Where the Faeries Play

I am not my mother's daughter. Grandmother told me stories of her smile. How it could draw the stars from their hiding places. How it gave branches voice and the leaves color. I never told Grandmother I remembered it. I was too afraid the stories would stop. 

The stories were secret and my father did not like to hear them. “He does not like the reminder,” my grandmother would breathe between her loose strands of dancing grey. I knew she didn’t understand though, that he liked nothing more than remembering that smile. What he did not like was my tainting it. Me with my pinched mouth and sour milk smirk. I did not deserve to recall what he kept sacred and tucked away. I could not find it in myself to resent him for it. 

I do not recall when my memories started. Time blends and animates the snapshots of framed photographs with distant voices, piecing together a fabric that never entirely existed. I cannot discern from the rosy cheeks and autumn dusted hair hung upon my walls from the live action reel of cold curls wet against my face and striped rain boots that never stilled. I do not know when one me became another, and I could find no evidence of the transition. 

Grandmother took me to the lone hazeltree behind my dad’s patchwork Buick, the sole object of his affections. We’d sit beneath its spindly trunks, and I’d pretend she was mother and I knew she would do the same. She’d plait my mousy curls, pretend they were golden, and tell me of The Little People, even smaller than me. 

“Are they beautiful?” I’d wonder aloud, and her answer never changed. 

“They’re like us in that way. Some are so filled with beauty it will make your chest ache just to see them. Some have lashed eyes so intense you could swear they hold constellations.” 

She never spoke of the other ones. The ones I wanted to hear about. The ones that weren’t beautiful. I drew them myself when I could, their upturned noses and limp, uneven shoulders mirrored me in a way I could not bear to look at. 

“Are they good? The ones that make you ache?” I would ask. I wanted them to be cruel, to take that beauty and tarnish it, to render themselves so unbearably monstrous that not even their perfect faces could remedy it. 

“Ah, love. They do not think of goodness as we think of goodness. Can one be wicked if they don’t intend it so?” 

“Wicked?”

“The words to unlock a heart are not given freely, my dear. Even we keep ourselves so far inside it is difficult to be found.” 

I knew she thought of mother when she told me how they’d sing. They did not sing to make the flowers grow, and they did not sing to make the moon wax or wane. They sang because they liked it and that was that. 

Grandmother kept mother alive in The Little People. She was hidden in every story. I made it my place to find her there. I used my own memory as a map, though as untrustworthy as Grandmother’s tales. I knew the danger of memory. Lies that disguised themselves as truths. 

I’d lay awake atop my blankets in the summers when the sun refused to set. I’d listen to the wind blowing through the hawthorne’s branches, a sound I knew masked the dancing feet of The Little People. Grandmother told me they made no sound when they danced, that their nimble feet brushed the thick moss with but the soft whisper of a kiss. I did not know at the time that kisses could be whispered.

My jaw worked on the ringleted apple skin that fell from Grandmother’s knife. She had piled them in a heap of red just for me, our secret bargain. 

“Do you think they stole her away? Because she sang so pretty?”

Grandmother’s head twitched imperceptibly towards the gaping doorframe. She sighed her wrinkle-studded sigh. “Your mother sang and sang to that tree. I think, if they have stolen her away, she knew what she was doing.” Grandmother spoke so softly, it was as if she were not speaking to me at all. 

I did not understand then, with my grubby little fingers and my dirt-coated apple shavings, what Grandmother had said to me that day. The phrase “she knew what she was doing” was one I had nodded at sagely, as though I had grasped its meaning. 

When I had learned, when I sat at my window sill thinking on all the pieces of her I had collected, I hated Grandmother a little for saying it. I had not then known the cruelty of truth. 

The betrayal weaved itself into each of my subsequent memories as if it had always been there. I could not untangle it. When I watched mother’s steps mirror my own, feet flying past half-shy spring tulips, my unwilling kite trailing behind us as though our laughter were not enough to convince it of flights’ worth, her smile held something it had not held before. Something heavier than even the kite’s fear. 

I wanted to forget that new look, that addition to memory now settled as fact. I wanted to know the mother as I knew her before, the one who’s guiltless voice had filled my nighttimes, the one who had loved me full to bursting and who had not thought twice of my changeling face. 

That’s the thing about truth though. You don’t get the option of forgetting. 

I had not thought the way she had left us could change anything. With mother taken, snatched away, I was left an unfortunate creature, an example left to warn others of the whims of fate. 

Victim is a far comfier guise than blame. 

I no longer liked to play truth. When Grandmother told me stories I kept them locked away and sought nothing from them. Mother’s tree became my tree, and it kept me company where shades of her had previously. 

I found myself more bold than before.  I was no longer afraid to ask after the twisted, ugly, wicked Little People. 

“Tell me of the Other ones. The ones that scream where there should be song, and the ones that lurch where there should be dance.” The distant mountains sent winged messengers to whisper in hushed lyrics the tales Grandmother now told me. It was in this way I learned that darkness nurtured in people a curiosity masqueraded as horror. 

“Tormented souls are often mistaken for cruel and wicked, child. The hate built in their chests twists and bends the body that found no weight in innocence. Remember that.” 

I worried Grandmother could see the hate that had twisted my heart, that circled my body in visible blackness, warping my crooked form before her ancient eyes. She had told me once of beings that held so much beauty it could make your chest ache. 

My ears of that time, naive and un-wintered things, had not known that life’s goodness could make you ache as much as its badness. 

We all fancied that tree as our own, fancied that those beings beneath its roots somehow preferred the lumber of our footfalls to another. 

They did not even know we stood there. 

To me, mother had become a fiction as grand as the myths that came from sunkissed countries. She was as unreal to me as my present father, his rolled button-downs stained with the evidence of time spent with his Buick. 

I thought I had known her. The way her shoulders twitched when I hung from her neck and the way her laugh rocked us both, my ribs cramping from my heart’s fullness. 

I had known her. The way she would run her fingers over the spot on my back that made me squirm, the knowledge of it’s secret existence shared only between us. 

I thought I had known her. The way her face would still when I pressed my nose to her neck, her eyes heavy and lidded with concentration, sketching that moment behind her eyelids. 

To love a patchwork person, sewn together with the threads of half truths and childlike trust, leaves a hollow emptiness, a vast blackhole of questions. 

Loving her memory was not like loving her. Wherever she had gone she was sure to have changed as surely as the moon of tomorrow would change from the moon of my right now. 

Father called me changeling, an insult. Grandmother called me changeling, a reassurance. 

I am not my mother's daughter, my mother sings with The Little People in their rooted halls. Her love was as fickle as a spring night, and I know now it could not have been mine unchanged for long. 

But it had been mine.