

BETWEEN MIRRORS

by Francis Rosenfeld

© 2018 Francis Rosenfeld

Smashwords Edition

Cover Design © JayF at SelfPubBookCovers

CONTENTS

PART ONE

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

PART TWO

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

About the Author

Other Books by Francis Rosenfeld

PART ONE

1

"Get out of the doorway!"

The words boomed like thunder in Claire's ears, now almost thirty years later, with the same intensity and pronouncement they carried the first time she'd heard Grandmother utter them, the first time of many. She smiled vaguely to the memory.

It was vast, this mansion of her grandparents where she had grown up, but Claire didn't know it at the time; she never questioned what she saw because she'd never known another way of life, she'd never ventured past the end of the formal alley flanked by huge oak trees, hundreds of years old, which led straight to its front doors. For her the mansion and its garden were the world.

The most interesting feature of this large house, and the one that had prompted Claire's memory, was its entryway. The double doors carved out of solid walnut had stained glass panes set in intricate wood tracery and were so heavy little Claire always needed both hands to pry them open. The doors were flanked by large crystal mirrors, parallel to each other, which ran floor to ceiling and reflected everything and everybody that passed between them into infinity, contours diffracted into rainbows in places by the finely polished bevels around their edges.

She must have been five years old at the time, intensely curious about this exciting new world she'd been born into, wandering around the old mansion whose windows were frequently propped open to temper the sweltering heat of the Louisiana summers and whose broad surrounding porch offered welcoming shade during those afternoons when even the wind stood still. Nature afforded itself no movements and no sounds then, other than the eerie trilling of the tree frogs. This was her first memory of the mirrors: she was standing between them trying to understand why there were so many of her and why they seemed to get farther and farther away. She could still remember the way the white ribbons of the dress Grandmother had sewn by hand just in time for her birthday moved in the doors' draft like they were alive. Little Claire had managed to smear cake frosting on the dress, a fact she was trying very hard to hide, and she remembered feeling somewhat relieved that all the Claires in the mirrors were also looking down with guilty expressions on their faces. A razor sharp ray of sun sliced through the stained glass suddenly, with the swiftness of a blade, and hardened the contours around everything, rendering the shadows deeper and softer than black velvet. For a second Claire could almost touch the substance of that shadow, feel its palpable nature. She got scared of it and ran out of the doorway, her frilly white ribbons trailing behind her, and promised herself to listen to Grandmother and steer clear of the doorway going further. Naturally, she forgot her promise the very next day.

Claire's fascination with this mirror world which she perceived as three dimensional due to its endless patterns of reflection had subsequently earned her many scoldings, but she simply couldn't resist the attraction it exerted on her; she kept getting drawn to it like a compass needle to the north. Even now the fascination that weird alcove exerted on her made her feel guilty, an absurd emotion for a woman in her mid thirties, even one who was still trying to find herself.

She decided to work on her assertiveness and stand wherever she pleased, since she was a grown up, gosh darn it, but her ears instinctively tuned in to hear if her grandparents were approaching, so she could get out of there before they saw her. She was grateful for her grandparents' company and felt relieved to be back home, but she was also kind of embarrassed to move back in with them at her age. She shrugged her shoulders. Life had unexpected ways to steer one's journey and it had certainly taught her it was easier sometimes to accept them at face value.

The world outside these familiar walls hadn't turned out the way she hoped, nothing like the overheated imagination of her youth had painted it to be. The real world didn't end up being her enchanted playground, quite the contrary, it stubbornly and consistently refused to cooperate. She was too weird for it, Claire learned. She didn't exactly know how or why, but she didn't seem to fit in it or understand its ways, the subtle cues and unspoken agreements that function so flawlessly in society and form the basis of common understanding.

It's not that her life had been worse than anybody else's, it's just that everybody else accepted it the way it was, without unnecessary commentary, while Claire, for whatever cursed reason, could not. She had questions in school which made her teachers uncomfortable, she had questions at work which made coworkers find her difficult, but worse of all, she had questions regarding social expectations that doomed any potential friendships before they even started. She often felt like a car stuck going the wrong way on a one way street with no places to turn.

She couldn't even remember what prompted her to pack up and come back to Louisiana on this self-imposed sabbatical she took because she didn't have an alternative to it.

"Get out of the doorway!" the real voice of her grandmother startled her from behind, and Claire let out a resigned sigh: she had fallen for the spell of the mirrors again and had lost track of herself. She obeyed, out of habit, and stepped out of the little alcove, somewhat disappointed that her endless reflections were now confined to just one body.

"You never listen, bebelle," Grandmother shook her head in distress. "Thirty years old and still you never listen!"

"What's wrong with it, maman?" Claire forgot to subdue the inquisitive streak that never failed to get her in trouble. "Why do you get so upset when I hang around the front doors?"

"It's bad luck, child! Do you need me to draw you a picture? Why would you want to invite trouble? God knows it is easy enough for it to find you anyway."

"Please, maman," Claire besought her in her loveliest cajoling voice, one she hoped the elder would find too endearing to deny, "just tell me!" Grandmother dismissed her with an irate hand gesture, turned her back to the granddaughter and went to the kitchen.

Claire was still standing in front of the doors, whose intricate stained glass and wood motifs, depicting angels and flowers, were close enough to get caught in the mirrors. They multiplied in ways that confused the eye and made the entire scene absolutely hypnotic.

"Aren't you hungry, dear?" the soft voice of her grandfather startled her from her second reverie. She felt his hand on her shoulder guiding her gently towards the kitchen. She was hungry, she realized, and weary, and grateful to be cared for again, if only for a while.

***

When she was about six Claire started wondering what had happened to her parents. She tried to ask her grandparents about them, but they got so upset with her that she cried for days and decided never to bring up the subject again. Children tend to believe that everything that's not right with the world must be their fault and adults will be mad at them for it and stop loving them, and Claire was no exception. Of course she never ceased questioning the issue, silently, and over the years constructed fantastic scenarios about what might have happened to them, stories which were heroic and extraordinary and made her hope that maybe some of their exceptional quality rubbed off on her too.

One wouldn't call Claire's life exceptional. One wouldn't call it miserable either. She had worked so hard at fitting in that the results, which turned out to be the exact opposite of that, were almost hilariously bad. Unfortunately Claire couldn't appreciate the fine irony because she had lost her sense of humor somewhere along the way and replaced it with a pleasant attitude meant to accommodate any opinion she might encounter on her journey.

That afternoon, when she asked what had happened to her parents and got scolded, Claire ran out into the garden and hid in the natural hollow created by the thick and gnarly roots of an oak tree where they broke the ground, and that spot became her secret hideaway from the world from that day on, the place where she could go to dream and find comfort in good times and in bad. That oak tree remained her best friend throughout her childhood: it didn't judge, it had no expectations and it listened to whatever Claire's wild imagination came up with. A weird friend for a child, but, as I said, Claire herself was weird.

She was sitting in that natural chair now, eyes closed, listening to the bird song and the tree frogs and the wind blowing through the thick foliage. The clinking of plates and silverware accompanied them - the sounds of her grandparents setting the table for breakfast outside on the patio, as it had been customary for them to do for decades. In the ever changing nature of things having this ritual felt almost like a gift, one of the fixed points which held her life well anchored in reality and kept it from being scattered by the winds. It was always at the same time, too. She kept smiling, with her eyes closed, and waited for the grandfather clock to strike nine. One...two...three...bang...bang...bang...Claire counted the guttural chimes with the clock until she reached nine, then got up to join her grandparents at the table.

"Did you sleep well, bebelle?" Grandmother asked, smiling.

Claire's sleep had been troubled by strange dreams, most of which she couldn't remember, but which left her uneasy and wrought. It was the heat, she thought, she'd become unaccustomed to the heat during all of these years she'd been gone, it didn't use to bother her when she was a child. Glad as she was to be back home something felt off, odd, out of place, like reality had been bent or dented in the present moment somehow, but only very slightly, allowing everything to look almost normal. Almost.

"Yes, thank you, maman," she smiled politely and her hard acquired social skills kicked in instinctively, eager to smother any chance that candor or, God forbid, a real connection might sneak up on her.

"Don't lie to me, child. I've known you since you were in swaddling clothes," Grandmother shook her head in a gesture so familiar to Claire it suddenly brightened her mood and made her feel safe. She smiled.

"It doesn't matter, really."

"Have some coffee," Grandmother enticed her.

Claire picked up the old china pot and poured the dark liquid carefully into her cup. Her grandparents had this rule, which Claire had never questioned as a child but never encountered in her grown-up life anywhere else, that each member of the family had to use their own plate and cup, not to be mixed up with anybody else's. There was a matching china set, of course, complete with tureens and gravy boats and large enough for twenty four people, but it was only used when the family hosted dinner parties and at no other time. Claire's cup and saucer were made of bone porcelain, hand painted with delicate blue and gold tracery and so thin they became translucent; it seemed almost a miracle they had survived Claire's entire childhood.

She wasn't used to seeing coffee in that cup, given her usual fare as a young girl which consisted of linden tea with lemon and honey or chocolate milk. It made her sad that there was a grown-up beverage in it now, especially since she hadn't managed to figure out how to be a grown-up yet.

"Milk?" Grandmother offered, as if she'd heard her granddaughter's thoughts.

Claire poured milk in the already full cup and made the coffee spill into the saucer in the process.

"For luck!" Grandmother dipped her forefinger in the saucer and smeared coffee on the young woman's forehead, another one of the many customs Claire never questioned. One threw salt over one's shoulder, ate beans on Wednesdays, wished on the first fruits of the year, wrapped up the outdoor activities at sundown. Life had different ways of marking the passing of time in their household - by the songs of the pigeons in the morning, by the height of the sun at noon, by the sounds of the old bell in the church nearby in the late afternoon. Seasons were announced by scents - the fragrance of the tree blossoms, the overheated aroma of the herbs, the sweet heavy scent of the harvest, the damp smell of the rain. The grandfather clock was the only exception in this world that marked its own time, as if it were brought there from outside just to make a point.

Claire's grandfather went over the tasks for the day, as he always did at breakfast, taking slow sips of coffee between rare puffs of his morning cigarette, whose tip glowed amber in the rhythm of his puffs, and which stood eerily far from his hand at the end of a very long tortoise shell holder. It was Claire's task, when she was a child, to prepare the cigarette and stuff so much cotton in the holder that almost no nicotine made it through.

Slow wisps of blue-gray smoke danced in the morning air, drawn towards the sky by the rising air currents. Grandfather finished drafting the daily schedule and turned towards Claire. He was in a good mood, a state of mind the presence of his beloved granddaughter only served to amplify.

"I'm going into town, do you want to come?"

He was referring to the daily bicycle trip to the baker from which he always returned wrapped in the irresistible aroma of warm bread. Claire immediately made a mental list of the items she hoped they still made and got up from the table without a word in order to follow him. It'd been decades since she had ridden a bicycle and she felt a little awkward trying to do it again.

"You're not going to change?" Grandfather turned around. She'd almost forgotten the first rule of going out: one never left the house wearing anything other than street attire. Clothes had to be perfectly pressed, shoes polished to a shine, always one last check in the mirrors before going out the door. Maybe that was the mystery of the parallel mirrors, Claire thought, although one had to admit that even for a family with such high standards for personal grooming reflecting oneself into infinity was a little excessive.

***

The rain started so suddenly Claire barely had time to get in from the porch and close the doors behind her before the downpour delivered a deafening drum solo on the roof. Claire's grandfather was rushing through the house, as he used to do under these circumstances, closing up doors, windows and shutters and making sure everybody was inside, safe from the storm. The young woman smiled, tracking his movements through the house by the noises he made - feet shuffling on the floor, sounds of doors opening and slamming behind him, footsteps up and down the stairs, the screech of the attic ladder being dragged on the floor in the hallway upstairs.

Claire's grandfather was a force of nature, he blew rather than walked through the doors, in a motion more akin to a rushing wind than to a living breathing person. He never closed a cabinet or a drawer, and when he moved through a room small napkins and pieces of paper which happened to be left on the table got caught in his draft like leaves in the wind, stopped from trailing behind him only by the doors which invariably slammed shut after he walked through them. Claire didn't even realize how much she had missed those noises. She spent a few minutes listening to this symphonic racket like she would to a fine piece of music, failing to notice she was standing in the alcove between the mirrors again.

The storm intensified, heavy with lightning and thunder, blowing the rain in horizontal bands and prompting Claire to rush over and close the storm shutters which had been left open. The light in the house dimmed to almost dusky levels as bruise colored clouds crowded the sky, so thick and so pregnant with rain they almost dragged on the ground. As she moved out of the darkened alcove she caught a glimpse of her reflections in the mirrors in a flash of lightning, and they appeared to be of a much older her, staring back with a knowing gaze that was simply annoying. Claire hesitated, waiting for the next flash of lightning in order to figure out what this was all about, but the next lightning revealed nothing other than her usual expression, if only slightly puzzled at the moment.

"Good God, I'm going to lose it one day!" Claire mumbled to herself, resuming her rush through the house to close the shutters, too late to prevent the pouring rain from reaching the wood floors. "Maman and her mirror superstitions! Now I have to wipe off all of this water!"

"Gracious, bebelle, if you open a door you must remember to close it behind you, not leave it ajar so anything and anybody can let themselves in! Look at all this water on the floors!" Grandmother protested and went to the kitchen to get a mop and a bucket.

Claire mumbled under her breath that her grandfather always left the doors open and nobody ever complained about that.

"He knows which doors need closing, he never leaves a door open that has to stay shut. And get out of the doorway."

"Why is it bad luck to stand in the doorway?" Claire returned to the unsatisfied curiosity that had plagued her entire childhood.

"You should be either on one side of the door or the other, not in between. Besides, you're blocking traffic."

"But there is nobody else here that might want to get in, not in this weather, that's for sure," Claire replied, bewildered.

"You never know, there may have been," Grandmother replied matter of fact, defying logic. Her face darkened for a moment and then resumed its usual expression. "Empty this outside, will you?" She handed Claire the bucket which was now half full of water and continued wiping the floors until they were completely dry.

***

The next morning brought sunshine, which beamed crisp and clear through the recently unburdened skies. The leaves were still loaded with the raindrops that had pounded them through the night and the lightest touch of wind or excited little critter turned them into ad hoc waterfalls and scattered their liquid load on the ground.

Mornings like these made for the best memories of Claire's childhood, those mornings when she woke up without a care in the world and nothing to do and rushed outside to greet the sunshine and the doves and the wind in the trees. During all of the time she'd spent here, in her grandparents' house, Claire could not remember a single instance of bad weather. It's not that she hadn't had her share of soggy winters and hot summer winds, it's just that she never perceived them as bad.

Life unfolds all its magic in front of the eyes of an enchanted child, it holds nothing back, drunk with generosity and abandon, it shows itself in the ways in which it wants to be seen, ways that become impenetrable to the sight of grown up eyes. The cold winter rain carried feelings and fragrance, the scent of the wet oak trunks and soggy moss and damp earth. The strong summer winds whirled their spirit through the branches, heavy and labored like the raspy breath of a hunted creature in search of a safe place to rest. The whole world was a miracle, every leaf, every sight, every day.

To celebrate this memory she rushed outside in her nightgown and barefoot, like she used to do when she was five, and ran her hands through the tall dill that was growing along the side of the house. She scattered the water droplets from its heavy umbels and released its scent. Her long white gown unsettled the mist that was rising from the earth in the warm light of the morning. If someone were to see her walk across the grass inside this eerie scene they might have thought they'd seen a ghost; a happy dancing ghost who couldn't hold back her giggles.

"I see you're in great spirits," Grandmother laughed, pleased to see her little girl happy. "The rain must have cleared away the shadows."

Claire returned the reply that was expected of her, as she always did when her elder mentioned the shadows. It was like a secret understanding, this exchange of phrases between the two of them, whose meaning, though obscure, had acquired almost ceremonial significance with the passing of years.

"What shadows, maman? There are no shadows other than the ones we cast."

"And those we have not yet been granted the grace to see."

Claire had always wondered what that last phrase meant; they were real things, the shadows, and everybody around this corner of the world took them very seriously.

"You smell like dill," Grandmother laughed. "If you keep rustling those herbs you're going to upset the bees, they're always besotted in the morning."

The table was already set for breakfast and Claire wondered if she should go back to the house to get dressed, but her grandmother gestured to her to sit down. Her grandfather wasn't there, she noticed.

"It's just the two of us this morning, I'm afraid. Your grandfather had some business in town." She poured coffee in the cups, without rushing, like people who have time on their side. "You know, if you don't have any plans today, maybe you can help me sort through some of your old things, I didn't know what you would like to keep, so I packed everything in boxes. They're up in the attic."

"You're still going up into the attic?" Claire asked, slightly alarmed.

"Of course I do, why do you ask?" Grandmother seemed surprised by the question, but then she saw the veiled concern in her granddaughter's eyes and retorted. "You're not fast enough to keep up with me, child! I can get up into that attic before you have time to rise from your chair!"

"What kind of things?" Claire changed the subject.

"All sorts," Grandmother didn't specify.

They ate their apricot preserves in silence. The confections were served in tiny glass saucers: one whole apricot, with the kernel in, soaked in a golden syrup infused with vanilla beans and boiled until it reached the thickness of molasses - their morning ritual. Claire hesitated to ask the question that was weighing on her mind, but eventually gathered the courage to speak.

"Maman, did you ever notice anything unusual about the mirrors?"

Grandmother's demeanor betrayed no reaction to the question, but the flash in her eyes was too fast to hide.

"Unusual?" she tried to tease out more detail from her granddaughter before responding. "In what way?"

"You're going to think I'm crazy," Claire almost whispered, "but I think I saw..."

"Yes," Grandmother grew a little impatient.

"Myself," Claire continued, without realizing how foolish her answer sounded. Grandmother didn't laugh.

"What about it?" Grandmother insisted.

"I...looked much older," Claire gathered up the courage to explain. "Still me, but older."

"Oh, dear!" Grandmother sighed, deep in thought, and sipped her coffee in silence. Claire didn't dare press into a subject that had been taboo in their house for a good twenty years. She felt awkward about bringing up such silliness and tried to change the subject, but Grandmother stopped her.

"There are many things in this world we know nothing about, bebelle. That doesn't mean they're not real."

Claire waited for her grandmother to continue, but the latter didn't.

"So," she inquired tentatively, "there is something unusual about the mirrors."

"When you get to be my age you start realizing that just about everything you see is unusual in some way," Grandmother evaded the question, "but we only get to carry the burden of the things we can understand. Or accept as true."

"I don't understand," Claire answered her unasked question.

"That's what I thought," Grandmother concluded the conversation and got up to take the cups and saucers to the kitchen. "Maybe we should leave that attic cleaning for another time, it's such a nice day, you should spend it outdoors. Being in nature is good for the soul, you know," she smiled mysteriously.

2

Claire's path had been a winding one, a life choice that had brought her both interesting and unexpected experiences and endless frustration from those loved ones who would have preferred it to have some direction and purpose instead. True to the wisdom that not all those who wander are lost she had rambled through life rather than live it, gathering experiences and memories on her path like one picks up souvenirs along one's journeys. She was old enough by now to open that symbolic box of mixed experiences and try to put them together in a broader context in order to get the big picture.

It wasn't easy, the life of a traveler, even in a symbolic sense. Much like the real one, the experiential traveler hunts special moments to capture in pictures, and in the end those pictures become the reality of his or her journey, obscuring the mishaps, the strains and the inescapable human needs. The traveler might remember his disappointments and sorrows but the pictures stand alone to form a different image of one's life, the image one chose to depict.

The tapestry she came up with as a result was beautiful and strange, and if she wanted to be honest with herself it didn't make much sense. That's probably why she had decided to take a sabbatical from normal life, find the missing pieces of the puzzle and put some meaning into this random cluster of events. That is how she ended up coming back to the home of her childhood, the place where things never changed: she needed a fixed point to focus on while this chaotic soup of actions, encounters and events kept swirling around her, so involved in itself it left no room for breathing. Its relentless churning gave her motion sickness and seemed ruled more by the laws of fluid dynamics than by those of human nature - it had eddies and currents and immovable rocks, mucky dead spots and rushing white waters, and places so clear one could count all the pebbles on the rocky bottom and all the creatures who lived there.

Heeding her grandmother's advice she went out into the garden to enjoy nature and stopped almost without thinking to sit under her oak tree. She unfolded memories inside her mind like one spreads photographs on a table, grouping them together, singling them out, looking for patterns and organizing structures in their jumbled mess.

There were too many those special moments she had greedily accumulated, and they had too many connections between them, made without rhyme or reason. Like the brain of a three year old gobbles up reality with no discernment and creates extraneous neural pathways it has to sort out and discard later, so did Claire's insight get weighed down by an unseemly amount of irrelevant details.

Hidden in that foggy maze were her pivotal moments, the events that had charted her life's path. She was surprised to notice that many of them were eminently forgettable, like for instance the day when it started raining and she sought shelter in the cafe where she ended up working for two years; that's where she made the friend who introduced her to the local art community and a way of life which had unfolded right under her nose for years and yet she knew nothing about. She'd spent some time in their world and dedicated herself to her painting, for which she ended up deciding she had no talent, but which gave her a reason to remain immersed in this different atmosphere she tried so hard to understand. Eventually she realized there was nothing to understand, not with one's mind, anyway. It was more like singing the song of one's soul loud enough for the world to hear. Her inexplicable devotion to the artistic milieu threw her into the unlikely job of art curator, which required writing reviews and got her tangled in the publishing world, from which she got side tracked into travel writing and culinary reviews.

As she looked back at her life she was amazed at the amount of living she had managed to stuff in such a short period of time and even though she was slightly disappointed that her loved ones couldn't see her footprints on the world, criss-crossing its shifting sands like openwork embroidery, she didn't resent them for it. How could they experience her point of view while standing in a different spot?

Despite the fact that her family deplored her lack of focus nobody accumulates this amount of life experience so young by planning for it. The complex patterns of life are so much richer than one's ability to process them and so filled with information and details they can only be experienced in part and in context, a single layer of an infinitely thick set. It's been mentioned so many times that our lives are unique that the meaning of the words got dulled by cliche, but it is true: no two of us see the same reality, we all have our own worlds to live in, coexisting with the others' and impossible to peel apart. Claire had experienced her own existence in motion since she was five years old and she had seen the shadow for the first time. The shadow had called out to her ever since, trying to entice her back to the uncharted place she knew existed but kept ignoring in order to stay the course.

It is interesting how life has ways to return one to their fated path when it deems it necessary, almost surgical in the way it eliminates anything that stands in its way. There is nothing it won't reshuffle, add or remove in order to achieve this goal. Nothing.

This lengthy session of navel gazing did yield a useful conclusion: most of her life's defining moments were not of her doing. She shrugged the irritating thought and got up to get back into the house, since the sun had already set and the violet shadows of the night were getting thicker. As she passed through the front doors she got a glimpse of herself in the mirrors, donning a garden hat and the same unnerving smile. This time Claire didn't cave. She stared right back at the stranger in the mirror, to get to the bottom of this crazy reflection well, but there was no bottom, just an infinite number of hers fading into the vanishing point. She gasped when she realized there were subtle differences between all of these reflections, not so pronounced that a careless glance would find them jarring, but inescapable to the attentive eye. Behind the surface of the mirror dwelt relaxed hers, and thoughtful hers, and tense hers, and excited hers, and sad hers and absentminded hers, but there was one thing they all had in common: the garden hat. Claire wasn't wearing a hat.

"How on earth is this even possible!" Claire thought to herself, more fascinated by the fact that the hat that didn't belong in the reflection seemed designed to draw so much of one's attention one wouldn't have enough of it left to focus on the much subtler differences the Claires had between them. She looked behind her to make sure her grandmother wasn't around to give her a piece of her mind about standing in the doorway again, and when she looked back at the mirrors she noticed the hat was gone. She got mad at herself for not taking a picture of this strange phenomenon before it was gone and promised herself that the next time the mirrors decided to go all alternate reality on her she'd snap up some evidence for posterity.

The grandfather clock struck eight and Claire headed to the dining room, where the table was already set for dinner. There were only two place settings.

"Your grandfather's business in town took longer than anticipated. He called to let me know he'll be staying overnight. It's just the two of us this evening," her grandmother smiled. Claire sat down, bewitched by the comforting aroma of baked macaroni and cheese that was filling the house. Her grandmother appeared, carrying the hot casserole from which thin wisps of steam managed to escape, even though it had the lid on.

"Did you have a pleasant day outside?" the latter started the conversation while dishing generous heaps of gooey goodness onto the plates.

"Yes, it was very relaxing," Claire replied, eyeing her favorite dish while her mouth watered. While she dug in, gleeful with anticipation, she realized she had no idea what her grandmother did on a regular day. "How was your day, maman?"

"Oh, you know, the usual," her grandmother gave her a vague response. "I had a few things to attend to, there is always something that needs done in this house."

Claire wanted to ask for more detail, but her grandmother didn't leave her time to do so.

"Oh, speaking of things that need done, I found a hat for you to wear when you go outside. I know you spent too much time up north to remember, but in our neck of the woods it's too hot to stay outside all day without a hat, you're going to get yourself sunstroke. And don't you tell me you're going to keep in the shade. You've been using that excuse since you were this tall," she held her hand slightly above the table top, "and it didn't fly with me then either. You can get yourself a different one if you don't like it, but in the meantime..."

Claire didn't comment, nor did she wonder what the hat looked like. She had a vague idea.

***

I don't know about other people, but Claire wasn't the kind of person who could just shrug off the sight of an inexistent hat. It weighed on her, this mirror enigma, so much more because of the proscription that accompanied it; what could possibly be so unusual about an object that her grandmother simply refused to talk about it?

The constant churning of her mind didn't let her sleep, that and the giant moon which shone through her window, full and round and barely touching the tops of the oak trees. It bathed the whole room in silver light, strong enough to reveal the shapes, but not the colors of things.

Old memories of sitting on the porch to watch its glitter on the surface of the little pond in their back yard called out to her and she longed to relive those happy moments. Back then her world extended only to the edge of the property and she knew it very well - every rock, every blade of grass, every tree - and felt protected by it, just as she felt protected by her grandparents. The property felt much smaller now, but then it was vast and wondrous, her little enchanted realm filled with birds and flowers where her imagination roamed free.

She walked down the stairs as quietly as she could, remembering to skip the fifth step, the one with the creak, so that she would not wake up her grandparents, and sneaked out on the porch to enjoy the beauty of the night and take in big gulps of its cool fragrance. Its darkness was humid and vibrated with the songs of the tree frogs. The waterlilies stretched their necks like periscopes with movements almost fast enough to notice, eager to take in as much of the silver radiance as they could before the moon hid behind the treetops again.

Claire watched the scene with quiet attention, as if she'd seen it for the first time, until the shadows became longer and the chill in the air put a shiver through her body. She got up to get back inside and noticed with displeasure that the door which led back to the parlor was locked. She knew her grandfather hated leaving the doors unlocked at night and figured he probably didn't see her sitting in the swing. He must have finished his business in town early and decided to come back home, rather than stay until morning.

"Great!" she thought. "Now I have to either wake everybody up or sleep here". She wished she thought to bring a blanket, twenty twenty hindsight, but unfortunately she hadn't, so she decided not to let this little mishap spoil her mood; she covered herself best she could with her long nightgown and eventually managed to fall asleep. The rose light of dawn nudged her to open her eyes just a few hours later, to the sight of a little posy of verbena and heliotrope. She stared blankly at it for a while, not knowing what to make of its presence, gave herself a talking to about the craziness of sleeping outdoors and fell back to sleep until the sun was high in the sky and the familiar clinking of cups and silverware alerted her that it was almost time for breakfast. The posy was gone. She jumped quickly and ran all the way around the house to the front door to change. She zoomed past the mirrors, unable to resist stealing a quick peek: the Claires were smiling back at her, their noses buried in the little flower bundles from the night before. She couldn't help notice that though a superficial look could have mistaken their white outfits for nightgowns, they were wrapped around their bodies and draped delicately from their shoulders with the classic elegance of stolas.

"Claire!" her grandfather's voice reached out from the garden. "Breakfast!"

She let go of the flowers and the stolas and ran upstairs to get dressed before the clock struck nine. When she got to the breakfast table she noticed the little posy was placed triumphantly right in the middle of it.

"I found this by your side when I opened the doors this morning," her grandfather explained. "Don't tell me you slept outside!"

"It was a full moon and I couldn't sleep so I got out on the porch for some fresh air and when I wanted to go back inside the door was locked. I didn't want to wake you."

The grandparents exchanged a quick glance, and if Claire didn't know any better she could have sworn she saw panic.

"I thought it was you who locked the door last night when you came back home late. I know you don't like to see doors open at night."

Grandfather said nothing. He frowned and retreated into his coffee cup. Grandmother changed the subject to liven up the atmosphere.

"Did you try the hat, dear? Does it fit?"

"Yes, thank you, maman, it will do just fine."

"Next time you wake me, you understand? Don't care if I'm tired or dead! You don't sleep outside in these lands, not unless you want to be taken," Grandfather broke into the conversation in a tense tone, completely out of character for him.

"Joseph!" Grandmother protested, outraged by the bluntness.

"What? Don't you see? They already visited! They left her a gift!"

"Who's they, Grandfather?"

Grandmother pinned him with a glacial stare. He gestured irritated and finished his coffee in silence. When he was done, he got up abruptly and left to tend to his beehives.

"What is he talking about, maman?" Claire turned her curiosity to her grandmother, who was pondering a reasonable response. After some soul searching she regained her poised smile and lighthearted attitude.

"Superstitions, child. Your grandfather forgets himself sometimes."

"This is ridiculous!" Claire thought. "I'm a grown woman, for God's sakes, whatever it is that they know, I'm sure I must be old enough to process by now." She then remembered that she had decided to move back in with her grandparents so that somebody would take care of her and conceded to a certain level of immaturity that did demand protection.

"Have you given any thought to what you're going to do next, bebelle?" her grandmother continued kindly.

"No, not yet, I'm still trying to get used to being back home."

"Yeah, but there is nothing to do here, not for a woman your age. Surely you don't want to linger in this house indefinitely and waste your life! You're young, you should be out and about, conquering the world right now, you just have to find yourself a new balance and make the best of your youth."

"You want me to leave, maman?" Claire asked, her eyes brimming with tears. What was it with people, the second she tried to forge a deeper, more meaningful connection with them they all pushed her away. Codependent personality somebody called it. "Nobody wants me around," she moped disheartened.

"Of course not, child! I'm beside myself with joy for having you here, it's just, we're old, honey, you should be spending time with people closer to your age. Nothing ever happens here!"

"Right!" Claire thought, now absolutely sure that this whole business about the mirrors was real.

***

We accept as truth that a reflection is just a virtual copy of reality, but it is so much more than that. A reflection is a blend, a superimposition of the image that is cast on the medium it's cast upon. The resulting picture is a little bit of real, though backwards, seeded within the substance of the surface of reflection itself: if it be water it embraces its fluidity and restless motion, if it be glass, its ethereal nature and its appearance of almost not being there, if it be mirror, the sharp shifts of quick silver.

That is also true of elements we don't usually conceive of as a reflecting medium; for instance we don't see the reflections we cast on other people, but they are always there. In every interaction there is a little bit of us mixed with the glut of their personality, intellect and emotions. This is why it is impossible to fully know a person: you can never see them without the influence of your own personality projected on theirs.

The most subtle reflections are those we cast on our surroundings, on the larger life with which we constantly exchange breath and of which we are an inextricable part. Even in perfect stillness we move the world just by being in it. Our emotions, like water, like glass, like quick silver, warp the essence of what's there from one moment to the next, turning hell into heaven and back at the drop of a hat. They make us hate sunshine in May and crave November mists, they make us perceive things as beautiful or ugly in ways nobody else can see, they literally recreate our world one feeling at a time.

The stoic ones, the cerebral types, the down to earth realists, dismiss this as ignorant nonsense, the work of lesser minds, incapable of higher reason. They take the unchanging nature of reality on faith and center themselves in its absolute truth even as reality bends itself out of shape to validate their beliefs.

In a very practical way we live in worlds of our own making, which are constantly influenced by interference from the lives of others, but whose very essence only we can change, just like an ocean that is endlessly moved by waves, eddies and currents, but never ceases to be an ocean.

Anyway, back to the mirrors. There is something disquieting about standing between parallel mirrors. It feels like you're being sucked in one reflection at a time into a world with no depth that looks just like the one you live in, but it's not. Your being is split between the right side and the left, and for a brief but very confusing moment, there are two yous staring you back, infinitely bouncing off the mirrors so you can't tell which one is which anymore. If you look carefully into the distance you will see their vantage point changing, as if those infinite worlds in the mirror had experienced a small but noticeable shift and they're different now, and you instinctively know that once you come out of this tunneling of reality, your world won't be the same either.

Give a curious and obstinate person a piece of reality which seems to be peeling at a corner and they'll pick at its thin film until they remove it altogether, especially after they've been repeatedly prompted not to. Who can resist a command, albeit expressed in the negative, that has been drilled into one's head for twenty years? Commands and prohibitions are two faces of the same coin: they both work to focus one's attention and heighten one's emotional response to their subject and whether that is done in a positive or a negative way their effectiveness is diabolically similar.

Very early in the morning, before dawn started shedding its blue and purple hues, Claire sneaked down the stairs, quiet as a mouse and trying very hard to calm her rogue heart. She didn't want to admit to herself that she was afraid, she didn't even want to think it, but her body couldn't dissimulate the waves of anxiety that coursed through her veins and made her breathing quick and shallow. When she reached the large hallway she felt the air suddenly grow colder, despite the sweltering temperatures outside. Its density was different too and she could feel the static charge against her skin that gave her goose bumps and played with her hair. All the constricted blood flow that had made her hands and feet tingle and her chin go numb was suddenly released and rushed to her cheeks.

"Claire," she told herself, "maybe this is not a bad time to turn around and go back to bed." A recalcitrant component of her personality intervened immediately, pushing her past the edges of the mirrors and into the entryway. "Great," Claire mumbled through her teeth, "It's too late already!"

Because of her grandmother's continuous warnings to stay out of the doorway so she wouldn't block traffic, she half expected a swarm of people to ambush her on their way to wherever they had to be, but the mirrors were quietly displaying an exact replica of her current state.

"What else did you think you were going to see, dummy?" she scolded herself quietly, while she gathered the wit to get closer to one of the mirrors and stare at the infinite reflections of her. They all had the same terrified look on their faces, and Claire made a note to remember how easily one could read emotions on her face: her eyes looked glossy, widened with apprehension, and reflected the vague patterns in her mind, the kind one couldn't describe rationally but could feel without a doubt, in their tiny domed mirrors. It was in their reflection, and not in the mirrors themselves, that Claire got her surprise for the day, because right there, in the endless row of eyes that stretched into the distance, she saw herself with flowers in her hair, smiling broadly at something she could not see, but which seemed to be right behind her.

"Holy Grace!" she jumped back, almost against her will, and she could swear she bumped into something solid in the process. She looked behind herself, but there was nothing there other than the first rays of sun which had finally managed to pierce the veil of dawn.

***

The next day it rained and since they didn't have anything scheduled, Claire and her grandmother decided it was a good time to tackle the attic. The young woman hadn't been up there since she was twelve, but she still remembered the warmth of the desiccated air trapped under the tin roof. The attic served as a drying room for the herbs and spices her grandfather grew in the garden. Its space was always heavy with their scents and its air was very still, so much so that the particles of dust which glittered in the bright spotlight of the glazed roof hatch looked frozen in time. On the warmest summer days its heat approached the intensity of an oven.

On this day it just felt warm and cozy, a place away from the world, wrapped in the sound of the rain.

"Oh, dear! When did we manage to hoard all this stuff!" Grandmother commented some sort of excuse for the change of scenery. There were old pieces of furniture in the attic now, boxes filled with stuff, lamps, blankets, even a rug, and they were arranged in a fashion that didn't look haphazard, almost as if somebody was living there. "Here's the box with your stuff," she pointed at a striped hat box, topped by a silk ribbon bow, which laid in a corner. "I'll be sorting out these drawers, I can't even remember what I put in them."

She opened the top drawer and an intense violet fragrance filled the space.

"Oops, I think I spilled it," Grandmother chuckled, holding up a small vial of perfume, now only half full. "That's too bad, they don't make it anymore, I was wondering where it went." The violet perfume lingered in the air, so thick one could almost taste it, releasing old memories of innocent childhood giggles, fragments of favorite songs Claire hadn't heard in a long time, the sounds of the owls. The light shifted quickly as a cloud passed over the hatch and the entire attic got drenched in purple light. Distracted by this unexpected light show, Claire touched the silk bow on top of the hat box and it felt soft and cool under her fingers, like flower petals after the rain.

She had this sudden feeling that there was no such thing as time, at least not here, in this place that felt so far removed from the rest of the world it might as well have been in a different realm. The sounds, the scents, the colors, they didn't belong to her time, or her grandmother's, they didn't belong to time at all. Claire briefly lifted her eyes from the hat box and looked at her grandmother, trying to figure out if the latter would think her weird for pondering such thoughts, but her grandmother's attention was focused on the third drawer, which was filled with colorful ribbons and Christmas decorations, and which she tried to reorganize in a way that would allow it to close.

Claire went back to sorting, admiring the beauty of the hat box in the process and wondering what kind of hat came in it and what it looked like. It must have been quite an elaborate piece of millinery, and quite expensive too, judging by the size and quality of its packaging. Curiosity got the better of her.

"Maman, do you still have the hat that came in this box?"

"How old do you think I am, child!" her grandmother protested, shocked. "This box has been in the attic since I was a child, I assume it belonged to my grandmother. And no, I didn't ask her about the hat, I'm sorry. Now you made me wish I did."

The scent of violets got stronger instead of dissipating, and to Claire's surprise, most of it exuded from the box in question. She figured the old silk was prone to trap scents and was relieved it had chosen the violet perfume over the smell of mothballs. There were so many things in that box, school projects, old toys, her skates, her favorite lunch box, a wind chime decorated with fairies. She couldn't bear to part with any of these things, which had now outlived their usefulness, not while being outside of time in this fragrant attic with the rain rapping on its roof. She suddenly remembered to ask.

"Where is Grandfather?"

"In the parlor, reading. Can't you hear the music?"

Old tunes were indeed rising from downstairs, blending their sounds with the violet fragrance into a completely different experience that words could not describe. Claire recalled that her grandfather liked to listen to music while he was reading, he said it helped him tune out the random noises. Claire's nose sifted through the mixed fragrance of violets, rain and old wood and found just a hint of smoke underneath. Her grandfather's four o clock cigarette. He never smoked it without the coffee.

"There must be coffee," Claire thought. "Why don't I smell coffee?" The familiar fragrance arrived on command, allowing her a sigh of relief.

"Well," Grandmother said, "I see you didn't set anything aside anyway, we might as well join him for coffee, I didn't even realize it was four already. It's hard to tell time during these rainy days, isn't it?"

"Maman," Claire asked tentatively, "does someone come here often?"

"Where, to the attic?" her grandmother asked, genuinely surprised. "Your grandfather brings up his herbs and peppers to dry, but other than that...Why do you ask?"

"No reason," Claire shrugged, reaching for the ladder.

3

We place ourselves in time because it makes it easier to orient our lives in the larger scheme of existence, and we use calendars and clocks like we do mileage markers on the freeway, to guide us in our travels. We usually ignore the fact that the freeway is already there, that we're not making it up as we go along, a mile at a time, and that the portion we've already traveled doesn't disappear behind us once it's out of sight.

Once a moment had been experienced, it belongs to us forever. We can go back to happy moments and relive them any time we wish, in any order we wish, the past doesn't have to obey linear time. We have full and random access to the stories of our lives and we can skip through the movie, which we've already seen, to get to our favorite parts.

That day Claire decided to visit the age of five, so she grabbed an old blanket and headed to the oak tree, the repository of her memories. A gentle wind shuffled the leaves, disturbing the quiet of the afternoon, and brought with it a strong fragrance of heliotrope and the humid scent of the shade. It wrapped itself around Claire like a silk shawl in which a familiar perfume still lingered. She closed her eyes, watching the inside of her eyelids turn incandescent in the glow of the summer sun.

There she was, again, aged five, wearing the same dress with the long ribbons, apparently before the moment when the chocolate cake had made its way into her lap, she noticed, smiling. She made note of this obvious benefit of running time backwards: one could return things, if one wished, to their unspoiled state with absolutely no effort at all. Still, the chocolate cake had been delicious, she remembered, so she skipped forward to the birthday table, set in the shade of an oak tree, where said cake was braving the heat of the afternoon surrounded by an army of plates and saucers and little silver spoons. Her grandparents were there, strangely enough looking the same age as they did now, returning beaming smiles of happiness to the apple of their eye, now almost ready for school, who looked radiant in her perfect white dress embroidered with flowers; she looked like a little Italian princess on holiday. The little princess, eager to partake of the scrumptious dessert, stood up on the chair, slipped and fell belly first in chocolate frosting.

"Oh, so that's how it happened, I had forgotten about that!" Claire's smile broadened, continuing on to her memory. A choir of irritated voices roamed around her, somewhat indistinct, a lot more people than she remembered, who on earth was there, she wondered, looking around inside her mind, surprised by all those faces she didn't know. "Who on earth were these people," she thought, "and how come I haven't seen any of them around during all these years?" She abandoned the goal of indulging in the delicious birthday cake and started focusing on the faces around her instead. The faces felt familiar, but she couldn't place them anywhere, she was absolutely sure she'd seen them before, maybe in another life whose memories she'd been required to discard.

Claire didn't have an opinion about past lives, quite frankly she had been too busy navigating her current one to think about that, so she chalked up all these feelings of deja-vu to a less than stellar memory. She could see all of those people perfectly now, and the more she took in their features, the more they felt like old friends. A wave of comfort relaxed all of her muscles and slowed down her heartbeat. As she gazed at these images inside her mind, watching all those people enjoy their cake, she caught a quick glimpse, in the corner of her eye, of a strangely dressed young man, very tall, whose image vanished from her mind almost immediately. She tried to look straight at the place where she thought she'd seen him, but he was nowhere to be found. "Great, I wonder if it is possible to hallucinate things inside one's head." After all our imagination makes up so many things all the time, both enjoyable and frightful, how hard would it be for it to have embellished that memorable birthday party with a whole lot more guests than have actually been present, and especially that man, dressed in white, with long flaxen hair and piercing eyes. She shrugged off the thought, closed her eyes again and returned to her happy memory, inside which she was now digging into the cake with a level of enjoyment only young children are capable of.

A shadow passed over her face and she felt a lock of hair brush over her cheek. She jumped, eyes wide open, adrenaline pumping, staring at nothing. Another gust of warm wind wrapped itself around her, as if to offer comfort.

"There you were," her grandmother waved from the outdoor table. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to wake you."

Claire got up, still unsettled by the experience, and joined her.

"Maman, do you remember my fifth birthday?"

"I guess," the grandmother responded tentatively, frowning and trying to retrieve the memory.

"Was it a big party?"

"Sort of, there were lots of people there, if I recall."

Claire sighed, relieved that she didn't make up all those faces.

"Like who?"

"Oh, some of our old friends, people from the village, visiting relatives," she enumerated.

"How come I can't remember any of them?"

"People move on, bebelle. They follow their lives, go to different cities, became estranged, pass away..."

"All of them?"

"Well, I don't know who you remember, it would be hard to answer that question without more details." She clapped her hands suddenly, excited about an idea. "Why don't I bring the photo album, I'm sure there is a picture of that birthday party in there!"

The old album was heavy and its mementos were bursting out of its sides like goose feathers from an overstuffed pillow: still frames of life scrambled in time. There they were, all the people she remembered; Claire and her grandmother went through them, one by one, recalling fun facts about their lives and little anecdotes, and what they could be doing now, if still alive. The guests looked back at them from their virtual world of thirty years ago. It was suffused with the spirit of its time and Claire could feel it alter her perspective.

"There was a tall man with long hair, dressed in white," she said. "He doesn't seem to be in this picture."

Grandmother looked at her intently.

"You don't remember him?" Claire asked.

"I don't think I've ever known someone like that, not to mention have them visit," Grandmother replied. "Are you sure?"

Claire wasn't sure. Maybe she did paint over that memory with the wide brush of artistic license, she must have been working in an art gallery for too long. One gets so used to imagining stuff that doesn't exist one starts to take it for granted. Grandmother, however, was determined to put this issue to bed.

"What else do you remember about him?"

"I don't know, I can't remember his face very well, I just remember him being there. He didn't eat."

"That's probably because you fell in the cake," Grandmother teased. "What else?"

"His hair was braided with flowers," Claire reluctantly shared the incongruous detail, which seemed too absurd to have been based in reality.

"I don't know, bebelle, sometimes I feel like you're making fun of me," Grandmother got upset.

"I'm sorry, maman, maybe I made this up, you know how children live in their own fantasy worlds."

The memory felt so real she found it difficult to shake, but it couldn't possibly have been, it didn't make any sense in context. As she sat across the table from her grandmother, each sipping tea from their personal cups, she couldn't imagine anything as odd as that happening in her grandparents' home, not then and not now. She let go of the thought and breathed in the strong scent of the linden flower tea.

***

"You better get out of that doorway before your grandmother sees you," Grandfather's voice startled Claire from her reverie. She'd been daydreaming between the mirrors, unaware of the passing of time, and now that she was back to earth she couldn't even remember what she'd been daydreaming about. She lingered in the alcove a bit longer, staring at her reflections, rendered cold and dull by the artificial light. The room felt heavier all of a sudden, for no reason at all, to the outrage of Claire's grandmother who had popped in from the porch through one of the French doors of the parlor.

"Get out of the doorway right now!" she raised her voice, more alarmed than upset. Claire moved out from between the mirrors and the room recovered its usual coziness.

"Told you!" Grandfather commented from his chair and then resumed reading his newspaper.

"Where is my room spritz? Now I have to chase away all the blood suckers, otherwise none of us are going to be able to sleep a wink!" She sprayed the fragrant mix of vervain and rosemary water, directing soft puffs of mist in the four directions. It always seemed to do a number on the mosquitoes.

Grandmother continued to walk around the rooms for a while, mumbling something under her breath, something Claire couldn't make out.

"That should do it! Child, I thought I taught you better than to leave the door open, and at dusk, no less! What were you thinking? I don't even want to imagine what kind of things could have gotten in!"

"I'm sorry, maman, I got distracted," Claire attempted an excuse.

"By what? I bet you can't even remember right now!" grandmother retorted in a tone that sounded worried. She didn't wait for a confirmation. "That's what I keep telling you, but you never listen!"

The light in the room started feeling warmer and grandmother's spirits lifted.

"Time for dinner," she announced.

Claire instinctively looked at the clock, which showed five minutes to eight, and started setting the table with habitual motions, still deep in thought. Grandmother showed up from the kitchen, holding a skillet of bread pudding, as the clock struck eight. "Just in time!" she announced proudly.

"Tomorrow I need to plant those potatoes, they're sprouting through the sack already," Grandfather broke the silence, making plans for the next day out loud, as he always did, in order to sort out his thought process.

The conversation flowed lightly, leaping from one subject to another like a playful mountain brook jumping around boulders. It carried the essence of their lives and mixed it together casually into something that was each of them and more, the conversation itself, which thus became the fourth being at the table.

If there was a place in the world where Claire felt she belonged it was here, sharing this meal with her grandparents and talking about the weather, the staking of tomatoes, the tending of the beehives and a million other little things that were not that important in the grand scheme of things. The carefree nature of an unhurried life.

Claire's mind held a secret stash of these easy evenings together which didn't much differ from each other: they were the nest which protected her happiness, the security which sustained her soul in hard times, the retreat she always went back to when she wanted to find peace. It is strange, the soul: it hides itself inside a fortress of feelings like in a castle built of water and feels safe behind its soft and movable walls simply because it believes it is. Emotions are the true protectors, much stronger than thoughts and so much harder to change. They can be one's lighthouse in the storm or the unseen rip current that drowns one in a calm sea. Claire's emotional fortress sheltered her soul and turned these evening hours into sacred space, into the nave of a cathedral which held the certainty that she was loved.

The dinner ended and while she helped take the dishes back to the kitchen she noticed the light in the room had changed again, making the space feel smaller and warmer, as if illumined by candle light. Grandmother noticed it too, but she said nothing, just smiled to herself instead.

"Bebelle, how come you never talk about your life in the city?" grandmother asked, and Claire didn't know if the latter wanted to carry on a conversation just to avoid the awkwardness of spending time in the kitchen in silence or if she genuinely wanted to know.

"Oh, there is not much to tell, really," she tried to avoid the subject. "You know, just life."

"There is no such a thing as just life," grandmother chided, half joking. "And your life is definitely less just life than other people's, that's for sure. You ended up in the art scene, that was kind of special, wasn't it?"

"I never gave it much thought, it sort of happened," Claire hesitated.

"Very few things are truly random in this life, bebelle," Grandmother replied. "Very few. How come you're not painting anymore?"

"Why do you think I became a curator?" the young woman laughed. "I wasn't any good at it."

"Art is not about being good at it, art is about sharing with other people those things inside your soul that are too powerful, too big to fit into words. Unless you are a poet, of course."

"But I don't have anything to share," Claire blushed. She knew that wasn't true. Those things her grandmother was talking abut, those feelings that were too big and powerful to fit into words, were always brewing right under the surface of her mind, restless and eager to come out.

"Of course you do," Grandmother chuckled. "You're just afraid is all."

"Afraid?" Claire's eyes widened with surprise. "Of what?"

"Oh, many things. What people will say, being different, feeling misunderstood, the usual," Grandmother continued casually, like she was talking about pie. "The worst of all, admitting those things to yourself. Not all of them are pleasant. Some are very scary."

"But what if nobody cares?" Claire asked.

"There's another one," Grandmother nodded. "You care, that's one person more than nobody. What were your paintings about?"

"Oh, pretty much abstract," Claire avoided the question.

"I am familiar with the concept of abstraction, that's not what I asked you," Grandmother gave her a probing stare.

"The shadow," Claire's answer came so softly she was sure Grandmother didn't hear it.

"What about it?" the latter replied.

"The way it feels to me, I guess. You said it yourself, if I could put these feelings into words I wouldn't need to find other ways to express them."

"Try," Grandmother insisted.

"I don't know, it's like something I had my whole life, an entire part of me that I forgot and I'm struggling to remember, but I don't know whether I'll like it if I do. It scares me and sustains me at the same time, it runs in my blood. It's the way it feels, the way I have to chase after it deeper and deeper inside my heart, like following the light of a candle between mirrors." She paused, embarrassed. "That's silly. I'm sorry, maman, I feel ridiculous saying this."

"Your truth is never silly, bebelle," Grandmother turned very serious. "Your truth is never wrong. It's who you are, it's why you are here."

***

As she approached the oak tree she saw the strange tall man standing there, in the nook between its gnarly roots. He stared straight at her, or rather through her at something beyond her physical appearance, not searching for anything, but rather with the delighted curiosity of someone who discovers small details in a painting.

At first Claire couldn't figure out what felt strange to her about his presence. The air around him seemed heavier, as if it had a different density, and surrounded his body in a transparent bubble which bounced back light at different angles like beveled crystal. The bubble stuck around him even as he moved, extending gooey wisps in the process and shifting colors from transparent to white to purple and back, and it looked alive, almost like an extension of his person. At some point, when he shifted his position abruptly, she could swear she had seen a pair of purple wings.

The tall man's gaze met her eyes, briefly, but long enough for Claire to notice that his irises had a metallic sheen, liquid and constantly shifting like quick silver. Deep in the back of her mind she noted that whatever this being was, it definitely wasn't human, but most of her consciousness was frozen in some sort of suspension of reasoning which compelled her body not to move. She tried to verify if that was indeed the case and tried to force herself to blink or something, only to realize her immobility had no physical reasons, but rather it was imposed by her own will: for some reason it felt very important to her at the time not to move from the place. She had no explanation for this, but she didn't doubt it, like one doesn't question whether they should draw the next breath.

The young woman didn't look directly at him, still shaken by the shifting surface of his eyes, but noticed that his demeanor was relaxed, arms folded on his chest, giving no sign of an intention to approach her. His face was very familiar and Claire was startled when she realized why: it was almost like looking in the mirror at a male version of herself.

She could tell that there were others, all around her, whom she couldn't see, a welcoming committee of sorts to a reality she knew nothing about. As she stood there, frozen in place, with her bare feet planted in the grass, she felt roots sprouting from the bottoms of her soles, breaking the ground and reaching deep into the earth, bright roots of light and fire eager to reconnect with the molten core that birthed them.

A giant light ball hit her eyes, wiping out everything that wasn't light in the process, and Claire felt a gentle touch on her shoulder, gentle but insistent. A flash of lightening blasted her eyes when she opened them, and it took her a while to get her grandfather's face into focus, although she didn't miss the fleeting shadow that moved quickly out of the corner of her eye. A deep earth shaking rumble followed a few moments later.

"Wake up, Claire," grandfather urged, "the rain is about to start. It's almost four, your grandmother has set the table for coffee on the porch."

Almost four! She'd been sleeping under the oak tree for over three hours, a time line that didn't jive with the length of her dream, and that bothered Claire in her weird attempt at rationalizing things that didn't stand on reason.

"You seem scattered, bebelle," Grandmother mentioned. The young woman was still trying to gather herself, she felt fuzzy and unfocused, like she was a little cloud herself. She frowned and shuffled in her chair, in search of a more comfortable position. Sleeping on the ground had put a strain through her muscles and joints and her body was achy and stiff. She scanned the landscape, absent minded, and her eyes stopped on a patch of bright purple gleaming with raindrops under the oak tree: it was a fresh clump of sweet violets which seemed to have sprouted from thin air. Grandfather dropped his cup on the saucer with noise to bring Claire's attention back to the table.

"You should never fall asleep outside! Never, you understand me? Especially not under that tree!" he leaned very close to Claire in a manner that felt menacing.

"Joseph! You're scaring her, stop this very instant!" Grandmother intervened, outraged.

"You stay out of this Celeste, somebody has to protect this family!"

Grandmother retreated in a resentful silence.

"Why are you so upset, Grandfather?" Claire tried to understand the reason for the unexpected family drama. "I spent half of my childhood under that tree," she tried to explain, but Grandfather didn't let her finish.

"And I will never forgive myself for allowing you to do that," Grandfather got up and left, angry.

"What did I do?" Claire whispered to her grandmother, who was still sulking, staring at her coffee cup.

"Oh, don't mind that, child. Old people enjoy airing out their grudges every now and again. Old story, nothing to do with you."

"Are you sure?" Claire asked her grandmother, staring intently at the latter in search for an answer.

"Am I growing feeble or were those flowers not there half an hour ago?" Grandmother tried to change the subject, bewildered by the sudden appearance of the violets.

"I don't think they were," Claire thought, really not sure about it. Her mind was still tangled in the morass of her weird experience and she found it really hard to focus on real life details. "I had a dream," she uttered, out of the blue.

"Really?" Grandmother continued sipping her coffee, uninterested.

"It was about that man," she continued.

"Claire," Grandmother put the cup down on its saucer with a deliberate gesture, "I told you there is no man that fits that description, you made him up, child. Why don't you help me with dinner this evening, get your mind off of things," she got up and started to move the cups and saucers to the tray. Claire grabbed her arm to persuade her to sit back down in her chair.

"I am a grown woman, maman, whatever it is, you can tell me." Grandmother hesitated, looking deep into her granddaughter's eyes in search of something. She couldn't find it, so she dropped her gaze and her facial expression went back to neutral.

"It's nothing, dear. Old wives' tales, your grandfather became quite superstitious after your mother...After she left."

"You never want to talk about my mother. What was she like? What happened to her?"

"As I said, she left," Grandmother cut her off abruptly. "She wanted to choose her own path, your grandfather didn't approve of her choice. He will never be shaken from his conviction that I encouraged her, but that's not true. People will do what they need to do in order to follow their fate. Besides, the seventies were a strange time," she said, and refused to build up on the story, despite her granddaughter's prodding.

"What about my father?" Claire insisted, but this turned out to be a subject which really upset her grandmother, who dismissed the whole issue with an irate gesture.

"Can you at least tell me about the local lore? Surely that's not a secret!"

"I'm sorry, bebelle, but I made a promise to your grandfather a long time ago that I will never speak of it with you. I can't break that promise."

***

"What on earth is that?" Claire asked herself while she got closer to the mirror to examine the strange way light seemed to bend around her reflection, held at a distance from her body. A fleeting shadow moved quickly out of the corner of her eye and she tried to follow it in the mirrors, but it kept jumping around, playful, too fast for her to keep up with it.

There is no perfect time for one to meet one's shadow, just like there is no perfect time to bring a child into the world, or to follow one's dream. The moment comes when it comes, often when you least expect it, and you have to adjust to it without notice and hope that you don't drown when you get pushed into the deep end of the pool.

Claire could feel its essence, curious and innocent like a child's, quietly watching her moves. It wound around her shoulders and then disappeared quickly, hiding in her peripheral field of vision to observe her from there with the single-minded scrutiny of a cat.

The endearing thing about the shadow is that, like all creatures of the wilderness, it is completely guileless. It has no ulterior motives, it doesn't dwell on resentment, it's not good, it's not evil, it just is, like nature, universal laws or life.

It lives so deep beneath thoughts that it doesn't get touched by reality at all, it doesn't learn the social conventions and the acceptable behaviors that so nicely wrap all of us into cute little packages, all the same, fit to belong wherever we're placed. It just hides and watches everything and keeps track of all the things you don't want to admit to yourself, the secret desires, the quiet disappointments, the unacknowledged fears.

This game of hide and seek in the mirrors really got to Claire and in her stubbornness she drew closer and closer to the glass, trying to catch a glimpse of the elusive fiend before it disappeared. There was something inside of it, she just knew it, something valuable that she might have been able to bring out if only she managed to keep it still and in focus for a few seconds.

She tried to catch it unaware but the shadow jumped quickly from reflection to reflection, hiding deeper and deeper inside the mirrors until she couldn't see it anymore.

Claire had this feeling of being watched and at the same time of watching herself from outside, like she was in the presence of something that shook loose the truth we all try so hard to run from, that is there is no safety and there are no physical boundaries, that our thoughts and feelings are the only things keeping the mirage of existence in place.

That presence knew her better than anybody in the world, it knew her better than she knew herself. It didn't judge her, it didn't hold resentment and it didn't hurry. The warmth and relief of being unconditionally accepted was so overpowering everything in the real world suddenly lost importance. She gazed at all her worries, plans, hopes and disappointments as if from very far away and they all looked fake and hollow, a menagerie filled with paper tigers.

It seemed so close, that truth that she intuited, it was right there, within reach, all she had to do was stretch out her hand and touch it. If she touched it she was sure she would have the answers to all those quiet yearnings that churned inside her mind and made her run around in circles for no reason. If only she could grasp that elusive substance, but she could not, because it was safely tucked behind the glass, behind the trappings of illusion.

Even so, it didn't mock her, it just followed her movements from the other side of the mirror and Claire could feel its sadness and its frustration for not being able to help. She placed her hand against the glass anyway in an attempt to make a connection through its hard surface, if only a visual one. An unexpected draft unsettled her hair and brushed it off her forehead and a soft weight, warm and comforting like a blanket, settled on her shoulders and made her shrug and cross her arms on her chest, as if to prevent it from falling.

"Claire!" Grandmother's panicked scream ripped her from her looking glass world and made her around, startled. She didn't have to ask what the reason for the panic was, she could see in her grandmother's eyes that the gentle weight she felt on her shoulders was still there for all to behold. "Come, child, come down from there, it's not safe," the former tried to guide her granddaughter down the shallow step into the parlor, unsettled to encounter resistance.

"No," Claire protested, like in a dream.

"Claire, there are things you don't understand, you can't be here, they'll come for you," Grandmother pulled harder on her arm. "Get out of the doorway!"

"Who is 'they', maman?" she continued in the same ethereal voice.

"The other world," Grandmother answered, more and more agitated. "Please, child, don't leave us! Don't go with them!"

"Leave you?" Claire asked surprised. Out of the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of the tall man in the reflection, but when she turned around to meet his image straight on she found nothing there. "Why do you say that?"

"Trust me when I tell you, whatever you think you're going to find in there is not going to be good for you; it's not for us, their world, we lose ourselves in it, don't go with them, please come back."

Claire stepped into the parlor reluctantly, like one wakes up from a dream which shakes one to the core but quickly fades away as consciousness returns.

"Oh, thank God!" Grandmother breathed a sigh of relief and Claire couldn't help notice that the old lady's hands were shaking.

They didn't talk about it for the remainder of the evening and got ready for dinner as they did every day, but Claire's soul was still in the mirrors, with the shadow wrapped around it like a shawl.

4

"Daydreaming, bebelle?" Grandmother teased her.

"Not really, maman. Just enjoying the sunshine." She took a deep breath to fill her lungs with the scent of the water lilies and a gust of wind rustled the trees to accompany it.

"There are some things you need to know about this place," Grandmother started, in a tentative tone.

"Ah, finally," Claire thought, but said nothing.

"This house," Grandmother spoke softly, "this land, it wasn't always ours."

"No?"

"It was acquired by marriage, several generations ago. The house too. And the mirrors."

Claire's attention came in full focus.

"Was it a forced marriage?"

"Considering the parties I doubt that would even be possible. Arranged, more likely, to some degree. Different times. The bride was...different too. Not like us at all."

"What do you mean, she was not from here?"

"Oh, she was very much from here, just not as much...human."

"You can't possibly be serious!" Claire jumped in her chair, upset that Grandmother decided to pull a prank on her.

"I wish I weren't, bebelle, but you have to listen to me very carefully. This world she was from, they have different rules. They don't understand us and we don't understand them. Whom they like, they take."

"What do you mean, kidnap?"

"I wish it were that easy, child, because then I'd just send you away from here. No. They just make you see things the way they do, beguile you and show you their ways, and none of us mere mortals can resist the lure of their world, which is filled with so much beauty and power and youth. You end up begging them to take you with them."

"Take me where?"

"Wherever they're from, that's just the thing, I don't know. What I do know is that nobody who left with them ever came back. Nobody, including your mother."

"What makes you think they're coming for me?"

"Because they already have. I can see a lot more than you think, bebelle. I saw it since you were only a child. I saw it on your fifth birthday. I guess it was unreasonable for me to think that things would turn out differently, considering. We try our very best to live in peace, and have, for many generations, but we're no match for them if the time has come..."

"For what?"

"For them to collect you."

"I'm not live stock!" Claire protested outraged.

"As I said, their world has different rules. You're blood."

"Ah." Claire pondered quietly for a moment, and then gathered herself. "So what? I'm a grown woman, they can't just take me."

"Do you remember your dream? You didn't put up much of a fight, did you?" Grandmother whispered softly.

"That was just a dream!" Claire retorted.

"Nothing ever is just anything around here, I told you before. That marriage I was talking about, the man who married this land, we're all part of this now. Over the centuries there have been...other instances."

"I gathered that much. Is he my father?"

"Who?"

"The tall man in my dream."

"Probably, I don't know. They look so much alike and they never get old. That's one of the reasons people are so tempted to join them. Your grandfather never forgave them, and I'm breaking my promise by telling you these things but it's already too late, child, and if you are to go with them, you're better off knowing the truth."

"And the mirrors?"

"They only work for people like you. I can't explain how."

"Thank you for telling me this, maman, but you shouldn't be worried about it, I'm not planning on going anywhere."

"It may not be up to you," Grandmother replied, so softly Claire could barely hear her.

***

The sun played with the tree canopy, painting bright spots on the tablecloth, the silverware and the coffee cups. A gust of wind moved a branch above and a thin ray of light bounced off the dark surface of the coffee and shone straight into Claire's eyes. The unexpected flash blinded her to her familiar surroundings and for a second she felt like she was floating.

The voices and the sounds around her blended into a soft hum, like musical harmony, which lulled her even deeper into this feeling of being out, out of what she didn't even know, but it didn't seem that important at the time.

"Claire," Grandfather's voice, a little more stern than he would have liked it to be, woke her up from her reverie. She dropped back into reality, so fast it actually made her dizzy.

"Yes," she smiled back at him.

"Would you like to help me in the garden today? I could use another pair of hands."

Claire couldn't remember a time when she wasn't aware of the garden, from her earliest childhood she remembered always being at her grandfather's knee, always a wellspring of questions: why are you making those holes, what is that tool for, why are you tearing those leaves, why are you moving those plants, why can't we pick this right now. One could ask Claire questions today and get correct answers on very specific gardening practices, most of which she had no idea she knew, because they had all been deposited in her mind in layers, like nacre, over many years, and then forgotten about and covered by more layers of grown up stuff which in retrospect didn't prove to be all that useful.

She was thrilled to go back to the garden, she'd always been happy there.

They worked quietly for a while, tying up stems, pruning extra foliage, picking and weeding and cultivating, and Claire didn't have to ask questions anymore, not because she knew the answers by now, but because she stopped thinking about the whys altogether, she just did the tending and nurturing instinctively. The plants called out to her, in unspoken understanding, to attend to their needs.

"We might have to water, the dirt is a little dry," Grandfather took a handful of soil and squeezed it in his hand to assess the level of moisture. He looked at it when his fingers released their grip and the soil quietly answered him in a way only he understood. The answer brought a soft smile to his lips. "What do you think?" he turned to Claire, nodding in her direction to test the soil for herself.

She grabbed a handful of dirt and reluctantly closed her fist around it. It felt cool, moist and velvety and its grainy substance eagerly melted into her hand, reaching out to her blood and trying to blend itself into it. Claire had to summon all of her will power to refrain from caressing it.

"Maybe not, then?" her grandfather pointed to the clumped up clod of dirt in her palm, which looked like it still held enough moisture.

"Tomorrow," she repeated without thinking the answer the dirt had given her in silence.

"Tomorrow," Grandfather agreed and smiled, pleased. "I see you haven't lost your touch while you were wandering out there in the grown up world covering canvases in paint. You never told us about your life, sounds rather interesting. No?"

"I guess," Claire parried the unpalatable subject. She didn't want to talk about the sequence of events which had built upon each other to bring her to her current midlife crisis, not to anybody, not even to her beloved grandfather.

"That's ok, sweetheart," the latter comforted her, "life tries us all, nobody is exempt. That's what this is for," he grabbed another handful of dirt and showed it to her, smiling at it like it was exquisite treasure. "This doesn't judge you and will sustain your life without asking for anything in return. Other than never ending labor and care, of course," he laughed heartily.

Claire touched the soil again, laying her palm against it, flat, and she could feel something strong and steady reach out of her and dig deeply into the ground, into the dark crevices which would never be exposed to human eyes. It felt a lot like the fire roots in her dream and she jolted, panicked.

Grandfather turned wary and got up suddenly.

"The sun is getting vicious, we need to get back inside, I guess we've done enough for today. Ask your grandmother if she could make us some lemonade, will you? I'll be in in a second."

***

That night the full moon woke Claire up again. It was staring at her through the window, so large it looked unreal, as if placed there by an unseen hand, to summon her attention.

She didn't really want to get up, but something inside her pressed her to, it spoke to a side of her she didn't know existed, or rather she knew, but didn't want to acknowledge. Throughout her life it had been easier to ascribe whatever she felt but couldn't explain to an overactive imagination and dismiss it. If she had never heard of anything like it before and it made her uncomfortable she decided it wasn't supposed to exist. There are some who say that there is no such thing as an imagination, that all the things one sees inside one's mind already exist somewhere in the nooks and crannies of reality, but she wasn't one to dwell on this type of wisdom. Her instincts, on the other hand, which she had worked so hard to dull her entire life so that they wouldn't interfere with her daily routine were sharpened and tightened like tension wire now, keen to pick up even the slightest input from her surroundings.

She didn't go to the mirrors, instead she made for the parlor doors and walked out onto the porch and into the night garden which looked polished like silver in the light of the moon.

Barefoot, she stepped into the soft grass and walked to her oak tree, careful not to step on the clumps of wet violets which had spread significantly since she had last seen them. With movements she knew by heart from her childhood she nestled herself in the hollow of the tree roots and their gnarly branches wrapped around her like the armrests of a chair. She sat there in silence, listening to every sound, noticing the slightest move, the shimmer of the moonlight on the blades of grass, the fleeting shadows passing over the heads of the cattails, the white of the gardenias piercing through their dark foliage.

"This is crazy," she thought. "I'm crazy, with the non-human nonsense, what reasonable person believes such things?" She wanted to continue her internal rant, but she suddenly felt very tired, like she hadn't slept in weeks and every cell in her body was screaming for rest, so tired that she didn't feel like returning to the house, but instead curled up in the nest of the roots with her long hair spread out on the ground between them. In the light of the moon her locks and the knotted limbs looked very much the same, like blood vessels branching towards each other to feed a common interstitial space.

She woke up at some point during the night and couldn't tell what time it was. The garden was still dark and the air felt a lot cooler. Strong winds must have blown while she was sleeping, because the oak tree had shed a thick layer of leaves on top of her body and formed a soft blanket that kept out the chill of the morning. She smiled, closed her eyes and went back to sleep, just as the first rays of sun started gilding the rugged bark above her head.

"Don't tell me you slept outside again," Grandmother woke her up, almost in time for breakfast. "If your grandfather sees you," she shook her head, displeased, and then turned around to finish setting the table.

Claire was still disoriented, not ready to shake off her slumber, as her crooked frown indicated, but she stood up from the pile of leaves with grass and violets tangled in her hair and green stains on her night gown, trying the best she could to stretch her achy bones and muscles back into shape. It turns out that us pampered humans are no longer that well adjusted to our natural habitat.

"You look a fright," Grandmother couldn't help a giggle. "What on earth were you thinking? You can't sleep out on the ground, you'll catch your death!"

"What?" a still confused Claire tried to make sense of the conversation, which sounded dull and muffled inside her brain. She regained her wits and continued. "I'm sorry, maman, I guess I must have dozed off."

Grandmother looked at her intently, but said nothing.

"Coffee?" she offered, eager to return her befuddled granddaughter to a rational state as soon as feasible, preferably before her grandfather saw her.

"Yes, please," Claire downed the first cup of coffee in one gulp and ran inside the house to change for breakfast.

5

As Claire sat on the little stone bench by the pond, listening to the song of the frogs late in the afternoon, she was suddenly struck by the realization that she could smell the shrill scent of violet. Not the scent of purple violets, or that of the humid air filtered through the purple rain clouds, but that of violet itself, in a range of frequency that ran slightly higher than that which humans are normally able to perceive.

She had read somewhere that birds and bees and fish and cats, and even people who underwent eye lens replacement surgery, had the ability to perceive ultraviolet as a color, but she'd never heard of anybody being able to smell it before.

If somebody asked her to describe its scent she wouldn't have been able to, much like any of us can't describe the taste of bread to someone who has never tasted food before. People need a common frame of reference for experiences, that's what entices us to create language, so we can share the ways in which we are alike. Society assigns no value to experiences that are so unique they can't be shared.

"What is it, bebelle?" Grandmother probed Claire with eyes that seemed to reach all the way to the core of her being.

"If I tell you, do you promise me you won't think I'm delusional?" Claire attempted a pointless request for a guarantee.

"If I thought you were delusional, would you rather I kept that to myself?" Grandmother teased.

"In fact I would, yes," Claire frowned.

Grandmother was still staring at her, waiting for an answer to her question.

"Do you think one can smell color?"

"It's been known to happen," Grandmother nodded. "Can you smell color?"

"I was just curious," Claire avoided the question. "Those...people who experienced it, did they share any details?"

"I don't know, I didn't pay too much attention to that," Grandmother continued, rather distracted. It seemed fairly clear that was not a subject of conversation of any interest to her. She remembered something and turned to her granddaughter. "It's been known to happen to people under the influence of mind altering substances," she hinted to her befuddled granddaughter, who looked like a possible candidate for this kind of situation. "Sometimes it can even be a warning of brain abnormalities."

"Great job, Claire!" the young woman chided herself. "That should teach you to put a filter between your brain and your mouth. Drugs? Really? I guess that beats having brain abnormalities."

Grandmother noticed that she looked really hurt and backed away from the subject.

"But not exclusively. On rare occasions the brain creates pathways between areas that are not usually connected to each other, and that generates synesthesia. I don't suppose you can call it a different sense in the real meaning of the word, smelling colors is still smelling."

"No it isn't!" Claire's tongue was burning to contradict her, but she held it, for once, demonstrating a level of restraint which boosted her self-respect.

"Whatever brought that up, bebelle?" Grandmother continued. She was still puzzled by the strange subject of conversation; she gave it a few seconds' thought and then shrugged it off as an idiosyncrasy of the artistic mind and started planning activities for the remainder of the day. "You know, if you found yourself something useful to do you wouldn't have time to dwell on this kind of stuff."

"This is just great!" Claire continued the inner train of thought of her current discontent. "One day if I get busy enough maybe I'll be able to stop thinking altogether. Way to better myself!" She remembered from her infrequent but educational yoga classes that it was in fact the cessation of activity which led to the cessation of thinking, and not its opposite, and she couldn't help smile at the irony of the advice.

The scent of violet bathed her consciousness again, strong and pervasive, refusing to be dismissed. The strangest thing about it was that she couldn't pinpoint where it was coming from: it seemed to emanate from a very close source which was right in front of her and which followed her around wherever she turned. It made her elated and anxious at the same time, like the glimpse in the mirror at dawn, the kind of feeling one has when one stumbles upon the sight of things one didn't know existed, and one can't tell whether they're safe or deadly, but one can't take one's eyes off of them anyway, mesmerized by their unexpected presence.

This presence, this otherness, was right there in front of her now, she had no doubt about it, so close that she could touch it if she stretched out her hand, close enough that she was always within its reach too, a terrifying thing to experience about things one cannot see. In a way she was grateful for this extra sense, which, despite her grandmother's generalization was to smell as wind is to a racing car: at least it allowed her to perceive the presence and the movements of this, whatever it was, when it was there.

It had not occurred to Claire that her unusual genetic makeup might have imparted on her abilities that were outside the normal human range, just as it had taken away from her abilities that every normal person takes for granted, thus making her always feel like she didn't fit in.

"You are different, Claire," Grandmother commented, as if she'd read her thoughts. "I might not be the best person to ask these questions. I...don't think we're alike enough for that."

The elusive scent of violet lingered around her for the rest of the evening, drawing out memories long forgotten, contradictory feelings impossible to reconcile, sadness and unrest, inexplicable giddiness, glimpses of extraordinary beauty and sudden bursts of vexation so irritating she could barely refrain from jumping out of her chair during dinner and leaving without a word.

After three agonizing hours, which felt like an eternity, she would have gladly exchanged this all consuming experience for anything borderline normal, anything that would lift the crushing weight of the larger reality which had come to bear upon her soul. But there was no denying its existence or avoiding its demands, because the truth had found Claire, and when the truth finds you, you can never escape it again.

It still smelled like violet when she passed by the mirrors on the way to her room and saw the shadows reflected in them. They looked so harmless now, compared to this inner struggle, that she acknowledged them like one notices the trees bending in the wind, or a passing butterfly gently touching the tops of tall flowers. There were weird reflections and patterns in those mirrors, generated by the passage of the clouds and the fading light of the evening, images that under different circumstances she would have found jarring, but which in her angst she welcomed because they provided her with a moment's distraction from this spiritual agony.

It still smelled like violet when she went to bed, eyes filled with tears for reasons she couldn't even understand, and it still smelled like violet when she was startled awake in the early hours of the morning by the bright rays of a giant moon peeking through her window.

***

"Claire, when are you going to put yourself together and go back to your life? I can't think of any other thirty year olds who live with their grandparents," her grandfather started abruptly, right in the middle of breakfast. His unexpected rebuke made the young woman, who was still trying to chase away the shadows of the night before, choke on her coffee.

"Leave it alone, Joseph," Grandmother spoke softly, in a voice that sounded very sad. "It's too late now. She knows."

"You filled her head with your superstitious nonsense, even though I specifically asked you not to!"

"She has the right to know who she is."

"Who she is is our granddaughter, who had managed to live a perfectly normal life until you decided to muddle her brains with fallacy and delusion," Grandfather became increasingly upset.

"You know the truth as well as I do," Grandmother held her ground. "And if she had a perfectly normal life she wouldn't be here now. You said it yourself, not many thirty year olds live with their grandparents. They called her back, there are no two ways about it."

"No rational person can have a normal conversation with you! Are you even listening to yourself?"

Claire followed the heated argument like a tennis match, following the bouncing retorts with increasing excitement but completely detached from them emotionally, as if the whole thing was about somebody else's life.

Out of the corner of her eye she could see movement in the shadows, in the dark greenery behind the house. The sky darkened suddenly with the expectation of rain. The feeling in the dream came back to her, the certainty that there were others watching this scene, others that had as much of a stake in it as the three people at the table and who were waiting anxiously for the conclusion of the argument. Through this strange feeling Claire stood perfectly still, like a marble statue, trying to quiet even her breath, to slow herself down to a much lower frequency in order to resonate with the denser realms of earth and stone. She found great peace in that state, and with it came an understanding, deeper than words, of the way the pieces of the world had come together to create shapes and forms. Simpler forms evolved into broader and broader organizing structures without effort to reach the complexity of a large cosmic symphony.

The light dimmed around her and the colors became unsaturated; an eerie buzz quickened in her bones and turned into a slow rush, something higher than a sensory input but lower than an emotion, the feeling of stone. She wanted to wonder how much time had passed and if she looked weird, sitting frozen like that, but there was no time in this state, because there was no way to measure or keep track of it. All that could be perceived was the uninterrupted vibration that came from all around her and passed through her flesh and bones like current through a wire. In this continuous present nothingness and infinity blended into one to became everything there is.

A loud voice, which turned out to be her grandfather's, brought her back to the much higher speed of reality so fast she got disoriented. Whatever her perception of time had been in her slowed down state, she noticed that no time had passed in real time at all, and she was still listening to the last words of the argument.

It's one thing to theorize about the dilation of time and a completely different thing to experience it personally. It turns out that when applied to practical matters scientific concepts are generally terrifying.

"Have you even been listening?" her grandfather continued his expression of disapproval for Claire's tentative demeanor, obsession with unhealthy pursuits and lack of direction.

"Yes, Grandfather," she said, still floating in a dream. She got up from the table, smiling, and walked across the lawn sprinkled with violets towards the pond, like something inside it had summoned her there.

"What have I done wrong?" Grandfather asked rhetorically. "What have I missed, in all of my efforts, so that she would still end up cursed like this? Why did I toil all my life only to have my future taken from me again?" He didn't wait for an answer, just stood up abruptly and walked into the house, slamming the door behind him.

Grandmother looked at Claire's silhouette, projected on the quiet waters of the pond and surrounded by water lilies and tall cattails. There were flowers at her feet, which almost seemed to have emerged from her footsteps. Even the wind had slowed down to a gentler speed around the young woman's body, to the speed of a caress.

"This is a gift, Joseph," Grandmother muttered almost unintelligibly. "We are the cursed ones."

***

Context fills in the voids in our understanding, so we have no conscious perception of the things we don't know, but the instinctive, deeper portion of our psyche can feel the gaps in reality, in ways it finds difficult to express, the gaps which reveal themselves to physical perception when dramatic, life changing events the kind we also can't explain, fall on us apparently out of the blue.

These gaps in reality are like a sieve through which you can see the things beyond it. Not everything that's forbidden is evil. Not everything that is hidden is wrong.

Without even knowing it, Claire had caught a glimpse through that sieve and saw a reality that wasn't supposed to exist. Doubting what is right in front of you is learned human behavior, no self respecting animal would question whether the food in front of their nose is real just because they have no explanation of how it got there. Claire's shadow, much like that animal, did not understand bias and allowed her to see what was actually there as opposed to what she was taught to believe she had to see.

Once you are made aware that you do not know the first thing about reality life becomes a lot harder, but also a lot brighter, more interesting and more surprising too. You suddenly start seeing the colors you couldn't notice before, the details you used to toss aside because they didn't make sense, you start seeing things just the way they are, without explanation or reason. Not everything has to make sense, not to our limited understanding, anyway; only our over-inflated sense of self importance makes us willing to throw away half of reality just because our minds can't make heads or tails of it.

Claire instinctively knew this other world would always be there for her from the moment she first caught a glimpse of its existence. It was there for her in the sunrise, in the rustling of the oak leaves, in her dreams, in the mirror reflections, in the clouds obscuring the sun, in the scent of the overheated dill, in every conversation, in every melody, in the pulse of her blood, in the wind brushing against her skin, in every breath she took, in her very life.

Like a child lost in the wilderness, Claire had to learn this other world for herself and trust it to reveal itself to her in ways that she could understand, and trust that it won't hurt her. She was smitten and overwhelmed by its surprising ways, and if someone were to ask her to put into words how she knew what she knew she wouldn't have been able to, because its patterns ran deeper, underneath concepts and words, in a much older recess of the mind where things simply made sense without rules or organizing principles - in the consciousness before thought.

From the moment this other reality had called out to her, Claire had been living in two worlds, equally important and equally real.

***

Things slowed down towards the end of the summer, after the first round of vegetables got harvested and preserved for winter in perfectly trimmed jars with pretty labels describing the contents and the date of processing in Grandfather's perfect calligraphy. In a burst of enthusiasm for cleaning her room Claire found her old paint and canvasses from when she was a teenager and dreamed about becoming a renowned artist. It felt like a silly dream now, life is not as dependable as one thinks when one starts out and everything seems to be within one's grasp.

She took a moment to decide whether painting made her happy or sad and she picked the former. She couldn't remember when was the last time she had held a brush in her hand, but it felt familiar, like she'd laid it down only the day before.

She started work tentatively, reluctant to disturb the pure white of the canvas, and the first brush stroke, defiantly thrown, looked like a knife wound on the blank background. It felt bad, it almost hurt, but she kept going, feverishly adding layer upon layer of paint until there was no white space left and the colors started fighting each other for space. She didn't pay attention to their clashing racket, she just kept painting, her mind far away, swarming with thoughts and memories both good and bad, until an incredible sadness built up in her chest, a sadness that came out in waves of tears and strange feelings of relief.

She was more bewildered than alarmed by this incredible downpour of emotions, by this feeling of longing and loss of something she never knew she had, by this feeling she couldn't even name. Through all this painful spiritual torment her hands kept moving, as if under their own guidance, independent of her will, making sense of the random mish-mash on the canvas in ways which seemed foreign to Claire, and which she could barely make out through the thick veil of tears that kept flowing for no reason at all.

Brightness dimmed at the approach of the evening, but she didn't stop, not until the sky turned from blaze orange to purple and dark blue and the light in the room became so scarce she could barely see the contours of her hands.

It felt very late and Claire suddenly noticed that nobody had called her for dinner. She panicked and ran downstairs to figure out what had happened to her grandparents. The lights were off and nobody was there except for the moon which was already high over the horizon and whose beams painted plush puddles of deep black around the doorways and the furniture, creating a strange soft world made of dark velvet.

Here and there the moonlight cast deep violet reflexes, which looked like negative shadows on the black background, a whole inverted world where all the senses worked in reverse. The overall effect of this non-world was so jarring that Claire couldn't experience fear, just a cloud of confusion and awe. She instinctively reached for the darkness that wrapped around her body and she wasn't even surprised when the air around her shoulders didn't yield under her fingers, like a magnet rejecting a similar charge.

She could see details in the dark, things which would have escaped her attention during the day, small details that suddenly jumped to prominence when touched by the violet glow. Every sound felt louder, amplified by the dimming of sight, and many sounds she wouldn't normally hear suddenly emerged in strange concert, overwhelming her by their sheer number: the soft flow of water through the pipes in the wall, the dull hiss of the floor boards contracting, the pitter-patter of feet from a scared little mouse hiding in the kitchen, the almost imperceptible whoosh of an air draft. There was something else in there too, a high pitched vibration, too high to be heard but not too high to be felt, which raised the hair on the back of her neck and sharpened her reflexes. It gradually grew in intensity to the point where its weird hum shook Claire out of her strange stillness and prompted her to look for the source. It seemed to get stronger as she approached the mirrors, whose surfaces blended into the black background like two pools of dark water, and only felt the rush of air blow past her as she stepped between them. For a second there was sunlight dappled through the leaves of the oak tree, the sound of laughter and a glimpse of the tall man smiling at her, and then everything faded to black and absolute silence.

"Claire?"

The sound of her grandmother's voice made her open her eyes and find out she'd been daydreaming in the sunset, caught between the mirrors, for only God knows how long. She was slightly disoriented, but otherwise fine. She could still hear echoes of the happy giggles, even as she stepped down into the parlor to answer her grandmother.

"I'm sorry, I lost track of time for a minute here. How long had I been standing there?" she asked.

"Standing there?" the grandmother looked surprised. "I called you because I just saw you come in. What are you talking about?"

"Nothing," Claire frowned at the still perceptible feeling of velvet darkness caressing her shoulders.

"I love your painting, dear. You should never have given up on your art."

"My painting?" Claire asked, dumbfounded.

"Yes, I went into town and had the canvas re-stretched. See?" Grandmother pointed at the art piece which was hanging on the wall in front of them.

"When did she have time to do all this," Claire wondered quietly, not even stopping to acknowledge the fact that she'd been moved from night to day, apparently backwards, and there was no possible explanation for how that could happen.

"So, why did you stop?" Grandmother asked with a glimmer of amusement in her eyes. "I thought you'd be pleased with this and continue painting, it's been almost a week since you finished it. Are you going to start a new one?"

"A week!" Claire almost gasped. "I lost a whole week!"

Further contemplation of this impossible occurrence got muddled in the facts: did she actually lose time, or gain it, since for all practical purposes she'd been living the whole experience of one night in the split second between steps while she walked between the mirrors. She couldn't remember that week her grandmother was talking about. She couldn't remember anything at all.

"Good grief, this heat!" Grandmother continued her monologue. "Can you believe it? And it's not even July yet."

"Definitely gained time," Claire noted, with insane calm. "And worked things back into the past in the process."

She looked at the strange painting, which was spellbinding and disquieting at the same time: there was something about it that didn't allow one to take one's eyes off of it, for fear that something unearthly beautiful was going to pop out of it at a moment's notice and a deal a deadly blow.

"A bit dark for my taste," Grandmother commented while she admired the painting looking sideways to get all the angles right, "but it has spirit. You never should have stopped painting, bebelle. I hope it sticks this time."

Claire couldn't explain how, but somewhere in that painting she could see all of her feelings mixed together like the paint she had used to depict them, forming major and minor harmonies in very unexpected ways - fearful joy, surprised stillness, the peaceful elation of grief?

"Joseph," Grandmother summoned.

"What?" Grandfather answered from the porch. He walked in with a basket full of vegetables, just in time for the preparation of dinner.

"Don't you think she has talent?"

"I don't know these things, why are you asking me?" Grandfather answered displeased. "I'm glad she's found something better to do than stand between those darn mirrors day in and day out. Here!" he handed the grandmother the basket of vegetables, expectantly.

"Oh, would you look at those peppers!" Grandmother obliged. "Aren't they a thing of beauty?" It was their secret ritual, this presentation of the offering and its gracious acceptance, a ritual that went back decades, decades of mutual appreciation and respect.

"Help me, will you?" Grandmother handed the basket to Claire, smiling. The latter looked down at the produce and remembered she knew one of the peppers, the slightly asymmetrical one. She'd been watching it grow all summer, at least the summer she had experienced, the one that apparently hadn't happened yet. She knew what pepper plant it had been growing on, she remembered the first time she had seen its dark green surface start blushing in the sunlight. It was still warm from the sunshine whose heat was releasing its flavor.

"Are you going to cook that pepper or marry it?" Grandfather woke her from her reverie. "Artists!" he shook his head in dismay. "Could starve to death with the food right under their noses," he mumbled under his breath and left the kitchen to the women to find peace on the porch with his newspaper.

"Well, are you?" Grandmother joked.

Claire diced the pepper and threw it in the pot.

***

Our muddled mess of emotions is there to remind us that we are not singular beings, we are collections of selves, as different from each other as we are from other people. The job of these impartial judges who dwell right below the surface of our consciousness is to arbitrate the arguments between our different selves and alert us to our internal conflicts. They establish hierarchies among the selves and decide which you is allowed to come out to play at any given time. Claire's emotions were delighted that she'd given them a canvas to express themselves, so to speak, and collectively decided that none of her selves was allowed to come out except for Artist Claire, a sub-personality which had lain dormant for ages and was quite maladjusted to the real world. Artist Claire made misfit Claire look even weirder.

Sometimes she'd stop and look at a flower for minutes on end, trying to see inside it, looking for something in there that she never seemed to find, an activity which looked odd from the perspective of an uninvolved observer, to put it mildly. When she got tired to stand and look at it she sat herself down cross legged on the ground and waited patiently for the flower to open up to her and share its spirit. It looked surreal, this silent dialog in which the plant responded in its own time, a much slower time than a human's; the need to adjust to the speed of this interaction turned Claire into a frozen statue, bereft of thought.

Her grandparents enabled these increasing oddities of behavior with indulgent love and witnessed, amazed, how the flower finally responded to Claire's calling and fell gently in her lap, asking to be acknowledged like an affectionate pet. They didn't question the way Claire smiled at it and held it gently, to let it know she was fully committed to this emotional bond they shared.

No one could understand this relationship she had with the plant world, but it showed vividly in her art and elicited the kind of feelings people usually don't have names for, because they are too strange to talk about. She even painted some which were not recognizable at all, because they didn't come from humans. She painted the feelings of trees.

Since Claire had rediscovered her passion for art every corner of the house was filled with pigments, brushes and jars of linseed oil, all primed to be spilled or scattered by a distracted family member whenever an opportunity presented itself.

"You've built up quite a collection," Grandmother commented, careful not to snag one of the jars of dry pigment with her apron. The jars were bunched together with the lids off on a rickety table which Claire had found in the attic and which looked like it was ready to fall apart at the slightest touch. "What are you going to do with them?"

Claire turned her head and looked at her grandmother like this thought had never dawned to her.

"Are you going to look for a gallery?"

Artist Claire stopped suddenly in the middle of a brush stroke and turned her entire body to face her grandmother, brush held high like an extension of her hand.

"I don't know, I never thought about it."

"Surely you of all people must know where all the good places are, you've been working in this field for what, six, seven years?"

"I surely worked in it long enough to watch all the bridges to those places burn down," Claire thought, then continued out loud. "Those places are too far away. Maybe somewhere closer, if I'm going to do it."

"Closer to where, here?" Grandmother protested. "We're a thousand miles from nowhere in every direction!"

"How about finding a place in town," Claire suggested.

"Who is going to visit your gallery in town?"

"I don't know, people?" Artist Claire replied with the mature conviction of her fifteen year old self.

"I simply don't know what to say, bebelle, other that you seem to be drawn to squander every chance life gives you. Why are you making art nobody will ever see?"

"Because I can't help it," Claire thought, a thought that seemed to emerge from a much deeper layer of her mind, a thought she wasn't entirely sure was hers at all. She stood still for a second, to contemplate for whom all this art was really intended.

The air felt heavier and a cloud passed over the sun; everything turned dark and then bright again, like a giant sky blink. If she closed her eyes Claire could tell there were a lot more people in the room than the two of them. "Why bother taking the paintings to the gallery, it looks like the gallery is all assembled here."

"Claire!" Grandmother snapped.

"Yes, maman. I'll start looking for a gallery."

"Where?"

"I don't know, Baton Rouge?"

"What's wrong with New Orleans?"

"And here I thought we were a thousand miles from nowhere," Claire mouthed off silently.

"When?"

"As soon as I'm done painting."

"You're never going to be done painting, I've known you since you were born, you always put things off. When?"

"I don't know, next week?"

"I'll hold you to it," Grandmother commented, unconvinced, and left to tend to her chores.

Claire returned to her painting, vaguely irritated that the color on her paintbrush looked slightly off and wondering what was the point of making plans for next week in light of her recent mirror enabled flight into the month before.

PART TWO

6

Rumbling thunderbolts ripped through the sky, giant ropes of electricity dancing their wild dances, guided by celestial rhythms unknown to mortal souls. The storm had started suddenly, as they often did around here, fired up by the hot air which could no longer hold its burden of water. In the middle of this racket from on high Claire's grandfather ran frantically through the house closing doors and windows and making sure everybody was indoors.

Claire followed him closely, trying to help him out with his task while secretly harboring guilt over the fact that she enjoyed this giant light show, noise and all. Thunderstorms had always mesmerized Claire with their profligate use of energy and their display of sheer power. Like it happens with many of nature's mysteries, there was no rhyme or reason for this uproar, none that would yield to human sense, but there was no need for one. This awe inspiring rush of energy was simply nature's way to breathe a sigh of relief.

A blazing flash of lightning blasted through the windows, followed by a booming thunder, after which everything went dark.

"Oh, great! The power is out," Grandfather frowned, walking to the mud room to get his rain boots.

"What are you doing?" Grandmother jumped immediately.

"I'm going to power up the generator."

"You're not going out in this weather!" Grandmother replied appalled.

He changed his mind and sat down in his chair while Claire and her grandmother were feeling their way through cupboards and drawers trying to find candles in the dark.

"Did you find them?" Grandfather asked. The impatience in his voice revealed his displeasure with a situation that relegated him to the role of a spectator.

"Yes," Grandmother said.

A scattering sound followed by an unfocused glimmer pinpointed her position in the room; the glimmer turned into a little teardrop of light which flickered for a second and then grew more confident and steadied itself into a poised undulating motion.

A second teardrop of light emerged, and then a third, as polished silver candlesticks found their way out of the back of the cupboard and got placed on display.

"It looks like we're having dinner by candle light tonight," Grandmother commented.

"Not if I have anything to say about it," said Grandfather. "I like to see what I'm eating if that's all the same to you. Is it still coming down?"

The rain continued its steady rapping on the porch. Grandfather sighed.

They stood there together in silence listening to the sounds of the rain, trying to perceive a change in its rhythm. Eventually Grandfather's patience wore out. He stood up.

"It's still raining," Grandmother attempted to protest while he mumbled something unintelligible on his way to the mud room. He shuffled the shoe rack trying to find his rain boots and got out, slamming the door behind him.

"He never listens," Grandmother shook her head in disapproval, walking to the window to follow his movements outside.

In the middle of this little domestic drama Claire felt like a voyeur, awkward that she couldn't give this unforeseen situation its due of fuss and irritation like any normal human being would. Instead she followed fascinated the flickering dance of the candle flame atop its pillar of wax, mesmerized by its swirling motion which looked completely random to an unfocused gaze, but was not. Her eyes reached deeper into the tiny teardrop, into its unmistakable color, same as the sun's, same as that of molten metal, the color that creation reserved only for those things which give out warmth and light. Claire breathed in that color with all her being, grateful for its gift of energy, even in this humble form.

Everything in the room was submerged in shadow, everything but the candle light and Claire's blissful smile illumined by it. She stood a little too close to the fire and a tiny glow was starting to flush her cheeks, tinting them to match the color of the flame.

Grandmother looked at her, slightly puzzled by this inner light which seemed to be powered by something inside her granddaughter. It had stayed hidden until now, waiting for its moment to emerge. She smiled, pleased, and leaned back in her chair.

"Don't stay so close to the fire, bebelle, you're going to singe your hair," she joked, then looked out the window again to check on the progress with the generator. The rain was starting to wane.

Light blasted out, seemingly from everywhere, flooding the room with a brightness that made them both squint.

"Ah, finally," Grandmother commented with relief and walked briskly to the kitchen to get dinner ready. It was already late.

Claire hesitated a moment before putting out the candles, with a tinge of guilt that she had to extinguish the very essence that imparted on her the gifts of warmth and light, two things which sustain human life without asking for anything in return. She thought about blowing out the candles, but it felt like an insult to the spirit of fire, so she licked her fingers and slowly closed them around the light instead.

***

The role of emotions is to push the mind in the direction it needs to go. Emotions are catalysts for the thinking process, they don't do anything in and of themselves, they don't get consumed in the process, but they make an idea possible when, under normal circumstances, it wouldn't have been. Dismissing the reactions catalyzed by negative emotions is like throwing away half of the reactants in the chemistry lab because they have potential to be toxic. You don't do that if you're an accomplished chemist, you only do it if you have the chemistry knowledge of a ten year old.

"Did you start looking for galleries?" Grandmother asked with an imperative tone that indicated she wasn't going to let this subject go until it was resolved to her satisfaction.

"Yes," Claire's answer surprised her. She stopped for a second, taken aback, to reorganize her inquiry.

"But..." she stuttered, "how? When?"

"I made a few calls," Claire answered. She was calm, as if none of this regarded her in the least, as if she was planning the affairs of a complete stranger. For a minute Grandmother didn't believe her.

"Don't lie to me, bebelle," she chided, and then turned the corner to another tactic. "Which galleries? I want names."

Claire obliged, adding names and details and photographic records of her work. Grandmother reviewed all the materials, still incredulous, then shook her head, slightly disappointed, as if she expected more of her granddaughter, as if all of these raw and conflicted emotions that called out to her from her granddaughter's paintings were not good enough.

Claire was in the middle of the drawing room, aptly called so in retrospect. The room had been transformed beyond recognition, all the furniture had been moved out of it and the walls were lined up with large canvasses in various states of completion. In the middle of the room, still on the easel, her last painting was waiting for the oil to dry. For days Claire had been adding layers and scraping them off with her knife, adding and scraping and mixing together, a real life depiction of the layers of her soul. Just like with the latter, the layers underneath were concealed by the reflections of the glaze that covered them, and those half-concealed layers were the most important ones; she could neither reveal nor let go of them and they made her go around in circles, scraping and covering and scraping and covering, building uneven thicknesses in the painting, so pronounced one could experience them with their eyes closed, just through the tips of the fingers. At one point the canvas had been scraped so many times the weave had been rendered threadbare and one could see through it, like through a rare sieve. The painting looked labored and rough, not entirely pleasant to contemplate, a quality which the threadbare patch accentuated, but one couldn't take one's eyes off of it, it demanded all of one's attention, like an open wound.

"What is this about?" Grandmother asked, disquieted by the painting's mesmerizing call.

"I don't know," Claire responded simply.

"Well, you painted it, if you don't know, then who?" Grandmother joked.

Claire shrugged and continued scraping. A medium sized area to the left, which had been the beneficiary of an impressive paint thickness up until that point was now cleared off and ready to be refashioned. The young woman frowned at it for being bare, as if it were its fault.

"Claire," Grandmother tried to get her attention. "Claire!"

"Yes?" the latter responded with a time delay, still staring at the empty patch on the canvas.

"Honey, are you ok?"

"No worse than usual," Claire responded. "Why are you asking?"

"That..." Grandmother pointed to the tormented struggle, "that looks like a lot of pain."

"Pain is an emotion," Claire answered with the same detachment. It was pain that she had painted, but not her pain, not anymore, she was painting the pain, a pain, as it exists when freed from its Pandora's box, the individual human soul. It wasn't ugly or beautiful, it was like the face of a person you can pass countless times on the street without noticing, but the echoes it reverberated in another person's heart were haunting and real and painful themselves.

"Why would you paint something like this?"

"Because it was there," Claire continued adding layers and then covering them up, unsure whether to reveal or conceal their contents. "I paint what is there. This was there."

"You know, you never told me what happened to you. Why are you here, bebelle?"

"What do you mean?"

"Why are you here, with us, instead of out, living your life. Why did you come here?" Grandmother insisted.

"This is my life, maman. However I live every day is my life. Why is this life worse than any other life I could have lived, I'm happy here," Claire continued in the same serene tone.

"This doesn't look happy to me," Grandmother took her hand gently.

"Whatever it is that you see on this canvas would be a thousand times worse anywhere else," Claire smiled. "We all have our burdens to bear, I guess I just cheated on mine a little bit. Not everybody gets to walk out the door and be greeted with love. And then walk back in and be greeted with love as well."

"If you say so, child," Grandmother responded softly, then changed the subject to a more practical matter. "So, when do we get to see these publicly displayed?"

"The curators need time to decide, I just sent the drafts," Claire came back to earth, drawing on the practicalities she was so familiar with from her previous life. A shadow passed over her face, brought on by an unpleasant memory which had hitched a ride on the decisiveness of her professional persona. She put the brush down slowly, as if she was afraid she was going to hurt it and just stood there, staring at the haunting painting and its gaping holes. "Maybe it is finished," she thought as she looked at it. "Maybe the whole point of it is not what is there, but what is missing."

"What does a man have to do to get a cup of coffee around here," Grandfather clamored from the doorway, faking outrage. It was five o'clock already and the women had forgotten the daily ritual.

"Oh, dear!" Grandmother smiled. "Why don't you two go outside and set the table, I'll be there with the coffee as soon as it's ready."

It is not often that one goes out the front door and ends up changing the world. The second Claire stepped over the threshold she knew this wasn't her world anymore. Everything looked the same, but she knew somewhere deep inside her soul, in that place that felt the dark softness of the shadow wrap around her shoulders, she knew this wasn't her world. This was the world of the tall man and his companions, the ones she couldn't see, a world not made for humans, she feared, because humans were weak and scared and they got lost in the places they didn't understand.

A gust of wind rustled the leaves of the oak tree and then brushed past Claire, as if to greet her in a language unknown. She smiled back, not knowing what to do, and stretched out her hands, trying to grab onto something she could not see. The gust of wind intensified, sweeping over her open palms and pushing the sleeves of her shirt all the way up to her shoulders.

"Claire," a voice whispered in the wind, so softly she couldn't tell whether it was real or just a rustling of leaves.

Clouds passed overhead, too fast almost, changing colors and shapes before she could tell them apart.

"What a strange thing this is," she thought, "shapes made of air." They made the whole world feel just as immaterial, her hands, the house, the large oak tree, the pond, just vast spaces dotted by rarefied particles, the illusion of matter, the illusion of senses. Not the illusion of being, she was pleased to notice. Being just was, like the wind, like the love, like the pain.

What difference did it make whether this world she thought she saw was the way she perceived it had a completely different nature, concealed by the limitations of her understanding? It was the perception of it that constituted her life, not the reality itself.

"But the things we cannot see are just as real," a thought fell into her consciousness, disturbing its smooth surface like a rock in a pond and sending circular waves through her other thoughts, blending them together and converging them until they stopped making sense and she couldn't tell them apart anymore. She closed her eyes instead, to allow the strange embrace of the wind to touch her shoulders and swirl a few barren leaves around her body in a slow circle dance. "This is just as real."

"Are you coming?" Grandfather brought her back from her reverie. She realized she was still standing in the doorway, barely past the mirrors, on her way out to the garden. The sky was filled with birds flying together in large flocks that changed direction suddenly, in unison.

"Weather's coming," Grandfather looked up at them, knowingly. "We better pick those tomatoes tomorrow, before the rain splits them. Ugh!" he sat himself down at the table with a groan. "It's not easy being old."

"Quit your complaining, Joseph. It's better than the alternative," Grandmother joked as she approached with the coffee. "When are you going to New Orleans?" she asked Claire, determined to keep her granddaughter's goals on track.

"She's going to New Orleans?" Grandfather asked.

"She better if she knows what's good for her," Grandmother frowned in Claire's direction, anticipating dissent.

"I don't know, maman. Whenever I'll get an answer, I'll decide then."

"Maybe you'll finish your painting by then," Grandmother hesitated.

Just like the swarming of the birds against the open sky, the gaps in her painting had a purpose, so she made up her mind that they had to stay.

She couldn't explain why, but she knew that the tall man, this unlikely kin she'd never known, was leaning against the oak tree, watching her from a distance while she drank her coffee on the porch.

***

"Close the door! Good grief!" Grandfather shouted behind her. Claire turned on her heels and obliged, dragging the heavy door closed and wondering why that made her feel uncomfortable. Much like cats, and if he admitted it to himself, her grandfather, she didn't like closed doors. Once a passageway is open, people unconsciously resent artificial barriers to it. Claire thought how lucky she was to live in the countryside, where leaving the front door open for the greater portion of the day was considered a sign of good manners. She remembered that during the early years of her blessed childhood that front door was staying not only unlocked, but swung wide open, so that the occasional visitor wouldn't feel awkward about coming in if the grandparents happened to be engaged in the back yard or the kitchen and couldn't hear them knock.

Come evening however the house went into lock down mode and became a fortress with drawbridges and moats. It was as if the sun was the unerring guardian of its inhabitants and once it went past the horizon, the poor dwellers had no option but to fend for themselves. Night wasn't a friend in their home. Strange things happened at night. Weird creatures came out at night. Night was dangerous.

Claire gave in to a gleeful burst of laughter in answer to this thought and conceded, surprised, that she was in a very good mood. She picked up her step as she approached the oak tree, eager to spend some time with her old friend. Not the most normal kind of behavior for a grown woman, if she cared to consider what normal behavior would be like, which she didn't. She couldn't think of a single circumstance in her adult life when doing the "normal" thing yielded anything short of disappointing. In time "normal" had evolved into the fountainhead of busy work, health concerns, financial struggles, irritating daily hassles, disappointing relationships, mediocrity, buried bitterness, slander and giving up. Midway through her grown up years Claire took a really good look at "normal" and ran for her life.

Unfortunately for her, this unjustifiable defection from the social norm added a lot of undue stress to her life, mostly engendered by well wishing self appointed saviors who tried to steer her back to a way of being that seemed to make everybody happy. Everybody but Claire.

She half opened her eyes to let in just enough of the comforting sunshine and gazed upon a familiar figure walking towards the house down the alley flanked by large oak trees.

"Oh, God no! How in the world did she find me here?"

The familiar figure approached Claire effusively, all smiles, presumption and self assurance. Even looking at her made Claire tired.

"Oh, honey," the unexpected guest looked around, half joking, "we really have to get you out of here, what were you thinking!"

"Hi, Janice," Claire smiled politely, mad at herself that life had carved that socially acceptable smile on her face so deep she couldn't help but sprout it on demand, like a little daisy.

"How have you been?" Janice continued. "No, don't tell me," she put her palm out to block any potential feedback. "You decided to take up bee keeping."

"Something like that," Claire thought. "Bees I like." She scraped through the bottom of her brain to recover social niceties and found an adequate conversation piece. "What brings you here?"

"Darling, everybody is asking about you, it's like you dropped off the face of the earth or something, we were so worried!" Janice's words kept flowing in Claire's direction, but her eyes were scanning her surroundings as if looking for potential dangers. She didn't feel safe in this backwards corner of the world, despite its bucolic beauty.

Claire didn't answer, she just continued staring at her conversation partner in a way that made the latter even more uncomfortable.

"Anyway," Janice looked down, "things are really busy right now and we all miss you, I came here to bring you back and I'm not leaving without you. Not a moment too soon, it looks like," she scanned the landscape again for that unseen danger lurking in the shadows. For the first time since this unbelievable adventure of her soul had started, Claire felt really grateful for her otherworldly kin. Inside her mind she quietly thanked the tall man for watching over her and his familiar figure nodded his head and smiled in response. This unseen world she had discovered was getting better and better by the minute.

"I'm actually not able to do that right now, Janice, I have other commitments," she finally responded.

"Doing what?" Janice blurted, genuinely shocked that one could find anything to do in this godforsaken place.

"Things need attention with the estate, I have to be around to address them."

"You are not a building manager, we'll find you someone to take care of the property if that's the sticking point."

"These are not things a stranger can take care of, it's really personal stuff," Claire replied, annoyed that she had to explain her choices to a stranger who assumed she had the right to run her life for her. "I can't leave."

"You're burying your career, you know that, right? If you don't come with me right now it's going to be too late. Everybody already forgot who you were, memories are not that long in this field, one wrong step and you're yesterday's news."

"Yeah, that's part of the problem," Claire smiled undeterred. "I'm sorry, Janice. Things can't be helped."

"Well, I did my part," Janice dropped the effusiveness and her gaze suddenly became distracted, drawn to more important people and tasks. Claire couldn't help wonder who of the many people she knew had forced Janice to come all the way out here and scuff her shoes. The latter didn't look very pleased about it.

Artist Claire watched Janice's struggle to keep her heels out of the fine gravel of the alley, which had not been intended for the greater fineries of fashion, and turned around to see her grandmother approach the table with a bowl of apples.

"Who was that?" Grandmother asked, curious.

"Oh, nobody," Claire tried to derail the unwanted details.

"Claire!"

"Somebody from work," Claire yielded.

"Why didn't you ask her to stay over for coffee, we would have loved to meet her, she must think we're so rude!" Grandmother fussed embarrassed.

"I wouldn't worry about that, maman."

"Did you tell her about your paintings? Maybe she can help. You shouldn't shun your connections, Claire. You never know when somebody you know might be able to help."

Claire pondered the thought that if that exhibit she had reluctantly agreed to work on had one chance of happening, it was because Janice didn't find out about it until it was too late to inflict real damage. She wondered what would be worse, lying to her grandmother, which she never wanted to do, or telling her the truth and taking the risk of being pressured into doing things she knew were not going to be good for her. Even the most heartfelt advice runs afoul when it is offered in the absence of pertinent information. Much as it pained Claire, she decided on option one.

"Yes, of course I did," she looked down, embarrassed. "She'll look into it."

Grandmother stared at her, disappointed, shook her head and started peeling apples with nervous gestures. She really hated it when her granddaughter didn't tell her the truth.

"Well," she continued as if the latter hadn't said anything at all. "You'll be better off in New Orleans anyway."

***

Like all of us Claire had many selves: there was the granddaughter Claire, the artist Claire, the practical Claire, the Claire at life's crossroads, the friend Claire. One could try and peel off one layer after another in order to find her real self and keep at it until there was nothing left: it was the sum of all of those reflections that came closest to approximating her soul, like a giant collage that would never be completed.

As she advanced in age, she kept adding and reshuffling layers until some of the aspects of her self became so deeply buried they didn't seem to matter anymore, but they were still there, all of them. Somewhere near the center of this onion of selves was the most hidden Claire of all, the little five year old in the dress with the ribbons, the one who had seen her shadow for the first time.

So much of who we are stays hidden, like footpaths in a dark forest. Some of those hidden paths we acknowledge to ourselves, but most we don't even know exist and are shocked to see them revealed in the light of day. Claire had wandered those footpaths in the dark her whole life, they were her domain, her safety, and in the absence of light she'd learned their footholds and their stepping stones by touch alone. She'd learned the fragrances of the dark, and its sounds, and they were all familiar and comforting, those harbingers of her inner world.

Artist Claire had allowed her hidden footpaths to lead her out of the dark and the layers of the 'Claire onion' suddenly revealed themselves in her paintings. Just as suddenly she didn't understand who she was anymore, she couldn't recognize this reflected self who stared back at her from every canvas and whose subtle personality suffused the message in all of them.

Her dark forest looked kind of beautiful in the light of day, but strange and alienating, and those feelings she could now identify and understand felt like they belonged to another person. You can't shift perspective on reality and expect it to still feel like home, nobody can. One is naked in the light; naked, vulnerable, ashamed and afraid. All the splendor of the world can't drown the humiliation of being exposed just the way you are, just the way you've always been, and found lacking. Everybody is found lacking, nobody is ever good enough for the harsh blaze of the truth.

We make up for our inadequacies, best we can, and pretend we don't mind being stripped of all of our defenses, though we do, and we go on, naked and afraid, both faker and more real than before, because we don't have a choice.

There is a devastating quality to this revealing light which annihilates everything you thought and felt about yourself and makes you uncomfortable, an impostor in your own life. Everything about you that is not broken recedes into the background while your inadequacies bask in full glory, and the worst part about this is that even in its unrepentant cruelty the rest of the world feels more genuine than you.

"I don't know what it is about this canvas, bebelle, but I can't take my eyes off of it. I...don't even know if I like it," Grandmother stared at Claire's finished painting, frowning.

"This is it," Claire thought. This was the feeling that had been haunting her since she was five years old, the feeling of staring into the unknown with fascinated apprehension. Just like the shadow it looked dark and empty, but in her heart of hearts she knew that it was not, she knew that a part of her soul that was precious and vital was waiting for her there and she missed that piece of her soul deeply, though she had been so afraid of it that she had labored her entire life to put the whole world between them so they would never meet.

"You know," Grandmother finally managed to dislodge her gaze from the mesmerizing image, "you scare me some times."

"I scare myself sometimes too," Claire thought, then responded. "It's art, maman. It's supposed to make you feel stuff."

"Just don't keep it in the bedroom, alright? It will give you nightmares."

"What's that?" Grandfather intervened. He had overheard the last part of the conversation and all he had gathered from it was the word 'nightmares'.

"Maman doesn't like my art," Claire joked.

"What's to like?" Grandfather looked at the canvas, eyes widened and trying in vain to untangle himself from the visual grip. "That thing will haunt you in the afterlife!" He drew closer to the painting to get a better look. "What is it?" he asked.

Claire fussed, aware that she should have an answer to this question, if not for her grandfather at least for the people who would eventually visit her exhibit.

"Me," the answer came, almost without thinking.

"She finally went off the deep end," Grandfather turned towards Grandmother, outraged as if it were her fault and then turned back to Claire. "You know what? Produce needs picking. Grab a basket and get to it." To serve as an example, he grabbed a basket himself and walked out the door mumbling something inaudible and shaking his head. "You coming?" he turned to Claire from the doorway.

"Yes, Grandfather."

"And stop doe-eyeing the produce, it's unnatural."

***

The problem with the familiar is that it lulls you into a deluded sense of certainty and veils your sight from the fact that you don't know the world at all, not in any meaningful way.

Claire could walk anywhere in the old mansion with her eyes closed, without stumbling on a threshold or missing a step on the stairs. She could stroll through the garden on a moonless night without trampling a single shivering violet underfoot. She could contemplate the depths of her soul without upturning a single deep seated feeling. In a word, she didn't understand the world at all.

"Claire," the wind called, but she didn't listen, because one doesn't expect to speak to the wind. "Winter wind. Spring water. Summer fire." she started reciting in her mind, for no reason at all, just giving in to the random fragments of consciousness which were trying to make their way to the surface.

"Claire," the whisper in the wind grew clearer in her mind, like a diffuse picture that starts slowly getting into focus. "Claire!"

She was in the clearing again, surrounded by oak trees, face to face with the tall man whose flaxen hair looked eerie in the moonlight. The whole scene turned her blood cold and made her shiver.

She tried to say something but couldn't summon her voice, and the tall man smiled, as if he understood her thoughts in the absence of words. There was something deeper there, in this unspoken communication, a much faster language of symbols, feelings and flashing images, the ideas themselves, stripped of their unnecessary garment of words. For a moment she understood its meaning, and it made sense to her, and then, just as quickly, it was gone, hunted by the hound of reason.

She wanted to explain to him that she understood what he had said in the same strange language without words, but the tall man smiled kindly and shook his head no. He seemed to be staring through and beyond her at something in the distance, and Claire turned her head to see what he was looking at and was met by her own reflection, uncomfortably close and with a strange glow in her eyes. She shuddered to regain her wits and realized she had been standing between the mirrors again, and it was fall, and there was a van parked at the end of the alley, where people were carefully carrying her wrapped paintings.

"Would you like us to take this one too?" one of the movers asked Claire, pointing at the painting of her pain, which was still baring its blank spaces like holes through the world.

"Ah," Claire tried to gather her thoughts, "yeah. Yeah, please do."

The movers wrapped the strange unfinished canvas in silence, indifferent to its artistic value or lack thereof, used as they were to pack and transport all sorts of things, of which Claire's unglued imagery wasn't even remotely the weirdest they'd seen.

They finished the job, brought her the bill of lading to sign and left.

"So," Grandmother said from behind her. "This is finally happening! I've got to hand it to you, bebelle. I thought you were going to swindle your way out of this and never follow through."

"Maman!" Claire retorted with faked moral outrage. "I'm hurt!"

"This calls for celebrating," Grandfather came up the stairs from the basement with a very dusty bottle in his hand. He looked at the carefully calligraphed label. "1975! I've been keeping this for a special occasion," he looked at it with what Claire recognized as the same unnatural doe eyes he had complained about. "This bottle is older than you," he laughed.

"Wait 'till I tell Adelaide about it!" Grandmother couldn't contain her excitement.

"I thought you weren't talking to Adelaide," Grandfather turned to her, surprised. "Claire, can you please pass the potatoes?" Claire obliged.

"Whatever gave you that idea?" Grandmother replied, raising her glass. "To good health and success!"

"Hear! Hear!" Claire and Grandfather responded, raising their glasses as well.

"You haven't spoken with her in years!" Grandfather continued his train of thought, while taking a sip of the wine, which had aged to a deep garnet color and tasted divine, judging by his facial expression.

"That doesn't mean we're not talking!" Grandmother protested. "We're all busy, we haven't had a chance to visit in a while."

"It's not like she's going to care, anyway," Grandfather tried to tease out additional details, but Grandmother had already settled the subject.

"When is your exhibit opening, Claire?" she asked the young woman.

"Sometimes at the beginning of December," the latter responded. The wine was strong and rushed to her head quickly, making her feel pleasantly warm and somewhat far away, like she was swaddled in a plush garnet colored blanket.

"Why so late? They already have all the work," Grandmother asked.

"The space was not available sooner," Claire spoke slowly, trying to cool her flushed cheeks with the back of her hands. "Besides, the closer to Christmas, the better. More visitors."

Her hands felt like ice against her face, like they weren't hers at all, and they had the same shiver inducing quality she recognized from her earlier vision. She shook, jolted, and placed them on the table, almost spilling the wine in the process.

"Look at this one," Grandfather teased, in a glorious mood brought on by the dual influence of good news and fine libations. "Thirty years old and she can't handle her wine! We should disown you! What's holding up dessert?" he turned towards Grandmother with a broad smile.

Grandmother had done her best to hide the surprise from Claire, hoping that the young woman would be too busy with the packing and loading of the van to notice what she was doing in the kitchen, but no such luck. Nobody could keep any secrets in that house.

"You had to spoil the surprise, didn't you?" she turned towards Claire reproachfully while she got up to bring the cake.

"It's the same cake," Claire thought, too soothed by the wine to fight the logical impossibility of this occurrence, because the cake did look exactly the same as the one she had fallen in when she was five, ruining her dress in the process. She couldn't help her curiosity. "Grandma, is this..."

"The same cake? Of course it is, it's your favorite, I thought you'd love it," Grandmother replied pleased. "Plates?" Claire got up and brought the plates over. A gust of wind startled the barren leaves around her ankles and swirled them in a motion that felt intentional and alive. The fall oaks burned bright against a leaden sky, so bright that they looked like they were the source of light for it and not the other way around.

Claire's mind followed the leaves scattered in the wind and its array of shapeless and free flowing thoughts found its way out of the conduits of her consciousness like water draining from a pipe manifold. For a second her mind was completely empty and she caught a glimpse of its intricate structure of hollow tubes, the 'her' behind the thoughts, the 'her' that didn't change. Just a vessel it was. Just a vessel with no purpose in the absence of its fluid contents.

7

The end of fall had always been a wonderful time in Claire's household. It was the time of harvest when fruits, vegetables and herbs were processed, stored and preserved for the winter.

It was the time for planting carrots in the root cellar, next to the large demijohns of fermenting grape juice and plums, the time for storing grains in the silo, the time for taking huge braids of onion and garlic and large bunches of dill and lovage to the attic to dry.

The smell in the house, Claire had tried many times but was unable to describe it to strangers. It was rich and happy and wholesome and abundant, a blend of baked apples and fragrant fruit preserves simmering on the stove. It was heavy with vanilla and cinnamon, and had the delightful sweetness of overripe fruit. Comfort itself, coming to a person through the senses: the warmth of the hues of October, combined with the aroma of home cooking and generously accompanied by the sweetness of fresh grape juice with just a hint of sharpness before turning into wine.

Grandmother liked to decorate the house with colorful leaves, berries and gourds; pumpkins and apples were always present at the table in one form or another.

The soul of October was warm, wholesome and delightful, and in spite of the declining temperatures outside, it made Claire happy.

"What is that delicious aroma?" Claire asked rhetorically, because she already knew, one couldn't mistake the scent of caramelized quince for anything else. In a large cast iron cauldron the quince preserves were simmering slowly, filling the room with a sweet tart fragrance, heavy with vanilla.

"Your grandfather's favorite," Grandmother smiled pleased. She dipped a large wooden spoon in the bubbling mixture, then held it over a cold plate until a few drops of syrup dripped on it. The droplets hesitated for a moment before they lost containment and blended into each other, creating a small sugary puddle. "Still not ready," Grandmother commented, turned down the heat under the cauldron and put the spoon down. She looked at Claire intently.

"You know, just because you shipped your work to the gallery, that doesn't mean you can stop painting now. What are you working on?"

"Nothing much," Claire replied. "It's a vision I had," she said, like it was the most natural thing in the world.

"A vision!" Grandmother joked. "That sounds serious! Of what?"

"I'm not sure, that's what I'm trying to find out," Claire answered honestly.

"Give me a hand, will you?" Grandmother gestured towards the pantry, where a large vat of plums waited to be pitted. Claire grabbed a bowl, a pitting tool and a towel and started working. Grandmother had been quiet, but she restarted the vision conversation suddenly.

"Your grandfather wouldn't let me hear the end of this if he knew, but it's been known to happen in our family."

"What, visions?" Claire asked amused. "What kind?"

"How many kinds are there?" Grandmother frowned, upset that her extraordinary revelation was met with such indifference.

"Did you have any?" Claire couldn't help herself.

"Sadly, no, child. I don't have the gift. Your mother, on the other hand..."

"Surely there must have been stories," Claire tried to entice more details out of the old lady, who was still weighing whether to discuss this further.

"Your mother, she saw. I can't tell you exactly what, we don't have words for it, but it's like there is a whole other world around us, on top of this one, blended with this one, actually occupying the same space. We never see it, of course, we only see odd details or unusual occurrences in places where the two collide, things we usually pass as accidents or coincidence. Put some lemon and sugar on those plums, will you? I don't want them to turn brown."

"What exactly did she see?" Claire was now possessed by a single minded curiosity.

"The waters," Grandmother whispered, looking behind her as if afraid that somebody might hear. "That's what they used to called them in the old days. Places where reality melts, where things become fluid and you can reach through them to the other side."

"You mean like gateways to their world?" Claire asked. None of them seemed to need clarification about what they she was referring to.

"It's more than that," Grandmother frowned, trying to explain in words something that defied reason. "You know how when you throw a rock in a pond it makes circles? The rock eventually falls through to the bottom but it's effects last for a while, growing wider and more diffuse around the spot until they finally dissipate. You can still see the rock on the bottom if the water is clear, but you also see the water lilies floating on its surface, and the waves, and your own reflection, and the sky, that's why we call them the waters. As I said, it's impossible to explain."

"What are you two talking about?" Grandfather sneaked in from behind, unexpectedly.

"Oh, just some local folklore, I thought it would spark Claire's creativity," Grandmother downplayed the forbidden subject.

"She's plenty creative already. More than that and none of us will be able to sleep again," grandfather retorted. "Is that burnt caramel?" he asked.

Grandmother rushed to the stove, worried she might have scorched the quince preserves, but it was only a few sugar crystals that had found their way into the flames. She grabbed the wooden spoon and tested the confection again, this time creating perfectly round drops of sweet amber. She turned off the heat and let the preserves cool down so the fruit could release its excess water before being boiled a second time.

***

There comes a point in one's life when one simply gets bored with one's own misery, no matter how justified. One just can't afford the amount of energy it takes to keep it going anymore.

Despite the tribulations, the sorrows and the betrayals of her dysfunctional existence Claire had the liberating insight that this, what she had here, was the best version of life she could have ever lived. She would have found it difficult to explain this to a reasonable person, for whom this leave from society was simply a cowardly denial of failure. She wouldn't have had any chance to explain to them that being here, doing what she was doing with her life and with her art, was the fulfillment of a lifetime yearning that she had never allowed herself to express and without which any activity, however justified in the eyes of society, meant nothing.

There was something more to her life here than what she'd seen out in the world, a soul, a purpose, if you will, something that she would never have found if her carefully manufactured social competence had worked out. She would have never painted again, she was absolutely sure of that.

Was that important? More important than being a functioning member of society? Nothing is really important and nobody is irreplaceable, those were the first things she had learned when she was trying to make her way into the art world. Nobody was ever good enough either. So the question then became, important for whom?

When you are young and just start out in life, life is a game to be won, a fortification to be conquered at any cost. You sweat and fight and run against the grain, and no matter the hardship, it would have been all worth it when you won.

If life sees it fit to give you a second chance you're much more likely to not end up burnt to cinders if you start from a place where you're loved. Claire was loved here, in her childhood home, and that made all the difference in the world.

"So, have you decided where you are going to live after the gallery opens?" Grandfather asked her abruptly.

"What do you mean?" Claire turned towards him like she didn't understand the question.

"Well, obviously you can't stay here," he pointed out.

"Why not?"

"You're way too young to be here with us. Besides, how are you going to manage your commissions from here?"

"It's only an hour's drive, I used to take longer to get to work when I lived in the city," Claire replied.

"But what about your social life?" Grandfather asked, unconsciously revealing his true concern, which was how was Claire supposed to find love and start a family while cooped up in the middle of nowhere like a misanthropic owl? Mid thirties already and no hope for great-grandchildren.

"Judging by our family history, marriage seems to be conditioned by access to a realm that is only available here," Claire gave way to a heretical thought.

"Oh, your grandmother and her stories about cousins and the land, wait until I give her a piece of my mind! Get a real life, Claire! You know, real?" he sighed, exasperated. "And stop chasing this airy-fairy woo-woo stuff, it never leads up to anything good!"
"I'm sure I'll get plenty of living in New Orleans, Grandfather. Stop worrying, aren't you happy for me?"

Grandfather really hadn't made up his mind one way or another, although he had to admit that having an artist for a granddaughter sounded kind of fancy.

"I'd be a lot happier if I managed to yank you out of here, but between your pigheadedness and your grandmother's kindred it looks like a lost battle. Do whatever you want!" he said and got up to leave, suddenly upset.

"What's gotten into him?" Grandmother approached with a plate of fresh apple pie, cut into perfect squares and generously covered in confectioner's sugar; the filling was still warm enough to steam up the cool air of the garden.

"You know," Claire hinted at the matter, but did not engage it.

"How are you holding up, dear, you look tired," Grandmother changed the subject.

"Tired? I don't think so, why on earth would I be tired?" Claire protested.

"I just thought you looked a little pale, that's all. Your hands are cold, are you sure you're not coming down with something?" Grandmother reached out for Claire's hands to check her granddaughter's temperature and then brought a thick shawl, as large as a blanket, to wrap around her shoulders.

"I'm fine, maman," Claire didn't protest the coddling. One of her hands reached out from under the shawl and snatched a piece of pie, which she enjoyed with childish enthusiasm.

"Are you sleeping well?" Grandmother continued her health check, trying to get to the bottom of Claire's apparent frailty.

Claire fussed uncomfortably. She slept soundly but had vivid dreams, long dreams that continued from one night to the next like a story. What consumed her was that she knew there was a coherent story line as soon as she fell asleep, but couldn't remember the dreams at all upon awaking, much as she tried. She got flashes sometimes, disparate fragments of events, triggered by a scent or a sound, never enough to bring the story together. It was as if she lived a second life inside her slumber and it was from that life that all those emotions in her paintings were coming from.

"Oh, baby, you can't do that! Let me make you a nice cup of linden flower tea, it will help you sleep without dreams, you look exhausted."

The fragrance of the tea announced itself from a distance, blowing slow wisps through the spout as Grandmother brought the teapot to the table. The image of a large linden tree in bloom flashed inside Claire's mind. "I know this place," she thought, absolutely certain she'd been there before, that she sat under that tree. She remembered everything about this scene in painstaking detail - the scent of the flowers, the air temperature mellowing out in the evening, the feeling of the grass under her bare feet, the dress she wore, white and embroidered with wild flowers around the hem, the ruggedness of the tree bark under her fingers, the bird sounds, like no birds she ever heard before. She remembered she wore a flower crown, loosely woven of chicory and dandelions. The sun and the moon were in the sky together, equally bright. Something brushed past her hand and she was rushed back to reality: the wind had blown the fringes of the shawl over her fingers.

"Where were you just now, bebelle?" Grandmother asked, more curious than concerned. Claire described the scene to her.

"Ah, ghost memories," the latter chuckled softly. "If only we remembered all the places our souls go when our bodies are asleep!"

"What sort of places?" Claire was still trying to shake the feeling of certainty which accompanied that image.

"All sorts of places: places in the past, places in the future, places in other lives, places in the minds of other people, places that don't belong to this world at all, memories of Heaven, scary places we get lost in sometimes, all sorts of places."

"So you mean to tell me this memory is real?" Claire's eyes widened.

"Who is to know? What makes you so sure this right here right now is?" Grandmother postulated.

"Don't even joke about it, maman. I'm crazy enough as it is," Claire frowned, sipping her tea in search of comfort.

"People are afraid of the unknown but they are even more afraid of things that are not supposed to exist. If you know they exist, then they are not scary anymore, they are just other places you can visit, no different from the nearby town, or another continent. You just acknowledge they are there, that's all, what's the big deal?"

Claire was still submerged in the vivid memory, so entangled in it that for a second she thought she could see it through reality like through a sheer veil.

***

"Who left the door open?" Claire asked herself. Both panes hung flush against the walls, almost touching the mirrors. She'd never realized before how close the doors got to their beveled edges and wondered how come in the long years the house had seen they had never been chipped by the random activities of the household. She pictured children slamming the doors in their tantrums, people carrying bulky furniture, her grandfather always leaving the doors open behind him. The last thought made her smile.

The wind had brought in a glut of dark leaves, all wet from the cold drizzle outside. Their make-shift carpet extended out into infinity in both directions, endlessly reflected by the mirrors.

"It's a path," a message fell inside Claire's mind clear as a bell, too clear to be dismissed. It didn't make any sense, of course, so she shook her head to chase the thought away, but her gaze was spellbound to this path that led into the virtual world; she lingered between the mirrors again, in front of the wide open doors.

She felt kind of sad about not being able to experience what it was like to be in that world behind the glass, but when she looked at the mirrors again, she saw that a few of the Claires were returning to her an aggravated stare. Not only did she have a delegation of selves represent her in mirror land, but it did not have any more access to the real world than she did to the virtual one. This understanding enriched the onion of Claire personalities with another layer: that of the virtual Claire collective.

The differences between the real world and its reflected counterpart are subtle and the brain normally shuts them down as irrelevant, but Claire took notice of them and made a game of finding as many as she could. In the process one of the Claires, who was so far into the distance that her countenance was barely visible, turned around and followed the path of leaves deeper inside the mirror. Real Claire didn't even react, as if she expected this to happen, as if this was just a mundane occurrence to see her reflection act independently, an event no more startling than seeing her grandfather walk through the door. She reached out her hand to draw that Claire's attention somehow, but the transparent boundary between worlds stopped it with a muffled thud.

"Were you just punching the mirror right now?" her grandfather blurted, confused and staring at her in dismay. "And can you please close that door? The wind is blowing in all the leaves and the rain."

He'd been standing there for a while it seemed, long enough to notice Claire engage in silent conference with her own reflection.

"Aah," Claire turned around, "no, not really." She wished she could find a rational explanation for her earlier behavior but there was none, so she took the last step towards the doors and struggled to push the heavy panes shut but the wind didn't allow it, like it didn't want a barrier in its path.

"Look at this mess!" Grandfather followed her into the alcove, displeased. "All the mud got tracked into the house!"

Claire looked at the floor, and then at her grandfather, like she didn't understand: there wasn't any mud, just the sparkle of the raindrops on the dark cover of leaves.

She painted again that evening, she painted the longing for that forbidden journey, turned liquid in the rain.

"Is that the pond?" Grandmother asked her, watching from behind.

"No, not really. It's just an abstract piece."

"It looks like the pond. Look, there are even waterlilies on it," Grandmother smiled, pleased to recognize some real objects in her granddaughter's conceptual art.

The surface of Claire's emotions did look like a lake indeed, a dark liquid clear that let the vague shapes of her submerged feelings shine through, amplified by the contrast. Claire smiled vaguely and kept to herself the fact that somewhere underneath that surface, below the feelings, there was another Claire, a liquid Claire, a being of emotions she'd kept hidden all these years, safely tucked away in her watery world and free of the shackles of rational thought. Liquid Claire was happy, she was shocked to discover. She couldn't explain how she knew that, but she didn't doubt it, maybe liquid Claire had told her. She giggled to the thought and turned around to meet her grandmother's probing gaze.

"Bebelle, get out of your head, you're spending way too much time in there."

The old lady looked out the window, absentminded. The November sky was heavy with clouds and their thick blanket kept warmth trapped underneath, defying the season. Everything looked purple filtered through their light, the wet tropical air was filled with purple fragrance.

"It's almost time for the opening," she said. "How is the exhibit coming along?"

"Everything is in place, we just need to install some of the lighting."

"How about this piece?" Grandmother asked, nodding towards the half finished painting.

"Next time," Claire replied.

Grandmother smiled, pleased.

"I see you have decided to stick with it, I'm very happy about that. I wasn't sure..."

Claire wrapped the shawl tighter around her shoulders, more for comfort than for warmth. The image of the door left wide open, the way it had been that afternoon, haunted her. It was the way it framed the image of the wide alley in the shade of the oak trees like a painting one could enter at will. For a second she remembered a fragment of her serial dream, and she remembered them being there, her unseen kin, waiting for her patiently in this very image framed by the open door. A wild emotion she couldn't identify, something between elation and dread, fired up all her nerve endings and gave her an irrepressible urge to run away.

8

The garden slept soundly under a mountain of leaves in the unseasonably warm air of late November.

"You never painted this beautiful landscape," Grandmother commented in a reproachful tone.

"Maman, you know that's not what I do," Claire tried to defend herself.

The carpet of fallen leaves glowed copper and gold in the sunset like a dare. A ray of light suddenly peeked from under a cloud and when it touched the ground it seemed to set it on fire: everything looked suddenly illumined from behind as if the essence of things had decided to reveal itself to the undeserving humans and gift them its spark, the spirit of being, the force behind the movements of existence.

She didn't know whether she was allowed to see it, there are things in this world which are not meant for the human eye or the human spirit, but she did, and because she did she was enraptured. She couldn't take her eyes off the strange glow which moved like a little fire across the golden landscape - the living spirit of things. She didn't know why but it seemed essential that she held that fire in her hands to share its essence. She touched the golden foliage with the tips of her fingers and the little fire moved quickly through them to reach her blood and meld with her essence.

"I thought that was not what you did," Grandmother teased.

"Can you see it too?" Claire asked her in a daze.

"See what?" Grandmother chuckled.

"Never mind," Claire responded, still trying to process the sensation of the little fire that had touched her being.

There had been experiences in Claire's life that defied explanation, things that she would have liked to share but there were no words to share them with, and this was one of them. How does one express the fear and awe of having touched the spirit of everything there is?

"That's why they invented poetry," Grandmother smiled, content. "Or painting."

"Is this..." Claire mumbled, choked up by emotion.

"Real? Bebelle, real is what you make of it."

The pulse of all existence still vibrated on the tips of her fingers, she could feel the whole life surrounding her in its slow buzz, the grass, the oak trees, the birds in their branches, the depths of the earth, the heights of the sky, the soft silence of the pond, she could feel herself too as a part of this larger whole, just another piece of it no different from the others. Her entire being was held together by threads of light, thinner than gossamer, too fine for the eyes to tell apart, and she knew these threads connected her to everything and blended her into everything. There was nothing else, just the comforting awareness of dissolving into the wholeness of being.

"When the spirit moves you..." Grandfather interrupted the scene, puzzled by the strange stillness of the women who seemed to have turned to stone in his absence. "What in God's name are you two doing?"

"Hush, Joseph!" Grandmother chided. "We're minding the silence."

"As I was saying, when you're done doing that can you come inside? Claire got a package."

"What?" Claire jumped surprised. "From whom?"

"Doesn't say," Grandfather turned his back and walked into the house, followed by the women.

Claire opened the parcel releasing a strong scent of violets in the process, but there was nothing in it other than a thin layer of shimmery dust which left smudges on her fingers.

"Are they inviting her in now?" Grandfather exploded, revolted.

"Joseph," Grandmother intervened. "Be reasonable!"

"Reasonable? You call this reasonable? Goofer dust?"

"It's not goofer dust and you know it," Grandmother protested.

"No! It's worse!"

"They're family," Grandmother tried to soothe him. "They mean her no harm."

"They meant no harm to her mother either," Grandfather said bitterly.

"Louise chose to go, there is nothing stopping her from coming back."

"Nothing but the fact that she forgot everything and everybody! She forgot us! She forgot Claire! You call that no harm? That's what the bloody dust is for!"

"I'm still here," Claire wanted to interject the state of fact into this argument about hypothetical disasters but there was no room for it in the heat of the conversation.

"I'll take those cursed mirrors down today if it's the last thing I do!" Grandfather raised his voice.

"You will do no such thing! Not unless you let me and Claire walk through to the other side first! You're not shutting the doors on our daughter!"

"You and your cursed kindred! I knew I was doomed the second I married you but I was too young and too stupid to care! Now we're going to lose Claire too!"

"I'm not going anywhere!" Claire wanted to scream but her voice came out in a gentle hush.

"Like you have a choice!" Grandfather turned to her frowning.

"Of course she has a choice!" Grandmother replied in a tone so unconvincing it froze Claire's blood. The latter closed her eyes for a second only to find herself face to face with the tall man who looked bored and gestured towards her to just ignore the whole conversation.

"Look at her!" Grandfather pointed out. "She's gone already!"

Before Claire had a chance to open her eyes she got drenched in the scents of summer. The wind had brought in a delicious fragrance of violets and overheated herbs through the wide open windows, and the wet scent of rain.

"Oh, God, no, not again!" Claire took in the amazing summer landscape, so beautiful it made her cry. She could feel its spirit tug at her heart strings, those thin strings of light that connected her to everything. She tried to figure out what season it was, but there was no season, just the joy of being alive at the peak of life's glory. She ran, barefoot, on the meadow in front of the house which was now carpeted in violets, and bent down to pick a strange one, the only one whose petals were speckled white and blue in a sea of purple flowers.

"Claire!" Grandfather's voice shook her out of her daydream and brought her back to the house and the end of November with the pretty violet still in her hand. "What, they're going to snatch her from the middle of the parlor now?"

Claire smiled to the image of eternal summer which was still occupying her brain.

"Stop smiling! Stop whatever it is that you're doing to bring this about!" Grandfather demanded, exasperated.

"I'm not doing anything!" Claire protested.

"It's that cursed dust!" Grandfather grabbed her hands trying to wipe off any spec of the nefarious substance, but it had already fused into her fingertips.

***

Weather soured quickly, eager to catch up with the calendar. The sudden chill drained all the color from the golden landscape and left behind an austere structure of bare branches, the bones of the garden. Their slender limbs the shade of fresh cement melted in the cold rain and dripped on the ground, living breathing watercolor paintings.

The landscape turned an intense kind of beauty, sparse and poignant like art photography, highlighting contrast, hard edges and constructed views. During the night its naked limbs looked unreal, half hidden in the mists, gleaming with a metallic sheen where the moonlight touched them.

A cold wind blew the drizzle in Claire's face and the icy blast sharpened her senses. She could see nothing under that dark moonless sky, she couldn't even make out the contours of the branches the wind was angrily twisting and thrashing about. She could only hear their wailing in the distance, muffled by the whirl of the wind.

Claire approached the oak tree in the dark to caress its rugged bark and the bark felt warm and dry under her fingers like the skin of a warm blooded creature, despite the icy rain. She felt comforted by the presence of her old friend and by the inky darkness which surrounded her and kept the world of hurt away like the inside of a womb.

In the realm of things there is a limit to how dark a shadow can get; in the realm of the soul there is none. The soul has no bottom and it reaches depths we aren't even aware of, and in those depths we hide our shame and our fears and sometimes we hide our treasures too, to save them from destruction. There is no safer fortress in the soul than an emotional place so dark no thought dares ever enter.

For some reason Claire had decided to make this Mariana Trench of her psyche the repository of her creativity and had to fish out her art piece by piece from its dark bottomless pit sight unseen and without thinking. Her hands did all the work for her, mixing paint and brush strokes as they poked at places in her soul she didn't want to see or didn't know existed. There they found her fears, her disappointments, her secret wishes, but most importantly underneath it all they found the real Claire, the one too valuable to wear out, safely tucked away from sight like a precious gem wrapped in black velvet.

"Good Lord, child, you'll catch your death! What in places are you doing out on a night like this? It's freezing! Come back inside, your grandfather is going to be so mad when he sees you, look at you, you're all wet!"

"I'm not wet," Claire tried to protest, but Grandmother had already grabbed her by the sleeve and was dragging her back into the house.

"I'll start a fire, you sit right there by the fireplace and I'll bring you some tea. What were you thinking!"

Claire thought for a moment and realized she had absolutely no idea. She couldn't remember going outside, she just found herself out there alone with the wind and the rain.

"Are you trying to get sick so you don't have to show up for the opening?" Grandfather asked with a crease between his eyebrows.

"Of course not!" Claire protested in earnest. She was quite adamant about it too, after all what rational adult would sabotage their own work?

"You're terrified," a thought rose from the bottomless pit to the surface of her consciousness.

Claire thought about all the times things didn't work out for her and she had to start over, an exhausting thankless struggle that had brought her back here where she started, no better for the experience, just older and really versed in the art of turning a new leaf. She didn't want to turn a new leaf anymore, she wanted to stay and enjoy the leaf she was on and actually live for a change. Why doesn't anybody realize that after so many new beginnings life becomes nothing more than a way station where they're constantly waiting for the next train?

What if she was successful? What if she had to leave here and move to New Orleans, or Denver, or wherever her commissions took her? Always in a strange place, always alone. Always looking for a place to rent, always trying to pretend she was on top of things, always meeting new people, always wearing the mask. She had learned what it felt like to live her life instead of managing it and she did what held meaning for her, even if it looked strange and abnormal to other people; in a dark and twisted way failure protected her from losing that.

"Why don't you cross that bridge when you get to it, granddaughter?" Grandfather stared at her intently. "Let's be successful first and worry about it after. Here comes the tea!"

Grandmother showed up with a tray of cups and saucers.

"What does success mean to you, papa?" Claire reopened the subject.

"I'm pretty sure everybody knows what success means," Grandfather skirted the issue. "Besides, if you end up in la-la land one day 'cause your evil kin messed up your brains, at least leave something behind that is worth mentioning."

"Joseph!" Grandmother protested.

"You know I'm right," he relented.

Claire was tired and the warmth of the fireplace made her doze off in the chair. When the strong scent of the tea woke her up she remembered she had dreamed about that familiar place again, the one with the large linden tree.

"Why isn't just being happy ever enough?" she thought.

She was very sure there was another presence in the room, sitting in the chair next to hers, watching her sip her tea. Just like the dark night outside it gave her comfort and kept the worries of the world at bay.

***

"Is this right?"

The lighting technician was waiting for her agreement on the final placement of the spotlights.

"Yes," Claire replied, awkward. She wasn't used to being the project of an entire team and this level of attention overwhelmed her; the art gallery looked a lot smaller and warmer now that all the work had been installed.

Grandfather pretended he had business to attend to in New Orleans so that Claire wouldn't have to face the world alone, but made himself scarce when he saw how many people were in the gallery already.

Through the brightly lit windows of the exhibit hall one could see the artist, a young woman who looked at home in the midst of this sophisticated decor. She was confident and polished, making light conversation and entertaining different groups of people with the ease of a social butterfly. Claire's professional persona had certainly shown up to play its part. Inside it, hiding in a little cranny of the brain from which she could watch the world without being noticed, real Claire was biting her fingernails, shaking like a leaf and praying for approval.

"I can't do this," she went into a full panic attack on her drive home. "What was I thinking? I can't do this, there is no way!"

"Would you give it a rest? It's done. What do you want to do, go back in time and not contact the gallery? I don't understand the problem," Grandfather did his best to calm her down.

"The problem is that I'm not this person!" Claire whimpered. "I don't know how to be this person. Who is this person, do you even recognize me?"

"So?"

"So I can't be this person," she continued arguing.

"Pardon me for being blunt, but you didn't know how to be loser Claire either, and yet you managed to emulate her for quite some time. Now you get to be up and coming artist Claire. What's all the fuss about? We all have our roles to play in life, why can't you enjoy this one? Seems a little better than your usual fare."

"But..."

"Oh, dear me, here come the buts!" Grandfather rolled his eyes annoyed.

***

"This is going to be perfect!" the museum curator swooned when Claire opened the door to reveal the impressive decor of the old mansion. The latter was so used to it she didn't realize the impression it would make on a person who was seeing it for the first time. "You really grew up here?"

"Yes, this used to be my grandparents' house, it has been in our family for many generations."

The curator sketched a timid smile before asking.

"Doesn't it feel scary, living here all by yourself? It's so...remote." She hesitated, looking around and trying to figure out how this situation would make her feel if she were in Claire's place, empowered or creeped out. Creeped out won decisively.

"I got used to it," Claire responded, smiling back to put her conversation partner at ease. "It's home."

"Of course," the curator continued. "It must be difficult managing the property all by yourself, I certainly wouldn't want to be the person who has to maintain all of this."

"I have help," Claire offered but didn't elaborate. "Would you like a cup of coffee?"

"Yes, please. No sugar," the curator made herself comfortable in one of the chairs by the fireplace. "Well, the good news is that we won't have any trouble fitting the party in here, besides, people might get the chance to see some of your new work. There is new work, isn't there?" she went straight to the heart of the issue.

Claire nodded.

"Can I see it?"

"Of course," Claire pointed to the adjacent room, which was already starting to fill up with large canvases.

"A little dark, perhaps," the curator commented, and then noted to herself that her art would be dark too if she had to live alone in this place. She tried to imagine what November nights wrapped in rain might feel like in here when one was all alone and she shivered as if she had touched a ghost. She was pretty sure the darned place was haunted, she could feel it in her bones.

"Listen," she hesitated again, "this is certainly none of my business, but are you sure you don't want to move to New Orleans? I think I can find you a really nice place to rent, introduce you to a few people, you could get out more..."

"Thank you for offering, but I wouldn't have enough room," Claire pointed at the mess of canvases, pigments, oils and paintbrushes that surrounded them. "I'm very lucky to have this place and as I said, it's home."

"Of course," the curator changed the conversation. "When should I send the crew to set things up in here?"

"Any time next week would be good. I go into town on occasion to pick up a few necessities, but I'm not gone for long and I always leave the door open," Claire continued.

"Aren't you worried about thieves and such?"

"Oh, no. We're trusting country folks here, people would be offended."

"I think I got all I need, let me take a few pictures for the team, to get them an idea of what the setting looks like."

Claire walked her to the door and watched her leave, then struggled to close the heavy doors behind her.

"Who was that, dear?" Grandmother asked from the kitchen.

"The gallery curator," Claire answered. There were warm beignets on the table; she grabbed one and bit into it, really pleased. "They're setting up a party in here for potential patrons."

Grandmother was silent for many uncomfortable minutes, then couldn't help herself.

"You didn't tell her about us."

"Maman, you know she wouldn't understand. People don't know our family history."

"Still, you could at least have mentioned something," Grandmother continued, upset.

"I promise you I'll bring up you and papa during the next conversation."

"I'm starting to feel like you're embarrassed by us, you never mention us to a living soul."

"Maman, you've been gone for decades, it's not something one drops casually into the conversation. Most people don't speak to the dead."

"Still, you could have mentioned us," Grandmother muttered. "And stop eating the beignets, they are for after dinner."

"What happened?" Grandfather came in from outside. His rain boots were covered in mud which he dragged in and all over the kitchen floor to Grandmother's upset. "A party? In here? Make sure to tell the movers to mind the mirrors when they bring stuff in."

"I will."

"How is dinner coming up? It's almost eight," he made his way around the kitchen lifting lids off the pots on the stove to find out for himself.

"Just you wait!" Grandmother hushed him away. "Claire, can you please set the table?"

"Yes, maman."

9

She dreamed of summer again that night. In her dreams it was always summer in her grandparents' garden, warm and fragrant and buzzing with bees. The cattails around the pond swung gently in the breeze, catching the sunshine every now and then and turning from tan to gold.

Here and there the landscape sparkled and Claire couldn't tell whether the little glimmers were fireflies or drops of dew catching the light but the overall effect was startling, like the entire garden had suddenly been infused with light.

Enchanted, she turned around to take in the whole image and saw all of them waiting there, smiling, waiting for her.

There was a young woman standing next to the tall man, a woman she'd never seen before but recognized anyway. She looked blissfully happy as if in her entire existence she had never known suffering.

"Mother?"

The young woman smiled and stretched out her hand to reach Claire's and when their fingers touched the latter recognized the jolt of the little fire she had experienced in the garden earlier that fall. They didn't speak any words.

"You haven't aged."

The young woman shook her head smiling.

"You look happy."

A nod followed.

"Is this why you left?"

The young woman nodded again and then looked intently in Claire's eyes to convey her message. Claire understood it and looked down at her hands: the tips of her fingers were still smudged with shimmery dust.

The morning sunshine hit her eyes and woke her up abruptly.

"Rise and shine sleepy head! You've got a lot to do before the guests arrive."

Grandmother had drawn the curtains to let in the light of day. She gave Claire a little nudge in passing to make sure the young woman was awake before she rushed to the door.

"Wake up, wake up! We don't have a lot of time!"

Claire washed up and got dressed, still half asleep and in bad need of that first cup of coffee and shuffled down the stairs to the kitchen.

She couldn't help look at her hands, trying to make out any trace of glimmer on the tips of her fingers.

"Maman," she started abruptly. "I think I dreamed about my mother."

"You saw Louise? She came to you?" Grandmother asked eagerly. "What did she look like, was she alright?"

"Yes," Claire was taken aback by this avalanche of questions. "She looked so young! She looked much younger than me. How old was she when she left?"

"You were a baby," Grandmother avoided the answer. "Did she look happy?" she barely dared to ask.

"Yes, she looked very happy."

"I always worried about that. Things had been so tense around here at that time I always worried she just left with them to escape her troubles. I have waited all these years but she never returned, I feared they wouldn't allow it, I feared that something really bad had happened to her, you have no idea how I worried. Was she alone?"

"No."

"Oh, dear. Your grandfather is going to be furious about that. On second thought he is your father after all. I'm glad they patched things up."

"He who?"

"The tall man," Grandmother clarified. "Isn't that who you were talking about?"

"So he really is my father."

"Unfortunately," Grandfather interjected from the doorway. "I blame you, you know," he pointed at Grandmother. "You encouraged them."

"I did nothing of the sort, it was meant to be."

"I'm so fed up with this malarkey about predestination! Nobody is meant to do anything. We all choose."

"She asked me to come live with them," Claire blurted suddenly.

The room went deadly silent. After the initial shock wore off Grandfather wanted to protest but Grandmother raised her palm to demand silence.

"And what have you decided?"

"I...don't know, maman. They all look so happy and young and they seem to live in perpetual bliss but..."

"But what, child?"

"I don't belong there."

"How do you know that?"

"I can feel it."

Another pregnant pause followed.

"Good. Now that we got that out of the way, finish your breakfast, I need you to help me with the appetizers. You have no idea how much stuff we have to do today."

Claire gulped the rest of her coffee and walked to the back room to bring the pastry dough that was left out there to chill over night. As she passed by the mirrors an impulse impossible to restrain made her reach out to the mirror and her hand got suddenly pulled onto the glass surface as if drawn by magnets.

Claire got dizzy and slightly disoriented as she watched the slow duplication of her world happen right in front of her eyes and she found herself existing in a weird superposition of two universes, open to her waking awareness the same way the real world had always been, the one she had taken for granted her entire life. She felt her mother's hug simultaneously with her grandfather's tugging on her sleeve to get her away from the mirror.

"Get out of the doorway!" Grandfather pulled her back. As she did, Claire felt her hand slowly peel off the mirror, like it had been Velcroed to it and the world beyond sight gently vanished. Before she turned around to face her grandfather she caught another glimpse in the looking glass and noticed she had linden flowers in her hair. She could still smell their fragrance and the feel the warm wind in her face.

"Do you want to get stuck on the other side? If you go you can never come back," Grandfather chided genuinely worried.

"Why are you telling her stuff that isn't true?" Grandmother intervened.

"Louise never came back!"

"Louise didn't want to come back," Grandmother stood her ground.

"Are you going to bet Claire's safety on it?"

"She's in no danger! She was never in any danger! Do you think her parents would hurt her?"

"Could you two please stop fighting? The guests are going to arrive soon and it would be very confusing if they dropped right in the middle of this."

"Did you get my pastry dough?" Grandmother demanded as she abandoned the battlefield to go back to the kitchen. Claire obediently followed up on her request and went to retrieve said item from the back room.

"Human folk and their superstitions," Grandmother grumbled, working the dough with her fingers, "it's a miracle our kinds have managed to make alliances and care for this land for so many generations. Seventy years I've been married to the man, tending to his every whim, and he still doesn't trust me. Listen to me, Claire: if you want someone who will hear you, you better find yourself a kindred. Humans are deaf as doornails."

"That's right, marry her off to your kin why don't you, so that this curse can continue," Grandfather grumbled.

"You don't look cursed to me," Grandmother gave him a sharp look. He gestured irate and went out to the garden to clear the path for the guests.

"He is still a little sensitive about Louise," Grandmother excused him.

"Maman, where is their world?" Claire finally managed to gather herself after the unexpected experience.

"I think you got the answer to your own question," Grandmother smiled. "Why don't you tell me?"

"It's right here," Claire muttered confused. "But that's not possible, it's not possible for to worlds to exist in the same space!"

"Why do you say that?"

"It's against the laws of physics, for one," Claire attempted an explanation.

"You should brush off on your science, bebelle. That is demonstrably not true."

"So how come we don't experience both worlds happening simultaneously all the time?"

"I don't know, dear. I think they're slightly out of phase with each other and only meet at the waters, which are like hubs in reality, doorways of sorts. When you stand in a doorway you're in both rooms at the same time, right?"

"Or neither," Claire frowned to the unpleasant thought.

"Or neither," Grandmother conceded. "You can't act upon the worlds but you can still see them both."

"So, how do you choose what world you're in?"

"You are where you think you are."

"Maman, what happens if I leave the door open?" Claire finally got the courage to ask the question which had plagued her entire childhood and young life.

"What happens if you leave a door open in the real world?" Grandmother chuckled softly. "Stop worrying so much, child, you're going to get wrinkles." As if prompted, the rolling pin skidded over the pastry and created a multitude of tiny folds. Claire sighed, rolled the dough back into a ball and started over.

***

There were so many people in the room! The warmth of the fireplace, the large gathering and the champagne rushed the blood to Claire's cheeks, making her look a little less poised than her professional Claire persona would usually allow, and a lot more human. The crew had brought additional lighting to make up for the fact that the old house was a little dark during winter. The glimmer of the old crystal chandeliers, the clinking of glasses and the gentle hum of the conversation blended together into a pleasantly monotonous rhythm that soothed Claire into a sleepy state.

If you turn on a light in a room full of mirrors after a while you get turned around and start wondering which one of the countless identical glows is the real one, but you got it all wrong: original or reflected, all light is real light. What you mean is which one is the lights' original source.

All around the gathering the real protagonists of the story, Claire's emotions, were on display. Every painting depicted a different state of mind but they all contained Claire's soul, like every shard of a broken mirror reflects the whole image.

She stood there, in the middle of the crowd, a little taken aback by this strange collective self-portrait, and by the bewildered realization that there was another spirit in there too - the original light source, the soul of reality.

The more she looked at this unexpected guest the more it became clear that there was no Claire, or wind, or stars, or feelings, just an endless series of reflections of this eternal soul in all the different mirrors of existence, in force, in matter and in spirit. The reverberations of its original spark were still propagating in the mundane aspects of being, building creation out of nothing under her very eyes.

"That's a very powerful image, Claire," one of the guests approached her, pointing at the painting with the water lilies. "A little dark, perhaps," she continued.

"You never mentioned us," Grandmother whispered in her ear.

"You know, my grandmother used to say the same thing," Claire smiled and guided her guest towards the painting to discuss it up close.

Claire had learned two things in art school, things which came in handy now and made her look cultured and profound without having to express any actually meaningful thought. The first thing she had learned was that if you're able to describe your art in words you shouldn't waste time and energy trying to produce it: the whole point of art is to express those things beyond the realm of normal communication for which there are no predefined concepts. The second thing she learned was that if one didn't manage to articulate an intelligent description of what the artifact was supposedly about, one was usually relegated to the dust bin of aspiring wannabes not to be taken seriously. Her lack of verbal skills had plagued her through all her years in art school, so upon entering the grown up world she had made it her life's purpose to learn this essential ingredient of social competence: the art of eloquent non-communication. After many years of practice she was finally fluent in its language of similes and metaphors which ran circles around themselves without relating to the subject at all and she could talk for hours about absolutely nothing without getting tired or being at a loss for words. Nobody in the room wanted to hear her talk about her feelings, she knew that, that's why she had painted them in the first place, so she regaled her guest with a detailed conceptual analysis of the piece, reminiscent of the talks she used to give when she was working as a gallery curator.

The guest listened to the presentation graciously and with well crafted attention, thus revealing herself as a sophisticated conversation partner, and offered back intelligent comments about nothing which made perfect sense in context.

"I'm just getting a feeling that you're starting to enjoy this," Grandfather whispered in her other ear.

"You know," Claire continued talking to the guest, eager to keep her promise to her grandmother, "my grandfather was a passionate art collector."

"I was what?" Grandfather frowned, puzzled.

"He encouraged me to pursue creative expression ever since I was a little child," Claire continued.

"If by encouraging creative expression you mean teaching you how to grow a decent tomato, then yes," Grandfather countered.

"So, you were raised by your grandparents?"

"Yes."

"If you don't mind me asking, why was that?"

Claire hesitated trying to find an answer and decided to evade the question as it felt too personal.

"Families are different. I had an enchanted childhood growing up here, I am very blessed in that respect." She smiled to the memories of her childhood, to her old friend, the oak tree, to her grandparents' presence and to this land filled with the spirit of life.

"No doubt," the guest responded politely, secretly wondering which part of this enchanted childhood had inspired the dark pool in the painting.

Claire was so absorbed in the excitement of the large social event that she barely felt the hand on her shoulder and was surprised when she turned around to find herself face to face with the tall man. He smiled and placed a weird piece of jewelry in her hair, something that didn't look made by human hands at all and glowed with its own inner light.

"Is that a family heirloom?" the guest brought Claire back to the room. She was staring at her hair. "It is very unusual."

Claire instinctively reached to feel the metal of the hair pin with her fingers. It was still warm and responded to the touch of her fingers with something that felt like a kiss.

"A gift from my father," she smiled, compelled to reach for the strange jewel again, but half way through the thought she remembered what her grandmother had taught her about preening in public and summoned all her self control to refrain from touching the pin again.

"So, you are still in touch with him then," the guest couldn't help her curiosity.

"We see each other on occasion," Claire smiled and nodded, secretly dying to find out what the jewel looked like: with its rounded middle and pointy ends it felt very much like a mouth. She excused herself and worked her way towards the entrance alcove where another group of people was engaged in lively conversation. They didn't seem bothered by the fact that they were standing in a doorway between worlds.

"Of all the times to get trapped between mirrors!" Grandmother commented, appalled at the sight of Claire approaching the alcove. "Can't it wait until your guests leave?"

"Claire, we were just talking about you," a voice from the gathering encouraged her to approach. Somebody grabbed her by the elbow and pulled her closer to the group, just past the edge of the mirrors. A glance at their reflection brought a feeling of recognition and a broad smile relaxed Claire's features.

"I'm so glad you could come, it means a lot to me," she beamed at a young woman who was standing very close to her.

"Are you kidding? I wouldn't have missed it for the world!" the latter replied, smiling back.

Living in two worlds was serious business, Claire waxed philosophical; one never knew what or who one was looking at, or was able to tell apart what was real from what was not.

"It's all real, my dear," the young woman responded to her unasked question. "If you see it happen, it's real."

"You're not getting away with this superficial take on the Cartesian argument," another person in the group jumped into the conversation. A lengthy discussion on the problems of interaction and causal impossibility ensued, during which Claire was uncomfortably quiet, since she hadn't the foggiest what they were all talking about and was trying to make herself as inconspicuous as possible to avoid being asked for her opinion.

Absent anything better to do she glanced at the mirrors again, curious to find out what the strange jewel looked like and she noticed very thin strands of light radiating from it and reaching out to everybody in the room.

***

"Well, that was quite a party!" Grandfather engaged Claire in conversation over a flavorful cup of coffee; the clock had just struck four. Grandmother had decided to surprise them and make the coffee Turkish style in a hammered copper ibrik over a low flame; the brew had a thick smooth texture and rich foam was floating on top, almost more food than drink.

"Yep," Claire sipped her coffee without elaborating.

"And?" Grandfather asked impatiently. "What do you think?"

"You know how I worried that I might not fit in with this crowd?" Claire laughed. "Now I know for sure."

"So, what are you gonna do, quit?" he asked displeased.

"Of course not, are you kidding? I'll just continue not fitting in," she smiled through the thick steam of the coffee like a guilty Cheshire cat.

"You're going for the misunderstood artist persona, I see," Grandfather smiled back, stuffing a small cotton ball into his cigarette holder before he fitted the cigarette in it. He lit it and took long slow puffs which he blew out in blue rings of smoke.

"For what it's worth, I think it was a success," Grandmother encouraged Claire. "People seemed to like your paintings," she said, then paused and qualified the statement. "Quite a few of them, I think."

Claire didn't answer, she kept smiling while she swirled the coffee grounds around the sides of the cup until their muddy texture coated it to the brim. When she was done she turned the cup upside down on its saucer.

"Whatever the future has in store is up to you, bebelle, not the coffee grounds," Grandmother laughed at her.

"No, go ahead," Grandfather encouraged; he smiled contented through the blue cigarette smoke. "I really want to hear."

"Might as well," Grandmother conceded and moved the little cup to a thick napkin to help it dry faster while everybody waited for the sweets. Claire got up and disappeared into the kitchen, returning a few minutes later with a plate of macaroons.

The late winter sun had almost reached the horizon and sent horizontal waves of yellow light through the west windows. Its intense glow felt even more unreal when paired with the crisp air outside. The logs in the fireplace had turned to ambers and Claire couldn't tell which glowed brighter, the fire or the intense yellow light of the sunset.

"The texture is too thick," Grandmother protested displeased. "Which setting did you use for the coffee grinder?"

"The finest," Claire protested.

"Never mind," she frowned, "I'll make do. Hmm..."

"What do you see?" Claire stretched her neck.

"Don't rush me," Grandmother pulled away to focus on the patterns. An intricate embroidery covered the sides and the bottom of the cup. "Well, there is one thing I can tell you, things are moving very quickly. I was just about to count three dots, and then two, and now just one, the grounds keep falling off even as I'm looking at them. So, before the last dot falls, in a unit of time, might be days, weeks, months, years, I'd say a month, you are going to catch a big fish."

"Oh!" Grandfather snapped to attention, pleased.

"Whatever it is, it's significant and very good for you," Grandmother nodded.

"What else?" Claire couldn't help herself. Grandmother turned to the side with the handle, the place of family.

"Kinfolk from the east, they're presenting you with the gift of water."

"What does that even mean?" Claire asked befuddled.

"How should I know? These symbols are very personal, you should be able to figure them out for yourself. It definitely looks like a dragon holding a chalice. Look, see?"

Claire followed Grandmother's fingers as they pointed out the outline of scaly wings.

"What kinfolk from the east?"

"What kinfolk do you have?" Grandfather's mood soured abruptly.

"Oh," Claire retreated.

"It looks like a big gathering too, in a clearing, maybe?" Grandmother continued interpreting. "I see two paths opening up to you, bebelle. You will have to choose."

"Between what?"

"Well, the right path leads straight to your heart and to the letter J," Grandmother nodded knowingly.

"I don't know any J," Claire protested.

"Of course you don't. You haven't encountered him, it or them yet. It can be anything, a person, a gathering, a place, a calling. I see three dots here. I'd guess they mean years."

"She'll be old and gray by then and shriveled like a prune!" Grandfather jumped indignant.

"Thank you, papa," Claire retorted.

"You're welcome, sweetie," he said, then turned to Grandmother. "You know I'm right! I'm of half a mind to bless a union with one of your kind before it's too late for it to matter!"

Claire pondered the fact that she had never considered whether those family members of hers who only showed up in the shadow even had names. A downpour of strange words fell inside her mind, some so strange they seemed impossible to pronounce.

"Anyway," Grandmother returned to her fortune telling, "the left path leads to an M and a very large chair. I guess that means a position of authority."

"Oh, good, two suitors then," Grandfather looked hopeful.

"I never said they were suitors," Grandmother replied.

"You're such a beacon of hope, you know that?"

"I never said they weren't either," Grandmother replied. "Oops, never mind, the M is gone." She avoided looking at Grandfather, who was giving her an annoyed stare. "What? I told you things were moving fast. Two years." She looked at Grandfather and reconsidered. "Or months."

"Oh, look here! Somebody's watching over you!" she said excited, pulling on Claire's sleeve to draw her attention to the outline of a ghostly presence looking down on her.

"I know, maman," Claire looked back at her, squinting a little to filter out the light of the setting sun. It was so intense it brought tears to her eyes. "I know."

***

"You have a visitor," Grandfather raised his voice as he passed the attic ladder.

Claire had been in the attic the whole morning, looking for a favorite set of brushes she distinctly remembered having seen there the last time she and Grandmother were poking around.

She'd been checking cupboards and drawers for hours to no avail and she really didn't want to be interrupted. She sighed, turned off the light and came down to the parlor.

A woman close to her age was already standing there, deep in thought, and seemed surprised to see Claire walk in the doorway.

"I'm sorry to barge in like this, I knocked and nobody answered," she mumbled, beet red with embarrassment. "I heard you were back, I hoped you wouldn't mind if I paid you a visit."

Claire tried very hard to remember how she knew her visitor. Her face looked very familiar, but she couldn't place her anywhere.

"I'm Jane, your cousin. We used to play together when we were kids, don't you remember me?" the visitor smiled and all the memories from childhood came back to Claire in a tightly knit package.

"Great!" she thought. "In comes the J, out goes my hope for love and romance."

"You really live here alone?" Jane looked around a little spooked. "People said but I didn't think..."

"Yes," Claire shook her head. "Where are my manners, please, sit." She paused to hear the clock strike noon and continued. "I was just about to have lunch, would you care to join me?"

"Sure," Jane tentatively agreed. "I didn't expect... I should have brought a bottle," she excused herself again, blushing even deeper.

"Bring wine to this house?" Claire started laughing heartily. "Grandfather would never forgive you. Have you seen the cellar?"

"Not since I hid in there the last time we played hide and seek," Jane smiled.

"It's Wednesday, we have beans," Claire announced, half apologetic, forgetting for a moment that Jane had lived there her whole life and everybody knew one didn't eat meat on Wednesdays. "I'll go grab a bottle of red."

Jane set another place next to Claire's, a little weirded out by the fact that the latter went to such trouble to set the table when dining alone; after that she sat down, not knowing what to do, and waited for her cousin.

"Not that bottle, Claire, not when we have guests!" Grandfather chided. "The shelf on the left; left, I said. '92. That was a good vintage!"

When she returned to the parlor she saw Jane stare at her plate, awkward.

"This is going to be uncomfortable," Claire thought and went straight to the kitchen to grab the bottle opener.

"So, it's been a while, I don't even know where to begin, how have you been?" Claire tried to strike a conversation as she poured wine into the glasses, but Jane blurted out the real reason for her visit.

"I hope you won't think I'm too forward, and I don't mean to make you feel weird or anything, but people have been talking, I'm sorry, I don't want to impose on you, but I heard...People say you can talk to them, that you can go to them. Please, Claire, you have to help me!" She reluctantly reached for Claire's arm, almost shocked to feel that it was solid.

"Help you do what?" Claire asked, shocked.

"Help me get to the other side. I have to talk to him," Jane started sobbing.

"I don't know what you heard but I don't even understand what you're asking of me," Claire mumbled confused.

"Please don't say no! I know you can cross to the other side, just like them, people have seen you, cousin. I know you've been there all this time. I understand they might not allow it, but I beg of you, please, I can't live without him."

"Jane, what are you talking about?"

"When you disappeared," Jane continued sobbing. "People said you went to the other side, that you can cross, like your mother. I didn't realize one could come back, I had to see it with my own eyes."

Claire took a big gulp of the wine to gather courage and continued.

"I went to art school, Jane, in Saint Louis, and then I worked as a gallery curator and as an art columnist. I am now at crossroads in my life and I came here to figure out what to do next."

"Don't lie to me, Claire. People have seen you, over the years, walk through the garden at night. They thought you were a ghost."

A chill went through Claire's bones when she tried to figure out if it was possible, on one of the occasions when her kin had shuffled her through time, that somebody might have seen her. She hadn't taken into account until now that if they could move her back in time from fall to summer, there was no reason why they wouldn't be able to move her back through entire years, or decades.

"I wish I could help you, Jane, but I have no idea what you're asking of me," she tried to extricate herself from this surprise challenge.

"Claire, I can see your markings," she pointed at her fingers, "I know you can do it! Mother would kill me if she knew I was here, everybody in town thinks this mansion is haunted, they say it's cursed, but I don't care, just get me to Aaron."

She turned Claire's hands over and the latter noticed, bewildered, that there was still a shimmering of dust on her fingertips.

"Who's Aaron?" she asked to play for time.

"My boyfriend," Jane whimpered.

"Why is he...wherever you say he is?" Claire tried to orient herself in this new story of her life, a story she was completely unfamiliar with.

"I don't know, they must have taken him, he was just gone," Jane started sobbing again.

"I'm not sure that I can help you, Jane," Claire tried to comfort the latter, feeling more and more awkward by the second. "I need a few days to think about it, find a solution, maybe?" she shot an arrow in the dark, which seemed to work nevertheless.

"Thank you so much, Claire! So much! I'll come back next week, when the moon is full. That would be helpful, right?"

"I guess," Claire replied, eager to end this unsettling conversation. She walked her cousin to the door, careful to avoid looking at the mirrors.

"Did I or did I not tell you to leave?" her grandfather confronted her the minute she walked back into the kitchen. "Don't you understand there is no way you can have any semblance of a life here? They'll never leave you be!"

"Is she telling the truth, papa?" Claire asked him as if she didn't even hear the previous comment.

"About what?"

"About me, and crossing to the other side, and Aaron," she said.

"She's nuts! Aaron couldn't wait to get out of here, he took the first bus to California, he's probably doing odd jobs, trying to make it as an actor. I bet he spun her that supernatural story just to get her off his scent. She's like a blood hound that one!"

"Joseph!" Grandmother interjected, offended, then continued talking to Claire. "He's right, though. Aaron isn't over there, the simplest reason being that he can't cross. No human can."

"What about the other stuff?"

"Which part? The part where this place is cursed or the one where everybody thinks you're a ghost?"

"About crossing and the Otherworld," Claire whispered.

"See?" Grandfather turned to Grandmother. "See where your decisions have brought us? Wouldn't she have been better off in New Orleans, living a normal life?"

"What does that even mean?" Claire continued her train of thought. "And what should I tell Jane next week?"

"You tell her she needs help and if she comes near you again you'll get a restraining order," Grandfather suggested.

"Why would I do something so mean to her? She's my cousin!" Claire objected.

"Everybody is a cousin around here, haven't you noticed? Tell her whatever you want, why are you asking me?"

He turned around and shouted from the hallway.

"I found your brushes!"

***

The week passed and the week after that, and no word from Jane.

"Her father probably found out she was here, I don't think she'll be back any time soon," Grandmother tried to soothe Claire's worry.

"It's not that, it's just...I'm not like her, maman. I'm not like anybody," Claire's face darkened with unease.

"It is a terrible waste of a life trying to be like somebody else. So you're not like everybody else. Nobody really is like anybody else, we're all different," Grandmother counseled.

"Not so different," Claire replied.

"Maybe not. So what?"

"So, how am I to live my life if I don't fit in anywhere?" Claire whimpered pitifully.

"Life is not about fitting in, dear. We're all just passing through. Sometimes we share the journey and sometimes we travel alone."

***

When the warmth and fragrance of summer welcomed her again Claire instantly knew she was dreaming. Purple clouds were gathering on the horizon and a few gusts of wind whipped the heads of the cattails announcing the thunderstorm in the distance.

The whole world looked like a patchwork of bright color swatches, tied together by barely visible strands of light. She picked up pieces of reality here and there, they seemed drawn to her fingers, attracted like tiny scraps of paper by static as if her entire being was charged somehow, she could feel it buzzing.

Reality felt soft and yielding under her fingers, she gently shook loose the bits that stuck to her hands and watched them fall back into place and meld into the background like a self healing mat.

Dazzled, she grabbed a handful of sky and closed her fist around it, feeling its dense substance resist the pressure of her hand with the elasticity of a rubber ball. She opened her fist slowly for a peek and there was light inside it, like all the essence of the sky had been distilled into the substance in her hand.

She grabbed a handful of the flower meadow and closed her other fist around it, and when she peeked inside it she noticed it glowed with its own inner light, soft like that of a frosted bulb.

The two lights didn't look alike at all, but there was something in their very essence that made them fit, they were two halves of the same whole. She brought her fists together and opened them very slowly, as if she feared that releasing the two essences and letting them blend too fast might cause unknown damage, and when her palms were fully open the mixed substances of the earth and the sky filled the whole space between them and stretched out like taffy when she pulled them apart.

She was still in awe of this miraculous transformation of matter when the silver glow of the giant full moon shone in her eyes and woke her up. The scarce background of a few bare branches in the middle of January made it look even larger and made Claire question whether she was indeed awake or she had slipped into another dream.

It looked like Jane had been right about the full moon after all. After she figured out that she was really awake Claire turned over and tried to go back to sleep, but there was too much light in the room. She worried that she might forget her dream so she grabbed her paint and brushes and painted it right then, in the moonlight, without minding what the colors would look like in the light of day. When she finished she went back to sleep and didn't wake up until three in the afternoon on the following day.

When she looked at the canvas the next day she was surprised to discover that she had painted light. Not a depiction of light, but light itself, which glowed from the inside of the layers of paint and illuminated the space around it.

It wasn't a single light either, it had several different temperatures, like fluorescent tubes, the warmer hue of the soft glow, the higher temperature of the cool radiance and a third, the hitchhiker, a silver hue, the light of the moon.

"What is this about, bebelle?" Grandmother approached, puzzled by the weird radiance whose source she couldn't identify.

"A lucid dream," Claire smiled.

"Oh, really?" Grandmother's curiosity was suddenly heightened. "What about?"

"I dreamed that the whole reality was made entirely out of light," Claire replied, feeling a little silly about making such an all encompassing statement.

"Isn't that a fact," Grandmother laughed.

10

"There is one thing I don't understand," Claire frowned while she sipped her tea.

"Lucky you! Most of us have quite a few of them," Grandmother teased.

"Remember what I saw in that dream? That reality is made of light?"

"Vividly," Grandmother smiled, pleased.

"What does that make me, then?" Claire raised her eyes and looked at her grandmother with a tormented gaze.

"What do you mean?"

"The shadow," Claire uttered. "I mean the shadow. Why am I haunted by the shadow if the whole world is made of light?"

Grandmother put the teacup down gently.

"Follow my thinking, if you will. If everything there is, if all reality is made of light, what is the shadow then?"

"The absence of light," Claire followed her train of thought.

"Which in this context is?"

"The absence of reality," Claire pronounced befuddled.

"Exactly."

"But there is no such thing as the absence of reality!"

"Why wouldn't there be? Everything in this universe is of dual nature. Everything but God."

"What does that even mean, 'the absence of reality', it doesn't make any sense!" Claire protested.

"There are more things under heavens than us frail creatures will ever be able to understand. It's the space between existence, the silence between the sound, the pause between thoughts: nothing."

"There is no such thing as nothing, if you can think it, it is," Claire presented her argument.

"That's right," Grandmother nodded. "Thoughts are reality too, and they too are made of light. Thoughts don't belong in the space between existence either. In the beginning everything came out of nothing, and in the ultimate sense everything and nothing are of the same essence, which they eternally exchange between themselves. Everything that was and ever can be came out of the space between existence. Everything that is yet to be is still waiting in there, absent time, all mixed together in a jumble of all possibilities, not subject to any rules or motives. It can never be explained, but you might be able to experience it."

"But there is no reason to believe this," Claire retreated into her rational model of reality for safety and comfort.

"Think about it, bebelle. Can you honestly say you can explain everything that has happened to you?"

"Just because I have this thing about the mirrors..." Claire went on the defensive.

"It's not about the mirrors!" Grandmother retorted. "It's not about your dreams, it's not about continuity gaps, it's not about the moon, it's not about your intimate connection with nature, it's not about your communing with the departed, it's not about your heritage, it's not about turning paint into light, it's not about anything. It can't be, by its very nature."

"So, what should I do about that?" Claire asked.

"Who says you should do anything? People always assume that doing is preferable to not doing. It's not, they're equally weighted choices. And stop worrying about the shadow. You create things, Claire. How can you draw water from the well if you don't go to the well?"

"What are you two talking about, leave the poor girl alone, she's weird enough already," Grandfather commented from the doorway. "Are you waiting for somebody?"

"Yes, the gallery curator is coming today to discuss the details of an upcoming interview," Claire answered.

"And you're going to receive her like this? This place is a mess! Where is the interview going to take place?" Grandfather looked around.

"Here, eventually," Claire preempted a protest. "Not today."

"When?" Grandfather persisted.

"That's what the meeting is for, to discuss the details," Claire repeated.

"You need to put away your art supplies, this is getting out of hand. First they were only in the drawing room, now they're spilling out into every room in this house. This place needs to look spotless!"

"Papa, I'll take care of it," Claire got up and started straightening up the room.

"You know, with all of this philosophical discussion about being and not being we're all going to drown in our own higher meaning. Here's a list for you: food, shelter, safety, family, he started enumerating exasperated. Last I checked you still needed feeding.

"Yes, Grandfather."

"What's for dinner?" the latter continued unperturbed.

"Pot roast," Claire replied.

"Is it in the oven?" Grandfather asked.

"No."

"So it's not going to be done in time for dinner and we're going to have to eat it raw," Grandfather continued going through his list.

"I'll get to it," Claire defended herself. "We don't want it to be overcooked either."

"It's five."

"Yes, we've got three hours."

"Three hours are not enough. It's going to be undercooked."

"Why don't you leave the cooking to us," Grandmother jumped to Claire's assistance. "I think we got more experience with that." Grandfather continued grilling Claire.

"What about your visitor? Is she going to stay for dinner?"

"I don't know, I'll ask her."

"Is there going to be enough food? What about dessert?"

"Papa, I'm perfectly capable of handling dinner."

"Just stay out of the creative well this evening, will you?" Grandfather mumbled, shuffling his feet down the stairs to the cellar to pick the appropriate libation for the event. "It's not like people are breaking the doors down to spend time with you or anything. You can at least try to be sociable to the few who do."

He returned with the drinks and lingered around the kitchen to kibitz the preparation of dinner.

"So they don't have male curators at this gallery?" he turned to a completely unrelated subject.

"Why?" Claire turned towards him, surprised.

"I don't know, are you going to join a convent?" Grandfather continued his train of thought.

"Papa, why are you so focused on marrying me off?"

"Because any moment now some being from beyond is going to emerge on the front lawn and take you away to God knows where!" Grandfather sighed dejected. "I wanted you to have a real life, Claire, a family, children..."

"Who in his right mind would want to come and live here? Everybody I know thinks this place is haunted!"

"They are kind of right about that, you know," Grandmother joined in the conversation.

"That's exactly why I asked you to leave, move to New Orleans, rent a place like a normal person, make friends."

"I don't want to leave! I'm happy here, why would I want to leave? I finally have a place where I can feel like myself. I don't want to get a fake life so that everybody thinks I'm normal. I'm not normal!"

"That's an understatement. This whole other side of your family qualifies as strange, but I think you take the cake. Thank God for your artistic inclinations, you can pass yourself off as eccentric for a little while, but you're going to fall off that social ledge pretty soon, by the looks of it. Let's make this brief: I want great-grandchildren."

"If it's meant to be it's going to happen! Why worry about it?" Claire managed to light the fuse under one of her grandfather's biggest pet peeves.

"So help me, it's like talking to the walls! What is it with women and their almost religious urge to renounce free will? There is no fate! You make your fate! I'll make your fate for you if you don't start soon! Give me strength!"

"What if I do marry a cousin? What then?" Claire took the opportunity to test the limits of said free will before it got rescinded and blown to smithereens.

"You can marry a cat for all I care. Just give me descendants. Who's going to inherit this place after you're gone? I made a promise to your grandmother's kin to take care of this land."

"I never realized you felt that way," Grandmother commented softly, choked by emotion.

"Speaking of seventy years of marriage," Grandfather retorted frowning.

***

It was cold but Claire decided to go out anyway, drawn by the mysterious mist which softened the contours of the naked trees and lingered close to the ground, pooling in low laying spots like water.

Here and there the oak moss had already started growing and it streaked lime green accents on the dark branches, making them look fuzzy and soft in the diffuse light of the morning.

Claire wrapped the shawl around her shoulders, shivering a little in the humid chill, fascinated by this eerie landscape which seemed to morph under her eyes, shifting surfaces and colors on what was supposed to be a static image. Nature was strangely quiet - no wind, no birds, no sounds of tiny critters shuffling the fallen leaves under their footsteps.

She started walking towards the oak tree and the mist swirled around her ankles, making waves like the surface of a pond. Without a thought she bent down and tried to feel this elusive surface, this cool breath of the earth that folded wet ribbons around her hand with the obedience of a beloved pet.

Her surroundings looked like a newborn place outside of time, young and innocent and trying to feel its ties to the rest of existence.

She knew her strange kin was there, just like in her dream, even if she couldn't see them. She knew that they were there watching her play with the mist like a child, and she felt self conscious all of a sudden as if she'd done something wrong. For a moment she saw herself from outside, with the bright colors of the shawl melting in the mist and a fine dusting of frost in her hair, and then her image receded into the water color surroundings and back into her self.

"Claire," Grandfather called from the porch, "breakfast!"

She turned to go back to the house and the mist followed her movement in a strange slow dance, hanging around her body like a loose garment whose long train trailed behind her over the barren leaves, occasionally dragging them in its wake.

The smell of coffee welcomed her on the porch and she hurried past the mirrors, failing to notice that when she passed between them the contours of her reflections softened and melted, casting waves on the surface of the glass.

"Ugly weather," Grandmother shivered, looking out the window into the mist.

"You don't like fog?" Claire asked, too cheerful for the context.

"Who likes fog?" Grandmother replied surprised. "I can feel its chill down to the bone, eh!"

Claire didn't respond, still covered in the hoar of the fog and feeling secretly comforted by its cool embrace. The smell of brioches reached out from the oven and changed the light in the room: everything had turned a shade warmer all of the sudden, smothered in butter and vanilla fragrance.

"Are they cheese or fruit?" Grandfather stretched his neck towards the oven, trying to guess by the aroma.

"Cheese," Grandmother opened the oven door to check if the pastries were done. She turned down the heat and set the timer for five more minutes.

"I'll have to tend to the garden soon, it looks like we're going to have an early spring this year."

Grandfather scrutinized the weather outside with the knowing gaze of a seasoned skipper who tries to make out the moods of the sea. There were many ways to travel in this world, it occurred to Claire as she watched her grandfather being transported to spring and to a completely different emotional space which didn't bear any resemblance to the unfocused view outside the window. In his mind the flowers were already blooming and shy seedlings emerged from their underground slumber, looking for supports. A singular focus centered his emotions into a smooth flow and he forgot all about the breakfast and the cool mist and went straight to planning next year's harvest.

"Joseph," Grandmother brought him back to the here and now. He shook away the reverie and asked.

"Are they done?"

The brioches emerged from the oven, golden brown, soft and dripping with melted cheese, sugar and vanilla from the places where their seams had burst open.

"When are people coming to till the soil?" he turned to Claire, biting into the delicious pastry, still hostage to his previous field of focus.

"Early February, just like last year," Claire replied.

"You should talk to them, have them come sooner this year, it can't hurt to have a longer growing season."

"Sure, if you think so," Claire didn't contradict him. "You know, with all this advice you're giving me people are going to start thinking I actually know what I'm doing," she joked.

"I should hope so, I taught you long enough," Grandfather countered. He grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil and started laying out the quadrants for the rotation of crops, parceling out squares and rectangles for each and every culture. The outcome looked like the lithograph of a strange language of symbols, the language Grandfather used to communicate with the earth; she could swear, cross her heart, that the earth understood it.

"You should try different tomato varieties this year, the ones we had last year were a little bland." He thought for a bit and penciled down a long list of options while the rest of the brioche was getting cold on the plate beside him.

Meanwhile Claire kept looking out into the mist, thinking how strange life was, and how she had never envisioned herself as an artist or a keeper of the land, and how all the choices she had made earlier in life had absolutely nothing to do with the place she was in right now, a place which felt so natural to her soul she didn't think to question it. She recalled her grandfather's proclamation of free will and thought that if there was such a thing it must have been carefully hidden beneath the layers of rational thought, in a place where it made revelatory sense but one couldn't for the life of them explain why.

"Finish your brioche," Grandmother nudged Grandfather and he finished his pastry without thinking about it, completely elsewhere.

***

"Careful with the wires!" the interviewer cautioned one of the movers who was carrying a box so big he couldn't see anything in front of his face and was about to trip on a cable. "This goes in the other room. Claire?" she turned to the host who was standing in the middle of this chaotic work in progress with a helpless and completely inept look on her face. She stared back in lieu of an answer.

"You are going to be sitting in this chair, by the fireplace, we should light a fire in it, by the way, get a warmer feeling in here, it's a bit dark as it is. What are you going to wear?"

Claire stared back at her in a panic, because she hadn't given any thought to the wardrobe.

"Never mind, we'll find you something. Can you sit in the chair, please, so we can get the lighting right? Jack, get the filters!"

Several giant white umbrellas filled all the space in the room, surrounding the chair in which Claire sat obediently. She experienced this surprise reshaping of her familiar surroundings like a close encounter of the third kind.

"Ok, don't mind them, let's get back to your part," the interviewer tried to pull her focus back to the task and away from the constant shuffling inside the room which Claire's distracted mind found almost impossible to ignore. "So, we're going to go over your early childhood to get some context for your concepts, explain why you're living here, the mansion is impressive, by the way, it's going to look great on camera." She looked at Claire to see if the latter had any comments and was met by the blank stare of a person who seemed hopelessly lost. "Don't worry about all of this, you get used to it," she smiled encouragingly, deploring her luck for getting stuck with what shaped up to be the dullest interview in the history of broadcasting.

"What in the name of God happened in here?" Grandfather stepped in the doorway and looked around the room in disbelief.

"Told you I didn't fit in," Claire commented inside her head.

"You can say that again," he started laughing and left, to her great dismay, just when she was hoping for a little homeroom support.

"So, why here?" the interviewer gestured towards the old fashioned room filled with antique furniture which didn't jive with Claire's artwork, dark as it may have been, at all. What could possibly persuade a young person to renounce living in the world and take up what looked like homesteading in the middle of nowhere, all alone. At least that had some potential to be interesting, she let out a resigned sigh.

"This is where I grew up, I find I can focus better with fewer distractions," she said as she watched Grandmother carry a plate of cookies to the kitchen, at the same time gesturing towards Claire that she should offer some refreshments to her guests. The latter was just about to follow up on that, but realized the timing was completely absurd and reconsidered.

"This looks like a lot of work, who's taking care of all of this, I mean the grounds alone! Do you actually grow food here? When do you find the time?"

"I don't do it by myself, of course, people are coming to help out with working the soil in spring, sowing, harvest, fall clean up," Claire started to explain.

"So then, why get involved with it at all if you already farmed out the work to somebody else?"

"I enjoy it," Claire uttered, desperately hoping her grandfather would return to throw her a lifeline, but sadly that didn't happen.

"Is this an additional source of income for you?" the interviewer tried another approach.

"No," Claire replied.

"Then why do it? I'm trying to understand why you would split your focus instead of dedicating yourself entirely to your art. It's usually an all consuming endeavor, being in the art world, you can't afford to get distracted."

In all honesty Claire wanted to explain her reasons, but after she went over her non-human kin, talking to the land, the constant company of the departed and the time shifts she simply didn't know how to spin a believable story out of her life.

"Unless you consider art more of a hobby than a calling, and your true love is really agriculture," the interviewer offered the unlikely possibility, just to check it off the list. "Do you plan to make painting your life's work or is it just something you will be involved with occasionally?"

"No, I'm pretty committed to it," Claire defended her dedication to her craft.

"It must be hard to focus on your art while living on a farmer's schedule, is it not? Oftentimes the workday spans from sunrise to sunset, one barely has time to catch one's breath," the interviewer decided to work her way back to the fork in the road where Claire's mind had split and couldn't get itself back together again.

"It's not that hard, it helps with the way I see the world," Artist Claire finally managed to put words together in a sentence that sounded both true and sane.

"Not to mention allows you to honor the vow our family has sworn to this land," Grandfather commented from behind one of the filters, upset that he couldn't offer an opinion himself. "Whatever happened to keeping one's word?"

"That was your word, papa, not mine," she couldn't help herself, despite the unfortunate timing.

"Oh, yeah? Why do you have dirt fused into your palms then, if you don't care? I'm not the one talking to trees around here."

Claire abandoned the futile squabble.

"It would seem to me that you're at an impasse. Do you think you might come to a decision, sometimes in the near future, about which one of these callings is going to take priority in your life?"

"I'm not sure how to answer that, why do you see this as a problem?" Claire smiled and avoided the question, trying to buy herself some time in order to find an acceptable answer.

"So you're planning to live like this indefinitely?" the interviewer asked incredulous, trying to get some clarity on the subject.

"Claire, don't forget to tell your guests there's lemonade in the fridge," Grandmother raised her voice from the kitchen. "Claire?" she insisted to make sure her granddaughter had heard her.

"Yes!" the latter uttered loudly, forgetting for a moment that they were not alone.

"I have to say, I really admire your commitment," the interviewer didn't know how to react to this pathos filled pronouncement of faith. "I wish you nothing but the best, I truly hope things work out for you."

They settled the last few details about what they were going to cover in the interview the following morning and after that the crew set everything in place and departed, leaving behind a muddled Claire at a loss for words. How does one present the personal perspective that shaped one's life choices without the latitude to discuss any of the things that made it possible?

Claire had just discovered the limitations of eloquent non-communication: it didn't work when one actually wanted to communicate something. She was about to start crying as she was sitting in her chair inside this weird umbrella pit when the strong scent of violets filled the room. She lifted her eyes and noticed a thick bunch of white, blue and purple flowers stuffed in a pickle jar on the coffee table in front of her. She didn't have to ask herself where did one get sweet violets in February. She already knew they were most likely brought in from June.

***

The Otherworld had revealed its wondrous strangeness to Claire and she was taken by its beauty. She was eager to find out more about it, but there was one thing that irked her: the fact that she could be snatched from whatever activity she was involved in at any time and dragged down the guts of creation to weird places she didn't know existed with or without her consent. On top of that she was invariably chastised for these occurrences, as if she had any choice in the matter. In one of those rare moments when her self decided to shed its submissiveness she figured that if she was going to be scolded, at least it should be for something she did on purpose.

She approached the mirror with way too little trepidation given her forbidden intent and pressed her hand against the glass, smiling when she heard the crackle of energy currents unlock the gate between the worlds. Both worlds were there, competing for her focus, so she closed her eyes to the one she had entered from. She saw the path, still covered in dark leaves, and followed it through meadows and valleys to the banks of a large stream. There she stopped and waited for her kin to show up, she waited until the sun and the moon made a full circle around the earth. On the dawn of the next day a woman emerged from the water. She had wet hair the color of ripe reeds that stuck to her features. She didn't talk because she didn't have to but their silent conversation made Claire's face grow gloomier and gloomier until she ripped her hand off the mirror and found herself back in the lobby with Grandmother staring at her.

"What on earth were you thinking," Grandmother started, but Claire responded before she had time to add anything.

"I had to know."

"Was it worth it, at least?"

"I don't know, maman."

"You look sad," Grandmother noted, pushing her gently towards the kitchen where at least they could sit down. "What happened?"

"They told me I had to choose," Claire frowned. "They said I can't be in this world and in the other because they're too different for me to be able to wrap my life around both of them."

"It kind of makes sense if you think about it," Grandmother said.

"Why is that?" the young woman turned defensive.

"Well, frankly, Claire, this schlepping around between worlds, never knowing which one you're going to be in, it makes you look weird."

"Who said I'm weird? Give me one example," Claire pouted.

"Everybody!" Grandmother exclaimed. "Even crazy Jane thinks you're too dangerous to socialize with."

"It's not like I chose this," Claire got really upset.

"No, but you can decide how to respond to it. What did they say?"

"They said that I should join them and forget about this world altogether. They said there was nothing here that could even compare with life in their realm. They said that as long as I still have a foothold in this world I will never be happy."

"See? This is what I'm talking about. Now you're conflicted, your art suffers, your grandfather is upset, you can't focus on your tasks and you don't have any meaningful relationships. How do you expect to have a life when you don't know whether you're going to be in it from one moment to the next?"

"So what do you want me to do?" Claire protested.

"Give up the Otherworld. It's for the dead and for the beings who belong there. Leave it be and never go back. Forget about it so you can focus on your art and the people who love you right here."

"That's exactly what they said! If you substitute happiness for art, almost word for word."

"Why would you even consider doing something as unseemly as going there for good?" Grandmother asked revolted.

"Everlasting youth immediately comes to mind. Besides, I think their culture is more advanced than ours."

"I'm sure it is! That's why they need your grandfather to tend the land for them. They never do anything!"

"I don't think they need to do anything. They seem to be everything, or at least animate it," Claire continued her discovery process. "And since when is Jane the arbiter of proper conduct? Last time she was here Grandfather suggested a restraining order."

"That's because your behavior led everybody in town to believe you do unnatural things!" Grandmother retorted.

"I do do unnatural things! Does any of this look natural to you?"

"At least you can choose not to do them on purpose!" Grandmother grew increasingly upset.

"So it's perfectly fine if these things happen to me, but if I choose to do them of my own will, then they are wrong?"

"Yes!" Grandmother cut the conversation short. "Claire, I wish nothing but the best for you and I love you more than you can ever imagine and I'm telling you right now that you have to make a choice, God willing the right one. You can't go on living like this!"

"What's with all the racket," Grandfather joined the conversation at the worst possible time.

"Nothing," Grandmother decided to end the argument and watched the pot of rice milk on the stove in silence.

"I heard you two talk about advanced cultures and the spirit of things, you didn't cross to the other side, did you?" he looked at his granddaughter and exclaimed disappointed. "Claire!"

"There is no need to make a big deal out of this," Grandmother tried to smooth things over. "She made a mistake and she knows not to do it again. I don't think we need to dwell on it any longer."

"Heaven forbid!" Claire thought. "Whatever realities there are that don't fit with what should be my reason for living must immediately be wiped out of existence, nothing to see here!"

Maybe both sides had a point about the difficulties of living in two worlds if one were to consider this instance alone: she could have had a pleasant afternoon, comfortable and content and instead she was arguing with her grandparents and having to defend her choices.

After an hour of soul searching, which she spent in silence because everybody was now mad at her, and during which she reviewed her life beginning with early adulthood, she couldn't get over the absurdity of the proposition: she'd been nothing but anchored in reality and nose deep in making the right choices for her entire life out there in the 'normal' world, which turned out to be a fistful of nothing, then she came here, in this place chock full of 'not normal' and became Artist Claire. Now she had to abandon the realm which had actually inspired her to start painting again in order to 'be normal' and succeed in her artistic endeavors. The most outrageous affront to logic she had ever heard! On the other hand the other world, whose threshold she didn't manage to breach when she didn't have anything better to do now wanted her to abandon everything she had started and leave whatever passed for 'normal' around here in order to experience never ending bliss. Why not wait until after her earthly demise and do it then, when she didn't have other options anyway?

She managed to work herself into a state of agitation while thinking about all of this and got mad at both sides for trying to run her life for her and tell her how she should feel. An entire host of emotions overwhelmed her, blessed memories of child Claire at her grandfather's knee in the garden and the mundane details of life in the house of her grandparents, where there wasn't a care in the world, and then more feelings followed, of her place within nature and her intangible bond with the old oak tree who had cradled her dreams since she was three, who fired up her imagination, comforted her and forged her will. The two halves of the wealth of experiences which had made her who she was.

If there was one thing she was sure about it was that she didn't want to renounce half of herself.

***

The songs of nature had returned - cheerful birdsong, leaves rustled by the wind, and if one listened carefully, the sounds plants made when they grew, sounds usually unheard by human ears.

Claire had brought out a blanket and spread it out on the grass of the front lawn to sit on, just like she used to do when she was a child. She welcomed the warmth of the timid spring that lingered around her, barely holding itself together and trying not to get swept away by the occasional gust of wind. The new grass was bright green, and the just open leaf buds on the trees were bright green, and the tall shoots of the water plants that grew around the pond were bright green. For a moment Claire felt she was looking at the world through a giant emerald.

She listened to the plants grow and her soul got carried away by their stories - the struggle of the grass blades pushing through wet clods of dirt, the worry of the daffodils that they might have emerged too soon, the trees' relief to feel their sap push through the tips of their fresh leaves. She listened to the plants' stories.

Grandmother approached her with a shawl, unwilling to entrust her grandchild's well being to the fancy of the spring sunshine.

"Thank you, maman," Claire smiled at her.

"Having an early picnic?" Grandmother teased her.

"No," the young woman wrapped the shawl around her shoulders and stood up to follow her grandmother to the outdoor table for an impromptu cup of hot cocoa. "Just listening."

"Listening to what?" Grandmother's curiosity was stirred.

"The plants," Claire replied in a very natural tone.

The table was covered with a thin layer of catkins, the oaks had been really busy planning their offspring.

"And what are they saying?" Grandmother turned towards her, suddenly serious.

Claire gazed at her grandmother half in jest, trying to figure out if the latter really meant it. Grandmother was waiting, all attention.

"Aagh...that they are happy, I guess," Claire blushed embarrassed. This communing with nature she was blessed to engage in was a very private affair, one too intimate to share, it belonged to her alone. Besides, she didn't have the words to communicate to people what it meant to her, it was something that one could sense, or rather glimpse through the veil of reality, the life inside of things.

"Happiness," Grandmother laughed heartily, "that's a tricky little weasel. It sneaks out on you if you look at it too long."

People didn't seek happiness, Claire had learned earlier in life. The driven ones thought happiness was a fake concept invented by those who lacked the strength of character to pursue an actual goal. The disenchanted ones thought of happiness as selfish and sinful, proof that one deprived the world of their share of misery and suffering. Happiness only managed to transcend the day to day hassle under extreme circumstances, like unforeseen luck, or epic love, or triumph, and even then it didn't last for long, weighed down by the heavy ballast of shoulds and don'ts which immediately got triggered to seek and destroy it. Happiness couldn't weather burdens, they were too heavy for its weightless cloud. It could only circumvent them during distracted moments, when the mantle of the world fell off one's shoulders, but before the feeling that one should feel guilty about it had time to sink in. Happiness! What was that?

"It's like love, I guess," Grandmother continued her train of thought. "You know it when you feel it, but if you can't put it into words without altering its substance. Some things are only meant to be felt, not thought."

"Like the sounds plants make when they grow," Claire thought smiling, still feeling the joy of that green world whose sights and sounds she'd been gifted with.

"What are you going to do now that the world officially dubbed you a real artist?" Grandmother brought the young woman back to reality and dropped a bucket of ice water on the shy sprout of happiness that was trying to find its way through the dark pool of Claire's unconscious to the surface of her thoughts. It shriveled like a mimosa plant and rushed back to the bottom in a hurry, waiting for better timing.

"I don't know, maman," Claire provided a vague answer.

"You can't 'I don't know' your way through life," Grandmother said, unsettled. "You have to make a plan or something, think things through, stuff doesn't just fall in your lap, you know."

"What happened to man proposes, God disposes?" Claire went on the defensive.

"You're responsible for the proposes part of this saying, bebelle! What do you propose? It better be a list, not an item, so you can account for the disposes side of things," Grandmother responded.

"But what if things do happen, but not the way I thought they would?" Claire voiced her concerns.

"Let me save you some mental energy and tell you things never happen the way you thought they would. There! Now you don't have to waste your time worrying about that anymore."

"But then I won't be happy!" Claire exclaimed.

"Why on earth would you tie your happiness to the whims of the world? It's like hitching your wagon to a billy-goat! The world will make you glad. It will make you sad. It will make you mad. It will not make you happy. Tying happiness to things that don't last and over which you have no control is the very reason why it is so hard to achieve. If you don't mind me asking, weren't you happy earlier?"

"Yes."

"Did you have any particular reason to be happy?"

"The weather is nice, spring is beautiful," Claire started enumerating.

"But you were also happy with the fog earlier this winter," Grandmother reminded her. "I'm not going to comment on that one, to each his own."

"I guess I'm usually happy in nature, no matter what the weather."

"And now you've gotten one step closer to being truly happy. You know how placebo works? If you believe you are taking medicine your own body starts to produce endorphins which actually soothe your ailment. It works the same with feelings. It can be as easy as making yourself a happiness rock: you now have a peg to hang your happiness on. Every time you feel that rock in your hand, you remember it is about you being happy. You have tied happiness to something you can always reach, something right inside your pocket. Short of tragic circumstances you can draw happiness from that rock any time you want, just because you choose to do so, and that is your ultimate affirmation of free will. People never believe they can decide how they want to feel, but they sure can, most of the time.

Happiness works because it works, and you believe it works because it worked before because you decided to believe it would. This is a rational person's worst nightmare, but if it turns sadness into joy even once it is worth a million times more than the rational argument against it. The rational argument makes you despair. The irrational one makes you happy. Even rational people can condescend to this logic."

"So, what happens if you lose your rock?" Claire followed the logic of the argument.

"You can always make yourself another one," Grandmother burst out laughing. "That's the beauty of it: there will never be a shortage of rocks in this world. But about the planning. When are you going to start laying out what you want to do with your life?"

"Why? You said it yourself it's not going to make me happy."

"Of course it won't. But now that your happiness is going to wield itself instead of being determined by whatever may or may not work out, you won't have it interfering with your propositions anymore. It's an aside."

"I don't understand. Why bother attempting to do something if not for the hope that it would make me happy?"

"Because you can."

***

Claire was awakened in the middle of the night by the scent of tree blossoms carried in the breeze. She had left the windows open before she went to sleep to let in the fresh air of spring.

Outside the window the ghostly shapes of the flowering trees, all shrouded in white, kept sentry to guard her peace. The spirit of the land was awake too.

Claire listened to its call and went outside, barefoot and dressed in a long nightgown, smiling to herself as she thought that if one of the neighbors happened to see her right now they would certainly believe she was some sort of apparition.

She pondered the fact that she might be dreaming all this, or that she might have been transported by her unseen kin to another time, and in this mansion that never changed, on this land that never changed, how would she even know if that were true. It didn't seem that important anymore, this inherently human need to place oneself in time, time is just a measure of entropy for things fated to crumble away. It has no meaning in the perpetual cycles of nature, where one moves through stations, rather than advances in a straight line. She was walking into night, the essence of which all nights were made, essence which they all shared outside the tyranny of time. Whether it be today or a long time ago, or years into the future, it was exactly the same night.

Soon its darkness was going to be chased away by the sunrise and it would be morning, the essence of all mornings, infinitely reflected in the motions of the circular universe. And then afternoon, and then evening, and then it would be night again.

This was all life was, walking a circle between now and now again, giving birth to time in the process and measuring it by how many walks around the circle one had already undertaken. Time sped up the more one walked the circle, as if one's motion snagged its flexible boundary, tightening it and pulling it closer to the center in the process.

Moving around in a circle is meaningless until you realize that the focus should not be on the next step of the path, but on the circle itself, which brings present, past and future together and reveals the inner logic of existence. You can then understand the connections between the stations of the circle, bound in an impeccable mathematical balance, and use them to navigate the waves and currents of reality instead of constantly being battered by them.

Claire sat on the new grass, closed her eyes and held her hands out to feel the hidden strings of light that bound reality together run through her, connecting her to everything else, and she got instantly oriented in her world, in ways which ran deeper than thought, like birds and bats and whales and butterflies do, without doubt. She settled into this state of unquestioned peace, this state outside of time, and waited in there for the morning.

***

Throughout her entire life light and shadow had been facing each other on Claire's inner battlefield, her soul, equally favored and equally strong. Since the outcome of this constant battle showed up in her day to day life in the form of indecisiveness, she had moved the struggle to the canvas, where all of its epic details were brought to the foreground.

Grandmother was staring at this epic battle through the lens of Claire's latest painting frowning and unsure.

"I don't know, child, some times I wonder where all of this stuff is coming from," she drew closer to look at the center of the painting where a clash of something she could not define seemed to be taking place. "What does this mean to you?"

Claire wished she could explain it, but she couldn't. She couldn't even describe it to herself, it had just come out, raw and crude, from that dark pool where her real feelings liked to go hide to protect themselves from the scrutiny of the world.

"I'm not sure," she mumbled.

"Is that what you're going to name this painting when you send it to the gallery? I'm not sure?"

"How about Uncertainty?" Claire replied. "It sounds more sophisticated."

"It's terrifying," Grandmother rendered her verdict.

"You should try feeling it, it's even more fun that way," Claire thought but didn't respond.

"You are way too conflicted, bebelle. You should make up your mind one way or the other what you are about and stick to it, nobody can spend their entire life between worlds."

"What if this is what my life is really about? What if this is who I truly am, she who lives between worlds?" Claire had been born between worlds and had spent so much time in that spiritual neutral zone she didn't know how to be any other way. She had never fit in the real one, where her yearnings and experiences were deemed strange and uncomfortable, and she didn't fit in the land of eternal summer either, where she was too far removed from the levers of creation. The only place where she really felt she belonged was between the mirrors. There she could keep a foothold in both realities while watching the many stations of her nomadic soul.

"You should find a home, Claire. You look like you're living your whole life out of a suitcase."

"But I have a home, maman. This is home," she pointed to the house and the garden with a broad gesture of her arms which looked like she had just let go of a warm embrace. The gesture stretched out farther into the horizon, to distant cities, to the edges of the sea and to the clouds, as if the universe itself was home.

Grandmother shook her head in disapproval and abandoned the subject.

"So, when is I'm clueless and it terrifies my grandmother going to the gallery?" she asked.

"Well, I have to finish it first," Claire pointed out.

"You are telling me that this isn't finished yet?" Grandmother shuddered. "I don't think you can fit anything else in there, not without having all of those whatever they are burst out and scatter all over the place!"

"You mean my feelings," Claire defended herself. "All of the me's."

The Claire collective stopped in its tracks in a moment of rare solidarity to assert its components' rights to exist, independently and together, at least in a painted world if not elsewhere.

"Quick, grab a broom and a dustpan and gather Claire's brains," Grandfather joked from the doorway. "It looks like they spilled all over the floor."

A cloud passed over the sun and the room turned dark all of the sudden, and then bright again, like some being in the sky was playing with the light switch. Claire squinted instinctively and when she opened her eyes she was outside, basking in the sunshine; the light was too strong for her to see anything, but she could hear giggles and bird song and the wind rustling leaves. A gentle touch brushed a strand of hair off her face and then she was back.

"We ran out of toothpaste and paper towels, care to join me for a quick run into town?" Grandfather asked, bringing her down into reality in the process.

Claire nodded; she put down the palette and the brushes, took off her apron and followed him to the door. Grandmother watched them from the porch until they reached the end of the alley and disappeared from sight.

11

The newborn sounds and scents of summer filled Claire's heart with an indescribable longing, with the mottled memory of something long gone, very precious and almost forgotten. She panicked like she had suddenly been made aware of its absence. She searched for this something for days, inside her soul and out in the garden, in every blade of grass and every gust of wind. She searched for it in the stones around the pond and in the song of the tree frogs, in the scant light of the starry night and in the blooming of lilies.

The more she searched for it the more it eluded her, that buried impression from long ago. It was lost to the fog of old memories and she couldn't tell whether it was from this life or from before, from a time with other rules, with other contexts.

This elusive memory was holding the key to a door Claire had been forbidden to open but never given the reason why.

In a daze she lifted her hands to her face and turned them, facing up, joined at the edges like an open book. She looked at them for a while, noticing the subtle details of her palms, the little acid dimple that she got from decorating Easter eggs when she was five, the place where she had cut her index on a broken cup when she was eight, the strange way fine lines joined into a little star at the center of her left palm, the soft fleshy mounds at the base of her fingers, the network of blue veins which showed through the thin skin of her wrists, the translucent tips of her fingernails. As if summoned the sun came out from behind the clouds and filled her palms with light; for a precious second she remembered what she was searching for, a second, no more, and then it was lost.

She folded her palms together in an attempt to capture that flash of remembrance in the memory of her cells at least, if she couldn't do it consciously, she tried to hold on to it a second longer, maybe feel its substance in her hands, like she had felt the scent of violet or the shape of the fog. The memory lingered for a while, struggling to escape her closed palms with a fluttering of butterfly wings and warming up her hands in the process, and then it melted into nothing.

Claire reluctantly opened her hands, fearing that whatever was inside them was trying to trick her and pretend it was gone, just to escape the second she let go, but there was nothing, only the touch of the wind.

"What on earth are you doing?" Grandfather exclaimed bewildered. Claire figured how strange she must have looked, reading her own palms like a book. She put her hands down and smiled, embarrassed.

"Nothing," she said. "Just trying to remember something."

"And you think your hands are going to reveal it?" Grandfather continued unsure.

Claire didn't answer, but that was exactly what she unknowingly expected. Everything there was to know that her mind couldn't recall or understand her hands brought out from the depths of her soul for her: the feelings in her paintings, the touch of the unseen substance of the world, the expression of inexpressible thoughts. Claire's hands seemed to live under the direct orders of her higher self in a quasi autonomy of sensing and motion that only made sense in retrospect. They were the maps of her soul, her hands, maps, tools, mirrors of her life. They allowed the world to share its essence with Claire and blend it into her being in a soft flow that did not require explanation. Her palms were open doors to everywhere.

"I don't know," she answered, smiling. "I guess I'll just have to try them and find out."

Grandfather rested his hand on Claire's shoulder and she could feel its familiar warmth and weight like she did so many times growing up.

"I hope they do, sweetie," he sighed. "I hope they do."

"What are you two talking about?" Grandmother showed up from the porch.

Claire expected Grandfather to crack a joke about her weird contemplative session, but he looked serious, consumed by a thought.

"Nothing," he said, looking up at the fickle sun which moved in and out of the clouds in a strange game of peekaboo. "I guess we're going to have some rain later this afternoon, I'll go pick the tomatoes, I don't want them to crack."

Grandmother was surrounded by a cloud of violet fragrance and Claire, whose senses liked to play tricks on her and cross wires in ways that shouldn't be crossed, thought she was having one of those moments again, like the time when she had smelled colors.

"I figured I'd use it," Grandmother chuckled embarrassed. "Be a shame for it to go to waste. Remember when we found the bottle in the attic? They don't make this perfume anymore, that's a pity."

As if to disagree the thick clumps of sweet violets at their feet reflected the scent, stirring echoes of it like waves in a pond, if only a little greener and a little less intense. The wind mixed the perfumes together and then there was one and it had familiar top notes - the shrill scent of the color violet and the unmistakable smell of the garden right before the rain.

"It's good for the plants," Grandmother nodded. She looked at the sky, where rain clouds were gathering fast, like they do during summer storms, and smiled, pleased like she'd been presented with a gift. "A strong summer rain is a blessing from above," she looked at her granddaughter whose worried face looked almost comical. "You look like you're going to tell nature that you don't approve!" Grandmother burst out laughing. "Let it rain, bebelle! Let it rain!"

The first drops started falling, large and heavy, and Claire's hands answered their own calls again. Without thinking she lifted them and turned her palms up to catch the gift from the sky in their shallow bowls.

***

That night she dreamed she was walking on a long bridge. It was made of gossamer and glowed with the strange shimmery dust that was still stuck on Claire's fingers.

It crossed a deep chasm, high up in the clouds, and stretched so far in both directions that she couldn't see the end of it. She tried to look down to find out how high up she was but she couldn't make up the world below it in the mist, and the call of the void made her dizzy and lightheaded. She jolted back, instinctively holding on to the railing for dear life, unsettling the bouncy surface in the process. The bridge wavered for a while, flimsy and immaterial; its substance appeared ready to tear at any moment, without warning, but for some strange reason Claire wasn't afraid, just curious and filled with the hum of anticipation.

Somewhere in the distant mist she could distinguish vague shapes and she really couldn't tell whether they were mirages of the fog or real beings advancing towards her.

She started running towards them but it seemed that the faster she ran the farther they got to be from her, although that was surely an illusion, because she could see their faces clearly by now, she could see their welcoming smiles even from that distance.

Those beings, whoever they were, had something important to share with Claire and she worried in her dream that she won't be able to get close enough to them to find out what that was.

The closer she got to the midpoint between her and them the more her body became immaterial, she could see through her hands now, and through her feet, and through the bridge beneath them. There was nothing there, she was walking on nothing, she was made of nothing, she was the same essence with the nothing.

She made a note of that and kept running as if it didn't matter at all, as if she had finally understood that she was more than that body and that this place responded to different laws than those that ruled regular reality, and what essence she was or was not made of was just a detail. An ever changing detail.

As they approached her, the beings of the mist took on corporeal substance, growing more solid with every step, and by the time they met in the middle she was so insubstantial she passed through them, like wind through a sieve, and found herself behind them, melting into the mist.

She turned around and ran after them, gaining substance in the process, and stopped when she figured out what their message was. She played with her bodily state for a while, walking back and forth on the bridge to turn from solid to immaterial and back, and when she felt confident enough that she could turn her body solid at will she walked into the mist, eager to find out what was hiding inside it.

***

What a strange gift, she thought. What a strange gift it was to be able to touch the heartbeat of existence with her hands. She grabbed a handful of soil, warm and fragrant in the afternoon sunshine. It was dark and shiny, it smelled of mushrooms and forests and clumped loosely in her fist: the crowning glory of garden soils.

She let go of it and brushed her hands against each other, her spirit far away, her heart split between this and the other world, her mind struggling to reconcile living in such an impossible bind.

Ever since she had returned to her childhood home she had been feeling like she was living on borrowed time, like life was expecting her to choose between the options it had laid before her and her decision was overdue. The almost unbearable weight of this imperative burdened her every thought and interaction and made her anxious for no reason.

"What is bothering you, bebelle?" Grandmother asked kindly.

"It's hard to explain," Claire welcomed the counsel. "I feel like I have to choose between things I can barely understand."

"Like what?"

"I don't know, who I should be, I guess. It doesn't make any sense, right? Why should one choose who one should be. Aren't we already who we are? What does that even mean? Besides, I don't want to choose. You always lose something every time you make a choice."

"You'll have to choose something eventually," Grandmother argued.

"Why?"

Grandmother didn't answer. The obvious answer, that one couldn't be in two places at once and be all things to all people didn't seem to be enough to satisfy her granddaughter's quest for meaning.

"What do you want to do?" she asked instead.

"I'm doing it right now," Claire responded. "I keep hearing people expect something else from me and I can't understand what that is or why?"

"Because you're always looking like you're stuck waiting," Grandmother offered the answer. "Nobody lives in the world of all possibilities. People usually pick one and stick with it."

"Why?"

"Because otherwise living becomes impossibly hard."

Claire frowned and turned quiet. She felt like a curtain had been lifted and she could finally see her life the way it truly was - a never ending tree of binary choices influenced by the pushes and pulls of emotions, desires, ambitions, societal rules, unquestioned traditions and tacit priority rankings, a tree whose branches had indifferent value and whose only function was to impose the choice. But having to choose meant having no choice at all because it meant that this tree-like version of her life did not belong to her, it was nothing more than a set of preselected one way doors with already determined destinations: Claire the urban artist, Claire the homesteader, down to earth Claire, Claire who'd gone with the winds, Claire at life's crossroads. Slices of Claire, layers of the Claire onion, not a whole Claire at all. It was like the world was attempting to build an almost Claire person out of random pictures of her that other people had taken, according to their own priorities and beliefs. There was no room in this paper mache replica of herself for things that hadn't happened before, for inexplicable experiences, for wandering off the path. She was living in a world that had been stripped of color in order to eliminate the things which could not be rendered in black and white.

She got up and went back into the house through one of the side doors of the parlor, with Grandmother following behind her without a word. She hesitated a second and then continued walking and only stopped when she reached the alcove between the mirrors. Infinite replicas of herself got lost into the distance in both directions. All the Claires that she could possibly have been were already there, she carried them with her everywhere she went, but she could only differentiate between them when she stood inside the prism of the mirrors.

With measured gestures she brought her palms together in front of her heart, then turned them outward and reached for the door handles; she swung the heavy doors open in one sweep with an imperative gesture that gave them such momentum they barely missed the edges of the mirrors. Claire placed her hands on the surfaces of the glass and felt the rush of current run through them and into her blood; the sights of the other world blended seamlessly into the picture in front of her eyes and the two became one: her new reality. A larger existence was staring back at her from the frame of the doorway, daring her to take the first step.

She walked past the threshold, half expecting the world to dissolve behind her, but when she turned around she saw the familiar decor of the foyer with her grandparents standing in the middle of it and watching her in dismay. She waved at them and started down the stairs of the porch towards the long alley between oaks that faded into the mist. It had been raining all morning and the heat of the afternoon sun was raising steam from the earth in wispy strands. They rambled across the landscape, woven together into a thin veil that concealed the reality behind it.

As she walked down the path the world surrounded her with a wide harmony of being that overwhelmed her senses. Her ears tuned in to the sweet sounds of nature one doesn't usually pay attention to, her eyes filled with tears at the splendor of colors and her surroundings were permeated by the strong scent of violets and rain. The senses fought each other for a moment and then suddenly snapped together like atoms binding into a stable molecule, to reveal the larger whole. There was sunshine in it, and rain, and birds, and tree frogs, and Claire's family line, spun together from spools of different colors. Their strands were twisted together so fine that the resulting thread didn't resemble either of them, it looked like something entirely different.

The thought that different Claire might be nothing more than another destination in her set of one way doors, another place of no return, bothered her, so she turned around and pulled gently at the veil of mist with her fingers. The steam yielded to her move, obedient, opening for her a view of the house with her grandparents standing in the doorway. The world moved slower for a moment and she stopped to watch it, her arms still wide open in an embrace.

Claire had yet to understand it but she had already made her choice, like many of us do, by following her instincts and without even being aware of what she was doing. She had decided to make her life the bridge between these two realities which were not so different from each other that they couldn't interface. She had decided to live neither in one world nor in the other but always in both.

Her grandparents muttered to each other from behind the frame of the doorway, which seemed worlds away right now, and Claire could hear them through the thin veil of the mist.

"Can you believe she left the doors open again?" Grandmother turned to Grandfather, outraged. "Claire! Claire! Come back this instant and shut the doors before you let God knows what into the house! Claire!"

But Claire was lost into the splendor of her worlds and she couldn't even tell which world she was looking at, but it didn't matter very much right now when she watched the two realities reflect each other, bound at the frame of the doorway like pages in a book.

About the author

Visit Francis Rosenfeld's Blog at

https://francisrosenfeld.com

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Other books by Francis Rosenfeld

Discover other titles by this writer at Smashwords.com:

 https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/FrancisRosenfeld

Terra Two

Generations

Letters to Lelia

The Plant – A Steampunk Story

Door Number Eight

Fair

A Year and A Day

Möbius' Code

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