Made in Wirral: Free Creative Writing and Arts Workshops for Adult Beginners

 

Through the Moon Gate

By Emmalene Brunés

 

Cassie used to have everything that she thought she’d wanted – a nice big house in Stanley Avenue, her husband, their daughter, a good job and exotic holidays.

But she was alone in the house now. They were both, the house and her, shadows of their former selves. It had been two years since Annabel’s death; she would have been eight today. And Pete had gone too. He’d tried so hard, but their grief was different, and he had got angry with her for not letting him in. He’d loved her but he couldn’t live with her like Miss Havisham entombed in their once living home. He’d meant that she was bitter and frozen in grief, she’d thought because Miss Havisham had had a daughter in the end, and Cassie no longer did.

She stood at the end of her garden, as she always did in the evening. The moon gate that Pete had erected when they moved in was overgrown, but through the arch Cassie could still see the field beyond, fallow this year, and further in the distance along the horizon stretching out as far as she could see, the shadows of Storeton Woods against the darkening sky.

It was stifling hot. Even though the sun was setting, the heat of the day rose from the dusty ground in waves. It made the twilight shimmer.

Cassie could barely breathe.

She swigged from a bottle of red wine. She had taken to drinking lately. It didn’t numb the pain though.

She stood, swaying slightly at the moon gate, as the light faded. She thought she would go back in to get more wine. But as she turned back to the house, the view of the field through the arch shimmered and shifted.

Cassie stopped. She blinked and looked to the side of the arch. The field was still there. She could make out the ploughed lines. She looked through the arch again but didn’t see the field that should have lain beyond. Like looking at a cinema screen, she saw an image of the woods a mile away, so near now she could put her hand through the arch and touch the foxgloves and red campion that carpeted the uneven ground. It was Storeton Woods – she recognised the shape of them, she had walked through them countless times – but she had never seen those flowers grow there, nor in such abundance and vibrancy of colour, either. In fact, the colour was so bright, it almost glittered.

And then, hovering towards her, like flitting fireflies, were three sparks of light, bright and eerie and frightening in the dark.

Cassie stepped back and sucked in a breath. She knew she was hallucinating and was scared. The fear turned into a horrified realisation, oily and thick in the pit of her stomach, when the lights coalesced into a tiny fairy with long golden-brown hair, and hazel eyes, and iridescent wings, hovering in the air, and she recognised the beloved face before her.

Annabel. It was Annabel!

The hallucination, no bigger than the palm of Cassie’s hand, flew through the arch and hovered before Cassie’s horrified face. Cassie shrieked, piercing the hot silence, and dropped the bottle of wine. It smashed on the stones in front of the arch and spattered red wine on her bare legs.

“What…? Who are you?” Cassie could barely speak. She wished the nightmare would end. And yet, she reached out to touch her precious daughter’s face all the same. Unchanged…yet somehow not the same. The creature flitted just out of Cassie’s reach.

“Who are you?” Cassie whispered again.

The fairy laughed, a careless sound that might as well have been a slap to Cassie’s face. Cassie saw the mouth of sharp teeth and the pointed ears as it drew closer to her. She dropped her outstretched hand.

“You do not know your own daughter?” It mocked her.

Cassie shook her head and stepped back again. “My daughter died,” she said, the disgust in her stomach making her feel like she would be sick.

The fairy said lightly, like it hadn’t just shattered Cassie’s world for the second time in as many years, “I am Annabel – you gave me that name. I was human, healthy and strong. And the Fairy High Queen put her own sickly child in my bed and took me as her own. It wasn’t me that really died!”

“I knew she wasn’t you,” Cassie said, almost to herself. “You got sick so quickly, and you had been so healthy before. I didn’t understand how that could happen. How could the Fairy Queen,” she spat the name out, “give away her child to die in a stranger’s home?”

Annabel shrugged her tiny shoulders and her fine hair lifted in a sudden breeze through the arch. “A changeling died, not me. Now I live forever!”

“What was the changeling’s name?” Cassie asked.

Another shrug from Annabel. “I do not know. I do not care.”

Rage, hotter than the stifling air outside, hotter even than a thousand burning suns, filled Cassie and turned her vision a blurred red.

“How could you do this? How could you do this to me? I thought you were dead! I’ve mourned for you!” Cassie screamed at the creature who had the face of her daughter and collapsed to her knees on the ground. She did not feel the broken glass digging into her knees.

Annabel darted to just above Cassie’s head. Her voice held no emotion to show she was affected by Cassie’s sorrow, only curiosity.

“But every human dies,” Annabel said.

Cassie whimpered, “Annabel was six!”

“But I’ll live for ever! Why are you not grateful?”

Cassie upturned her eyes to Annabel with a look of such vicious pain that Annabel startled and flew back into the entrance of the arch, only to laugh cruelly at Cassie. “You do not understand,” she said in her tinkling, cold voice.

“How could I possibly understand?” Cassie said, tormented. “I want to see your Queen!”

“If you do that, you will never go back to the human world after. You would be fae – like me.” Annabel tilted her head, contemplating. “You could be with me…but you wouldn’t care that I used to be your daughter,” she said, taunting, tempting.

To be with her daughter forever, Cassie thought, without this pain. To not care about that moment, always seared into her memory, when the doctor told her, “I’m sorry, there is nothing more we can do.” That horrible, awful hope that they would find a cure in time, and then Annabel dying. Finding her tiny, frail body cold in the bed. Feeling impatient and numb, waiting for the ambulance, praying that when they arrived, they would revive her child. Not being able to quite believe that they took her away in the ambulance to the morgue and not the children’s ward where she’d spent so much of her last few months alive. To remember all that with a cool distance, to have no grief and no sadness. Cassie wanted that. Cassie wanted the pain to go away.

But she also remembered the years before with Annabel too. How they had got home from school that last year on Pete’s birthday and decorated the house with banners and balloons and made the cake, which had indeed looked like a six-year-old had done it, to welcome him when he came home. How pleased Pete had been, how delighted Annabel was to surprise him. A stab to Cassie’s heart in the remembering of it.

And the teddy that Cassie still hadn’t washed, lying on the ground by the moon gate. That had been Annabel’s favourite toy. Peanut butter on slices of apple with a glass of milk when she got home from school. Her drawings of mummy, daddy, and granny that Cassie still had hung on the walls, curling now, frozen in time. How she had cried when her goldfish died, after one week. Each memory another stab to the heart. A swell of loss and love so great that Cassie thought it would consume her. It had consumed her already, for the past two years.

Cassie stood up under the wave as it crashed around her. “No,” she said, with a calmness that surprised her.

Annabel said, “so be it.” She flew back into the archway and dissolved into three separate lights. Cassie’s heart – still broken – fragmented even more.

Cassie stood at the gate and watched as the image faded into nothing and she could see the ridges of the field behind it once more. The deepening light softened the edges and made everything blurred. She stood so long that night fell. The neighbours lights went out and she was left with the shimmering heat and the silvering light of the moon.

An owl hooted.

Slowly, achingly, Cassie bent down to pick up the pieces of the shattered glass at her feet before returning to the house.