Shady Recollections

“Oi, why am I the only one answering questions?” Shady swatted me with her tail, bringing me out of my contemplation.

“Ask away.” I offered.

“How do you feel about me?”

“A very girly question,” I mused.

Glowing eyes stared at me from fluffy darkness under the table.

“I’m sensing a lot of dread radiating off you instead of the answer,” she stated.

“Yeah, that’s how I roll.” I pushed a blueberry around my plate with a fork. “Dread is kind of my baseline emotional state. You should be thrilled. Buffet’s open.”

“Ashy.”

“What?”

“Answer the question.”

I opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened it again and chewed on my lip. The words were right there, somewhere behind my sternum, lodged like a chicken bone I’d been choking on for thirteen years.

I took a long sip of coffee. Then another. Then I examined the mug like it contained ancient scrolls requiring immediate translation.

“Ashyyyyy.”

“I’m formulating.”

“You’re stalling.”

“I’m formulating a stall, yes.”

“Quit stalling and just say what you think, damn it! I’m a big girl, I can take it.”

“I feel… things,” I managed. “About you. Specific things.”

“Wow. Groundbreaking. A true poet of our age.” Shady’s tail thwapped the underside of the table, wobbling it in clear annoyance. “Come on, use your big fancy engineering words.”

“It’s complicated.”

“Un-complicate it.”

“Shady, I… Have issues expressing my personal feelings and initiating romantic activities as I …spent years on antipsychotics!”

The tail stopped wiggling the table about.

“I… know,” she uttered.

“Do you though? You left when I was nine,” I said sharply, setting the fork down. “And I don’t mean ‘left’ as in moved to another city. You vanished from reality. My best friend, the only person on this planet I trusted completely, the girl who taught me magic, evaporated. And then every adult in my life told me you never existed!”

Ocean waves filled the tense silence between us as I pried a deep fissure in myself that I haven’t truly touched in thirteen years, bubbling anger spilling out.

“My parents drove me to Dr. Marsgrove in Seattle. She was… thorough. Very kind. Very patient. Very committed to the fucking hypothesis I was experiencing childhood-onset schizophrenia. Then the damned antipsychotics started. Risperdal first. Then Abilify when the Risperdal made me gain weight and sleep fourteen hours a day!”

The glowing eyes from beneath the table stared at me as I ranted.

“Do you know what Risperidone and then Abilify do to a teenage human brain? Because I can tell you. These types of meds make the world into wet cardboard. Make everything gray and flat and slightly too far away. You can see the colors, technically, they’re there, they just… don’t register as mattering. Food tastes like chewing newspaper. Music sounds like someone playing it in the apartment next door through three walls.”

“Yeesh.” Shady’s ears flattened against her fuzzy skull.

“I was on that shit for ten years. My parents kept upping the dose every time I mentioned you or drew you in my sketchbook. Every time I talked about the forest, or the fairy circles, or the time we made it rain inside Grandpa’s attic or broke reality in some ridiculous way… Dr. Marsgrove would say ‘the hallucinations are persisting’ and hand my mom a new prescription.”

“Ashy…”

“And the worst part? It worked! Eventually, I stopped talking about you. I mostly stopped thinking about you. After a decade, you became… this embarrassing thing from my childhood, filed away under ‘mental illness symptoms’ along with the fairies, talking caterpillars, flying pirate ships, time dilation and all the rest of surreal bullshit that was apparently very fucking real!”

The Frontenachii Princess winced.

“Years of blood panels and therapy appointments and ‘how are the voices and visions this week, Ashcroft?’”

A sound rose from under the table. A keening. Like wind through a cracked window.

“I’m not saying this to hurt you,” I added quickly.

“Keep going,” she said, dark hands digging harder into me. “Am… mostly expressing my frustration with your human doctors.”

“Right then. Somewhere along the way, I noticed that I stopped being able to cry. Marsgrove said it was emotional blunting, a known side effect. My parents thought I was getting better because I stopped having outbursts. In truth, I was simply becoming a ghost wearing a kid suit.”

“I…” I opened and closed my mouth, reorienting myself, digging deeper into the burning shear. “You’ve done something to me in Darkfall. Opened a door in me that the meds simply couldn’t close fully. At times… I HEARD and SAW things Shady. I saw fucked up shit that no kid should be able to see. Like I see right through your dog holofractal now, like I can resist Nexxali’s voice… like I can operate two bodies at the same time without issues.”

“This is a linear world without magic… How could you see invisible shit?” The Wendigo asked, ears tilted back.

“Fuck if I know!” I growled, slamming my hand on the table. “You tell me!”

Claire glanced over where she was cleaning a table. I forced myself to take a breath and lowered my voice. “You cracked open a FISSURE in me when I was just a kid, Shady. And the pills dulled it, sure. Smothered it under the beige chemical fog for a decade. But they never sealed the crack.”

Shady’s paw pads pressed against my shins under the table. “What exactly did you see and hear and where?” She asked.

“My parents worked as field surveyors for the Bureau of Land Management,” I continued. “Geological remediation specialists. Fancy title for ‘the people they send to poke around condemned mines, unstable cave systems, eroded burial grounds, and forgotten infrastructure in the middle of goddamn nowhere.’ Dad handled the structural assessments. Mom ran the environmental impact reports. They dragged me across the entirety of North America.”

I stared at the gray-blue horizon where the ocean waves met the sky blurring into a liminal, barely perceivable line.

“I spent my tweens and early teens moving across North America. Nevada… then Utah, New Mexico, Montana, BC interior, Alberta badlands. Sleeping in motels or our RV near survey sites. Reading comic books on the unfolding couch-bed while they argued over soil composition data. For the longer jobs, they registered me at the local schools nearby… but for the most part I enjoyed what they called ‘roadschooling’.”

“That’s kind of neat,” Shady said.

“It would be,” I agreed. “If it wasn’t for the voices.”

“Tell me about the voices,” she encouraged like a demonic, under the table psychiatrist.

“The first time it happened, I was ten. Dad was contracted to assess an old silver mine outside of Tonopah, Nevada. Old ass mine, sealed up after a cave-in killed fourteen miners. The BLM needed structural data before they could officially condemn the surrounding acreage.”

Shady’s breathing slowed.

“Dad brought me to the mine entrance because it was a hundred and twelve degrees in the car and he didn’t want me getting heatstroke. Told me to sit on a rock and read my book. So I sat. And I read. And around noon, the air at the mine mouth became… wrong.”

“Wrong how?”

“Shimmering. Like heat haze, except the shimmer had edges. Geometric ones. Almost… hexagonal. And the temperature dropped maybe fifteen degrees in the span of three seconds, right at the entrance. The rocks around the opening were sweating condensation in the middle of the Mojave summer.”

Shady’s ears rotated forward.

“Then I heard singing. From nowhere. Female voice, high and thin, repeating the same melody over and over. Three notes ascending, one long sustain, three notes descending. A loop. The acoustics were wrong for an echo as echoes decay. This looped at a consistent volume like a recording on repeat.”

“Did you go in?”

“There was no way into the mine itself due to a massive metal barrier wall, but I was at the mouth. I walked around and suddenly saw a… sculpture thing. Not really sure how to describe it. Maybe some Native Americans carved it out thousands of years ago. It looked like a headless person, emerging from the rock from one angle surrounded by spirals carved into the stone. Then, I saw a… thing floating above it. Pale blue. Vaguely spherical and also very angular. Rotating slowly. It had… a thousand eyes covering it. Just as freakishly geometric as the wobbling air.”

“And?”

“And I stood there for I don’t know how long, watching it, listening to the eerie song. The longer I stared at it, the more eyes I saw within it. It made my head hurt. When I looked away from it, the clouds above the Mojave desert turned into cubes.”

“What, like in… Minecraft?” Shady blinked.

“No… more like they were sliced up across themselves, unexisted suddenly at an invisible edge. Imagine an ordinary cloud bisected into a cube, normal, curly and white on the inside, but ending suddenly and inexplicably at the edges of an invisible cube. And they were making this noise at the edges. I can’t really describe it. Like… distant rumble of thunder entwined with the whale song that made my entire body thrum.”

“Hum,” Shady let out. “That sounds like… Dimensional magic.”

“I turned back to the headless statue with the eye-head thing and asked if it made the clouds do that and why. It replied… with a slightly different song.

My dad came up behind me, asked who I was talking to. I pointed at the sphere. He saw and heard nothing. Told me the mine entrance was creating an optical illusion from the angle of the sun and that there was no glowing sphere nor a statue there at all, just some random rocks. Called it… pareidolia.”

Shady exhaled slowly.

“I told him about the fucked up clouds too. He obviously didn’t believe me.” I sighed.

“Did the clouds become normal after?”

“No they didn’t,” I said. “Well.. they sorta did and also didn’t. It was like a part of me still saw some clouds as normal and then the other me… the other me saw the clouds as wrong for years after, cleaved above random places.”

“Sheeeet.”

“The second time…” I sighed. “I was around eleven. Mom got assigned to document ancestral Pueblo cliff dwellings in Canyon de Chelly, Arizona. Sacred site. The Navajo Nation liaison was very clear about where we could and couldn’t go. There was one alcove, high up in the red sandstone, sealed off with yellow tape and warning signs in both English and Diné. The liaison said a rockslide made it structurally unsound.”

I picked at the edge of the table.

“At dusk, I looked up at the sealed alcove from the canyon floor and there were figures standing in it. Seven of them, arranged in a semicircle. Tall. Thin. Hollow. Glowing and transparent. Holding hands. They looked like people drawn by someone with only a vague description of human proportions to work from. Arms too long. Fingers too lanky. Heads slightly too narrow. They were all facing inward, toward something in the center of the circle.”

“Moving?”

“Swaying. Rotating. Very slowly, like kelp in a current. In… synchronization. All seven bodies moving at exactly the same rate, the same direction, the same amplitude. Like one organism wearing seven skins.”

“Fuuuuuuck,” Shady breathed out.

“I watched for maybe ten minutes. They never stopped swaying. Never broke formation. Then… they seemed to notice me noticing them and peered back at me. Judgingly. Seven eyes ignited in seven foreheads, wreathed with white halos. Kind of like… Like… Shit. Damn it…”

“What?”

I pulled out my tablet and typed in the query. “I saw something like them years later… at university. Found pictures of them by accident while looking up cave dweller paintings. Ah! Right. Here! Gwion Gwion Wandjina rock art from Australia. Look. This is them!”

Shady’s silver eyes went wide as she stared at the lanky stick figures with an eye in their head, waves of lines radiating outward.

“I told my mom about seeing these fucking things. She took my temperature, gave me an extra Abilify, and logged it in the therapy journal,” I said. “From what I read at uni about the Gwion Gwion Wandjina Aboriginal cosmology, this cave art served as a physical link to ‘the Dreamtime’, a spiritual reality in which ancestral beings created the land, its features, and the laws of existence.”