The Magic Garden
Page 3
*****
The moon is high and full, its light falling on the garden and flashing off glowing wings that have gathered in greater abundance than I can ever remember.
Tonight is the night, it has to be, but Elette is still awake.
For three days the parcel she collected sat unopened and untouched, but now - now - she decides to stay up and open it.
“What is it?” I asked her on the day she brought it home.
“Don’t be so nosey,” she replied after depositing it on the coffee table in the living room, “you’ll find out soon enough.”
“You’re not going to open it?”
“Well, of course I am.”
“Now?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
“The time. Not right,” she replied, sticking her tongue out at me, and refusing to answer anything more on the subject. I’d been insanely curious. The brown paper wrapping seemed to conceal secrets as enticing as the ones that frolicked in my Magic Garden.
That was then, though, and this is now. Having to compete with the splendour my mind has conjured from thoughts of the Faerie Queen, those secrets seem as drab as the crumpled paper that keeps them from me.
But the secrets that interest me are a world away, on the other side of a pane of glass - to seek them out now would be to reveal my own. I have to turn my back on the garden court.
“So,” I ask, walking into the living room, where Elette is on the floor, her slender form sat between my eyes and the unwrapped box in her lap, “what was in the package?”
“I don’t know if I can tell you just yet,” I can hear the smile and, despite myself, I can’t help but let it reflect on my face.
“oh, come on. That’s hardly fair.”
“Secrets rarely are,” she replies, saying more than words.
“What?”
“Is it right, would you say, to keep secrets from the ones you love?”
I can’t answer. Honesty is the best policy, after all, “Well, um…”
She turns to me, a twinkle in emerald eyes that an hour ago were a deep brown - almost black. Standing up, her loose-fitting blouse slips over her shoulders, gliding down over skin the colour of milk. She smiles as my stare falls from her eyes to follow the silken fabric down her arms until it comes to hang from the crook of her arms, I can’t help but turn my attention to the contents of the package, held tenderly in her soft hands.
Entwined branches and roots wind about themselves like snakes to form a wooden, grey-barked hoop, bejewelled with thorns and sprouting leaves. It’s dull, not a trace of a golden glint to be seen, but clearly a crown nonetheless.
On Elette’s face is a smile such as I’ve never seen before, even on her lips - warm, hopeful, joyous.
“My prince,” she whispers.
I say nothing but, with silent realisation, pull the shirt from my back, letting it dangle from my clutching hand as she takes a step toward me.
Around us, beyond glowing swirls of air, upon which dance winged men and women, the world seems to shrink.
I was right, she is something special. More so than I could have imagined.
*****
The chill of mid-morning frost clinging to my bare form isn’t what it used to be.
The cold does not go unnoticed, but it isn’t the discomfort it was all those years ago when I wore a different skin. I still run through the garden, darting in and out of bushes and bounding over flowers, now shaking loose the petals from the jacaranda in the far corner, but the grass no longer prickles the soles of my feet as I gallop across it.
No, now it is the wind I feel between my toes as I go.
The flash and flitter of wings is not the tiny mystery it once was, but my garden - my world - is no less magical for the fact. Perhaps it is more so.
My friends, my family - the little people I now know as my own - gather at the edge of a flowerbed, their eyes drawn to the house whose walls were once my sanctuary. Carried on splendid wings of green, I skim the currents to hang in the air alongside my queen - even more radiant in this life than my last - to join them.
There, on the other side of a pane of glass, eyes wide with wonder, the face of a young boy stares out at us. Somewhere inside his family must be busying themselves with boxes and movers and the beginning of a new life, in a new home.
My eyes meet his - though I know such a tiny detail will be lost on him - and I smile.