Future Enid.
That’s right. Observing Amber was a Future Enid concern.
Halfway to the farmhouse. I considered taking a break but decided to push forward, with a new brain-busying plan to say aloud all the vegetables I knew; no triggering of uncomfortable emotions could come from vegetables.
The vegetable list (ending on romanescu) took me until the For Sale sign came in view, actually a For sign and a Sale sign, as the sign had cracked down the middle and each side now hung lopsidedly off its own hook. Our realtor, clearly, hadn’t been here in months (unlike whomever delivered phone books, since a water-logged one sat underneath the For Sale sign), but I didn’t fault the realtor for her lack of attention: one can’t show a house that no sane person would pay money for. The For and the Sale signs blew back and forth opposite to each other, meeting up for a millisecond in the middle before swaying back out again. Odd, since there wasn’t any wind.
“Well, I’m going to go in there,” I said, pointing down the long driveway as I came to it. “And you’ll just have to wait. I mean, look at all these old, thick, sturdy trees that guard my farmhouse. No way you could come in with me. And what might I be doing in there, hmmm? Wouldn’t you like to know.” I hoped that sounded interesting enough to pique a faerie’s — the faerie’s — interest, and, being cat-killingly curious, it would stick around to find out what I was up to, at which point I’d trap it. Muahahahaha.
Which faerie exactly are you going to trap? Because I don’t see even a one. Didn’t you say this place would be lousy with them?
I’m still getting ready. It isn’t like they need to be here yet. (Hmph! Future Enid was going to need to give herself a stern talking-to about constructive criticism and self-compassion and not being a jerk to myself.)
I started off down the driveway, now more overgrown than ever. At one point the driveway had been, I guess one would say, cobbled with large stones. The stones were still there, I assumed, underneath the moss and overgrowth (they couldn’t have gone anywhere, rocks having a general lack of self-momentum), but you couldn’t feel them; wheeling my suitcase down the drive was like wheeling it over carpet, a pleasant respite from the bumpy and pebble-filled road to the farmhouse. I strolled along, coming up to the turn in the drive where all would be revealed. (I slowed myself down to draw out the magnificence of waiting for it. Took a few deep breaths. Listened to the leaves, which, with no wind, wasn’t really that interesting a sound. Smelled sun, possibilities. And —) There it was.
Home.
More of the decorative woodwork from the gables had rotted through, and fewer windows were paned than I recalled. The house sloped to one side, and the smell, until I got used to it, was overpowering. A rodent had chewed a hole through the front door, and I got the feeling that at least three undiscovered species of creepy-crawlies resided inside.
But it was home.
And it was beautiful.
Still, I couldn’t glory in it too long since I needed to check the electrical situation and, with the edges of the sky having already turned to indigo, I couldn’t dawdle any further; dark snuck up quickly out here without street lights. I tenderly nudged my way through the front door and reached my arm up the wall until I found the entryway light switch.
“Please,” I said. “Let there be light.”
I flipped the switch.
Nope.
I glanced up at a wall sconce.
“Oh, come on,” I moaned. There weren’t any light bulbs. My mother had probably unscrewed them and taken them with us when we moved into town.
Time a-wasting, I darted about with purpose: back out the door to grab one of the Angelpoises, back in after ripping the lamp out of its box, dropping onto my knees to jam the plug into a wall socket, fiddling around with the lamp in the gloom to find its on-off switch, taking a deep breath, and then closing my eyes (I found giving inanimate objects a little bit of privacy made them less self-conscious about performing). I used this brief pause for positive thinking: to imagine the volleys of electrons vibrating, getting ready to move, getting ready to rumble, ohms or volts or kilajoules of energy eager to start flowing or pulsing or however electricity worked. (I had read the chapters on electricity in my mother’s physics textbook, but that didn’t mean I understood how electricity worked. In chemistry, electrons flicked everywhere. In an electrical wire they stayed trapped inside. Why didn’t they go through the wire and back out into the world? Was wiring jail for electrons or something? I didn’t get it. Not that my confusion was particularly relevant since electricity worked whether I understood how it did or not, and it was going to work for me now.)
“Ready?” I whispered.
Ready.
“Go.”
I turned the light on.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
I was still sitting in a grey, twilight washout.
Why hadn’t it worked? I tried the lamp in a few more plugs, venturing deeper and deeper inside the dusky house, but to no avail. The light remained firmly off, as did the other three when I tried them in the hopes that my first Angelpoise was faulty.
Is the power still out?
Nope, because back out on the road, looking towards town, I spied twinkles as street lights and house lights began turning on for the evening.
Okay, assuming at least one Anglepoise lamp worked and my mother had been truthful about the house still having electricity coming in, I had one further option (and thank goodness Barb had mentioned it because I wouldn’t have thought of it otherwise): flip the breaker switches, and maybe the big grey metal box by the front door with ELECTRIC written on the front in black permanent marker contained just the breaker switch I needed.
The box was latched shut, but some nifty finger work got it open. In the evening murk, I couldn’t make out the penciled-in labels next to any of the small switches, but next to the big one, in my mother’s block caps and written in glow-in-the-dark ink, were the words an infinite land of day. Day implied sunshine implied light, and using quotes (which I was certain “an infinite land of day” was, even if I didn’t recognize it) to obscure the obviousness of everyday life was exactly the sort of thing my mother would do.
I flipped the switch. A subtle hum, then, at my feet, an Angelpoise lamp buzzed and turned on.
I grinned and got to work.
he answer to this, of course, is why not? In most of humanity’s other pursuits, “for adventure” and “for science” are deemed worthy rationales for behavior, and are those not simply gussied-up versions of why not? If Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary didn’t require a treatise to explain their desire to mount Mount Everest, why should I have to justify my interest in interacting with faeries?
However (hypocritically) here is a reason for justifying my inter-est in interacting with faeries: they could teach us how to use light differently.
Now, obviously, humanity already has somewhat of an ability to use light, what with fire, light bulbs, disco balls, etc. I might even say that humanity has somewhat of an understanding of light: for example, that light travels as both a particle and a wave.
Aside for those unfamiliar with the basics of physics: My mother’s physics textbook tells me that light travels as both a particle and a wave. Physicists know it travels as a particle (like little grains of dust, which physicists call photons) because light travels in a straight line and then something called the photoelectric effect and by this point the book starts using words like diffeomorphism and I’m lost. However, a few pages later the book tells me that physicists also know light travels as a wave, because shining a light through two thin slits in a sheet of paper gives a light pattern on the other side just like overlapping waves in a pool. So yay, light can be two things! Aside concluded.
My hypothesis is that faeries are able to manipulate light’s dual nature, using waves to propel themselves forwards and particles to hide behi
nd when they wish to remain unseen. I believe that the shadows of faeries I see in my kitchen (see Chapter 1) are not shadows of light unable to pass through the faeries but shadows of particles behind which the faeries are hiding, and further interactions with faeries will teach us how to use light in the same way.
From the other perspective, we can also assume that faeries are fascinated with some things that we, as humans, find quotidian. For example, I’ve recently discovered that faeries are particularly taken with the chemical reactions that combine heat and yeast. I realized this after encountering faerie footprints on a wide range of baked goods (obviously not on goods baked in my house, which is protected from faerie incursions; again see Chapter 1.) These tiny indentations are no wider than a cat’s whisker and no longer than a baby’s fingernail, but they indicate that, while baking, a faerie or faeries unknown have investigated the contents of the baker’s oven.
While I have been unable to perform any faerie baking experiments in my house, Mrs. Delavecchio has graciously allowed me the use of her oven, never once questioning me on exactly what I was trying to bake nor berating me for frequently burning my concoc-tions. Via these trials, I have determined the following necessary (but not sufficient) conditions for faeries to be attracted to baking:
1.the temperature of the oven must be such that rising is accomplished in no more than sixteen minutes and eight seconds;
2.no sprinkling of spices or sugar on top of the baking; for example, this means no cookies rolled in brown sugar and cardamom before baking;
3.no margarine or any other vegetable fat used in the recipe (which is probably a good idea regardless of faeries since butter always makes everything taste better);
4.no artificial dyes; and
5.what is baked must be a bright and attractive color. This is not as hard without artificial dyes as you might think. Boiling beets gets you either red or yellow dye (depending on the beet). Mashed blueberries get you blue. And then, primary colors achieved, the whole rainbow opens up for you.
Is baking magical or simply science? Is light interplay magical or simply science? I’m pretty sure the answers to these questions depends on your starting perspective: faerie versus human. Once we understand each other’s science, these, and many other things, may not seem magical at all.
awoke well rested and with a smile on my face. Sleeping in true darkness, as opposed to the artificial darkness of a blackout curtain, had been glorious. After that blissful sleep, full of energy, I leapt up, arms above my head, in a well-deserved stretch.
“Let’s go!” I shouted.
A bit of the ceiling agreed with me. It went, pulled down by gravity right onto my head with a smack.
“I didn’t mean literally,” I said to the newly made hole in the roof. Bits of the second floor poked menacingly through.
At least be glad any rain is holding off so we’re not soaking wet. And roll up the sleeping bag in case the weather changes its mind.
I did, tossed my backpack on top of my pile of stuff (after extracting a juice box, two large oranges, and a package of crackers for breakfast), then burst through the front door and into the sunshine, ready for the new day.
First step: get the extension cords out of the shed. The shed door was padlocked closed, but action movies had taught me that all padlocks could be forced open if hit with a heavy object, like a softball-sized rock. Luckily, softball-sized rocks made up the ornamental edging of our back garden, and the one I chose was definitely heavy enough (my poor arms!) to break open a padlock.
Exceedingly heavy rock in hands, I shuffled, muscles straining, in the direction I remembered the shed being; without my mother to cut them back, the shed was now obscured by branches, moss, and thistles. The overgrowth, however, hadn’t stopped whatever had left terrifying gouges all along the shed’s door. (Skunk? Wolverine? Therizon-saurus?) Or maybe faeries had broken through the tree line to leave me a message in angry scratches? Either way, I could be in danger. Fear overwhelmed me, thoughts racing, sweaty palms almost dropping my burdensome über-pebble onto my unprotected toes.
But then the wind caught the overhanging tree branches, dragging them across the plywood door, and the cause of the scratches became clear.
See? Nothing untoward. Wind, pointy branches, wooden door, cheap paint, scratches: all perfectly normal.
My heart, unconvinced, still raced.
I lifted my rock as high as I could, bringing it down with a satisfying crash on the of the padlock.
Action movies, I then discovered, may have exaggerated how easy it was to break open a padlock with a heavy object.
I moved on to bashing the rock against the square locking mechanism of the padlock instead of the , since maybe that had been what action heroes had been bashing when they smashed padlocks apart in the movies. Also a failure: the padlock remained decidedly in one piece, locked.
My next option was the more conventional way of opening a lock: using keys. After elegantly (and in no way dropping it with a loud crash) releasing my rock to the ground, I tried to remember all my mother’s favorite quotes to see if any were about locked doors or sheds or jars of rusty nails, to hint at where she’d hidden the padlock’s key. Nope. And there weren’t any flowerpots or hollow rocks around that a key might be hidden under, either.
Deciding to give physical force another go, I shouldered the door. It didn’t budge. The rusty hinges didn’t even give a weak rattle. And now my shoulder ached.
Despair overcame me. Why hadn’t I grabbed a crowbar at the hardware store just in case? There was no way I was going back to town now to get one. Firstly, the more time I spent in town, the more likely I was to run into my mother, or Dr. Holden, or Dr. Sivaloganathan, or Amber Holden, or Mrs. Delavecchio, or, really, anyone the faeries might use to try and upset my machinations. Secondly, the chances of another opportune power outage so I could future-pay for more supplies seemed extraordinarily unlikely. Thirdly —
Thirdly, why don’t we try the shed window?
I’d forgotten about the shed window, likely because its size (minuscule), its cleanliness (not applicable), and its location (facing directly onto a tree trunk) meant that it blended into the wall. But, obviously, now that I remembered it was there, the window could be my entry point. Plus, based on the furrows on the shed door, branches had likely broken the window for me already (if not, tossing my rock through the window would do it). Make a hook out of branches, wrangle it through the broken window, grab the extension cords, and I’d be good to go.
Spirits buoyed by those thoughts, I eagerly pushed my way through the greenery to the back of the shed. And there, in the sunless, mucky, mosquito-breeding edge of the forest, my eyes beheld a sight that was even more beauteous than a broken window I’d have to negotiate extension cords through: the back wall of the shed lying on the ground.
How’s that?
Well, all the plants grew up and made a damp microclimate back here. The damp probably warped the wall. As the wall warped, it pulled away from the shed’s frame. While pulling away from the frame, the nails that connected the wall to the frame must have popped out. Then, with the back wall no longer attached to the frame, gravity did the rest. Thump. I pointed at the former wall, now fallen to the ground.
I kind of wish we’d checked round the back here first. It would have saved us a lot of time. And we wouldn’t have aggravated any of our injuries further. Our arms are really sore, not to mention our shoulder from trying to bust down the shed door, and —
“Oh hush,” I told myself. “Or I’ll just pretend that this wall never fell and make a hook anyway just to teach me not to complain.”
I hushed and then I hopped into the shed, stuffing the longest extension cord (mystery for later investigation: why did we have so many extension cords of varying lengths?) into an abandoned garbage bag rescued from the shed’s floor. I was about to add in a pair of rusty scissor
s with which to snip some grass (fingers crossed the scissors wouldn’t pierce through the cheap plastic of the garbage bag) when my foot banged against something twangy. Whatever it was had been wrapped in an impermeable black sack, which I stabbed at with the scissors until the bag revealed its contents: our old push lawnmower with grass catcher attachment. The bag had cocooned the mower, keeping its blades, unlike the scissors’, sharp and unrusted and perfect for cutting grass. I needed grass clippings to conceal the extension cord: the mower could get me grass clippings far more easily than the over-oxidized scissors, and far more quickly as well. A most fortuitously magnificent find for Enid! I pulled the mower out of the shed and behind me to the field across the road.
Now, the field across the road was government land, but our government was run for and by the people, and what was I if not a person who needed to make use of government land and should therefore be free to do so? Plus, I was going to mow some of the grass. If anything, the government should be commending me for my volunteerism. A medal or a plaque would be appropriate, I decided, not some flimsy paper certificate.
Triumphantly, I marched to the middle of the field. Then I had to march less triumphantly back to the farmhouse to get the lamps and light bulbs and two ropes and a piece of plywood about twice as long as my foot and three quarters as wide (this I pried off the felled wall of the shed), plus all the other miscellany I’d forgotten to haul out on my first trip.
“Curious?” I called out as I took my second load out to the field.
No response. Not even that tingle on the back of your skull that says someone or ones (i.e. faeries) are watching you. But if the faeries weren’t here, where were they and what were they doing there and just how were they planning to thwart me thwarting them?
I dumped all my supplies in the middle of the field, far enough from the road that my provisions wouldn’t be too obvious to any casual passersby but not so far that the extension cord wouldn’t go the distance. I extracted the ropes and the board from my pile. With apologies to Mrs. Delavecchio and her Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown books, it was crop circle–making time.
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