cause and a desire to tell the story overcoming all natural inclination to protect herself. She tells me that she does not think of herself as courageous; that courage is a word meant for those she leaves behind. I am coming to recognise what she means.

 I looked to my Mother who was kneading dough, and smiling so widely I held my breath and concentrated hard, trying with all my strength to make that moment last. I wondered how she would survive when all this was over. 

 Someone nudged me in the side. It was Peter. ‘I’m bored, do you think we can go outside and play?’ he asked me. I knew he was dying to disappear into the bushes, to shake tress so the leaves and caterpillars pattered down, to scrimmage in the dirt and breathe in the earth. Possibly stroke a few worms and sing them a song. Peter is a little strange like that.

 At sunset, we stood in a circle and joined hands. Women shook ritual beads, crooning the occasion. Men wafted a sweet smelling smoke, spiraling up from a bundle of twigs alight, in metrical circles, as tinkling music floated out from the house. There was an alter in the centre of our ring, adorned with seasonal gifts; apples, leaves the colours of glowing embers, pumpkins and grains. There were also quarter candles, and a goblet of wine. As the wine passed around the circle, everyone took a sip and shared a wish, a hope for the coming months. The goblet arrived at me and everyone looked on expectantly. A simple nod from the woman with the long robe and shimmering scarf in her hair, let me know that I did not have to speak aloud. I passed the goblet on.

GreatSpirits, I ask for your help to clear and cleanse this space for our gathering, to provide healing to those in need, to send your love, energy and protection to bless our work, and empower our working with your divine light and energy. Under the light of the harvest moon let all that ends, begin again. A cycle in life, so mote it be.

 As we were motioned to sit, the woman picked up a bundle of the smoldering twigs, what I now know to be a smudge stick of sage, and chanted as she walked around the inside of the circle, dousing us in flame and fragrance. To me, it smelt like soul. Soon others began to sing with her, repeating a blessing over and over in canon. I closed my eyes and let myself be pulled into a sphere of pink warmth and light. It moved from me into the centre of the circle, where it was fertilized, and blossomed into a giant spiraling column. As it unwound, uncoiled and released, it changed to the colour of a crisp, clear emerald. I stared hypnotically through closed lids as the light traveled back to me, consuming me, engulfing my body and mind. I felt the woman linger over me, and she placed a cool hand gently on my forehead. Then she moved on. A sleep beneath the earth; was the only ending so certain.
 

 Later on, as the sun steadfastly slumbered, I sat on a log, watching the fire blaze before me and the adults laugh and jingle around it. Peter was lying a few feet from me on his stomach, his tongue twitching resolutely between his teeth as he drew with coloured pencils in a large notepad. I rustled my bare feet between the blades of grass, allowing them to tickle my toes. It was upon gazing further down the garden that I saw a girl sitting by the lake alone. An invisible energy seemed to pull my weary bulk to standing, and towards her. 

 ‘Hi,’ I spoke softly as I did not wish to startle her. ‘I’m Aria.’ 

 I settled myself on the ground as she stared at our reflections on the water. ‘I know who you are.’ She offered no name for herself.

 ‘What are you doing down here alone?’ 

 After a few moments she replied, ‘Just sitting. I like to just sit these days. It’s peaceful down here.’

 I nodded and chewed my lip a little, playing with a loose thread on the hem of my skirt. When she finally turned to me, I  found myself faced with an iniquitous reality. Her pallor was so ghostly it looked like bone, but her eyes so young and bright in those sunken sockets, so powerfully conveying a fight that I found myself pulling her gently towards me. As she breathed, like a newborn sleeping, into my chest, and I held her as I would Peter after one of his nightmares, I could not find words. I realised there were none, so I just clung to her; tried to telepathically communicate how sorry I was. Tell her it would soon be over, one way or another, and that it would all be okay. Even though I knew it wouldn’t. Not really.

The noise from the celebrations was dampened, compacted, by the fog that drifted lazily over the water, creating wraithlike shapes that rose and fell with the evening breeze. My eyes grew sleepy as I saw a figure rise from the mist, angelic, and magically evaporate into the night.  A wooden swing gently clunked against a tree trunk behind us.

*


It is evening again, perhaps four years after that first visit to the house, but that I can’t be sure of, as time has become something I pay little attention to. We are back at the house and I am watching myself dangling on that wooden swing in the soft glow of twilight. The ceremony has finished and the others have retired indoors to the room with mats on the floor and where children are not allowed. Peter and I had lingered outside once and peered through the crack between the door and the wall to see the adults with bent heads, a sound beating from them like a living organism, a central spiral of smoke wafting up and brushing the ceiling. My Father had looked like he had fallen asleep. My Mother looked as though she might cry. We are older now, but still we don’t join them, which suits us fine really. Instead we wash dishes in the kitchen, but tonight the other children were being too loud, so I had done what I could muster before hiding away outside. 

 ‘Hey Aria! You wanna come play? We’re going into the tree house!’ Peter yells at me from the shadows. His hair has grown back now. I convinced him that having two bald children in the family was just a little too sad. Otherwise he is still the same, if just a little more social. 

 I wave in refusal and turn back to my swinging. I always see myself from a distance now. Even in my dreams, and in my dreams I am always light too. As though I’m shedding matter, losing molecules, shrinking, and filling with warm air that does not make me rise, but fall. Deeper, deeper into a darker place; witness to the blackening of life. I also notice I look small. 

 I watch myself wander towards the lake at the bottom of the garden. The elder house stands behind me, like a wilderness on its own. The light barely reaches this far down, and the glassy surface is sliver grey, ghostly as it always appears at this time of year. The moon sits under the surface with a beckoning silence, a glassy spherical gem pleading to be touched. I lift a foot and slip it into the liquid glass, my toes sinking into the soft, cool mud. The other foot follows and soon I am waist deep. I watch, as I disappear under the water, my hair fanning out and like an eclipse, covering the moon. Everything goes black, and I am gone. Only the stars still twinkle above me, shining light on a wilderness, a peace, and those left behind.

‘Aria! Come play with us!’ …………..