A Girl Made of Time - Part One of Three
Short Story | Folklore Fantasy
First, some boring housekeeping
You are in the Fiction Section of Notes from the Town Hermit. Just like in my main publication, these stories centre on themes of identity and what it means to be human. Main genres are literary and slipstream fiction and fantasy written with a lyrical and poetic writing style.
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If you’re looking for more to read this weekend, take a look at this smorgasbord of short stories by various authors. Maybe you’ll find a new favourite writer among them. You might even see Yours Truly somewhere in there for a free EPUB download.
Now that that’s all out of the way, please enjoy today’s story.
This is a tale of something that happened long ago, perhaps when your great-grandfather was still a child. In those days, rations were short, and the mad queen in her castle walked about in her bedclothes all loose and indecent, speaking to empty air and searching the castle halls for something only she could see—or perhaps for someone she used to be. The nobles called it madness, but peasants whispered other stories.
Back then, I skirted the edge of the woods near our cottage on tiptoes, daring myself to step beyond the pre-set borders into the unknown. I was a child, but not one who knew how to follow rules, alas.
Back then, they said a witch lived in the forest who spoke to mushrooms and knew the secrets of time. She was young as spring in one telling, old as winter in another, but always with a sharp tongue that reminded those who met her of their scolding mothers. Common folk knew to stay clear of the woods, especially at night, because that was when spiritual forces were best at work.
But there is no rest for the wicked.
“You are a most ill-tempered child,” my mother often said to me, and I felt ill-temperateness must be a form of wickedness because of what later befell me. Though perhaps it was always meant to befall me. Time has a way of ensuring these things.
Our tale begins on one of those long summer evenings—you know the sort—the kind that blurs the mind with heat until the moments blend one into another with a slow ennui. Idle hands, the devil’s tools, or whatever that saying was. I, myself, was certain that there were no devils in the world, that they are merely a pitiful collective scapegoat for any awfulness that happens. (I would learn later that time makes devils of us all, in our own ways.)
This notion came to me on that day I have just mentioned, after a scolding from my mother. I had learned to silence her grating voice as though it was nothing more than the insects that buzzed about my ears. I listened instead to the croaking of frogs and song of grasshoppers. Oh, and my brother humming as he followed the scattering of mushrooms along the small patches of grass.
“This,” Dom said finally, holding one up to the fading light, “is the finest specimen of shroom I have seen.”
Flora scowled at him. “I would appreciate it more in my stomach.”
For we each had no more than a mouthful of black bread crust for supper. They would do well to stay away from the mushrooms, which are said to be inhabited by forest ghosts sometimes. But as they both knew this full well, I said nothing. (In the castle tower, my older self watched this scene unfold in a mirror of water. In the forest cave, my other self prepared for what would come.)
“One day when I am rich,” I said instead, “I will give you all the butter on delicious white bread and make you eat it until you vomit.”
Dom grinned. “If you have that much food one day, I will make sure to puke it onto your face. Payback for tricking me into drinking your piss.”
“Please. You will make me lose the little I was fortunate enough to put into my stomach,” Flora said.
Such was the sort of conversation I was subjected to. We ignore my small contribution.
“If only you would behave more like a lady,” Flora continued. “The white ghoul will chop off your legs if you continue sitting with them spread so wide. Mother always says.”
“There’s need for only one lady in the house and if that is ever Carys, I’ll eat my own toes,” Dom said, laughing. “Can you imagine her acting as you do, Flora? So straight and prim I could stack these mushrooms atop your head without a spill.”
I plucked the one he had in his hand and held it until it nearly touched my lips. “You know, if I swallowed the ghost of a royal maid, maybe it will possess me. Then I will be the lady everyone wants me to be.” I closed my eyes and opened my mouth in jest, as though to drop the mushroom into my gaping mouth.
The mushroom pulsed in my palm like a star fallen to earth. Flora’s face had gone pale. “Carys...” Her voice trembled. “Put it down. Please put it down.”
I lowered the toadstool and opened my eyes in surprise. Only then did I notice the ethereal light spilling between my fingers. My siblings’ horrified faces met my confused one.
“Wha—”
My hand dropped to my side, the mushroom falling with a soft thump on the grass.
I blinked rapidly, trying to make sense of my siblings’ reactions. “What is it?” I asked. “Did I say something wrong?”
Dom and Flora exchanged an uneasy glance. “Carys,” Flora said. “That mushroom...it was glowing white when you picked it up. We thought you were actually going to eat it!”
I looked down in surprise at the mushroom lying innocuously on the grass.
(In the castle, I remembered this moment—the first sign of what I could see. In the cave, I watched the mushrooms pulse with their own light, knowing what was to come.)
Dom shook his head. “Never mind, it must have been a trick of the light. But don’t go putting strange mushrooms in your mouth. Don’t need you being carried back home, hallucinating about fairy circles.”
“Did you forget, brother, that we are the peasants, living on the edge of a forest?” I raised my eyebrows, trying to sound brave.
“Oh no, did you forget, dear sister, that Flora aspires to lady-hood?”
Our sister stuck her nose up to the air in true nobility fashion and turned back to the dilapidated cottage we shared. “Forgive me if I want to sleep on a real bed of goose feathers for once in my sorry life.”
“Better our bed of wood than a mad queen.” I started to my feet, brushing encroaching insects off my apron.
“CARYS!”
I flinched at the sound of my mother’s sharp voice cutting through the thickness of the evening humidity. “Ah…” Only one person could say my name in a way that made me hate it.
Her figure soon followed, thick arms already swinging against her sides—thick from all the beating she had to inflict on me, I expect—to shape me into someone more like Flora. As she approached, I thought, not for the first time, how remarkable it was that she moved with such speed, given how little sustenance she had throughout the day.
I knew better than to move, and only tried to make myself appear smaller when she arrived and towered over me. My eyes turned downward in an attempt to look contrite. You learn these sorts of tricks over time when you’ve been reprimanded a lot, you know. Dom and Flora backed away and sealed their lips. They, too, had learned it did me no good to intervene.
“Do we,” she shrieked, “speak of the dear, beloved queen in such a way?” Her voice had sunk to a menacing whisper when mentioning the queen (as did everybody’s except mine, I suppose), then rose to her usual shrillness. And yet, I heard fear laced between the tones of rage. She waved her hands above my head as though to strike me with both of them at once. For the first time since I can remember, the blow didn’t fall.
Instead, my mother sank to her knees as my siblings and I looked on in horror.
“Mum!” Dom rushed forward and seemed to try to catch her.
I heard, rather than saw, the thud of her body crumbling to the ground. (In the castle tower, I pressed my hand against the cold glass, remembering this moment. In the cave, I stirred my potions faster, knowing time grew short. Time moves differently for each of us—the girl lives forward, the queen remembers backward, and the witch stands at the crossroads between, weaving past and future together.)
Flora still stood where she had been, eyes wide and frozen. Dom clutched at our mother’s shoulders as she lay there, unmoving. Wonder of all wonders, my attention drifted from Dom shaking our mother and yelling at her to get up, to that mushroom from—earlier? A whole lifetime ago?
It was glowing.
In fact, all the mushrooms Dom had held were glowing. In a line of eerie light against the fast-approaching night, as though purposefully assembled there, pointing straight into the forest.
All common wisdom says, do not follow strange mushrooms. Do not go anywhere after dark. Above all, absolutely do not go into the forest. But if Flora longs for nobility, I long for wildness. Really, we just want the same things: freedom.
Or, something better to eat than the dried up crust of moldy, black bread.
My feet shifted almost without my conscious command, not toward my prostrate mother, but in the direction of the forest.
At that moment, the bite of fingernails digging into my arm forced my focus back.
“Carys, what are you doing?” Flora’s voice was high and thin. She sounded younger than before, all pretense gone. When I was grown, I would regret the way I pushed her hand off me without even answering. She clutched at me with such ferocity. Dom’s frantic cries asking why we were fighting only deepened my own inexplicable desperation to get away.
At last, I shoved her to the ground—not too difficult when I am the oldest—and without saying another word to either her or Dom, I lifted up my skirt and sprinted into the forest.
Their terrified screams still haunt me, even after my hair turned silver-white.
Part 2 | Part 3
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