Glimpses

By Jennifer Sheehy

  Once upon a time – so long ago you can barely remember it – you knew what freedom felt like.

  All that is left to you now is a pale remembrance, a fleeting ghost of what you once took for granted. If you strain, you can remember the taste of freedom on your tongue, feel the wind caress your face once more, but the binds that hold you tighten, and the memory slips back into shadows and ashes.

  Faerie. That’s what they called you. That’s what you were once, before. Before the humans. Before the war. Before what was left of your kind retreated, and you gave into the pull of nature – before you merged your spirit with the life force of the oak you now inhabit. Towering, beautiful, still. Oh, so very still.

  Once secluded, civilisation has spread like a blight through the forest you chose for your eternal resting place. Something keeps them from claiming your grove for their own, however – perhaps some long-buried knowledge that there are still some things in this world that are Other.

  Thus, the years pass. The birds, initially wary, have long forgotten their fear and nest in your boughs, living and dying in time with your slow, slow breaths. The seasons pass and you notice less and less, as your leaves fall, grow, fall again, the steady heartbeat of the earth lulling you as you forget you ever lived any life but this.

  Of the people that pass by, you notice little. Once so filled with hatred you would have watched the world burn and called it revenge, now your anger has smouldered and died. In its place, a terrible sorrow, edged with pity. These humans have forgotten the beauty of the world. Their heads, bowed under a thousand burdens, cannot see the sky as it transitions from honey gold to the palest eggshell blue, from a fire of crimson to glorious, deep onyx, studded throughout with a hundred thousand shimmering spots of starlight. They have lost the knowledge of the magic that lives in the song of the dancing stream, an effervescent accompaniment to the melodies of birdsong intertwining above.

  These secrets remain only to you.

  As the centuries pass, the hidden beauties of the world grow dimmer. Nothing penetrates the fog of your mind, until her.

  A voice hovers at the edge of your consciousness. Slowly the form begins to take shape. For the first time, someone stands in your grove. A girl. A human, and yet, she calls out to someone, beckoning, and you realise that where the minds of others are poisoned by fear, this place whispers to her as it once did you. She calls out again, and her voice carries memories. You are transported back to the days of your life, your real life.

  A thousand sensations fill your mind, clearer than they have been in centuries. You feel once more the pure, unbridled joy of movement; of running with the hunt, breathing and moving as one creature; of dancing at a revel, your brethren swaying around you, their hypnotic movement calling all the creatures of the night to join. You remember how it felt to fly, wilder than the wind, surrounded by stars. You lose yourself, in the memory of what was lost. When the spell is finally broken, the girl is long gone.

  Yet she returns. Undoubtedly mortal though she is, you recognise in her something of freedom, of Faerie. Perhaps it is this that leads her to follow the siren song of the clearing; perhaps it is this that opens her eyes to the beauties of the world that so few see, that you yourself had forgotten.

  Through her, you begin to live.

  Marking her visits grants you a sense of time clearer than before. Gradually, you awaken to the world around you; above the slow heartbeat of the earth you discern the quicker rhythms of the countless lives surrounding you. The hum of the insects, indistinguishable but for your heightened senses, growing keener by the minute; the endless variations of birdcall as the creatures search for food that will be the difference between life and death; the brays of the horses and the panting desperation of the fox as it flees through the brush.

  The girl brings sorrow, also. Through her eyes you see life become again shining, new, precious, and so you notice the intervals between her appearances grow longer, her visits shorter. When the girl appears after the longest gap of all, you are shaken to your core. Ten, twenty years have passed for you as mere seconds, but on her they have taken a terrible toll.

  You had forgotten the awful fragility of mortals, how terribly short their lives are. You see the lines on her tired face, as though tears had carved a path there in the long years she has been gone. You see her diminished form, the shrunken way she holds herself. And you see that this is not the worst damage that has been done to her.

  Her eyes, once so full of joy and laughter, hold none of that captivating quality that had so entranced you. That connection to the world you held so dear, the pure joy she took from the simple act of living – gone. The world has beaten it out of her. Her head is bowed under life’s many burdens. Your heart aches for what you have both lost.

  When she dies, years later, it does nothing to assuage your grief. The spirit you loved has already died, and you live on. As life disappears and the world fades to grey, always, you will live on. That is your curse.