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Up a long, isolated little road, in an overgrown lot next to a vast swath of forest, there is a house. It’s an old house, definitely in need of some better upkeep and repairs. The wallpaper inside is yellowed and peeling in places, the paint is chipping, and there’s a spot on the back porch where a heavy step will put your foot straight through the planks and likely leave you with a twisted ankle. There are cameras everywhere. The dining room is stuffed with monitors and screens, and every spare inch of space, it seems, is overflowing with half-finished contraptions and boxes of spare parts. There are no less than six hummingbird feeders hanging from various posts and corners, which might seem excessive; but the feeders are never wanting for customers, and when night falls, the air turns sweet, and the gentle hum of electronics mingles with the noises of the forest in an unlikely harmony.
This house is the house of MK’s childhood. It’s the house of an enthusiastic, absent-minded scientist, and a dog that refuses to die, and the place where she discovered a truth so bizarre, it ensured that she would never look at the world the same way again. This is Mary Katherine’s home. She left it once before, when she was very young, peering out through the back window of a station wagon and waving as her father’s sad face got smaller and smaller, until the car rounded a corner and she couldn’t see him at all anymore.
Back then she had felt incredibly tiny.
Now she feels big and clumsy, slow and disjointed from the world, as if part of her is still trapped between the jagged edges of the forest and everything beyond. As if the house has become the border between worlds and places in time, and if she looks a certain way she can see it how it used to be, when the wallpaper was new and the windows were clean, when her mother’s curtains hung in the windows and she would sit on the back porch with her dolls, playing silly games and tying ribbons into Ozzie’s collar. She can also see it as it was, once, when she was even smaller than a child, a vast complex looming like a mountain on the edges of the forest, massive and tragic.
She’s leaving it again.
A summer spent running around the forest with her dad, checking monitors and pulling on helmets, chasing after Nod and tip-toeing along overgrown trails and beside babbling streams, had ended with the start of the school year, with a new highschool where she was the daughter of ‘that crazy guy out in the woods’, where she kept her head down and her grades up, and skirted around the counselor’s awkward questions about her ‘home situation’. My dad’s not crazy, she wanted to say. But everyone already knew that he had dedicated his life to finding little people who lived in the forest, and betraying the existence of the Leafmen had seemed like a far greater crime than ignoring a few mean-spirited whispers. After all, she couldn’t claim that her father was right without proving it, and she knows – in the way that her father has never properly understood – that proving it would be disastrous.
The world beyond the forest is not so simple as heroes and villains and truth and lies. Humans are not as straight-forward as jinn; though sometimes she thinks back to that moment in her father’s study, to Nod and Ronin making fun of the big, dumb stompers, and she remembers that they do not have the monopoly on cruelty. But they do have the monopoly on most of the world, and no matter how fast or clever or magical the people of the forest may be, MK doesn’t doubt that humans could destroy them if they wanted to. She spent ages trying to convey the proper gravity of the situation to her father and to her friends, explaining concepts of paranoia and unethical curiosity, of the ramifications of discovering that magic is real, of the potential havoc that fear and greed could lead to. Her father had too much faith in the scientific community to properly appreciate the risks, but he at least acknowledged that they existed, and were not worth testing. Nod hadn’t understood it at all, had simply shrugged it off with a casual ‘you worry too much’.
She thinks that maybe Ronin got it, though. There had been something like understanding in his eyes, and maybe even fear, something old that flickered there and reminded her that however human he looked, he was not constrained by the limits of a human’s lifespan. It made her wonder how much bigger the forest had been a hundred years ago.
She hadn’t asked.
But the idea still comes back to gnaw at her on occasion, when she heads down to the road and sees where the line of trees end, watches where the town eats up the green and replaces it with concrete and brick. Not that it isn’t a nice town. The buildings are old but well-cared-for, neatly ordered around cheerful parks and the sloping curve of Main Street, where the lights from the movie theatre’s marquis reflect off of the tall glass windows of the shops across from it. The highschool is an old grey-bricked building, almost too small to accommodate its student population, and she would like it, she thinks, if it weren’t for the small-town nosiness and rumour-mongering that comes with it. People she doesn’t know, faces from a past she was too small to remember approach to offer their consolations on the death of her mother, and ask probing questions about her, and her father, and her plans, and all of it just makes her miss the cool anonymity of the city, where she could walk down a street and not have someone know that she was Mary Katherine Bomba, whose mother died, isn’t it awful, and now she has to live with her eccentric father, you know, the one who thinks there are real live fairies living in the forest and fancies himself some kind of scientist.
She’s relieved to get away and desperately doesn’t want to go at the same time. Because now graduation is over. She is no longer a highschool student, and no longer a child, either. Her father wants her to go to a good university. Apparently the only thing that can compete with his desire to have her around is his desire for her to do well in life, and his firm belief that education is the key to success. Part of her wants to look forward to it. It’s an adventure, even if it’s not quite on the same scale as her last one. But if there can be such things as Leafmen and jinn and boggans hiding in the woods she spent hours playing in as a child, then what else might be out there in the wide, wide world, just waiting to be discovered by someone who has the patience and willingness to look for it? What other childhood fancies hide little kernels of truth?
Part of her wants to keep to the life she’d had laid out for herself before everything went awry as well, the life she and her mother had painstakingly planned out together. But that path, at least, flickered out with her mother’s death, and was smothered completely the moment she caught a glowing flower pod in her hands and the world grew vast and unknowable around her.
Part of her wants to go into the forest and say that she made a mistake. To ask Queen Blossom to shrink her back down again, and then spend the rest of her days running around with Leafmen and visiting her father, letting her life play out between tree branches and hidden cities, on the backs of birds and falling leaves, in long days that stretch on forever.
This last impulse is the most tempting. She wants to be small again. To leap from great heights and land on her feet, to fly, to explore the forest from the very smallest of places, to see what she misses when she’s too big and too slow to catch it, even with her father’s inventions to help her. She wants to know what it would be like to kiss Nod again, or if she could ever learn to really move the way that the Leafmen do, to properly lift a sword or shoot an arrow, to be another leaf on their tree, irreversibly and for always.
But if she goes, she doesn’t think she’ll be able to do it by halves. And there are things in the broad, wide world that she doesn’t want to miss seeing, either. The problem with being small is that it makes it harder to look at the big picture. It seems almost foolish to give up on her own world when she is only just beginning to really understand it, and when she fought so hard to get back to it. Yet… it also seems foolish to leave just so that she can spend more of her life sitting in a classroom, listening to lectures and studying her nights away, learning rules and structures for a society she may very well turn around and leave again. Education is costly, and though her mother’s insurance managed to leave her with a marginal inheritance, it would perhaps be put to better use in looking after her father than in paying for courses and supplies that she doesn’t really need.
She’s stuck. Her father thinks that all of the big decisions have been made, when really, none of them have been.
It’s the rest of her life.
It’s only a little while.
It’s possible she’s taking things too seriously.
It’s possible she’s not taking them seriously enough.
More than anything, she wants her mother’s advice. She tries to imagine what she would say, but the factual circumstances of her life have become so bizarre that she can’t. She doesn’t know what her mother would really do if she’d been around to find out that her father was right all along. She has no clue what she would make of real-live jinn, or boggans, or magic. The last thing her mother had said about anything even remotely approaching the subject was that, for all his eccentricities and distractions and strange obsessions, her father really did love her, and maybe if MK tried, they could have something. Because her mother hadn’t wanted to leave her in a world where she had no one else.
Maybe she’s thinking too big, though. In too great an amount of detail. Maybe if she takes out the particulars, the tiny people and the strange adventures, she can find something of her mother’s insight that works for this.
She closes her eyes.
I met a boy I really like, she imagines saying to her mom. They’re in the apartment kitchen, her leaning against the little dining table like she used to, Before, while her mom eats dry cereal from the box and leafs through a home décor magazine.
Oh? her imaginary mother replies. What’s his name?
Nod.
That’s a strange name.
Yeah, his family’s kind of weird.
Does he go to your school?
No. No, he just lives near Dad’s place. But mom, I really like him. I mean, it’s kind of like we’re from two different worlds, but he… he gets a lot of what I’m going through. And he’s fun to hang around with. I like his friends, too, they’re all really nice and helpful, and I love spending time with them. They make me feel less lonely.
That sounds great, kiddo.
It is. It’s just… I’m going away to university soon, but I don’t really know if I want to leave them behind. There’s stuff I want to do, but I won’t be able to keep in touch with any of them, really, and I’m... I guess I’m scared. What if something happens to them while I’m gone? What if they forget about me? What if he meets somebody else? I kind of want to stay with them. But I also don’t want to rush into it and make a mistake. But I also don’t want to go off and waste a whole bunch of years getting educated for a career that I’m just going to end up abandoning anyway, because that just seems stupid no matter how I look at it.
Growing up is hard.
That’s all you’re gonna say?
The image of her mother slides the magazine closed, and folds her arms, and peers at MK over the tops of her elbows. The sunlight catches in her hair, makes her look soft and warm, and just a little bit brighter than she ever properly did.
If it wasn’t for the boy, would you still want to stay? she asks.
I’m not sure, MK admits. …I think so. Yeah, actually, I know so. I’d still want to stay.
Well that’s a good sign.
So you think I should?
Of course not! I want you to go to school, get a proper education, get a job that you love, and maybe find a guy worth marrying when you’re thirty and financially secure and don’t still have any teenage hormones addling your brains. But it’s not my life we’re talking about here, kiddo. It’s yours. You’re the only person who can decide what to do with it.
But I don’t know what to do with it!
Her mother smiles, slow and sad.
Live it, she says. Just live it, MK. Don’t be afraid of making the wrong choices. Don’t be afraid of making mistakes. I made some pretty big ones, you know, but that’s how it goes. A life without regrets is a life that nobody’s lived.
She opens her eyes, and she’s standing in her dad’s front yard, again, staring at the house, and the woods, with the daylight steadily shrinking around her. She sucks in a breath, and then lets it out again.
Live.
There’s still so much more out there that she wants to see.
She turns, and goes back inside to finish packing.