Timeless

The first time I saw him, I thought he came out of the painting in my aunt’s living room, but that’s not how time works. The next summer he stepped through the full size mirror my aunt kept by the door.

“I can’t stay long,” he would say.

He could step in and out of the shadows of things. He could turn any beam of sunlight into a rainbow. He could make a song play backwards and forwards at once. Best of all, he could slow down time. A bit of cake could last an hour. A raindrop could dance forever on the palm of your hand. My favourite birds held like a burst of colour to enjoy. The old farm became a wonder.

The magic was incredible. It grew with me and so did he. He went from a child to a teenager alongside me. He never stayed more than a few hours and came every other day. He would vanish cheerfully, rippling like water colour paint into whatever shadow or light was nearby. If he stayed still too long, everything around him would start to ripple instead, smudging and creating a dull, ominous hum.

“Where do you go?” I asked when we were twelve.

“I go back to watching,” he said.

“Watching what?”

“Time,” he said. “It moves but I don’t.”

“Can’t you just stay?” I asked when we were fourteen and for the first time that jolly, playfulness vanished.

He looked so much older when his face turned serious that my heart moved in my chest, slowing down to meet him.

“I make holes when I stay,” he said. “And then I can’t find them again. A hole is how I fell through in the first place and then I couldn’t come back.”

It was the most he had ever told me.

“How do you visit me then?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I can be where you are sometimes.”

“How long since you fell through?”

“I can’t remember any more,” he said. “But I’ve watched more families live in your aunt’s house than I can count. So, a while.”

When we were fifteen, I tried to touch him for the first time. It was winter, a first for me at my aunts. I had come for Christmas. He slowed down the snowfall until every flake caught the light like a star and I found myself holding my breath. I brushed my fingers against his to take his hand and he shuddered away.

“Don’t…” he warned.

“Or what?” I asked feeling reckless.

“What if you end up like me?”

“You would finally have some company.”

He looked at me, incredulous.

“Aren’t you lonesome?” I asked.

He didn’t answer.

“It’s not worth the risk,” he said finally but his eyes lingered on my hand, and I knew at that moment it absolutely was.

I would find a way.

At sixteen, in the summer, he appeared pale and anxious, his skin the most vivid it had ever been—a texture instead of an impression.

“I found one of my holes,” he said. “But I can’t figure out how to close it. It’s different. Don’t play down by the river bank this summer.”

But of course, my stupid brother did and fell through the hole. And since no one was going to believe me that my brother fell through a vague hole in time, many search parties and hysterics ensued. My brother had stopped seeing the magic years ago, so it was no surprise he missed the hole. I found it easily. A blurring of edges as though a stone had been dropped into a river, rippling infinitely slowly, the substance of time thick and shimmering.

My magic fellow—we had spent years trying to guess his name and he could not remember—stepped from the blur.

“I found him,” he gasped. “I can push him through—I think.”

He went very still, his blue eyes steady on mine.

“I—I think if I do this it will seal this hole, but I don’t think I’ll be able to come back.”

My blood ran cold, my face went hot, “What?”

“To put him back helped me figure out how to fix the hole,” he said. “But you have to be on the other side to push someone through and—it changes me, the holes. It makes me feel farther away from this side.”

I listened in horror.

“You said there were other holes though,” I said.

“I can’t find them.”

“But you come through the mirror!”

“Those places come closer to me,” he said. “But not for long and when I make holes, they’re all pushed farther away. The holes aren’t doorways like coming to you—they’re mistakes.”

He stepped back and I rushed him, throwing my arms around him, clumsy and out of rhythm.

“Nothing you do is a mistake,” I said, and an awful cry caught in my throat.

He stiffened in my arms but didn’t pull away, then very gently laid his head on my shoulder, his edges all real, his body warm and alive, a cry catching in his throat now.

“I’ll miss you,” he said. “You were my magic too…”

I held tighter but he pried me off and jumped before I could stop him. I made to jump after him only to have my brother—a burly, broad-shouldered twelve-year-old beast—come hurtling out into my arms, knocking us both to the ground.

“Whoa,” my brother declared stupidly. “What just happened to me?”

“How did he get you back?”

“How did who get me where?”

My wretched brother. He was useless. He rarely came to our aunts anymore. He was only here to nurse a broken elbow from football before hurrying back for his next season.

I pushed him into the river, emotion coursing through me with adrenaline.

“What was that for?”

“Everyone’s worried and looking for you!” I shouted as my heart churned in my chest, refusing to move with the rest of me.

No one would look for my magic fellow but me. I would never stop looking.

That evening my brother could not remember what had happened to him.

“I fell into something and got stuck,” he said. “Then I got out again.”

Aunt was delighted to assume it was a regular hole near the creek—it wouldn’t be my brother’s first time falling into one.

I spent the rest of the summer looking for holes in time. Aunt’s farm had always seemed idyllic to me. A place where the world outside faded away. It was perched on a hill that dipped down to a creek. Every kind of flower seemed to have a home in little pockets about the place. There were a hundred secret places. Countless everyday magics.

I ignored all of them and spent hours at every mirror. Near every shadow or sunbeam in the house.

Summer waned away and despair cut into me, chafing away the magic and colours of the farm. The idea that my magic fellow could only be a memory was unbearable.

“You haven’t been outside in weeks,” my aunt noted in late August. “What’s the matter? You’ve always loved it here!”

My brother had already departed so it was just the two of us. I had passed on my favourite meal and was sitting melancholic by her bay window, searching the sunbeams for any sign of magic.

Her beloved face looked warmly into mine. She was all love lines and peace. I considered telling her. Something stopped me.

My mother collected me at summer’s end, and I had the worst autumn and winter of my life. I despaired of summer never coming and despaired of it coming at all.

The farm was unchanged when I returned at seventeen. I visited every place my magic fellow had ever appeared. I spent hours looking for ripples in the sun-drenched expanse of my aunt’s farm. I waited by sun beams and promising looking shadows. I slept by mirrors. And then I noticed the painting.

It was such a small change I almost missed it. It was the painting I first thought he came from. A window-sized canvas thick with colour that captured the wheat swaying in the golden sun just a short walk from the farmhouse.

It had hung unchanging on that wall all my life. I loved the textured acrylic paint so much that at age six I dragged over a chair and added my own strokes to it with my child’s paint set.

My Aunt exclaimed in horror, tried desperately to mop off my additions to the left side and made me swear never to touch it again. But despite her best dabbing my greenery remained, marring the perfect pattern of the wheat.

Today there was something new. The barest hint of a silhouette at the back of the field. No details to be had in the bright sun of the painting, but there, nevertheless. Hope crowded tightly into my throat.

The next day the figure was closer. A silhouette, tall and lanky and just as I remembered him. I did not sleep at all that night and crept out hourly to check his progress.

In the morning, he was there. Halfway through the wheat field he stood in smudgy paint, his face coming into focus. By lunch he was looking wistfully back at me. And my aunt noticed.

“What are you looking at?”

“My magic fellow,” I told her.

“Magic fellow?”

Then her eyes focused on the painting, and she paled.

“How long has he been there?”

“Since yesterday,” I told her.

Then I told her everything and her hand gradually went to her throat, her face more upset than I had never seen it. She went to the old desk in the corner and opened a small drawer, pulling out a black and white photo cracked with age. It was him, as a child.

“That’s how he looked when I first met him,” I gasped.

My Aunt’s hand went over her mouth. She turned the little photograph over and, on the back, nearly faded away, was written Toby.

“We all thought he died…” she said.

“Died?”

“The spell is so old now,” my aunt said, looking at the painting, her eyes wet. “Hundreds…”

“What spell?”

“A little time moved just out of the way—into this painting,” my aunt said. “I know you feel it when you’re here. Everyone does. If you stay long enough, your life extends quite a bit. For the rest of the clan the visits keep us feeling young. I always thought you’d take over the place after me. You’re so fond of it.”

“And this boy?”

“He disappeared when the spell was created. Everyone grieved. They hoped he wasn’t some kind of sacrifice for the spell, but no one was sure.”

A falling sensation went through me as the realization hit me. Outside this farm the world had no magic, no spells, they were written in books or movies as a fancy, a dream. Inside this place, one boy had paid a terrible price for magic. He had become magic. Alone.

A little time, moved just out of the way.

Aunt was right. This place was wonderful. A living painting. But it had two sides and to enjoy one, someone had to watch it from the other. It was a bad spell.

I sprinted to the painting and tore it from the wall.

“This was never a painting…” I said, thinking of all the times I had looked at it.

How I had painted into it myself with the love of a child. Maybe that was why my magic fellow could reach me—I had reached for him without every knowing it.

I could reach again.

My Aunt chased me out the front door.

“Wait!” she said.

Was she considering abandoning him? She was a monster. Maybe that’s what the spell did to you when you lived in it too long.

I ran for the field. I ran for the wheat.

“Wait,” Aunt’s voice called, and I ignored her.

I would find it. I would find the place. I looked and looked and there it was, the greenery that shouldn’t be there. Clumsy leaves coiling from the ground as though scribbled there—which they were! They were.

The painting had never been the doorway, it had been the time. I held it up, my eyes watering as I strained to line it up. My Aunt was hysterical now. I could hear her running towards me.

The painting went weightless in my hands, and I let go. It was finding its way. It wanted to mend. All these years my family had spent lingering here, enjoying their stolen time while a boy was made to watch.

There was a great crack like a thunderclap and the painting vanished, the colours rippling into the landscape and with a blurring like water it all changed. The colours grew duller, the sun faded, the wheat scratchy and ordinary. My aunt looked around her in despair.

I waited with hope crushed into the secret, timeless chambers of my heart.

He did not step from a sunbeam or a shadow this time. No mirror or frame let him closer to me. A cloud passed over and in the next moment he was there. Tall, alive, next to me. He looked down at himself in wonder. Patted his face, his old-fashioned clothes.

“Toby?” I asked and he looked up sharply.

Then his face curved into his very best smile. Joy, mischief, magic.

“That’s me.”

I took his hand and ignored my aunt’s selfish grief.

“It took so many people to make that spell,” she wailed. “We’ll never get it back again.”

But the farm rippled as I touched Toby’s hand. We had grown together on two sides of time, connected by a smear of paint.

“I think there are much better spells,” I told my aunt.

Spells where both people were on the right side, watching together.