What was the alternative, being afraid all the time?
What if I wanted to be angry instead?
That was better, right?
Right?
I was nearly jogging back down the hillside. I stopped and took a breather.
A blackbird landed on a fence post near me and sang, suddenly loud.
“Fuck off!” I screamed at it.
It leapt from the post, a black fluttering, crying its warning call to the rest of the pine forest, and disappeared into the trees. The world was silent around me. No crickets. No insects. No birds. Nothing.
I rubbed my arms in the ensuing emptiness on the lonely hillside. My throat hurt.
That was the conflict. To take your finger off the trigger and risk getting hurt. Or to hold onto it and let it push everyone away. Where did the line lie? How much good faith did I owe other people? I’d always felt stuck somewhere between getting taken for a ride on the off chance someone might be genuine, and spotting threats around every corner and mockery in every comment.
I sat in the grass. God, I was tired.
I was so tired of trying to read the minds of the people around me, to see if they were safe, to see if I was safe. I could never know their thoughts, never see the world as they did, know it as they did. My brain, the seat of myself, sat in its castle of bone, completely encased, a wall separating me from everyone else, never to touch, never to meet. I and everyone else, in the very physicality of what makes me ‘me’ and them ‘them’, were alone.
I lay down on the verge.
All the assumptions I’d had about my neighbour when I’d first arrived, when I first met her, and then when I’d met her again, none of them had been right. It was me trying to read her mind. When all along there was just me on my side of the wall. Her on the other.
Who was my neighbour? My neighbour was unknowable, unfathomable. Another country. A whole other alien species. Just like every other person I knew. Everyone I met.
Everything else was translation.
Translation!
I sat upright. Of course, why hadn’t I thought of that earlier? I pulled out my phone and woke the screen. I had a weak signal, but it was signal. I opened a new browser tab from my earlier research and opened up a Scots Gaelic to English translator. I typed in ‘Sgàthan Sìth.’
The answer came back and my eyes widened.
Fairy Mirror
The old man had said the house was a mirror. Maybe he wasn’t as mad as I thought. I had to find him.
I got up and reached into my pocket to check my things were still with me. I found my key, needle still hooked on its ring.
And then I found the keys to Rowan’s truck.
Fuck. Of course.
I hissed through my teeth and looked back up the hill. The pines blocked my view of the forestry. No, I wasn’t going back up to give them to him. There was nothing worse than backtracking after an argument to pick up a coat or a bag. I wasn’t going to throw them in a bush either, no matter how much a part of me wanted to.
I marched back down the hill. I would drop off the keys, then I would find the old man and ask him again about the house.
CHAPTER 33
By the time I got to Carlinsrest, it was late afternoon. My legs were heavy and my feet were covered in the dust of dirt roads. I kept an eye out for the old man and his wife on my way in, but I’d have to complete a quick chore before I could properly go looking. I forced myself back toward the hardware and supplies store, hoping I’d beaten Rowan back down.
Fergus looked up at the ring of the electronic doorbell and barely concealed a huff of disdain. He returned his focus to a box he was sealing up with an industrial stapler the size of his head. Of course. Rowan had said Fergus was busy at the store. I thought he’d meant the antiques shop. Rowan must have got Fergus to cover for him so he could corner me into his little ‘discussion’.
I marched past the rows of wood paint, twine and work gloves and dropped the truck keys on the counter. Fergus raised an eyebrow and looked behind me.
