Tiny Dancer
But, oh, how it feels so real
Lying here with no one near
Only you, and you can hear me
When I say softly, slowly
Hold me closer, tiny dancer
- Elton John, Tiny Dancer
I'd stood on the edge of this same forest in the Spring, completely unaware of how much my life would change in such a brief amount of time. Now, as the crisp edge of the Autumn breeze blew through the glen, I knew what I had to do. There was no other choice. This small lucite prison I carried contained all the hope I'd found in this world but it also contained the greatest sorrow and grief. I had to let her go. She needed to be with her people.
I was reminded of that Summer morning so many years ago I had stood on the Hill of Tara at sunrise. I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me as the Sun hung low on the sky as it rose. But no, they really had simply . . . appeared . . . there off in the distance as the hill slopped down and away. They where just . . . there . . . and then they were comsumed with a ritualistic dance whose music I could not hear. All shapes and sizes, bathed in an etheral glow. I was transfixed by their dance. It seemed to grip me tightly, almost pressing the air out of my chest. I felt a strong, undeniable compulsion to cross the distance and join them.
Just as my legs started to move, almost out of their own volition, a strong weathered hand came down on my shoulder. The spell had been broken then and when I looked up I saw the face of experience and knowledge staring back at me.
"Aye boy," he said in a thick Celtic brogue, "the Tuatha Dé Danann. The Good People. They call to you."
The stranger produced a hand rolled cigarette almost magically and lit it up. He sniffed, took a drag, but maintained his firm grip on my shoulder.
"Midsummer," he sniffed again, "One of the Moving Days. If I let you go with them, you might not know where in the world you'd end up."
Thinking back to that day, as I stand on this wooded threshold, I never really understood what happened that morning. The older I got the more willing I became to think that it was some sort of flight of fancy or liminal, imaginary event. But that warm May Day six months ago proved to me that it had been a real thing that happened in a Universe that was seemingly stranger than anything I could contain in my mind. A world that contained possibilities more fantastical than I had hoped. She proved all of that.
Steeling myself, I picked up the lucite box and marched across the border between the field and the woods. The electricity in the air immediately made every hair on my body stand up. This place always felt different, super charged with hope and fear and light and dark. But six months ago something changed, something had shifted that evening I ventured out here by myself and became forever changed. Molly could feel it too; she'd refused to join me. Either in fear or protection. I couldn't tell at the time.
I had found the mound exploring the woods a few months after my eccentric mother's passing. This wasn't where I'd grown up, my mother had inherited it from her second husband upon his own death. It had then passed to me; a large, sprawling wooded plot like many of those that made up this side of Canada. A deep wood full of overgrown thickets and trees that seemed to reach over and blot out the Sun. This forest probably hadn't been thinned and tended properly in 100 years. It gave it a shadowed, imposing quality that made many turn on their heels and walk right back out again. But not me. I could feel the energy and allure of this haunted place. The same kind of energy that tugged and coaxed me that Summer morning in Tara also inhabited these woods. The kind of place you could imagine the stray dead branch that scrapes you as you pass through the underbrush was a gnarled, scragly hand reaching out for you.
My eye caught the gentle rise of the mound without first seeing its end, the slope pulling my gaze upward to the top. It looked just like a slight elevation change until I walked around and saw it was an equal perturbance in the ground. It became an interesting landmark in the subsequent year as I walked the woods with Molly, trying to make sense of my life and the hand I had been dealt. Although I had always felt . . . attuned . . . to the invisible world, I never once thought anything of this geological anomaly on my property until that fateful May Day evening.
It was weird, I didn't usually walk the property after supper but something called me out that night. Molly refused to join me, safely ensconsed on her couch after a full day of pouting, demanding food, and generally acting like an annoyed, belligerent teenager. Which wasn't terribly abnormal for Molly but, looking back, may be she was trying to tell me something? Or may be she just knew what waited for me out in those woods that night. They say that animals are attuned to energy and presence that we aren't. God knows she didn't trust our visitor those days after she showed up.
The previous Winter had been hard on us both so that warm Spring night was definitely welcome. I stepped out through the screen door and immediately smelled a strange fragrance in the air. Sweet like lilacs but it was too early for those to be blooming yet. And there was something intermingled with that, like lavender with a spicy muskiness underneath it. I was by no means an expert on those woods and what all the blooming plants smelled like this time of year. I was a software developer, not a horticulturalist.
As I tromped out through the back field, a distant light and music caught my ear ever so slightly. A flute may be? Some drums? There was a farm behind me through the woods about a kilometer distant, I thought they might be taking this warm evening to enjoy a bonfire and some music. It was a good way to celebrate the coming warmth. But just then some lights caught my eye, will o'the wisps thrumming in time to the drum beat that got louder and more driven the more I approached the woods. I knew this was weird but still I walked towards the woods. As I crossed the threshold of the tree line it felt like a barrier was holding me back and I actually put up my hands to push through it. I could see the lights now, dancing and circling rhythmically around the mound. Dipping, swinging, and flying in spirals up into the air and falling back again. I couldn't believe my eyes. Were they fireflies?
Unabashed and curious, I walked forward.
It was when I approached the mound that one of the lights broke free of the frenetic motion and flew by my head at an astounding speed. It caught my eye as it passed and I couldn't believe what I saw in that instant.
Was that a tiny person with wings?
But then the light shot up into the air, twirled, and dove straight down at me again. Not angrily. Curiousity?
Somehow, my body had carried me up and around the mound to the other side. I rarely came around this way because the path curved away at this point and cut further into the forest. I could feel the underbrush scratch and claw at me; scraping my arms almost raw from the thorns and brambles. The pull towards the light and music on the other side was magnetic; an adult experience of the child on that Irish morning. I felt warm and flushed under my clothing but this May night wasn't that warm, not yet.
As I fought my way through the uncleared land and followed the curve of the mound, my eyes astounded me. There, in a clearing I had never seen before, was a circle of standing stones; may be 25 metres in diameter. The stones where high, may be 3 metres give or take as each was rough hewn and irregular, and inscribed by hand all over with runes and symbols. The circle was illuminated by a light not cast into the area but from . . . within it? . . . like the circle itself was the source. A large bonfire burned in the centre throwing flames high in the area but, oddly, I couldn't hear the crackle of the fire. It was silent. Only the etheral music escaped the area; flutes and drums and harps. Around the fire danced creatures from mythology of every shape and size. I stood stunned as that one light circled frenetically up and down my body in lazy and tight circles. I could feel the astounishment in my body but it was like I was gripped by something primodial; something from a Jungian darkness deep in my soul. What the hell was going on here?
My weight shifted and my foot rocked forward, snapping a branch. The music abruptedly stopped and the assembled court turned towards the sound.
"Fuck," I reflexively muttered.
The light, completing the apogee of a lazy orbit around me, spun quickly, and shot quickly and directly toward me again. It came at me at full force and stopped instantly in front of my face. I finally got a good look at it. I could see that it was indeed a tiny . . . person? Human shaped. Covered in a gossamer gown who's beauty defied Human words. A set of translucent wings on her back. The light seemed to emanate directly from her as well. She was no Tinkerbell though. Her tiny form was athletically built with dark hair with olive colored skin. Her eyes had the darkest pupils I had ever seen, a black so dark that it seemed to swim in her iris. She wore a mischievous and knowing grin. Not necessarily evil but definitely of ill intent.
She turned to the assembled mass, nodded like she was receiving an order, and touched my face with her delicate hand. A hand like it belonged to one of the delicate porcelain figurines that used to line my mother's display case.
Words burst into my head like they were forcefully stabbed there with a psychic knife with the most demure voice I've ever heard.
This won't hurt a bit.
I woke up with a start in my bed the next morning. Someone knocking at my door. Every light rap on the door felt like a thunder clap rolling and resonating through my head. The sunlight streaming through my bedroom window felt like a thousand laser beams excruciatingly piercing my retina. Had last night all been some sort of May Day fever dream? Was I drinking last night? Oddly, everything after I left the house to go for my walk has a hazy blur. Like I was trying to watch the memory through a foggy up window. There was music? Lights? Fireflies?
The incessant knocking starting thundering through my head once more. Who was knocking at such and ungodly early time?
I looked over at my bedside alarm clock just as the digital displayed turned over 1:01pm.
I heard the screen door creak open. The sanctity of a closed door didn't mean much when you lived in the country. A lesson I'd learned when I moved here. It came from a good natured place but it still unnerved me a bit. Apparently I hadn't remembered to close and lock the main door last night when I stumbled in.
"Hello?" questioned the feminine voice from downstairs, "Are you okay George?"
I let my heavy, ringing head fall back to the pillow. It was Kate.
Kate Peabody was my neighbour on the farm back through the forest. She too had found herself here after inheriting her farm from deceased parents. One of those oddly romantic stories where lifelong spouses died within days of each other a week after their 60th anniversary. An avowed city dweller and, in my opinion, a bit of a hippie Marxist; Kate approached her farm with the conflicted grace of someone who wanted to get back to the land with an alpaca farm but also wanted gigabit internet. She'd turned out to be very interesting and good company, a salve against my self-imposed loneliness.
Kate found me eventually, barely functional, in my bedroom. She listened to my incoherent, cobbled together, and half-remembered story of the night before with the rapt attention of a mother humouring a hallucinating child. She was a forager and herbalist and had a good sense of what grew in these woods. I'm sure she thought I'd stumbled across a particularly large patch of mushrooms on my evening stroll.
"Why . . . do you . . . have your dress on inside . . . out?" I managed as she rolled me back fully in the bed and tucked me in.
She smiled and winked as she set off downstairs to make me some tea.
"You never know!" she yelled back up the stairs.
It had taken a solid two days before the . . . illness? . . . finally wore off and I was up around again on my own. It was a week after that I found her collapsed on my front porch.
It was a weird memory to have, but U2 was playing somewhere in the background that morning I stepped out into the late May sunshine.
And I can't be holdin' on to what you got
When all you got is hurt
I was caught in the lyrical ballet of the song, distracted by Bono's strong voice full of pain and restrained fury. I almost didn't look down and see her tiny form laying there, the size of a striken hummingbird.
I was confused at first I remember. I didn't quite comprehend what my eyes were seeing. That night in the woods had grown into a distant memory, like something half-remembered when you fall asleep watching TV or something you read in a book and confused for a memory. It was there but it didn't seem . . . there. So my mind thought it was looking at an injured bird at first but as I bent down I saw it had the form of a tiny Human . . . with wings? It was laying across the porch on it's . . . stomach . . . arms and legs akimbo and it's long, dark, matted hair strewn wildly across it's head. No sign of injury or blood. Did it bleed? What was I looking at?
For a moment, my mind snapped back to the present and I looked down at the lucite box in my hand as I marched into the woods. Today was Samhain, another Moving Day. They would venture out to find a new home tonight and close the door between realms for the Winter. Her weak, almost translucent body laying on the bottom of the box was hard to look at. If she didn't get back to her people tonight she might simply . . . cease . . . I don't think they die like we do. I think they just fade and fade and fade until their magick is gone and . . . they're . . . gone. She had been gone from them for so long that she was weak and sick for not being in their presence. I don't know how any of this works. I just know my own culpibilty in her weakness and illness. They must be empathetic and sympathetic souls because she stayed when she could have gone. Even after I realized what I was doing to her, how I had unintentionally used her to mask my own weakness and sadness and loneliness, she refused to leave. She had given me my life back and I didn't intend for her die in that endeavour.
As I walked on into the woods towards the mound in the dimming light of the October twilight, my mind went back to that May morning.
I don't know how long I crouched there in utter, stunned silence. I might just as well stumbled across a crashed UFO in the back field. A faerie?
I reached out and touched it lightly with my hand, nudging it slightly. It felt like a body, nothing overtly supernatural or weird to the touch. It was then I noticed the slight rise and fall of it's back. It breathed as well apparently?
To say that my mother was . . . eccentric . . . was generous. The grandchild of Irish immigrants, she carried many of the traditions and beliefs of the old country that predated the arrival of the Catholic Church. She was the reason I was standing on the Hill of Tara that morning I'd had my . . . experience. Which was odd because when it happened, she was no where to be found. Just that strange old man who had kept me from being caught up in the ritual. The strange old man who told me his name was Oisín.
There had been a lot of weird experiences like that with her, traveling the world to weird spots like Tara, Serpent Mound, Machu Pichu, and Mount Shasta. It had been an interesting but lonely childhood. I remember her lecturing me once during a hike around Mount Shasta with a group of her friends. I was probably the only kid in my Grade 5 that knew the name Jacques Vallee
It? She? It looked like she seemed stunned or knocked out. There were no visible cuts, she wasn't bleeding, she just seemed asleep. But the way she was sprawled across the porch it looked like she had passed out midair and crashed.
I looked around the porch, wondering what to do; trying to remember what my mother would have advised in this situation. Most children of single mothers got practical, if not slightly sardonically tinged, advice on how to survive in the world. I'd gotten advise about how to ward off vampires and detect if the person I'd encountered on the street was actually a Grey in disguise. Oh! And Changelings. How to tell if someone had been switched for a Changeling.
I finally decided that mother would have preached prudence. Some faeries were good natured, some evil, and some just mischeavous. A place to hold her for now . . . but how? Cold iron, a circle of salt or chalk, running water, a true name. I looked around and tried to find something that fit any of my mother's admonishments. There was nothing in the immediate area so I walked back into the shed attached to the house.
The shed was a mausoleum to my mother's inability to let anything go. It was piled high on all sides with old, tattered boxes of veritably everything. People magazines from the 60s over here, building supplies over there, old bat cages in the corner opposite me, bicycles no one had ridden in 40 years hanging by their flattened wheels in the rafters. She had been an affirmed String Saver; raised by a survivor of the Depression. "You never know," she had always said with a wise smile. Death had turned out to be the ultimate surprise she had no part or bangle to fix.
Wait? Bat cage?
I quickly strode through the shed to the far corner. At one point my mother had been convinced that she needed a bat as a familiar. For some reason. She had accumulated an impressive array of cages in that pursuit. My eyes fell on a small lucite cage with holes in it, one I remembered she bought at a yard sale when I was probably 12. "You never know," she said with a wink; the dollar already in her hand.
I picked it up, pushing the remaining heap out of the way to free it from the tangle. It was dirty and dusty but the door still worked and the hook locking mechanism seemed tight. But just the cage wouldn't do. I needed to break her magick, ward it until I knew what was going on. I circled my head round the shed, my eyes falling from box to box and evaluating what it was I needed.
Cold iron.
I ran to the building supplies and rifled through boxes madly. Nails. I needed nails or horseshoes or something like that. I cursed as my hand pushed into a box and snagged on something sharp. I flipped it open and found an old box of nails, ancient, may be even handmade by a smith. I grabbed a handful, tucked the cage under my arm, and ran back out to the porch.
I don't know why, but I half-expected her to be gone when I came back out on to the porch. It had been a hard Winter and if she had been a hallucination, she wouldn't have been the first.
Losing Annie was hard on me. In my darkest moments, I wondered if it was crueler to lose her a bit at a time the way I did or if she had been gone in an instant. The cancer ate away at her, digesting her dignity and pride a bit at a time until all that was left was the shell of the woman I had loved. The shell of the vibrant, loving, and giving woman the Universe (literally) slammed into me on a street corner in Toronto on a sunny Summer day. The shell of the woman who didn't flinch or hesitate when I inherited my mother's place. The shell of the woman who cheerfully took on the homestead as her own and gleefully adventured through the woods with Molly and I. Until one morning even the shell was gone.
It was about a month after the funeral that it started. A whispered voice here, glimpse out of the corner of my eye there. One dark, November night I dozed in front of the television and I could have sworn that I saw her come into the room and sit in the chair beside me. But I knew it was my grief that formed her in my mind and that wouldn't let her go. It was like that all Winter, I kept expecting her to come around a corner or clomping her boots as she came in from a snowy morning. The harsh reality of having someone taken from you that you thought you'd spend the rest of your life with slowly invaded my life like an infiltrating agent, an emotional Fifth Column. There was relief when her ghosts seemed to disipate in the Spring but the chasm where my heart was still remained. Who could ever fill the expanse that Annie so easily fit into?
I'd met Kate during one of those early Spring days in March. I'd come across her squatting behind a particularly large old oak tree that seemed to be by itself, a lone hardware elder amoungst the dense softwood grove. It's branches reached out and encompassed the immediate space. Underneath it's protection grew a cornocopia of forest plants and mushrooms. At the time it reminded me a bit of a weirwood tree from Game of Thrones; large, ancient, protective, and somehow magical. Wasn't that a prescient thought?
I was walking through the grove when I thought I heard a person's voice whispering through the hollow. It wasn't Annie's hallucinatory voice I'd heard all Winter; chiding me, confronting me, comforting me. It was different; a little more frantic and excited. Suddenly, Molly shot out from my side and went racing towards the far side of the oak tree. She was running with an energy and a speed I hadn't seen come out of her in a long time. She used to run home to Annie that way when we broke the treeline and came across the meadow after a hike. That last part through the field seemed like an impossible distance to wait to see her favourite person again.
"OH!" the voice shouted loudly as I watched a woman stand up hurriedly, her wicker basket of mushrooms and plants spilling across the forest floor. Coarse salt spilled from the shallow pockets of her loose dress. A large amulet of some kind swung freely at her neck. Intrigued, I walked toward her.
"Good morning!" I exclaimed happily, but a little awkwardly, as I closed the distance between us. Kate had honestly been the first person I'd talked to that whole season. I'd isolated myself after Annie died, drawing inward past the high walls of myself and closing the gate. I did the normal stuff; bought groceries, went for drives, acknowledged people I knew. I wasn't a hermit by any means but I definitely did not seek out company either. Who could understand any of it? Which of my minutely small number of male friends could understand and process these emotions with me? They were all still happily middle-aged and married. Who amoung them wouldn't awkwardly shift in their barstool when I described the internal hell of watching your soulmate slowly waste away to nothing until she seemingly disappeared? Who amoung them wouldn't awkwardly shift in their barstool when I talked about the terrible pain of having to clean out closets and dressers and take down all those pictures? Memories sure but all also reminders. Who amoung them wouldn't awkwardly shift in their barstool and change the subject to comment on how the Patriots sucked this year?
She smiled in my direction as she turned, brushing the detritius and branches from the lap of her dress. As I closed the distance to her I could see the amulet she wore was a stylized version of Yggdrasil, the Norse World Tree.
"Kate Peabody," she beamed behind her outstretched hand, "I'm sorry, have I strayed on to your land?"
"George Hawthorn," I grinned as I returned the smile and took her hand.
In the coming weeks and months, Kate and I bonded over the land and how we came to possess it. She seemed to have a genuine care and connection for it for someone who grew up in the city. Part of me felt she might have been a pretender to it but at least her heart felt true. By the time I had my . . . incident . . . in May, she'd become a regular on my farm; foraging the land and coming for regular visits. Although I fancied that she was coming to see me, it was obvious any interest in me was platonic and friendly; kinship, not romance. And it was just as well, I had come to regard her with the affection for a younger sister. We mapped the territory of our land and our lives that Spring. It helped heal me and miss Annie less; even if there was still a hole in my soul that Annie would fit perfectly into. Kate didn't fill that hole but she did plaster all the other cracks and crevices that found there way into my broken heart. She brought joy back into my life; intentionally and unintentionally. It had been good for Molly too to have bustling feminine energy around the house again.
Oddly though, as I gingerly placed my visitor into the lucite box and secured the door, I didn't think once that I should call Kate. It was this . . . brake . . . in my mind that I couldn't quite explain. It was like that inner voice whose first intuition was to call Kate; earthy Kate, hippie Kate, wise Kate; had been taken hostage and locked behind a door. The more I stared at her, her tiny chest rhythmically rising and falling, the more I knew that this was something so secret, so . . . otherworldly . . . that it should be for me alone. A hand, lightly at first, touching the parts of my mind that clutched and kept instead of reaching out. A hand pushing ever so subtly against psychological pressure points. I was overcome with a sudden feeling of paranoia, looking frantically over my shoulder and across the field.
What will I do when Kate comes? She can't have her.
I picked up the box so quickly I almost bobbled it and sent it spinning off the porch into the grass. I was struck with an intense compulsion. I had to get her inside the house now and hide her away from the world. This . . . faerie? I hesitated to use the term even in my own mind but yet here was the evidence, living and breathing in front of me. I had to get her inside before anyone came. I had to get her inside and figure out what to do next.
I sat for a long time in the parlour, in the ancient wingback chair by the fireplace that had blazed all Winter long. I didn't think about what was happening more than brooding over it. Brooding like some tempestuous ruler whose kingdom had been unceremoniously invaded by a reality different than his own.
I sat a lot in that chair in the days that followed, the box sitting beside it on a worn side table. It's captive was still seemingly sleeping or unconscious. It gave me time to contemplate everything that was happening even as that foul mood hung over me. Even for all the flaky parenting, neglect, and odd side quests into the mythical world; how I wished my mother was here in this moment to guide me through it. It was like this moment had been handmade especially for her and, as was always the case, she was out somewhere else and not here to deal with the problem in the moment. Always off somewhere else, doing something else, being someone else other then the person I needed her to be. And in the oddest turn of events, that other person was exactly the person I needed right now and she was gone too. Why couldn't she have been there when I needed her to be there and be the person I needed her to be? Was that such a selfish request? Stop being a mythical creature like those she chased around the world and come back down to Earth to me?
It was the fourth day after I found her that she finally came alive again. I had been sitting out on the porch step on a warm, early June night staring at the stars when I heard a tiny thumping. It didn't really register at first, a hollow and irregular drumbeat amoung the sounds of the night. I was distracted by the dance of fireflies off in the field. There was something about it, something rhythmic and something I couldn't quite put my finger on . . . something . . . familiar. On the edge of rememberance . . .
It was louder and more insistent now; a gentle rapping moving from intermittent to regular to persistent. I looked down and stared into her eyes, irises so blackly intense that it is was unnerving. Supernatural was both an inadequately and erriely accurate description. She was bent over as the cage was shorter than her by a few inches and her tiny hands were banging on the thick lucite with a muted but angry thumping. Her wings buzzed with distraught annoyance at her prison. She seemed genuinely perplexed that a mortal man would know to hang the singular iron nail across the closed door of the cage.