[2016] Leaving Traces Read online

  Leaving Traces Short

  A Wild Scene

  by Jennifer Moreland

  Copyright 2016 Jennifer Enfinger Moreland

  All rights reserved.

  Discover the rest of the Leaving Traces series on Amazon

  This book is a work of fiction. Incidents, names, characters, and places are products of the author's imagination and used fictitiously. Resemblances to actual locales or events or persons living or dead is coincidental.

  This short scene is part of the chain connecting the Leaving Traces short stories into a full-length story, to be published as soon as its author is done having adventures.

  SOMETIMES, UPON RETURN FROM A TRAVEL, I find myself a-rush with energy, and I clean my little house from roof to floor, or whirl through the rooms shouting with glee until I collapse in a heap, sinews ringing.

  Other times, I can barely crawl back home, moving like sap on snow, awkward and out of place and stiff, as if the atoms in my body have cooled and slowed and can’t be stirred to warm again.

  Most often, however, I exist in a muted mix of the two extremes — a giddy languishing, or a frantic peace — for hours or even days, until I spring up from my bed one morning, revitalized and rebalanced, and move back into my life.

  On a golden afternoon one summer, when I was young but feeling older, like a tree that has hardened but can still bend, I lay on my back atop my little bed with my legs dangling over the edge. My windows were open to draw the warm air, and golden-green tree limbs reached sun-drenched fingers into my second-story room.

  I had just returned from a small trip to rural Russia, where I huddled by the smokey fires on snapping, cold spring evenings to drink in hot cups of sbiten and tales of Baba Jaga. The trip, seen from an adventurer's perspective, would have appeared unremarkable. But the land was ripe with magic, and the stories were deep and rooted and lush, and I felt sorrowful for their loss as they faded from my mind like drifting bees. I wanted to run back, right through time, and linger by the fires forever. But familiarity and harsh winters obscure all kinds of glamour, and I knew I’d have been be disappointed if I’d stayed longer.

  So I rested, and I remembered, and I tried to hold on to the soft glow the stories left in my belly and my mind, for a little longer.

  And then the world turned inside out.

  HERUSHED UPON THE ROOM LIKE A STORM, flowing out of the air and onto the floor with long legs, his hands clenched at his sides and his eyes snapping under dark-cloud brows. In two thundering footfalls, he was before me, and I was too astonished to even cower away, rising to my elbows and gaping at the tide of his fury.

  “You are SO COLD!” he said, his cheeks red and teeth clenched, and I was confused enough that I almost reached for a blanket, before going rigid as my mind caught up to events.

  Even then, I wasn’t scared. Just startled and still perplexed. He waited for a heartbeat to see if I’d respond, but something held me still, as I searched his face and waited for him to go on.

  My silence seemed to further infuriate him, and he went mute with the power of his rage, mouth slightly gaping, then spun away. As I saw his clean profile for a moment in the tree-dappled sunlight, I realized I knew him.

  It was Leopold, from a place starry and strange, he of the quick-wit and the noble heart, who shone in the all-seeing Light of Truth like a match in a cave.

  I had met him only once, not so long ago then, and we had shared an extraordinary experience, it was true. But it was an impersonal, circumstantial kind of sharing, and I could find nothing in the memory of it to account for his wild anger.

  He whirled around again to face me, his hands loose now, his emotions more restrained, and I sensed I was about to get some answers to the questions I didn’t know enough to ask. I tried to look small and helpful as he leaned toward me and spoke in a hot whisper.

  “You didn’t even let me tell you myself! I never thought you were vain, or cruel, but to winnow all my secrets away somehow behind my back, and then throw them in my face — you must have a heart like a stone!”

  Knowing no secrets, I tried to drop my eyes from his to think, but I was caught in the blue anguish there, and I couldn’t look away.

  He mistook my mute ignorance as proof that I had no compassion, and I could tell he was frustrated, and a little lost, and that I should probably say something — anything — to ease the tension. But I had no idea what words would make things better, and which would make things worse, so I remained quiet.

  I saw the moment he realized I wouldn’t speak, and his face seemed to crumble and rebuild upon itself, becoming stern and smooth. Then he gathered himself up, and drew back from me, as if he’d decided it was time to leave.

  I started to relax, just a little, with cautious relief, but a soft white light began to glow through one wall of my bedroom, and I saw his upraised hands moving apart, opening a portal that could lead anywhere. I found my voice.

  “What on earth do you think you’re doing? Shut that at once!”

  “She speaks!” he said in the tone of a carnival barker, but he didn’t stop drawing the glowing, gaping hole wider in my wall. I began to see glimmering stars and heard a softly rushing sea move against a shore.

  It was a window to the Between Times, the place where we’d met.

  “Do you remember this?” As he asked, he snapped his hands down, but the portal stayed open, held agape through some trick of his fury. “Has it been too long, now? Or will you remember, and shrink away from seeing what you’ve become?”

  It hadn’t been that long, a couple of months, maybe three. I remembered the trip vividly. But it didn’t matter. Instead of being frightened of what he had planned, I welcomed it.

  He would shine the truth light into my face, and see that I held no malice toward him — maybe even see that I knew none of his secrets, after all, and we could be done with this drama.

  So I said, flippant from the tension, “Let it shine.”

  And he did.

  THE LIGHT CAME CREEPING over the sides of my furniture and spilling across the floor, overtaking the sunshine and turning half of my room to dusk. I noted with some fascination that the floorboards and the rug and the scarves on my dresser didn’t change shape, having no intention or will of their own, but in the stillness there was an ephemeral hum and glow that spoke wordlessly of tall trees growing and sheep bleating under branches where silk worms drowsed.

  When the glow reached my feet, nothing changed on them, either — no cloven hooves or tiger’s paws, no mermaid tail. I was just a girl, and a girl I remained, as the light slid slowly up my calves and then over my hands, clasped in my lap.

  As I watched it move upward, I saw a shadow overlaid across the bed at my right, and I realized that Leopold, with his back to the portal, stood much closer than I did, and would be fully enrobed in the brilliance, his true nature laid bare.

  I had to wonder if something had changed since we’d met on the starry beach Between Times, if this storm of furious emotion welled from some deep twist in his soul.

  So I lifted my head to look at him, and saw he was all in shadow, as the moonlight turned him into a silhouette and ran silver and liquid across my face at last.

  I heard him gasp, and I feared then that maybe I was changed into a monster, after all, and I braced as I looked at myself in the mirror near my little dresser, to see what he had seen.

  At first glance, I was just myself, and I weakened relief and slumped a bit onto my bed. But the girl in the mirror did not slump; she folded and bent in places while staying stiff in others, like a little clockwork doll, and I saw what I had missed at first glance.

  My face was the face I had known all my life, but rigid and glossy, like an painted mask.
When I tried moving my mouth, it stayed fixed in a smile, and though kind, it looked wrong, because I knew it was false.

  I raised a wondering hand to that smile, and my lips felt normal, warm with rushing blood, but my face in the mirror stayed smooth, and I knew then that maybe my heart was a little cold, and I was aghast.

  But that couldn’t be true. I had so many stories inside me, so much swirling hunger for human connections — I’d made a life out of finding and cultivating new friendships. This mask couldn’t point to my true self.

  A glint in my widening gaze caught my attention, and I saw that where blue eyes should be, the doll-mask just had mirrors, reflecting back to the world exactly what it wanted to see.

  Leaning forward, peering deeper, I finally saw them, the stories, and the longings, and the moments of loving and being loved, swirling behind the silvered glass of those fake eyes, hidden from view.

  It didn’t make the mask any less false, but I felt an upwelling of thankfulness to be something more than just that doll, and I leaned my face into my hands, the doll going broken and limp like a puppet with cut strings.

  OF COURSE, IN ALL THE INTROSPECTION, I had forgotten Leopold.

  Leopold, who saw my face and reacted with anguish, who seemed to know, before the light ever came, that I was hiding my inner self.

  Seemed to count on it, even.

  Maybe I needed to look him in the eyes, to let him try to see beyond the mask.

  He was still in shadow, watching, I assumed, as I took in my own true reflection. I had to step off the bed and turn to the side to see into his face, and at first he wouldn’t look back at me, turning his head away even as his body shifted toward mine.

  “You came here to see something in me, so see it,” I said, and finally he looked up, naked hope on his face, and searched my soul.

  His eyes, I noted absently, were not mirrors. They were blue like the deepest part of the sky, where eternity reaches up so far it hurts. In the Light of Truth they were still warm, and human, and kind, but they carried an ache and the acrid taste of smoke, as if something inside him was burning violently to ash.

  At that thought, I saw the flames, and they began to climb until they raged behind his pupils, then flared and were gone. Now the air smelled of sulfur and pain, but his eyes were clear.

  Love was all that remained.

  A vast, flowering vine grew from his heart; I could see it reaching into every part of him, deep and wide and green. It was glorious and wild, humming with life — it was everything, and it left me awed.

  At the touch of my eyes, it shivered, and I saw that it was for me, all for me.

  I drew back in alarm and wonder.

  Before I could blink, the vine began to wither, and the banked fire faded to ashes. Flowers shriveled and became stones, and the rustling leaves hardened to thorns that fell away like drops of blood.

  “You don’t love me,” he said, his voice hollow and echoing.

  And it was true. I didn’t love him, hadn’t been given the chance to love him, and the truth was all there in my eyes for anyone who looked deep enough.

  He seemed to sag then, and I worried he might collapse, but he drew himself up and straightened his spine, and his beautiful head lifted as the truth light winked out, like a blown candle.

  We were in the sunlit room once again, but the smell of burning lingered.

  I had no idea what to do next. I felt a little as if no one really should love me like that, and I couldn’t understand why he did — or had, maybe.

  But I knew it was real, and I hurt for him, so I stayed quiet, unsure how to fix things or if I even could.

  As he turned to walk away, I sat back on the bed, watching until he was half in and half out of my space. Then he turned to me, with those glorious eyes, and smiled a sad little smile.

  “I’ll never try again. I’ll never mention it, and we’ll go on as if this never happened. But we’ll know, you and I, and I want to make sure you understand that you can never have that chance again.”

  I could see that he wanted to hurt me, to make me feel a little of the pain he was bearing away. And I was startled to find that it did hurt, somewhere very deep and small, somewhere beyond time and place. It hurt so much that I simply turned away from it in my mind.

  He slipped out of the room, and I stared at my hands, uncomprehending, not sure how to tell this story, even to myself.

  Then he was back, and I felt his hands on my face, and his strong fingers in my hair. He kissed me, lifting my mouth to his like a cup, then reached down under me to draw my whole body up and pull me tight against him. I felt the fire, the dying fire from his eyes, spark inside of me, and I grabbed his shirt and held on as he clenched his hands at my hips to draw me closer.

  Then he dropped me, cold and alone, back onto my bed.

  “Never again,” he repeated, and I saw that his eyes were empty.

  Never again.

 

 

  Jennifer Moreland, [2016] Leaving Traces

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