We wander through the mist and the mud, the land brown and desolate. I know in my heart that I’ll never see my Solenn again, that this fairy woman whose hair was glossy, thick and blonde like my dead mother’s, whose eyes were the colour of mossy boulders, whose skin was like silk has tricked me into roaming this part Breton, part fae countryside forever, a spectre trapped between two worlds. There’s no point asking why she did it, enchanting herself to look achingly beautiful, or what made my sense of self-preservation fade as I spent the night in her bower. I could ask her, but she’ll never answer.
                                                              *
We wander through the mist and the mud, the land brown and desolate. This man who I’m sure I’ll be cursed to drag along beside me until time itself gives out won’t even look at me now my back is bent and my skin wrinkled, my lips dry and my gossamer dress ripped to black rags. He won’t admit that it was his lust that made him forget his new wife, that magic had little to do with it. If he asked, I could tell him that my form-shifting spell was a test and he failed it. I could tell him that I am his moral conscience. I could tell him that all he has to do is utter sorry and mean it and he and I will both be free. I could tell him, but he’ll never ask.

Well for starters, the red-gold leaf was as big as my face. Which is why it was kind of bad it stuck to my forehead, nose, mouth, chin like glue. I wrestled with it, and you’d think I’d have won easy-peasy on account of it being a tender sugar maple versus a boy, but it wouldn’t budge. I think I had a panic attack – certainly, it was hard to breathe, and I soon hated the taste of crisp bitterness and dirt mixing with saliva. I bashed into other trees in the national park (I’d gone for a picnic and wandered off), seeing blue stars behind my lids, none of which helped either. Falling in a heap, crying and a-shivering seemed the only thing to do.

That’s when the coven found me.

I should have expected something of that nature, living in New Orleans and all, but usually they’re fake new agey types rather than, you know, actual witches. These ones prodded, the wood bristles of their broom poking into my arm and chest as they whispered.

That’s when one drew my hand in hers, kissed the inside of my palm (I later learnt that meant ownership, that she’d sealed me as personal property). “What’s your name, kid?”

“Troy,” I said, “and I’m thirteen, which is old enough to fight if I have to and young enough my parents will come find me if I’m not home by dark.”

“Why is there a leaf on your face, Troy,” she snickered. “I bet you’re no crash-hot fighter with that obstructing your vision and your parents won’t want a leaf-boy for a son neither.”

She had a point. “It won’t come off,” I said, looking at my feet.

“No,” she said, way too calmly. “We’re trying a new enchantment. Good to see it worked. It’s more interesting than rats, rabbits, or a pumpkin, don’t you think?”

“If it’s all the same to you, miss, I preferred being a boy, and I’m getting mighty dizzy and sick in this darkness. I’d be much obliged if you’d help a kid out.”

She placed a cool finger to my leaf, muttered an incantation, carefully ripped the waxy cells so I had eye and mouth holes. “Will that suffice?” The other witches cackled around her.

“As I said, miss, I was really hoping to get back to straight homo sapien.”

“But you see, I need a new familiar, and you crashed right into our circle.”

That’s how I came to live in a forest looking like a freak with Betty McLean, leaving school, friends and family behind.

Its mouth stretches and I can smell decay, and something vinegar sharp. “Aren’t you afraid, good Sir? It’s October after all, and though I hate to point it out, you’ve got a long drop if you lose your grip.” Its voice is low and deep, a matron’s voice.

My heart’s hammering fit to wake the dead now – too bad that someone already has – and I dig nails tighter into my precarious perch. Just in time. With a sudden whoosh of cold air, the ghost’s floating, its nose to mine. An ache spreads through my chest, like the winter chill. Suddenly, I’m glad I have my knife in my pocket.

She’s a woman. I can tell ‘coz she’s all in dusty white, her crinoline showing off full skirted splendour and lace at the bust. Her starched cotton gown is dry against my knuckles, dry as animal carcass salted within an inch of its life, and I kind of like it. Reminds me of that time Lucy let me stroke the triangle of stiff linen at her lap. Poor Luce married off to that drunkard, Willie. Free Willie, we call him, on account of his easy way with the young girls at his inn. She might be respectable now, all chignon buns and silks and furs and in a good strip of London where the posh toffs go but—Well, I was glad to leave her sitting at my kitchen this morning. I’d promised her I’d not make her go back, that she could stay with me as long as she needed, until she found her feet.

“Don’t you want to know why I’ve appeared?” The ghost lady asks politely. “I’m told most people do.”

I run through my worst transgressions as fast as I can. Until this job, I stole watches on the corner, pickpocketed coin while I boot-blacked, guarded a brothel.

“None of that,” she says, amused. “Petty, small things, and you needed to do them to survive. I’m no sanctimonious rich philanthropist in the House of Lords to lecture you.”

“Can’t say I do know then,” I say. “And if it’s all the same to you, I’d much rather you left.”

“I can’t do that,” she says. “You see, you’re a good man with a good heart.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“You see those men scurrying away in the shadows?” She says.

I look down towards the dark park lined by brass fencing and see four of ‘em, top hats pulled over their heads, toiling away with a coffin on their shoulders.

“They’re grave-robbers and know full well you’re a watchman as much as a lamp lighter. They’d have stabbed you easy as winking afore your knife could flash.”

Cor, I could see she were right. If I’d have shimmied down a minute or so earlier, I’d have happened upon ‘em … “Here,” I say suspiciously. “Why d’ya care so much ‘bout my mortal coil?”

She’s crying now, clear tears sizzling as they hit the air and vanish. “I was William’s first wife. Ran away from a respectable home to be with him and he beat me until I died, a bloody pile of rags. Your Luce was smarter than me. She got away.”

I’m gaping. The ghost is already breaking up, wisping at the edges like a thread pulled loose. She won’t be with me much longer and still I can’t think of anything to say.

“You could try thank you,” she laughs, sounding faint as her mouth smudges out like chalk wiped from a blackboard.

“Thanks,” I whisper, thinking of what woulda happened to Lucy had I not come home.

But the ghost’s already gone.

Ben

We ballroom danced
through your glitter dust
switched partners, said
“encompassing Wollongong, Sydney, Melbourne
let’s follow your rose red.”

Foxtrotted to your piping
opened our arms and said “yes”
Give us chai magic and the beat
duck charmed dreams
gentleman’s jacket sewn deep

Silently rubbed skin-
fire for justice
spirit for kindness and care
open heart for love
and passion for fair.

So though death clutches
in conga clasp
this much I know is true;
your song winds on
we’ll keep dancing for you.

The Hestia

My hips wedge against the boat rim. I can taste the roughness of knotted rope at my mouth. Thick braids constrict my hands, feet, waist. With the movement of the boat, I roll into cracked and peeling painted edges.

The Hestia.

I had defined myself by him and me: Paul and grey stone pylons, pebbled sand underfoot, waves crashing, shoreline to shoreline. Back then, I imagined that our love would run free, our feet taking wing. Like Jesus we’d walk on water into sunset, coming out the other side, unscathed…

“Hestia, Hestia,” he said early in.

“Not Hestia. Ruthie, remember?”

Too dark. Too reticent to be flaming Hestia.

He stroked my cheek.“My island worshipping Hestia, darling.” His eyes burn smoke rings on my retinas as he flings liquid all over.“Sacred heart, sacred flame, burn bright for me.”

The boat lulls gentle on cresting tips. He hasn’t shared salt spray or the scaly damp of silver fishies. Rainbows reflect in slick oil.

He drops the match, leaps ashore and pushes the crackling boat into deeper sea.

Blistering skin. Obscured by smoke and flame.

Behind me, the pylons and Paul’s mad shadow. Ahead, the promise of blurry sunset.

A tall woman towers over me, her hair done in intricate ringlets like the statues they have in The Louvre, a shining pomegranate balancing on her head. When she smiles, crimson juice stains her teeth. “Welcome,” she says as she extends me her hand.

“I’m dead, aren’t I?” Maybe it’s for the best. I’d had nowhere to go and no plan for the future when I’d run away from Andre’s drunken punches, but I’d soon found homelessness every bit as lonely and soul-biting as the newspapers said.

“What a strange question,” the woman replies, and I can see she believes it, grey silk sliding about her arms as she pulls me to my feet. She extends me a black goblet. “You won’t die unless you drink.”

I hold onto the goblet, but I don’t do as she says. “Where am I? Who are you?”

“The Avenue des Champs-Élysées, silly. Where else? As to who I am? I’m a woman who’s lost her way.”

I glance behind me, through the Arc, at a world that’s white and full of magic from the fairy lights on the trees and laugh. “Join the club. Where are you trying to get then?”

“Aglea.”

“Never heard of it,” I say dismissively, leaning back into the Arc. It’s weird having no one crowding for snaps or yelling because you’re ruining the aesthetic of a national monument.

“Not it. Who.” She smiles. “You know I’m Persephone, right?”

“Sure, and I’m Hades.” Still, there is the fact I’m in some kind of second Paris so maybe it’s not as mad as all that.

“You’re not mad at all,” she laughs and I’m trying not to freak out that she’s somehow read my mind. “The world’s gotten everything wrong about me. They say I wanted the underworld to escape my mother, that Hades kidnapped me, and I made the best of it, that other Gods and heroes came to woo me. They say Hephaeastus was one of them.” She steps forward to grasp both my arms. “Bullshit. It was you, Aglea, I yearned for.”

“Come again?”

She tilts her head. “You truly don’t remember?” And before I can back away her honeyed lips are on mine and it’s intoxicating and frightening all at once.

“We walked through the Elysian Fields and we loved, but then you returned to Zeus and Olympus. You Charities were always too unselfish. I’ve waited so long for you to be reborn and to find me.”

My head feels like cotton candy as I let her take my hand and force the death goblet back to my lips. I’m thinking I’d rather stick with a goddess over Andre or begging and there’s the fact I remember someone who looked an awful lot like this Persephone in Algeria, when I’d bought my plane ticket to France. She’d given me money, told me some story about making a fortune in the city of love. Had it all been leading to this?

I’ll take the chance. I drink down to the bitter dregs.

The Hestia

My hips wedge against the boat rim. I can taste the roughness of knotted rope at my mouth. Thick braids constrict my hands, feet, waist. With the movement of the boat, I roll into cracked and peeling painted edges.

The Hestia.

I had defined myself by him and me: Paul and grey stone pylons, pebbled sand underfoot, waves crashing, shoreline to shoreline. Back then, I imagined that our love would run free, our feet taking wing. Like Jesus we’d walk on water into sunset, coming out the other side, unscathed…

“Hestia, Hestia,” he said early in.

“Not Hestia. Ruthie, remember?”

Too dark. Too reticent to be flaming Hestia.

He stroked my cheek.“My island worshipping Hestia, darling.” His eyes burn smoke rings on my retinas as he flings liquid all over.“Sacred heart, sacred flame, burn bright for me.”

The boat lulls gentle on cresting tips. He hasn’t shared salt spray or the scaly damp of silver fishies. Rainbows reflect in slick oil.

He drops the match, leaps ashore and pushes the crackling boat into deeper sea.

Blistering skin. Obscured by smoke and flame.

Behind me, the pylons and Paul’s mad shadow. Ahead, the promise of blurry sunset.

Before I can scream, a hand closes over my mouth. I think about struggling but I am too busy gagging silently at the light falling on the smash of white bone and pinky guts and red blood of Beatie Turner lying there on the ground just ahead.
Lips brush my ear.
“It’s me.”
Derrick. A Potato Head like me. Like my brother. Like poor Beatie Tanner. I guess he’s scavenging too so I relax in his grasp. He reaches for my hand and starts to tug me back from the pit onto the tar cracked street.
I shake my head. I’m nearly pissing myself but I can’t go anywhere without those potatoes. It was bad enough that my brother had been shot and left us with nothing.
Derrick wrenches me onto the road and pushes me down it. When we’re around the corner, away from the pit, I swear at him.
Derrick is unfazed. He laughs and places a full sack in my hand.
“I got these earlier. There’s plenty to spare.”
My eyes widen.
“How,” I whisper.
It’s impossible to get that many without a bullet to the head. Impossible.
His lids lower and his mouth curves wickedly.
‘You haven’t been paying attention to the town criers or the street art,” he whispers and is gone.

Copyright Maureen Flynn 2013

As I read Metro Winds, it was the personal element that caught me the most; Isobelle’s focus on travel and metamorphisis, change and growth. My initial reaction was to remember my own special travel memories and apply them to the stories I was reading. This post incorporates relevent quotes from Metro Winds with my own travel photography. Metro Winds is copyright Isobelle Carmody and Allen and Unwin Publishers. Photography copyright InkAshlings 2012. Please do not repost any of these photos without credit. Quotes from Metro Winds should not be republished without author/publisher permission. If you have any concerns about this post please contact me at inkashlings@gmail.com

… this girl who had lived on a remote coast of a remote land in a solitary yellow house listening to the chilly grey sea that rushed straight from the ice pole to pound on the shore beside her bedroom window.

– Metro Winds, p. 8.

Giant’s Causeway, Northern Ireland

“Tell me where you have come from, that you seek audience with the Dove Princess.” 

The Dove Game, p. 79.

Christmas markets and fair, Edinburgh, Scotland

“Then I looked around at the glowing white snow, radiant in the sun whose light reached us but not its heat. The pine trees wore shapeless hoods of glistening snow, and the black-trunked trees were sugar frosted.”

The Girl Who Saw The Wind, p. 144.

Edinburgh, Scotland

“A seed was planted,” she said. “Many seeds were planted, but only one will summon the stranger who will be the way and the gate.”

The Stranger, p. 203.

Inside St Vitus Cathedral, Prague

“Yet few who travel to that city, which is fantasy made real, discover that it is the gateway to this labyrinthine land of islands and canals it merely mirrors imprecisely.”

The Wolf Prince, p. 210

On a gondola in Venice, Italy

“I was a fringe dweller of the most meek and timid ilk, and if someone had accused me of being a shadow in the world, I would have admitted it. But that was before my shadow was lost, and I understood by the gaping void its absence left that it is we who need our shadows, not they us.”

The Man Who lost his Shadow, p. 359.

My flatmate and I skating with shadows outside the Natural History Museum, London.

Intrigued? You should be! You can purchase Metro Winds from Booktopia here: http://www.booktopia.com.au/metro-winds/prod9781865084442.html