Lost Hours

 Every spring, Matilda set the clock forward an hour, only to reverse the process in the fall just as she started noticing the days shortening, making them even that much shorter. She idly wondered where the time went, that hour that got cut out between 2 and 3 a.m. and then added back again later in the year. When she had been a child, her father had explained Daylight Saving thus: Finding his blanket was too short to cover his toes, the owner thereof cut a section from the top and sewed it on the bottom, so that the length remained the same, but the distribution of material changed. That was all very fine and well when it came to explaining DST and our return from it. It did not explain where that single hour went for the six or so months until it was returned to its rightful place.

Tonight was the time change, springing forward, and Matilda was determined to find out. She made herself a pot of tea and got comfortable in the armchair with a book, a mystery thriller, so that she wouldn't be tempted to close her eyes and doze off, and set a timer to go off just before 2 a.m. when that hour would be cleanly snipped from the agenda and her computer clock would flip to 3 a.m. automatically.

In the middle of a riveting car chase scene, the microwave timer beeped, and Matilda looked up. Two minutes left to Standard time and then DST would kick in. She laid down the book and waited, watching the seconds lapse on the virtual clock on her laptop monitor. At precisely 1:59:00, a small animated icon of an elf or gnome or some other mythical creature crawled out of the edge of her monitor and traipsed across her screen. Perhaps it was a brownie or a hob. Matilda was sadly ignorant of the denizens of fairyland, in spite of having read her share of fairy tales as a child.

The small creature carried a net and a jar, and wore a tool belt with a knife, hammer, pliers, and other tools of a carpenter's trade. Intrigued, Matilda watched as it positioned itself next to the clock counting up, readying itself for the moment 2 a.m. would normally strike. It readied itself with its knife in one hand, net in the other, and at precisely 1:59:59, swiftly cut 2 a.m. free, catching it deftly with the net, and then sliding it into the jar and corking it firmly. 

The little creature then examined the new time to make sure it was a seamless join before returning its tools to their rightful places and reversing steps toward the edge of the monitor from where it had emerged, carrying the jar in a sack pulled out of a back pocket. Just about to disappear at the edge of the screen, it looked outward and saw Matilda staring at it, wide eyed and open mouthed. It stopped to wave and smile, then vanished. Matilda let her breath out in a whoosh! She must remember to reenact this vigil in the fall. She needed to know just how the little time collector returned the hour exactly to its place. 

In a warehouse somewhere, there are shelves of jars, each containing an hour sliced and preserved from all those time zones that observe DST, being carefully curated, until they are to be put back with no indication that they'd ever gone missing in the first place.

Words

 “Traditionally we begin every new session with words,” said the group leader.

“Words?” asked one of the members.  “What have we been using up till now?”

Words.  We have been using words, units of language, to capture ideas and pith them in display cases, pins stuck with surgical care fixing them where they can be seen and admired.  Words, taken separately and enjoyed for their iridescent casings, frilly antennae, delicate wings, glowing with a luminosity of their own, pulsating with an inner beat, words for their own sake, as jewels, as poetry.  

But we take those words and, like jewels and bits of precious metals and shining beads, thread them on a string, join them together so they are not individuals awaiting our scrutiny and admiration, but a colony, a line of ants toiling together with purpose, performing the task of story telling, of description, of making a garment out of threads.  

We cannot tell a story without words.  They are not always audible; they may be a string of images, like pearls, forming in our minds when we watch a ballet, or listen to a piece of music.  We give the abstract meaning through words, labels to first-encountered objects, to new experiences.  We talk about those experiences, make them into our own stories through the use of words.

The young mother revisits the details of her child’s birth.  It is a tale she never tires of telling, for someday her child will want to know his origins, and she will be ready with his story.

It is language, words, the joining together one after another of nouns, verbs, prepositions, conjunctions and participles which gives us the stuff of our lives, and when words begin to fail us, when we stop mid-sentence, unable to continue because the next bead to be strung has evaporated, or has been replaced by a black hole that creates an impassable lacuna in our train of thought, we start to panic; for we equate loss of words with the first signs of dementia, of decline which leads to the inevitable silence of death.

The story continues, is told from one generation to the next, and words are its vehicle.  Polonius asked Hamlet, “What are you reading?” and he, on the verge of madness, voicing a lament of the discontinuity of life ended too soon, the orphan forbidden to mourn, answered, “Words, words,” and slammed the book shut, for that story was over and done, as his own sentences unravelled into their disparate parts.

The Third-Floor Bedroom

I.

It all began when someone left the window open, not that that person was necessarily to blame. But the weather had been fine for the first time in months, sunny and dry, and the bedroom was musty and stale from being shut up all winter. As well, the occupant of that room regularly disobeyed the house rules and smoked in it, making sure no odours seeped out underneath the closed door. As a result, a stale tobacco reek permeated everything and a good airing out was certainly in order, especially as the weather was so fine.

Hilda never went into that particular bedroom unless it could not be avoided, and on this occasion she had an armful of laundry to deliver to the occupant who did not answer her gentle knock. After several moments’ uncertainty, Hilda turned the knob and pushed open the door, the reek hitting her like bus exhaust. She deposited her load of clean clothes on a chair and made her way through clutter and debris to the window. The curtains were drawn and the room was in darkness, so she pulled them open and illuminated a mess. Clothes lay scattered on the floor and other surfaces, a garbage can overflowed, and there were dustballs and ashes everywhere from the forbidden tobacco. Disgusted, Hilda unlocked the window latch, threw up the sash and let in a draught of warm spring air scented with lilies. Immediately the atmosphere of the room changed and Hilda felt that she could stop holding her breath.

Since she had delivered the laundry, she took a few moments to tidy, emptying the garbage can of its overflowing bag and making a mental note to bring up a fresh one when she returned to close the window. Pleased with her work, she closed the door behind her and went about her other domestic duties.

As it happened, the third floor bedroom’s occupant was away for several days, having business in another city. He had among his possessions a small, egg-shaped paperweight given to him by a friend of the family. It was carved from translucent alabaster and he liked to hold it in his palm, feeling its weight and the coolness of the smooth stone. Sometimes, if he held it up to a light source, it seemed as though a spot of gold gleamed at the rock’s centre, and surmised that it was a bit of a different coloured mineral caught in the matrix. The egg sat on a desk, weighing down a pile of papers, and sparkled in the sunlight coming through the open window. The speck of gold seemed to dance in its centre and give off a warm glow.

The afternoon waxed and then waned and the sun started its descent behind the woods that bordered the west-facing side of the house. Hilda forgot all about returning to change the garbage bag and close the window, only remembering later when it was already too late.

II.

It was all my fault, or at least that’s what I believe. I was the one who opened the window to air out the third-floor tenant’s room, which always smells like the uncleaned bowl of a pipe that has been used for burning the cheapest-quality tobacco. He knows the rules. Why he can’t go outside to smoke like the other tenants do I do not know, but there you have it.

It was a beautiful day and I opened the window and forgot to close it. That is definitely my fault. What happened next could have been avoided if I had not been so derelict in my duty.

After the sun set and darkness fell on that side of the yard, the glow bugs started to flicker, calling for mates. I’ve always loved that time of evening, watching the fireflies dance and signal to each other, and that night there seemed to be more than usual. They gathered among the trees where I could see them from the kitchen window as I did up the last of the dishes, and drifted upward out of view. Some were definitely fireflies, flashing seemingly random patterns, but others didn’t behave quite right. These were the ones that flitted upward while the others went about their buggy business.

It wasn’t until it started to rain that I remembered I’d left that window open, so I hastened up the stairs to the tenant’s room to close it. I knew he was out of town for at least another day, so I was very surprised when I saw light under his door and heard sounds coming from within. It was quite late and I was in my dressing gown and had no weapon of any sort with me and I was frightened. But I’m not called Hilda the Horror for nothing, even if in truth it’s merely for reminding the tenants to have their affairs in order for housekeeping purposes; so I screwed up my courage and opened the door to the third floor room.

I can barely describe what I saw. The lights were coming from glow bugs. They were almost like little people in shape but with wings, and they shone with light that just poured off them. Some were flitting about the room, but most of them were surrounding a paperweight the tenant kept on his desk, an egg carved from alabaster with a speck of some golden mineral at its core. I had noticed it earlier in the day when I’d delivered the clean laundry. The small glowing creatures were gathered around the egg, pulsating rhythmically in unison, and the golden speck was pulsating back! I could not move. It was just too unbelievable. As I watched, the glow bugs started pushing and pulling on the paperweight. It was too heavy for them and individually they were tiny, but together they managed to get it closer and closer to the very edge of the desk until, with a huge effort, they sent it crashing to the floor. I covered my mouth with my hand to stifle a scream.

III.

I do not know how long I lay cocooned in that cold alabaster egg. Flickering moments of awareness came to me through the ages, but nothing coherent. Perhaps a sudden jarring of my enclosure or great heat or cold would temporarily rouse me from that aeons-long slumber, but darkness would always return. When the sound of the faeries and their pulsating light finally entered my consciousness, I was truly awake for the first time in my existence.

I do not know how I came to be where I was—an egg has very little choice in these things. But when full awareness dawned, I saw that I was surrounded by flashing faerie folk. Their bodies pulsed rhythmically with light which I returned, trapped within solid rock. They were too small and weak to release me, so they rocked and pulled the egg to the edge of the ledge upon which I’d been resting and pushed me over, to fall loudly onto the hard floor beneath. The egg remained intact, but a hairline crack sprang into existence along the curve of the stone. The faeries tried to lift it up to let fall again, but the stone was too heavy and smooth for them to grasp with their tiny hands.

They were not alone, although they had not acknowledged the presence of the human woman standing at the chamber’s door, her hand over her mouth, an expression of amazement on her face. She strode into the room and the glowing faeries scattered, still pulsating but at a safe distance from the woman. She bent down and picked me up, her hand warming my egg. She peered at me, glowing, through the milky stone. Then she walked to the window, raised her arm and, with all her strength, threw my prison onto the brick walkway below. The alabaster shattered with the impact and I leapt free. Free! It was raining lightly as I unfurled my tiny wings and tentatively flapped them, then tested my strength and flew back up to the window and shelter. The woman was still there, staring at me, surrounded by faeries, some of whom were now perched on her head and shoulders. I hovered at her eye level and she tentatively reached out one hand, palm upward, inviting me to settle upon it.

IV.

The next morning the tenants arrived at table for breakfast to find there was none. Hilda the Horror could not be found. Telephone calls to friends and relatives yielded no news. She had simply fled without taking so much as her purse. Anyone who knew Hilda would agree that this was unheard of. But no one who really knew Hilda would have been surprised to learn that she’d run off with the faeries and the dragon she had helped birth the evening before. They were gone, perhaps to some magical place where she didn’t have to worry about tenants’ breakfasts or laundry or rule-breaking. The only clue was a smashed alabaster paperweight on the walkway outside and the curtains still flapping in the third floor bedroom’s window.

The Vessel

Karina looked in the mirror and wondered when she got old. It wasn’t yesterday. It wasn’t that morning. When, then? Yesterday she was walking the dog, briskly, feeling the morning sun on her face, a knitted hat keeping the tangle of her hair under control while it kept her ears warm. She had gone out to the Mortons’ dinner party with Ralph, feeling sleek and sexy in her black satin cocktail dress. This morning she had lain in a bath of mango-scented mousse and read a few chapters in a novel, and had not felt old. Even seeing her reflected nakedness in the big bathroom mirror had not convinced her otherwise.

But here in the Simon’s dressing room, squeezed into an outfit meant for a girl a third her age, she suddenly realized she had made a mistake. She wasn’t 25 anymore; she couldn’t pretend that she was. Her hair, naturally curly, looked like a witch’s thatch, the skin on her arms was loose, and her breasts sagged. Where was the flat stomach she had always prided herself on maintaining? An old woman stared back at her from the mirror, skin pouched under the eyes, jowls instead of a smooth jaw line, and her neck a mess of ropey wattles. Her eyes filled with tears and she changed back into her own clothes, sniffling.

“What’s the matter, Kar?” asked Ralph as she emerged from the dressing room. “Are you crying?”

Karina handed the clothes to the clerk and took her husband’s arm. “Let’s get out of here,” she said quietly. “I don’t belong in this place.”

“Want to get a coffee?” asked Ralph. Karina nodded and sniffled again.

Later in the coffee shop, over their lattes, she told her husband about her experience in the dressing room. “I don’t know if it was the light in there or if I’ve been deluding myself for years now,” she mused, “but I suddenly realized that my body has gotten old. I still feel good, but I look awful.”

“No you don’t,” soothed her husband. “You’re beautiful!”

Karina smiled. “You say that because you love me,” she said. “It’s sweet, but not realistic.”

Ralph sighed. “Don’t be so down on yourself,” he admonished. “All those flaws you think you saw: you’re the only one who sees them. You’re being overly critical of the vessel housing your spirit. It’s inevitable that our bodies are going to age. Human beings have built-in obsolescence. But no one really notices it. They’re seeing your soul shine through your eyes, hearing the love in your voice. Your body, how you choose to clothe it, isn't really important. It’s you we love, I love.”

Karina looked up from her coffee, eyes bright, and smiled.

Between the Cracks

     The edges of things are what fascinate him: the changing of seasons, waves lapping against the shore, the first glow of sunrise. As he lies on his pillow, before putting on the eyeglasses that will throw everything into sharp relief, he savours the blurriness around him, the softness that his sleep-filled, myopic eyes afford him in the morning. It is now that he can see the spaces between the molecules that make up reality, the passageways that should allow him into different worlds. Alas, he has never found the way through those openings. He can only gaze at them and wish in vain.

     Washed, shaved, dressed and bespectacled, Albert is every inch the unimaginative accountant. His world consists of ledgers filled with numbers and hard facts. There is no room for the unknown, the speculative. He wears dark suits with crisp white shirts, neatly knotted, unassuming ties, and his thinning hair is cut short. You would not notice Albert in a crowd; there is nothing remarkable about him. In a police lineup, you would most likely gloss over him.

     But for some reason after work that particular Thursday, after reviewing a difficult client’s complicated accounts and developing a headache that made his temples throb, Albert decided to stop at a bar on his way home. He’d never gone in before, but it looked dark and quiet inside, and he needed darkness and calm to settle the pounding in his head. He found a seat in a corner where he couldn’t see the television—mercifully with the sound off—advertising some product for premature, male-pattern baldness on an eternal infomercial. The bartender came over to get his order and he asked for a single-malt scotch with no ice. When it arrived, he sipped it slowly, appreciating the slow burn as it made its way down his esophagus.

     Albert fumbled through his pockets looking in vain for aspirin. He took off his glasses and rubbed the sides of his nose where they left imprints, trying to shake the headache. Someone appeared to have joined him in his booth, so he put his glasses back on, only to see an empty seat. ‘Strange,’ he thought, and took the glasses off again. Once more there seemed to be someone sitting opposite him, out of focus, but solid enough that he could not be mistaken.

     “Excuse me,” he said aloud, addressing his visitor, “do I know you?”

     The apparition reached across the table and tapped Albert’s spectacles. “Try them now,” he heard someone say.

     He put the glasses back on his nose and this time the person opposite him did not disappear. In fact, where the bar had been empty, it was suddenly crowded with people, the bartender obliviously wiping a glass out with a cloth. He hadn’t seen or heard anyone arrive. Where had these people come from? Why hadn’t he seen them before?

     Albert studied the person across from him. He saw a woman with long silvery hair, but her face was unlined and her eyes were bright and alert. She was dressed in what he took for rags and then realized were pelts of small animals, dozens of them, sewn together so that they overlapped with heads and paws hanging over the ones below. Those periwinkle blue eyes looked like they missed nothing. How had he missed her?

     “Hello, Albert,” she said in a voice like rustling leaves. “You probably wonder why I called you to this meeting.” Suddenly she burst out laughing, and Albert heard the tinkling of a glockenspiel, the clang of tubular bells and the peal of a carillon as all the strangers at the bar joined in her merriment. He could not hide his amazement. Either he was hallucinating because of the headache and the scotch, or he was just going crazy. The woman reached across the table and took his hand as the laughter ceased.

     “I’m sorry, Albert,” she said. “This must come as a bit of a shock to you, but you are gifted with the Sight. We’ve noticed you, we’ve heard your longing to travel through the cracks at the edges of things, but we haven’t been able to help until now. Your life is so regimented, you never let down your barriers, and it is just today that you have done something different enough that we could take advantage of your weakness. Thank you for taking off your glasses.”

     “How,” Albert stuttered, “how do you know what I was thinking?” He started to blush, wondering what other intimate thoughts this woman—whom he now realized was very beautiful—had read. She recognized his discomfort and smiled, making herself even more lovely.

     “Don’t worry, your secrets are safe with us,” she said. “Call me Olivia. These are my friends. Would you like to come with us? Would you like to travel through the spaces at the edges?”

     Albert looked around the bar, at the strangers who glittered in the dim light, shining with gems and iridescent feathers and silver and gold and he thought, ‘Why not? This is what I’ve always wanted, isn’t it?’ He considered going home to his cold and empty apartment, heating up a frozen meal in the microwave, reading his journals and going to bed as he always did at 10:30, alone, with only the prospect of more of the same the next day.

     “Just a moment,” he told Olivia, and signaled for the bartender. Albert paid for his scotch and gave the man a generous tip, then rose from his seat and said, “I’m ready.”

     Olivia took his arm and together, followed by the rest of the throng, they walked through the dusky twilight until they disappeared between the cracks.

Lost

The sky was reverberant with geese flying every which way in their V-shaped communities.

“They’re flying the wrong way,” Nicole said to Phyllis. “That’s not south.”

Phyllis looked up from her lattè and squinted at the chaos overhead. It was true, the geese were flapping and honking, but none of the Vs was headed south toward warmer climes.

“Maybe they’re lost,” she said.

Nicole didn’t think so, but she didn’t know why exactly. She’d read something about magnetic fields and wind directions and knew the geese were smarter than they looked, and that somehow they always ended up where they were supposed to. Phyllis glanced at her watch and drained the rest of her coffee quickly.

“Got to run, Duckie,” she said. “I’ll see you at Mother’s tonight.” Then she kissed her sister on both cheeks, gave her a quick hug, and hurried out of the café. Nicole sighed.

Ever since their mother had been admitted to the residence, the two sisters found they had less and less quality time to spend together. When they met, it was to grab a quick coffee and discuss the care and feeding of their mother, who was now incapable of either since her stroke. She missed just having girl talk. Now it was all business. Nicole thought of the eventuality of the old woman’s death and wondered if she would gain her sister back after she lost her mother. It wasn’t a pleasant thought. Instead she looked out the window and watched the geese arrow above, going everywhere but the right direction.

“Would you like something else?” asked the waitress.

“No thanks, I’m done here,” said Nicole. “I’ll pay at the cash.”

Leaving the café, she started rummaging around in her purse for the address of the bookbinder that she’d copied down from the phone book. She had a set of dictionaries that had been her grandfather’s, with a publication date sometime in the late 1880’s, and they needed to be rebound desperately. She’d written the address down hurriedly on a scrap of shopping list and shoved it in her bag, but now she couldn’t find it.

“I’ve got to clean this out,” she thought to herself, starting to get a little frantic. There were bills, receipts, concert tickets, kleenexes, a lipstick and several matchbooks, but the torn piece of yellow paper with pink lines was nowhere to be seen. “This is crazy,” she thought.

Another spate of geese honking made her look up and there, right in front of her, was the sign, Books Rebound. She let out a sigh of relief and headed across the street to the shop, only to be greeted by another sign in the window: Closed. “Well, that sucks,” she said to no one in particular. “What do I do now?”

Nicole stood still on the sidewalk and felt like a lost goose. The passersby milled about her, traffic made a constant roar, and the honking continued overhead. She didn’t know where to go or what to do. Her purpose of seeking out the bookbinder was lost, as was her sense of direction.

“I suppose I could go home,” she said, then realized she had spoken out loud and thought people might think her slightly daft. But she didn’t want to go home. There she would undoubtedly go to the next thing on her to-do list, right after “visit bookbinder”. In her mind’s eye she saw the list on the kitchen table, the bottom torn off where she had written down the address that she couldn’t find and now didn’t need. Just then her cellphone rang, and she grabbed it as a drowning man might lunge at a line thrown to him.

“Hello?” she answered. It was Phyllis. Hadn’t they just parted ways moments ago?

“Nicole, honey,” her sister’s voice said urgently, “come to the home. Now. They think Mom might be on her way out.”

Nicole snapped the phone shut, shoved it back into her overstuffed purse and found her car keys. Suddenly she had her purpose back, and her sense of direction. “But for how long,” she wondered as her eyes were drawn once more skyward. “For how long?”

Genie

“Pick a bottle and let your genie come out of it,” instructed the woman who had introduced herself earlier in the evening as Evening Breeze over Sweet Grasses, and the women seated cross-legged on the rush mats obediently reached toward the array of glass and ceramic vessels and chose. Paula sighed.

The entire session had been a bust, as far as she was concerned. It was Doreen from work who had suggested she sign up for the workshop. “I loved it!” the receptionist had gushed. “Breeze is fabulous. She was able to tap into all my deepest places where I was repressing emotions and memories, and I felt like a new person when it was over. You really ought to try it,” she had advised Paula. Was it that obvious? Could everyone see that Paula was carrying around a steamer trunk full of angst? Well, she thought to herself, if it would help her sleep better at night and stop obsessing over the things she couldn’t change then it was worth a shot. All she had to lose were several hours in a long line of evenings where she sat in her empty apartment, trying to stay away from the liquor cabinet and not eat everything in the refrigerator.

Evening Breeze over Sweet Grasses—she told them to call her “Breeze”—was a tall, middle-aged white woman (somehow Paula had been expecting a First Nations squaw in buckskins) in a long dress of cotton homespun tie-dyed all the colours of the rainbow. Her long, gray hair was braided with feathers and beads and she wore a necklace of shells and semi-precious stones. From her earlobes dangled more feathers. Paula resisted an impulse to roll her eyes when the woman introduced herself.

The workshop was being held in a small room at the local community centre which Breeze had transformed into a hippy den. The walls and ceiling were draped with printed Indian cotton sheets, the air was thick with incense and the only illumination was from a multitude of candles. A low table in the middle of the room was covered with various objects, and the floor was strewn with rush mats upon which the workshop participants were instructed to sit “comfortably”.

Breeze chanted a prayer, at least it sounded like a prayer, invoking the spirits of all the elements to join them in their journey of self discovery, as they uncovered the demons lodged in their souls and banished them to make room for the essences of sunlight and fresh air and clean water. Paula fidgeted and felt self conscious. She had never believed in the mumbo jumbo the priest had spouted on Sunday mornings when her parents had forced her to attend church, and she didn’t believe this either. But Doreen had said it would help, so she was willing, at least, to try.

The workshop participants were all women. Paula wasn’t surprised. She didn’t know any men who would sign up for this kind of activity. They ranged in age from a young mother in her early 20’s to a grey-haired crone of at least 80, with Paula herself somewhere firmly in the middle. As she looked around the room, she felt as though she were between a pair of facing mirrors, watching her reflections march from youth behind her to old age in front. She shook her head to clear it of that image.

Breeze asked the women to take items from the table, to hold them and feel them and let them evoke memories and emotions that they would reveal to the others. An orange stuck with cloves brought the grandmother to tears as she recalled the Christmas her husband had died, and the smooth marble egg induced the young mother to talk about her fears during her pregnancy that her child would be stillborn. Paula fingered all the items, but none moved her. They were just things. The other women seemed to draw from some kind of communal energy that Paula just couldn’t tap into, and she felt left out and vaguely cheated.

There had been one moment when she had picked up a a small bit of quartz and had thought of speaking about her own losses: the marriage that had ended in failure, the son dead in a motorcycle accident, her father in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s who no longer recognized her and her frustration at a job that she hated. But when she looked in the faces around her, at the expectation that she too could experience a catharsis that would set her free, her desire to unburden herself vanished and she simply passed.

Now she was to let a genie out of a bottle. Paula picked up a container of amber glass, only an inch high, a cylinder of a half-inch diameter and a quarter-inch narrow neck. A tiny bit of cork served as a stopper, sealing the contents away from the outside. Except, there were no contents.

Paula held the orange glass up to the light and watched as the candle flames warped in the cylinder. There was no genie in this bottle. It was as empty as the whole evening’s exercise had been. The other women didn’t seem disappointed at all, and she wondered if maybe it was she, Paula, who was somehow deficient, and not this white woman in the long hippy gown with the gray braids and tacky jewellery. She wasn’t even sure now why she had signed up for this workshop of self discovery.

Okay, she said to herself, here goes nothing.

She grasped the tiny bit of cork between her fingernails and pulled. Nothing happened. She sighed and looked up expecting to see her fellow workshoppers experiencing various revelations. They were gone. Evening Breeze over Sweet Grasses was gone. The rush mats and low table had vanished. Paula was sitting crosslegged on a sandy beach, the ocean stretching far off to the horizon where the sun, a glowing ball of red-gold, was about to plunge into the water. A cool breeze teased her graying hair from the elastic band that loosely held it, and she heard the cry of gulls in the distance.

What the…? she thought. Where was everyone? Where was she? She felt goose bumps rise on her arms and reached for the sweater she had taken off earlier in the evening during a hot flash. It wasn’t there. Of course not, it was on the rush mat she had been sitting on in the community centre. This was crazy.

Paula carefully got up, feeling her knees and hips complain as she unfolded herself from the cross-legged position she had been in for hours. The beach stretched uninterrupted as far as the eye could see in both directions. One way was as good as another, she figured, and started walking north, grateful that for once she was wearing sensible shoes. The golden sun started sinking below the horizon and she felt a moment of panic as she thought she might be stuck out there in the dark, not knowing where “there” was. Overhead the sky moved through the shades of sunset. In the east it was already indigo.

As Paula trudged across the sand, twilight became dusk and then night. Stars appeared in the darkening sky and she tried to pick out familiar constellations, but recognized nothing. Was she still in the northern hemisphere, she wondered? She chuckled at the thought that she had been magically transported to a beach in Australia. Paula had always wanted to visit the sub-continent. She and Harold had talked about it, back when they were still in love. Before Jonathon had…. She left that line of thought and kept walking, hoping she would find some shelter for the night. It was getting cooler and now she really was starting to panic.

To her left, the ocean glowed with a phosphorescence she tried to remember what she had learned about in nature shows from television. It was some small sea creature or an alga that created that effect, Paula thought to herself. The result was unearthly and beautiful. To her right the sand ended at a dense forest, the darkness beneath the trees holding she knew not what danger. Ahead, quite suddenly, she espied a flicker of light which grew, as she neared, into a small fire on the sand. Paula approached the flames eagerly and saw a small man seated beside them, roasting an unidentifiable animal on a stick. Her stomach growled and she realized she had not eaten for many hours.

“Hello,” said Paula. “May I join you?”

The man looked up from where he was carefully turning his dinner and squinted at her over the fire. He was tiny, wizened, more like a monkey than a man, she thought to herself. His skin was brown and leathery, and there was scant hair on his small head. He was dressed only in a short leather kilt, but a coat of animal skins lay nearby with a pack and what looked to be hunting weapons, a bow and a quiver of arrows. Paula smelled the cooking flesh and her mouth watered.

When he did not answer, Paula stepped forward so he could see her better in the light of the fire. “I’m lost,” she said, “and I’m hungry. I saw your fire. May I sit down?” It occurred to her that maybe he didn’t speak English. You’re not in Kansas anymore, she told herself. Suddenly the man spoke and she startled.

“Please,” he said. “You summoned me, after all.”

“I summoned you?” Paula gasped. “What are you talking about?”

“The bottle,” he said. “You let me out of the bottle. I’m your genie.”

“No!” cried Paula. “That’s impossible!” Yet nonetheless here he was, and here she was. Maybe it wasn’t impossible.

“I’m cooking our dinner,” he said. “Join me.”

Overcome with hunger, Paula obediently sat, not wanting to get too close to this wizened creature and yet grateful for the contact with another human being. Wait, was he human? He had said he was her genie. Were genies human? The little man scraped the meat off the stick with a sharp blade onto a metal plate, then cut it in two and placed the second portion on another plate. Paula didn’t see where he took them from, but at this point she didn’t want to know and she really didn’t care. As he handed it to her, he said, “Be careful, it’s hot.”

He was right, the food was hot. But it was also delicious. Paula wolfed it down, not caring to ask what kind of animal had sacrified itself for her supper, she was so ravenous. As she was licking her fingers clean, the man passed her a canteen and she drank deeply. It’s true, she thought to herself. Everything tastes better when you’re outdoors. Her hunger sated and her thirst slaked, she felt she could face whatever came next.

“Thank you,” she said. “Now, would you please tell me who you are, where I am, and I how got here?”

“I don’t have a name, unless you give me one,” said her host. “This is where you need to be, and you came here by opening the door, which in this case was the bottle. My bottle. Genies live in bottles, you know.” He winked then, or it was the flickering of the fire? Paula wasn’t quite sure.

“Wait,” she said. “I opened the bottle, that tiny little orange glass bottle that wouldn’t hold a teaspoonful of anything, and I let you out? Or did I let myself in?”

The genie smiled. “Either or,” he replied. “Actually, it was just the vessel. It was a bottle, an empty bottle. When you uncorked it, you opened the passageway within yourself that would bring you here.”

“But where is here?” Paula wanted to know.

“As I said, it’s where you need to be,” repeated the genie, “only it’s not really a place.”

“It sure looks like a place.” Paula suddenly shivered. “It feels like one, too.”
The genie reached for his animal-pelt cloak and put it around Paula’s shoulders. He seemed unaffected by the cool night air. “It’s all in your mind,” he said, and winked again. This time Paula was sure of it.

“Okay,” she said, “if you’re my genie, aren’t I supposed to ask you for three wishes?”

He smiled. “You can if you want to,” he said. “But what would you wish for? What would you change? What do you want that you don’t already have?”

Paula thought of all the things one demanded from genies: wealth, health, love. She wasn’t rich, but she had enough to live on and a little bit put by for a rainy day. Her health was good, the one thing in her life that had not forsaken her. Love. That was another story. She had known love, and she had known the loss of it, too. Harold had loved her. They had both loved Jonathon. She felt a sudden ache in her breast as she remembered her son, the day he had kissed her goodbye and then ridden off to school on his motorcycle, that vehicle she despised, always fearing he would have an accident. She remembered the call from the principal, the visit from the police, the condolences of the doctor in the emergency room. She remembered afterward Harold treating her as though it had been her fault.

Paula thought of her father whom she visited dutifully in the nursing home every weekend. He no longer knew who she was. She had gone from being his daughter to her mother, to his sister, to his mother and then to a stranger. She no longer knew why she subjected herself to this weekly torture, except that this was her daddy who had pushed her on the swing, who had taught her to ride a bicycle, and then a car; he had shown her how to thread a worm on a hook and cast the line out into the stream. When she thought of him, she remembered the tall, strong man smelling of pipe tobacco who would read her stories at bedtime and then kiss her goodnight, his cheek scratchy with five-o’clock shadow. How could she abandon him? Even though he did not know her, she still loved him. The tears that had refused to flow during the workshop came then.

“I can’t have them back,” she whispered, her voice choked with emotion, “can I?”

“No,” said her genie softly. “I’m sorry.”

She pulled the cloak closer about her shoulders and stared into the fire which still burned high, even though the little man hadn’t put any more fuel on it. Suddenly overcome with fatigue, she lay on her back and stared up at the unfamiliar constellations in the night sky. As her eyes adjusted, she started to pick out stars of different colours and brightnesses and meteors shooting through the upper atmosphere. As a child, Paula had believed that the stars were living beings who granted wishes. She still sometimes recited the nursery rhyme “Star light, star bright” when Venus appeared at dusk, even after she had learned that she was seeing a planet and not some distant sun. She never expected to “get the wish I wish tonight”, at least not since she turned ten. Still, where she hadn’t believed in God or Jesus, she had still kept her mind open to magic; and yet, like God and Jesus, magic had never manifested itself—until now.

“Well?” asked the genie, who seemed to know what she was thinking before she spoke. “If I had the power to grant you even one wish, and I’m not saying I’m that kind of genie, what would it be?”

Paula looked over at the little man where he sat next to the fire. In the time that she had lain on her back gazing at the night sky he had changed. He seemed taller, less wizened, younger. She considered this phenomenon, and then looked off toward the phosphorescent waves lapping at the sand. “Why hasn’t the tide come in?” she mused out loud.

“Because this place doesn’t really exist, remember?” answered the genie. He was definitely looking younger now, and taller, and bore a striking resemblance to someone she knew but couldn’t name. Paula squinted at him in the firelight. Who did he remind her of?

“I don’t know what to wish for,” Paula finally answered. “The things I want most you’ve already said I can’t have. You can’t bring Jonathon back, or restore my marriage, or give my dad back his mind. Nothing else really matters to me. I don’t even know why I still go on day to day, except that I feel I should be there for my father, even though he doesn’t even know who I am anymore.” She looked over at the genie again. “Why do you keep getting younger every time I look at you?” she asked.

The genie grinned. He looked like a teenager now, his long hair falling in unshorn locks about his face. “It’s a trick of the light,” he answered.

Paula watched as he continued to age backward, and then she knew. She sat up and turned to face him. “I want a child,” she said, “I want to care for someone, I want someone to love, someone who loves me in return. Nothing else matters. Really.”

The genie snapped the thumb and middle finger on his small right hand. “Your wish is granted!”

Paula blinked. He was gone. The fire was gone, as were the beach and the strange constellations. She stared at the tiny bottle of amber glass in the palm of her hand, and then looked up at the women seated around the low table on their rush mats. They all stared back at her. Breeze asked, “Paula? Did your genie come for you? Would you like to share your experience with us?”

Paula shook her head. “I must have fallen asleep,” she mumbled. “Sorry.”

As she was leaving the community centre, her sweater over her shoulders and her purse tucked under her arm, Paula glanced at the corkboard where messages and advertisements were posted. She saw a sign with a fringe of telephone numbers hanging off the bottom asking for volunteers to help school children learn to read, and tore one off. She smiled to herself. All was not yet lost.