Show Me the Elf
Short Prose
“Twist me and turn me
and show me the elf,
I looked in the water
and there saw…”
~ Brownie Ceremonial Rhyme
*
“She could be herself, by herself… All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others… and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.”
~ Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Once I have finished necromancing myself, I take a stroll to the bottom of the garden and find that the hydrangeas are monstrously over-bloomed. They are a gargoyle’s miracle, such a pale purple they are almost stony hoar, draped like grudge-laden guardians atop the fence. This is my little land, where the calls of crestfallen knights echo through the snowy undergrowth, the bracken capped with the pewter of moonlight, the soil shuddering itself into tinny sound.
Distinctly, there are no windchimes here. I think this unforgivable and tug my denim bow from my hair. If the air is to be bereft of decorous dangling things, then so shall I. As I toss the denim bow to the ground, my hair becomes curiously shorn and sooty.
After allowing myself a brief moment of bereavement, I lift my chin, I twist and turn through the brambles barring my way to the back gate. They touch me with the sly barbs of a broken promise. I glance down at my feet and observe that their soles are stained green and mottled with toadstool heads, stuck fast to my skin, a cheerfully eerie buffer. I clasp the top of the gate and swing it inwards, the wind whipping up my nape into the creamy breath of a thaumaturge. Pishogues are chanted behind my back, the waxing crust of the exhalations, the gruesomely pious rind, bleeding superstition.
Splashing through scarlet, I collapse onto a drumlin, the exact circumference of my world, and my eyes are again their colour. There was a lumbering chill in my past, I am convinced of it, now iced upon bedrock like a yeti’s confection — but the horizon is oozing mercury of a cosy temperature. There is a puddle with ragged edges before me. I look into it and see myself; the strangest adventure!
M. J. Severn 2022
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