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Date Posted: 16:53:50 07/07/08 Mon
Author: celtgirl
Subject: Inside for Bridget/Brigit>>>
In reply to: celtgirl 's message, "I thought it was time to introduce you all to Bridget, or Brigit, as she keeps spelling her name a variety of ways. I'll post the prologue to her story inside. For those of you who have read my short story 'The Measure of My Dreams' while this is the same character, but the story is getting much larger and growing a bit every week. I hope you'll enjoy meeting her. :) For those of you who've seen this prologue, I'll be posting other snippets from her story over the summer." on 16:44:26 07/07/08 Mon

Bridget- Prologue copyright 2008 Cindy Brandner

My name is Bridget Moran, but all who knew me, simply referred to me as ‘Bridget of the Fairies’- claiming they’d known from the first I was not of this world, nor kin to the human race.. People say as they like in hindsight, but I imagine I seemed no more unusual than any of the other babbies born that year (?). A mite small, perhaps, with the strawberry hair only true witches are said to have and with eyes that my mam claimed looked straight through a soul from the first. I only knew I was different from the other children and that I saw too well their games, their small deceits, their narrow-ness of experience and thought. And they knew me for different too, which is where all the trouble started.

Later they would come to me with their troubles, wanting help, wanting cures, not ever realizing that what ailed them most lie within their own hearts, a canker that could not be reached by the most potent of magic, nor the potions of plants. But still, despite their need of me in the most desperate of times, they did not like me, but they feared me, which kept me safe for the most part.

My village was the whole breadth of my experience. Fifteen square miles of soil and wee cottages. The townland, the baile of my youth became the expanse of all my years. You will think I was an ignorant peasant who knew not how to want more. You will smile at my simplicity, spare me a moment’s sorrow and forget. But I tell you- the measure of my dreams was the span of a world entire.

I’d like to tell you my story, but first you must understand my landscape. Will you come? Will you look through history’s kaleidoscope, knowing that the passage of time distorts vision and makes the dead seem small, even toylike. As though we existed in dioramas, the sort found in folk museums.

I will not bother with the name of my village, for it no longer exists on any map or even as a ripple caught in the traces of living memory. Its roots are there in overgrown stone foundations and depressions in deep grass that were once cart tracks and paths made for feet to fly along.

There were twenty-one homes contained on three hundred acres, but that is merely a note for the historians. You couldn’t see the baile until you were almost upon it, it merged with the countryside in an organic manner, a small huddle that contained a wealth of tangled relations, loves, hates- in short all the salt of life. Even our memories were scarcely personal, they were communal, shared, transformed through the tellings and re-tellings.

I understood the value of story, especially for a people that had little else to call their own. But I was different. I wanted all my thoughts for myself, I clutched at memory like straws of salvation. The fire that was to ruin me was burning in me even then. And in a world where all things are shared, where community is everything and all, to want to be alone is viewed with grave suspicion.

But I preferred the company of the woods- the trees and the wee animals, the plants that spoke in their own language- pungent, soft, fragrant, sharp- each telling their own story, each with their own purpose. The forest came right down to the edge of the village, with only my grandmother’s cottage actually dwelling within the forest itself. The forest was an ancient one, filled with all the nobility of the Irish wood- oak, ash, yew, hazel, holly, pine and apple. It was rare for a village to have such a plentitude of trees upon its doorstep, for they were generally cleared to make way for pastureland, or crops, trees being seen as a luxury of the gentry, and therefore regarded with some hostility by the natives. But we lived on an estate where the masters, in a long line, had kept the forest as sacred, and so while there was pasturage and fields filled with root crops, it was the forest that shadowed our lives and storied our thoughts.

The baile itself lay not far off the eastern coast of my island country; surrounded by water on all sides, this land was bound by enchantment, but formed in blood. From the day I was born I could smell the blood in her soil, I could hear the grass grow in her fields. It was I, afterall, who first heard the potatoes in their death cries. When people spoke I saw the colors their words left behind. Some said I was a changeling, child of the fairyfolk, but they said it with fondness and indulgence. Later they would mutter from the corners of sunken mouths that my mother ought to have left me on a hillside to die. I cannot disagree that, in the end, it might have been better for all concerned had my mother done just that.

Once, there was an entire world here, once there was laughter, tears, joy, hate, hope, and once, there was life. Now there is only I, tonight, alone, under a sharp-faced moon, surrounded by a terrible, unholy silence. There is no lowing of cows, no rustle of small animals in the hedgerows, no bleat of a sheep half-waked in a field of dreams. And there is the silence that lives, terrible as a mist that cannot be cleared, of a place where children no longer exist. That is the hollow vacuum at the heart of existence. Why do I survive when all else is gone? That is the question I ask myself, as I stand here on a small rise near my village- a rath- a place that everyone knew the fairies favoured to live. For a long time the fairies smiled upon me and my works, but they are gone now, and have taken with them all that is familiar. More importantly, HE has gone, the one that walked the spiral ways with me, the one who was to have been the saving of me in the end. But he no longer answers my call, no matter how desperate it has become. For I am alone now, alone even to the soil, which has turned foul and betrayed the people for whom it was the very bone and marrow of existence. The silence that has come upon the land extends even to the trees, for all their leaves have fallen and blown away on the wind and they no longer speak to me, as they once did. And so I travel the old roads alone, the long ridged spines of my country that were here before people, before memory. I do not know what I seek, only that to stop moving now means death, and I am not ready for that…yet.

Perhaps you will come with me and help me find what it is that will give me rest, that will end this curse under which I travel, placing one bruised foot after another upon a journey that has no destination. Up over this hill and into the forest, where the needles and dead leaves will swallow whole the pale noise of our steps. Where the water runs beneath the ground and the scent of it will lead us on, where memory waits to snare us, before granting the ultimate mercy.

Come with me, won’t you? For I am tired now, of being alone.

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