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Chapter 1
The Carousel
Inside everyone’s head, including mine, lives the dream of traveling to impossible places. Near the Artists’ Gate of Central Park, I pass a lamppost my lifelong friend, Colleen, swears is the entrance to Narnia, her personal fantasy terminus. Neverland tops my list. So far, no red-haired boy in a green felt hat has knocked on my window with an invitation to fly across the Atlantic. Even if Pan bothers to show, one look at me, and he’ll zoom away. Adjunct college professors nearing thirty have already hit the expiration date for eternal youth. No matter. It’s best to avoid the risk of running out of Faerie dust off the coast of Newfoundland.
My breath coalesces into a tiny kitten-gray cloud as a patch of ice ambushes me. With a whoop followed by moves worthy of a contortionist, I avoid plunging into a crusty mound of snow. My performance spooks a pair of wrens pecking at buds on the branch above me.
Ice is a villain.
After an adjustment to my cross-body bag, I trudge deeper into the frozen park. Lose the ice and snow already. It’s the first day of spring or Éostre as my grandmother called it.
“Éostre is a fortuitous time, Ella. Rise up to catch it.”
I cling to her sayings and stories since they’re all I have left of the woman who adopted and raised me. On the way to her favorite winter solstice celebration, she had a terrible fall on devil-sent ice and was gone. Based on a directive I had no part in, she was cremated before I made it to the city from my apartment upstate in Kennard Park. I never got to see Máthair again to say a proper goodbye. Since that awful day, time has become more construct than reality for me, as frozen as the Central Park lake. The last three months have been one prolonged sorrowful heartbeat, reverberating through my hollowed-out soul.
On the path to the carousel, bare branches of trees float above my head in a pearly haze while birds carry on a grand conversation with squirrels. I do love Central Park’s fierce hold on nature despite being penned in by buildings tall enough to blot out the sun.
A glint of light on the bridge ahead catches my eye. I remember one of the dream flashes I had as a kid where a buck with silver antlers carried a nymph over those very stones beneath an iridescent dome. I pause a moment, reliving the vivid daydream, one of many visions illustrating my past. Today, no kingly beast breaks through the fog.
“Maybe next time,” I tell the trees and chase the mystique of daydreams away. Forget Neverland or Narnia. My grandmother, Máthair, would insist this morning’s scene is the misty realm of her ultimate Irish vacation destination, Tír na nÓg.
The words I’ll never hear from her lips again sting. “Someday Ella my girl, you’ll fly over the hill of Tara through the gates of Tír na nÓg to live forever young among the Faeries.”
I hope she made it there.
I’ll be content to meet up with Colleen without slipping on another patch of devil ice.
I take the turnoff to the carousel. Canvas covers its brick pavilion. When I slip inside, a V-shaped shaft of light sneaks past me to reveal a carved swan serving as the side of bench seat. Milady swan’s black eye shoots me a savage glance for disturbing the inhabitants’ winter sleep.
“Aim that attitude somewhere else,” I scold as if she’s one of my incoming freshmen.
I drop onto her bench seat. A scant glow trickles under the bottom of the canvas, painting alternate strokes of light and shadow across slumbering beasts. I lean back and soak in the presence of the carousel. The sensation of being encased in a prismatic sheath hails the onset of a dream flash that comes swift and furious. Vibrations within the wooden shells of animals wake around me. In front of the swan, a fierce black horse wears a saddle in the shape of a lion. The great cat’s roar resonates through my bones. I imagine it leaping free to lord over the squirrels and rabbits of Central Park.
Air thickens as I give over completely to the vision. Pages of an illuminated manuscript fan inside my head like a flip book to reveal the true story of every beast on the carousel. Behind me, armored plates on a war horse beat a tattoo as the loyal steed carries his knight into a battle lost in time. I revel in this altered reality. Colors smear across the inside of my eyelids as I will creatures to tear free of golden poles and vanish into their stories.
In my fantasy, I leap upon a war horse to join the escape and gallop through the park. A strand of my pale white-blonde hair that shines gold from the kiss of a rising sun catches in an eyelash. The horse banks to the left, my body to the right. I’m thrown into the air, destined for a bone-shattering fall. My eyes snap open to a world where horses are painted wood.
I open the notes screen on my phone to capture every detail of this dream flash. Like all the others, action lingers inside wavering, multi-colored boundaries. The rainbow casing takes on different shapes, sometimes a tunnel or a giant bubble for the length of the flash. I’ve delved too deeply into Irish myths and folktales not to wonder if there very well might be more to this world than we’re comfortable with. I choose to live by the rule it’s safer not to be tempted beyond the confines of reality as many in the stories were. More often than not, they did not meet cheery endings. Best not to chase a Faerie down a well if you can’t swim.
Today’s dip into the imaginary will become one of the poems and stories along with the others I’ve transformed from a lifetime of these wild visions.
“Colors burst. Horses cry. Bonds dissolve…” My poetry generator is stuck on prosaic. I need a fiery sunset over the Hudson River to inspire a shift into my creative brain.
A scratch at the canvas makes me jump. “Colleen?” No answer. If she were trying to scare me, I’d know. Colleen has zero giggle control. A branch then. Another reminder I’m just an ordinary woman trespassing on a carousel in the middle of a giant city to avoid the inevitable.
The calendar reminder on my phone dings, startling me. I’ve got three hours to clear the last of my personal items from the rooftop apartment attached to the sky-high greenhouse of Times Square’s Royal Crown Hotel where I grew up. As produce manager, my grandmother transformed the unlikely garden into something extraordinary. She coaxed the most stubborn plant to grow regardless of the season. Butternut squash soup in mid-summer—unheard of. Fresh seedless watermelon and watercress soup at Christmas dinner—sorcery. The restaurant at the Royal Crown, the Jewel, keeps its five stars because of Máthair’s nothing-less-than-magical green thumb.
Kept.
I can’t fathom the new caretakers maintaining the level of my grandmother’s excellence. Turning over her beloved garden to anyone feels like a betrayal.
My entire childhood and the last of Máthair’s belongings I haven’t given away since she passed are boxed and ready to join me in my faculty housing at Kennard Park University. Tonight, a new family will move into the place my grandmother called home for nearly forty years.
“I can handle this. Do you hear me, swan?”
Is it bad luck to lie to such a majestic bird, even a wooden one?
The close air makes my nose itch, my stubby nose Máthair called a Faerie kiss in her way that made everything sparkle. I puff a breath strong enough to make strands of hair blow across my face, tickling, torturing. Colleen has come at me more than once with scissors to solve my flighty hair issues. I hold out a piece to examine it and play my game, blaming feathery hair on my mother, and the strange colored freckles, more gold than brown, sprinkled across my skin on my father. Why not? I have no clue what my parents look like. Wishing Mom had stuck around long enough to teach me how to deal with these ridiculous locks that defy clips, spray, and even braids is a childish pipe dream.
