Fey by michael scholtes

A philosophical supernatural tale about death, consciousness, and the unsettling possibility that those who have gone before us may know more about life than we do. Set against a silent winter landscape, the story blends ghost story, fantasy, and existential mystery.

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Fey

Late into the night, the silent snow falls and falls.

Under the down quilt pulled up to my nose, I seem to float, as if I have no body. But the icy air makes my forehead ache and the tips of my ears sting. The snow outside sucks the sound from the room.  For a long time I am nothing but ache and sting hovering in dimness, miserably waiting for sleep…or daylight.

I hear something, feel something—that makes no sense.

“What?” My voice, hoarse, is muffled by the covers. I pull them off my face, staring and straining to hear who roused me. “You?”  Almost a cry. Then softer, “…here?”

My heart thuds many times.

“Yess...” The word is the whisper of ice blowing through frozen boughs.

Is the voice just in my head? Or is it real? I know her, feel her so-familiar presence.  There can be no mistake. I molded myself to it over years, over decades. Absolutely no mistake. And yet...

I can see her now.  My mind fails to grasp the way she somehow pivoted from absence into solidity. I can see her, but with what light?

“You look different,” I blurt, still stupid with drowsiness.  In life she had been a sturdy, sunny tomboy, and, after babies and years, a cheerful matron. A steady love.  But now…now she is young, but not like before. Her familiar features have a subtly alien, elfin cast.  Like the fey folk.  Standing almost close enough to touch, she still feels remote.  And perilous. I shiver.

Color and shadow cloth her, shifting prisms.  Silence presses me. I push back.  “I had no idea this was a part of you.”

I try to master myself, but my foundations shift when she speaks again.

“I have…changed. But the openness to become different, to ascend...words aren’t precise...was always a part of me.”

I remember.  Her questing intelligence. Her bright fascination with everything and everyone.  Openness.  Without fear. Yes.

“And me?”  My voice shakes. I try not to show it, but I am shaken. To have her back. All wounds healed. Our future reborn from its old ashes. It’s all I can see.

She doesn’t meet my eyes. Hers are still silver-gray, but unfocused.  She is partly, or mostly, elsewhere.

“You have everything figured out.  The whole universe Mapped and Connected. But your world is too small.”

The so-familiar phrase rattles me.  My words rush out. “I can’t exercise faith. Religion makes no sense! Reality does.”

Now she meets my gaze. The veil of her otherness lifts like a cruel weapon being drawn.  I looked into her eyes and see pity as she cuts me.

“Yes. Religion is a fiction. But you never imagine something true beyond it.”

This difference between us was never resolved. When I witness other people’s struggles for enlightenment and meaning, I am coolly dismissive. I have been there.  I have searched those arid wastes for gleanings to nourish a tiny flame of faith.  In vain.  I rue the wasted hours, and years, and condemn my own folly along with everyone else’s.  But her response to the same benighted people, however horrifying their acts, was ever compassionate: “Their God is too small.”  I remembered the benign smile, the gentle shake of her head.  She made me feel unworthy of her, and that was infinitely beguiling. I promised her all the years to come.

But even with my back turned, that glimpse of mystery always pulled on me.  I didn’t know how to follow the tug, or even whether I wanted to. Our life together teased me with possibility.  What was it, that together-life?  A cathedral of color and shadow.  A vastness that rendered me inarticulate.  It was the core of me, but too huge to comprehend. I didn’t need to comprehend, as long as it never stopped.

After her death, everything flattened to echoes and emptiness. Possibility erased. Fade to black.

Can it be that it was not erased, but only forgotten, color chased into the shadows?  I wore myself out trying to understand. Then I numbed himself to that emptiness, and my need. My life would be blank, until it stopped, and there was nothing.

“I love you,” I say. The old ritual, whether I said it or she did, had always healed us both, but now it’s a plea.  Her response, at first, is a non-sequitur:

“With my loupe, a grain of sand was a great flashing diamond.”

Her loupe...  I still wear it on a leather cord around my neck; I reach for it, find it, clutch it like a talisman. How long since I have looked through it? 

What is she trying to tell me?

Silence sings in my ears.  I turn the question over and over, worried that she might leave if I take too long. A grain. Of sand. A diamond. No! A big diamond. And I work it out. Aah… What had seemed large, was in truth very tiny. Our life together, our love, the biggest thing I ever knew…can her reality now be very much greater than that?

What would that even mean? How is it possible?

She has reached glory. Somehow continuing, and not in sorrow.  Joy wars with grief, twists my face and squeezes my heart. She lives! But for myself, death, a final nothingness, is the only end I can foresee. Without her. Nothing could be more bitter. Now that I know.  She lives.

Tears blur my sight. I struggle to speak. “Can I get there? Where you are?”  Why has she come to me if there is no hope?

She is disappearing, rotating away on some higher-dimensional axis.  My eyes try to follow, but cannot. Her whisper of ice kisses me.

“You would have to change...”
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Early in the morning, the silent snow falls and falls.

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Michael Scholtes has been an astronomer, a software engineer, and has had over 1600 limericks published with OEDILF.com  (the Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form.)  After a long time in Texas, he now lives in southern Oregon between the Cascades and the Siskiyou Mountains with his wife and two bengal cats. He is stardust, and makes a lot of sawdust.
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