Fantasy, Part 1

by bfalcon2013

Stacy had followed the slow moving creek bed up into the trees.  It was the first time she had been to the park since leaving home for good so many years ago.  Her parents didn’t even live on the hill above the park anymore.  She had come back to help them move.  But as she drove down the hill something called to her from the park, from the creek, from the past.

Stacy had spent many days by the small creek as a child, picking out the finest of bright wet stones, imagining them to be precious gems.  She was always a little more than disappointed to find that the rarest and most beautiful had become nothing but dull gray rocks once she got them home.  Despite this she would pick her favorites and keep them with her, rubbing her fingers along their cool spines.  Occasionally, when she was alone and without anything to do, she would take them out to examine them, to see if the warm oils from her fingers had given them back their luster.  Sometimes they had, sometimes they hadn’t, and this became a sort of diving rod.  Was the world beautiful today, or was it hiding its beauty away?

She had found her stones again when her parents had moved.  They were in a small blue tin that once held butter cookies, hidden away with so many other small scraps of paper and baubles.  Among all the stuff in that tin, the stones brought the most back to her.  More than her old toys which were boxed and put into storage for her future children’s play.  More than the photographs of old Halloween’s with her baby brother.  These three small stones, cerulean blue, india green, and cornelian red, carried the song of her childhood.  There was nothing to do but to put them deep into her pocket.  It was where they belonged, not in this small forgotten tin.

The creek bed no longer held jewels, just stones.  Blacks and greys and sometimes off whites.  She wondered if they had all been taken by kids just like her, over the years.

As she went deeper into the narrow valley.  The plants grew in thicker, making the place feel wild and overgrown, not at all what it was.  The path, obscured as it was by the growth, seemed to lead even deeper between the hills.  ‘I’ve never come this far,’ she thought as she looked back over her shoulder.  The manicured lawn surrounding the playground was out of sight now but she could still hear the comforting hiss of the sprinkler heads as they watered the large meadow.

“I can’t be too far in, if I can still hear that.” she said to herself, allowing the sureness of her voice to give her courage.

She pushed further in.  Past the reaching fern leaves which made her worry, only briefly, about deer ticks.  Past the fallen tree now covered in moss and a thick mushroom colony that jutted out in small half circles, like hundreds of tiny saw blades stuck into the log’s side.  She could only hear the babble of the creek now, hidden as it was behind the thick clusters of blackberry bushes.

Her father used to come home with bags full of fresh blackberries.  A few scratches on his forearms and not a little purple juice staining his lips.  They would wash the berries together, but despite asking her father where he had found such sweet ones he would never tell.  “A fine berrier never reveals his favorite bushes!”  he would say.  It was just one of those things adults said that didn’t make any sense to her .  She took it as it was, allowing the meaninglessness of the words to pass, focusing instead on his grin, both assertive and mischievous.  Looking at the bushes now, bare of berries, she wondered why he had never taken her along for the picking.

Her wondering was startled away by a cracking in the brush beyond the next wall of green.  There were rumors, years ago, of mountain lions prowling these thin valleys.   There were also rumors of trolls and goblins.  It was doubtful there could still be animals that large in a wilderness so cramped.  It was more likely to be a rabbit or a raccoon, she thought, running away from her own clumsy tromping .  She thought to turn back.  No one knew she was out here, and she remembered the stories of joggers on trails not unlike this one being attacked and killed.

She pushed the thought away as simple paranoia.  She wanted to know what was at the end of this path, wanted to know where the creek came from.  It had been years since anything in this small hill town had surprised her, years since she had gone anywhere she hadn’t been a thousand times before.

As she pushed through the narrow space between the blackberry bushes and the low thick hedges on the hill it was there.  Standing full upright in the middle of a surprisingly open clearing, alone in the waist high yellow grass was a door.  It was bright yellow with a white trim and a shiny golden knob.  A door.  No larger and no smaller than the door to her own small apartment.  But bright, and new, and completely out of place.

…..to be continued, dear reader