I'm doing 39 things
They (fairy tales) make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.
-G.K. Chesterton, from Orthodoxy
It was you, it was you, who said that dreams come true
And it was you, it was you, who said that mine would, too
And it was you who said that all I had to do was to believe
But when your ivory towers tumbled down, they tumbled down on me.
-Fred Eaglesmith from “It Was You”
It’s the family you choose that counts.
-Andrew Vachss
pg. 21
The forest seems familiar to me right away, but it takes me a moment to realize why. I stand there, absorbed by the towering trees that surround me on all sides, trees bigger and stranger than they have any right to be. There’s next to no undergrowth, just these behemoths, their trunks so wide that five of me couldn’t touch hands around them. Light pours down from the dense canopy above in golden shafts and that’s when I know where I am. The cathedral effect reminds me of what I call the place that Sophie goes traveling to at night.
I’m back in the dreamlands again. The cathedral world.
It’s not the city of Mabon that Sophie founded here, but a magic place all the same. It would have to be, wouldn’t it, with trees like this. They must be close cousins of what Jack Daw used to call the forever trees, the giant growth that made up the first forest when the world was born.
pg. 31
I’m an onion girl, like in that song Holly Cole sings. And what I’m more afraid of is that if you peel back enough layers, there won’t be anything left of me at all. Everyone’ll know who I really am. The Broken Girl. The Hollow Girl.
Maybe the stories can fill me up.
So.
Once upon a time…
I try to move my right hand again. It’s like it doesn’t exist.
I can’t imagine a life in which I can’t paint and draw.
Once upon a time…
I’m in the fairy tale where the girl gets hit by a car and then lies in the ICU ward of the hospital, waiting to die. Or at the very least, life as she knew it is over and everything is forever changed.
I’m not sure I want to know how the story ends.
Once upon a time…
pg. 73
There’s magic in this world, too, I remind myself. I’ve seen faerie girls who call themselves gemmin, living in an abandoned car in the Tombs. I’ve been to an underground kingdom of goblinlike creatures called skookin that exists beneath the city. I’ve met crow girls who can shift from one shape to another.
And even my friends aren’t immune. Sophie has faerie blood. Geordie once dated a woman that he lost to the past, while the Kelledys—Cerin and Meran-came here out of the past. Sue had her dog talk to her one Christmas eve. Christy and the professor have had more magical encounters than I’ve got fingers and toes. And Wendy…Wendy grew a Magical Tree of Tales from an acorn one winter and fed it on stories. Come spring she had to move it from the pot in her house to Fitzhenry Park where it’s this huge spreading oak now. But she still feeds it stories.
pg. 79
It hurts because it reminds me of all the other kids who’ve had that kind of experience and worse. Who are still having it today, right now, right at this moment. Children are the brightest treasures we bring forth into the world, but too large a percentage of the population continues to treat them as inconveniences and nuisances, when they’re not treating them as possessions or toys.
And people wonder why I prefer drifting off to the dreamlands to being in this world.
I sigh. This is depressing me. I should just go to sleep and cross over into the cathedral world. But I’m beginning to recognize that Joe’s right. My crossing over as much as I am isn’t to give myself some breathing space. It’s escape, pure and simple. Now that I can do it, I could just pack up and go there forever. Let the world carry on without me.
pg. 223
Jilly was forever talking about how she’d like to be magic. To live inside a story, instead of always standing on the outside of it. To know what magical beings did when they were just hanging out-and did they even hang out? What would it be like to be a part of that world?
pg. 237
There’s nothing worse than the things we leave undone. No matter how long ago it was we deserted those obligations, they find ways to return, again and again, nagging at us like intermittent toothaches, fermenting a bitter and depressing brew in the shadows of our minds that’s one part guilt, one part shame. They sour pleasures and sow a discontent inside us that seems so far removed from its true source, we end up finding other things to blame, creating new problems to sneak upon the old. And so we end up with this midden in our heads, hot coals smoldering deep inside the refuse, invisible, but no less dangerous for that. At any moment they could burst into flame, the subsequent conflagration utterly consuming the safe little world we’ve been pretending to live in for all this time.
And all our kindnesses would come undone…
pg. 446
Don’t matter where I went, if’n I was alone or in a crowd. I always knew I was carrying around some kinda black mark on my soul. I done so many shitty things in my life it couldn’t be no other way.
I don’t feel forgiven—that’d be asking too much of anybody. But I do feel forgotten. Like the world’s going on and nobody’s thinking ‘bout me, for good or bad. I’m just off their radar and I like it.
