Patrick and Sophie Obrien were direct descendants of a cursed family when the tales of Fairies were very much real and feared among many Irish families abroad. Patrick and Sophie only knew of the tales that were told by their parents and were not directly affected by the superstitions they didn't believe in any of them. Patrick and Sophie would joke at times about the evil fairies that lived in the forts just miles from where they lived. The children's father would tell bedtime stories to their three children Seamus, Niall, and Aine. The children often had nightmares about fairies taking their souls and coming back as a changeling to torment their family than die after that with their parents never realizing that it isn't their child.

As the children got a little older, their fear of fairies seems to fade. One day the children got the courage up to take a trip to the fairies, fort to put their concerns to rest about these evil fairy tales their parents told them when they were too young to distinguish between fantasy and reality. Seamus was the older of the three children and the bravest so it was evident that he would be the one to lead them through the evil fairies, fort. Aine was the youngest and the most frightened, but she knew her older brothers would take good care not to let anything harm her.

The children proceeded to sneak out of the house when all of a sudden, their mother Sophie stopped them dead in their tracks and said: "Where do you children think you're going?"

The children replied, "To ride our bikes through the trails, and we'll make sure we get back before sundown."

Their mother said, "Please be careful, and you better all be back for dinner!"

Seamus replied, "Don't worry mum, we'll be right on time for dinner; that's a promise”

"OK, now hurry along. I've made cookies and hot apple pie for dessert," said Sophie.

The children got on their bikes and peddled down the road to the evil fairies, fort.

Finally, after about an hour of riding down the road, they reached their destiny the evil fairies fort.

"There is such a place," said Niall.

"Look at this place; it is creepy looking; I wouldn't want to live here," exclaimed Aine.

"Well, since we're here who wants to go in first," said Seamus.

"I do," replied Niall.

Niall entered into the fort and felt as though someone was watching him. "Is anyone feeling what I'm feeling right now," said Niall.

Aine and Seamus laughed at Niall.

"All I feel is a cool breeze, nothing unusual," laughed Seamus.

Aine chimed in and said, "Niall don't talk like that you know I scare very easily."

"No, I'm not kidding; I felt like someone is watching me. said Naill.

"I want to go home!" cried Aine.

"Oh, it's probably nothing, let's stick close together, and not separate from one another said, Seamus. Seamus laughed and said, 'I don't believe this is a fairies fort." Then Seamus found a metal pipe on the ground and started shouting and swinging his metal pipe with great force desecrating the evil fairies fort. Seamus was in for a big surprise. Each swing of the metal pipe against the fort just angered the fairies even more. The evil fairies had seen enough, and it was time to teach these kids a lesson.

All of a sudden there was a blinding light so bright it lit up the whole fort. The children couldn't find their way out, and they were frightened. All the children could hear was the evil fairies voice telling them their souls were being taken a right before their very eyes, and when they return to their home, they will be changelings. The evil fairy explained to the children that "When you return home, you will whine and screech and consistently irritate your parents. Also, you will have an appetite that can't be satisfied.

If anyone of you should survive, you will be rejected by all fairies, and you will no longer belong to your parents. If you die, your parents will never realize you aren't their child.

Now go and do your evil deeds because your souls no longer belong to you!" laughed the wicked fairy.

The bright light diminished, and the fairy vanished before their eyes, and the possessed children left the fort and got on their bikes and headed for home to torment their parents.

The children's eyes were red as fire, hearts pounding out of their chests and whining as they peddled their way back home. Now that evil thoughts were in their minds. They were ready to turn their once beloved home into a demon house.

It was getting dark outside, and their dinner was getting cold, and their parents were worried sick something terrible might have happened to them, and they were right.

As the children approached their house, Sophie was looking out of Aine's bedroom window on the second level of the house, hoping the children would show up soon

Sophie said, "Look! I can see them, but something is wrong, am I imagining things or are their eyes red as fire, and I can also hear a whining noise

Her husband got out of the chair and came to the window.

"Do you see what I see!" said Sophie.

"No, I do not know, you just imagine things," said Patrick.

"I know what I saw was not my imagination our children's eyes were red as fire and I could have sworn the whining came from them," said Sophie.

"Nonsense!" laughed Patrick.

"What you need is to calm done, and when you see the children, their eyes won't be red, and they won't be whining either. You're just letting the evil fairy superstition get the best of you. As long as we've lived in this house, we've never encountered anything out of the ordinary, and especially there has been no evil fairies lurking in the woods and not in our house, now let's drop the whole thing, and you'll see I'm right," said Patrick in a stern voice.

The children got off their bikes, and ran into the house, sat down at the dinner table and tore into the cold food like a bunch of wild animals. Sophie and Patrick ran down the stairs to confront the children as to why they were so late.

Before they could scold the children, all three children turned their heads towards their parents with eyes red as fire and started whining and screeching.

"What is wrong with our little darlings!" cried Sophie to Patrick.

"If this is some joke, it isn't amusing!" said Patrick in an angry voice.

"I want you all to get up from the table and go into the living room, and I want some answers?" said Patrick.

"What's the matter daddy don't like the way your little darlings are acting." laughed the children.

"Daddy, why don't you and mommy go to your room and don't come out until we say you can," giggled Aine.

"That's it. You're all grounded for a week!" yelled Patrick.

The children just laughed and threw their plates on the floor and ran upstairs to their room. Sophie started crying, saying,

"The fairies have stolen their souls, and I'll never get them back. What will we do, Patrick?"

"I'll tell you what I'm going to do is give them all a spanking to let them know how upset I am!" said Patrick in an angry voice.

"Patrick my darling, please don't spank the kids they are changelings, and now that we see with our own eyes the tales our parents told us when we were children were true, we would have stopped this from happening before it got this far," cried Sophie.

..."Patrick, let's lock their doors and in the morning, call the priest to bless our house and perform an exorcism on our children. Maybe, this will bring our children's souls back so they can live again as normal children should live," said Sophie....

"Sophie, now you know an exorcism should be out of the question because everyone that has ever come in contact with the evil fairies has rarelysurvived and there is about a one percent chance of survival, and if they do survive then they are shunned by the evil fairies and their own families.

As much as I hate to say this, there is no cure for our children, we will probably be burying them all by the end of the week," said Patrick in a sad voice.

"No, I won't let you talk like that about our children, there has to be a way out of this curse, and I won't rest until I find a cure!" cried Sophie.

"OK," then Sophie go ahead and do what you need to do, but in reality, you will see that I was right all along," said Patrick.

Sophie stormed out of the room and slept on the coach the remainder of the night, she prayed and wept all through the night that God would intervene and save the children's souls from the evil fairies, curse. All that was heard in the Obrien's house that night was whining and screeching at the children's bedroom doors.

Finally, morning came, and Sophie got in her car and drove as fast as she could to beg her preacher to go to her home and save her children from the evil fairies, curse. But the curse was too strong for any mortal to break, as Sophie's car sped down the road, she noticed something was very wrong.

As her vehicle passed the houses on her street, the car wasn't making any headway. All the houses were the same, and she just ended up in the same spot right in front of her own home

Sophie stopped her car, put her head in her hands, and wept uncontrollably. Sophie's husband walked up to the car and knocked on the driver's side window, and Sophie rolled down the window, Patrick asked her, "What's going on? I thought you were driving to bring the preacher back to our house!"

"I was, but as I was driving down the road and got nowhere, all I kept seeing was the same houses on our street. It's as though some force was keeping me from getting to my destination. I know I was gone for over an hour, and you can't tell me this is as far as I got!" cried Sophie.

"Sophie, I don't know what's going on but get out of the car, and let me go, and get the preacher," said Patrick.

"Please! Hurry! Patrick, there's not much time left!" exclaimed Sophie.

Patrick sped off down the road, as Sophie was walking up the steps to the front door of the house and turned to wave goodbye to her husband, the car exploded, killing Patrick instantly. Sophie ran down the steps screaming to the top of her lungs "Why did you evil fairies kill my Patrick?" Sophie dropped to her knees and asked God not to let the fairies harm her children. "If you want to take someone take me, but don't, please don't take the children. They've done nothing to hurt the fairies." cried SophieBut Sophie was wrong about the children angering the evil fairies because Seamus destroyed the wicked fairies fort with his metal pipe. The evil fairies forewarned her children that if anyone desecrates their fortress, they will surely die along with any family members. Sophie's whole world came crashing down in twenty hours. Sophie said to herself, "If I don't get a grip; I'll surely lose the children too, and I don't want that to happen.

Sophie ran back into the house to call the police, but all she got a busy signal, so she ran to the neighbor's house to use their phone. Sophie knocked on the door, and an evil fairy answered the door and said, "It's too late the children's souls are mine, by the time you reach them they will all be dead.

Then you will be taken back to the fairies, fort where you will be locked inside forever as an evil hag. I will let you see your children as they take their last breath. Then you will be whisked away to the evil fairies fort where you'll spend eternity as an evil hag to scaring off any intruders that try to defile the fort."

Sophie's tears were pouring down her cheeks as she walked inside her house to see her children for the last time. All she could hear was their whining. Sophie decided since she lost her husband and was going to miss her children and spend eternity as an evil hag, she wasn't about to give the evil fairies the satisfaction. So, she went upstairs to her room and opened the top dresser drawer and pulled out Patrick's revolver, then loaded the gun and went to the children's room and kissed her dying children on their forcheads until there was no life in them. Then she pointed the gun to her head and pulled the trigger and Sophie fell to the ground dead.

The Obrien family was no more, and after the townspeople found out what had happened to the Obrien's, the townspeople built a concrete wall around the evil fairies, fort to keep out curious onlookers. Finally, the townspeople could rest easy and not have to live in fear, wondering when the evil fairies would wreak havoc on their town.

Hugo told me once that fall was his favorite time of the year. Told me to hold leaves as delicate as you would a pretty girl’s hand. His teeth would then spread wide across his face. Pallid and flaked with brown. Rows of sweet tooth that hadn’t been cleared of duff.

On his days off we’d go hunting for mushrooms in the forest behind our house. “It’s hard to tell which mushrooms are edible,” Hugo would say. Always said, giddy over the possibility of the inedible as he led me through the forest. My studies turned to what you can eat. It didn't matter if it were safe or not.

That day, Hugo pulled me along— his meaty fingers pressed white hot divots into my skin. I followed as quickly as I could, but Hugo was excited, alcohol and smoke wafting off him in ribbons. My shoes filled with filth.

Mycology was his most recent hobby. An acquisition from an old friend he said.

Hugo's hobbies often skipped from one gruesome hobby to another. From taxidermy to collecting dead things in jars; these activities though innocuous in some hands, turned sinister in his. A field mouse captured in our backyard was less a friend and more an exercise in how long he could extend its suffering, how well he could preserve those little moments of despair, driving a needle in, then capturing the moment in frame by frame photographs. To pinpoint the exact moment, the most miniscule of details. Measured them in the span of flesh stretched to its limit, twisted in abject horror. It was a different kind of science. One that I likened to a kind of dark magic; powerful and detrimental to its user and the people around him. Wrapped up like something beautiful and awful, sequined and glittering, but dripping in oil slick, rainbow sheets of sludge.

Hugo yanked me forward, grip turning tighter. I tripped and he laughed, still dragging me along over root and rock until we hit a clearing with one solitary tree sitting in its center. Its trunk was devoid of a small swath of bark, smooth even at a distance.

As we got closer, I saw a ring of mushrooms at its base that traveled up its trunk in a spiral pattern. Up and up it disappeared into its canopy. Oyster mushrooms,” he said, releasing my hand to pluck one from the bark. He left marks. My reddened wrist contrasted against the pale white of freshly pulled bark. It reminded me of his angry red gums gnashing at me, smiles and frowns. Hugo was smiling at me then, pulling swiftly and roughly, tearing off just as much bark as he was mushrooms, raining clumps of brown to join the clutter of the forest floor.

Bark and mush fell haphazard atop a corpse—a fox—carpeted in what looked like to be more mushrooms. They bisected its torso. The mound of mushrooms, which looked like nothing I'd ever seen in Hugo's many, many books, stemmed like a dress from its waist, draping the rest of its body in its fungal carpet. Only its feet were left uncovered. But they were not bare, frost had started its seasonal creep, transforming the Foxes’ paws into glass slippers. Winter’s supine approach had begun, starting with her. I hadn’t realized it when we first arrived. This was a birthplace; a death, anchoring itself to the forest.

I continued to stare at the fox, searching. Her light-less eyes glittered at me in the dying light. Resurrected under my attention; life found unraveled, unspun at my feet, thread loose and fibers imbued with story. I imagined that she smiled a smile at me full of sharp, friendly teeth. For the briefest of moments I felt the whisper of her touch—her paw caressing my cheek, and telling me how this fate had befell her. A story not too dissimilar from mine. I had to protect her.

I knew what Hugo would do to her if he found her. Exactly the way he’d extricate her and preserve her, perpetually dead in his basement with a sprinkling of mushrooms and fall leaves for company. The other dead animals didn’t count. They had no more half lives; no in-between. That was my domain. With liminal fingers half crusted with frost, straining from the breakdown of cartilage, that life would wrap around the soft bend of my joints, her joints. She’d sit taut and stiff, halfway between specimen and taxidermy, a product of clumsy hands and even clumsier mouths, cruelly propped up against the door to let the draft in. We weren’t meant to be gutted and set for display.Hugo’s delighted face was sharp; shadows fell across him like they belonged there, deepening the crags and dips of his smile.

The fox’s unseeing eyes still bore into mine, and as Hugo stepped back from his rough foraging to look at me, I blocked the fox from view with my body, leaning languid against the tree.

His eyes raked over me, hungry open maws of sight. He made to move toward me, his basket overflowing with an abundance of mushrooms dangling from his elbow. I did not flinch. I had been chewed up and spat out before. But a single oyster tumbled out of the basket, falling at his feet. His eyes darted down. Curses tumbled from his lips just as the mushroom just had. He crouched and picked up the singular mushroom, angrily brushing the excess dirt off it. He looked so vulnerable there, on his knees, cooing over the fallen thing as though he hadn’t just violently torn it from its home moments before.

A rock sat right by the foxes' head, large enough to serve as its stony pillow, jagged enough that it could promise a painful and messy death. Her dead eyes smiled at me; her form less vulpine and more human the longer I stared at that rock and breathed life into her story. If the fox had hands and strength enough to lift it, would it have lived? Would her paws not be dipped in ice? Would she be here now, acting as my hands? My hands had already found their way to the rock, having leaned down as I had pondered those questions. I inched closer to Hugo, staring at the top of his head. I examined his receding hairline and the numerous nascent liver spots and silver hairs—it looked like pencil lines interrupted by a filthy and worn down eraser.

His eyes met mine then. I don’t know how he didn’t notice until I was already towering over him, rock gripped in both my hands, raised over my head. His eyes bore into me. Terribly blue eyes as death clung to me, whispering to me, “I’d never get them out of my hair—the leaves—the mushrooms—not until…. “

She sat at my shoulder, right there inside the memory of our house sitting quietly without him. A vision tailor made for me. Her tails unfurled; her teeth sharpened. Her gown of mushrooms was apparent and as white as the snow, taking on the quality of shaggy fur. Delicate like the tendrils of a medusa, she was a woman sitting on our porch. She was a fox sitting on my porch, her ears tipped with frost and twitching as leaves fell from our maple tree, never falling outside of the careful circle that we laid out for him.

What would I do without him? she asked. Maybe spend that fall studying the weight of the leaves and measure them in the fade of green to withered brown. Gather them in piles, feel how they’d crumble to pieces in my hand—the crunch of their skeletons, soft and grainy in their collapse.

Decomposition will sit with you. Set in the circumstance of life. Circles of death and rot. The house will sit empty, but they will sit quietly. No hands to interrupt.

My hands shook imagining the collapse; she shook, shedding the gown of mushrooms, taking on the look of death in its entirety and encouraging me to lift.

And so I did. As I raised the stone higher, I watched his eyes drown with a surety. A certainty. Realization. Recognition. She comes for us all at some point; clever little foxes that don’t stay dead. But for now she wasn’t here for me. All she did was help guide my hand.

The oyster mushroom he had cleaned of dirt sat snug in his hand. I could see it waiting; the knowing of what was to come and the knowing that it would not change anything for it and its brethren. But Hugo and his eyes, those terribly blue eyes did not care. He smashed it in his fist, letting its flesh ooze out between his fingers. And for the second time that day he showed me that sweet tooth smile, wide and menacing.

I swung down.

Death was accompanied by the patter of nurses’ rubber-soled shoes marching briskly along linoleum floors. The smell of antiseptic solution. A gurney wheel, in need of oil, squeaking rhythmically as another patient was rushed past. Starchy white sheets, and the sharp and angular shapes of nurses headdresses.

My body revolted against the crisp order in violent expulsions of browns, greens, and yellows against the bleached hospital whites. Veins stood out on my small, pale neck and spittle flew from my mouth as I screamed. The cool bed sheets, tucked with neat and stern hospital corners, were twisted into angry, damp knots against my writhing body. I am ordinarily a neat and demure person, so you can imagine my cringing in horror at this loud, violent, and messy departure. I shudder when my mind, invariably, drifts to remember it. I am happily brought back to the present by the distant iron clang of the cemetery gate.

There’s a reassuring and settled sameness about death. A contentment. Cool, mossy, and stone strewn. Calm and painless. Life was harder - stressful. My father worked long days in crumbling mining tunnels cut deep into the earth. He would return with his face etched deeply with coal dust, collapsing into wheezy snores on the small, hard bed. I remember, too, my mother’s mouth, tight lipped with constant worry, and concealing two chipped front teeth. I remember my baby brother screaming with hunger and cold. The frigid earth was chipped open by large-shouldered men with axes and spades when that brother died before the spring melt.

Of course there were some joyous moments; things I recollect with nostalgia. There is one thing I remember with a thrill of excitement: Alice Alderidge and I on that summer morning. The air was already thick, humid, and buzzing with crickets as we ran to the creek. It was our favourite place in summer, this particular spot, where water gathered - cool and shaded - in a gurgling pool of deep stone. That day, for the first time, we swam *****. Our girlish squeals were loud, we were exhilarated with the naughtiness of it - with the thrilling and mortifying possibility that someone might appear suddenly and see us.

When we got out to dress on the warm rocks, I turned to watch as she emerged, serpentine and lithe, from the water. Beautiful, was the thought that arrived - unbidden but suddenly completely obvious - into my mind. We were no longer squealing or giggling. Droplets slid over her small, round breasts. Her nipples were nut brown, and bunched tightly and sharply from the cold water. For a terrifying and intoxicating moment, I imagined licking off the sliding droplets which rolled over her honey-coloured skin. She watched me watching her. Her wet, dark eyelashes framed bold and knowing green eyes, like a a bewitching goddess.

It’s difficult, now, to ascertain to what extent Alice Alderidge knew about my sudden and sincere desire to lick her beautiful young breasts, because we both contracted cholera in the following days. She lived, but I died.

I waited, aching, but Alice didn’t arrive at Highgate Cemetery for another sixty years. As with all of the others, a pile of earth was disgorged for her, in dark and damp clods, worms struggling wetly in the too-bright air. Her body was wrinkled and thin, but those sultry green eyes had never dimmed. She had married a man - liar, I thought - and had five children. I spent those first decades in hope, but she did not remain after death in a ghostly form, as I had; I remained alone.

Sometimes I trace the name I had in life, Adelaide Quail: 1898-1913, with a finger as translucent and light as a whisper. This simple summary of myself is etched in modest stone, now coated with moss. These days, my existence is mainly devoted to observing the predictable contours of the seasons. I sit for weeks on the shoulder of a stone angel to watch the snow gradually recede from sun-filled valleys; I observe the daisies, irrepressible, forcing their way through the frigid ground to greet the spring sun. I lie across the cracked stone of my own grave and watch as rain drops hurtle towards the ground from tempestuous, autumnal skies.

I am contained here, by unknowable forces, to the cemetery and the surrounding forest. I have little influence on the world around me, except maybe a slight parting of the wind as it moves around me. I am impervious to dirt and mud; invisible even after bathing in stagnant September moose swamps, or lying across summer-baked dirt roads. On swirling, freezing winter mornings, my bare feet leave barely perceptible prints as I wander across the lightest drifts. I am unnoticed by all but the lightest and most alert insects and birds, which I can occasionally convince to briefly perch on my insubstantial form.

I spend some of my time, in the warmer months, accompanying tour groups of motley children on school excursions. Modern people tend to burn their bodies - a morbid practice in my opinion - but it has had the positive effect of converting Highgate Hill Cemetery into more of a commemorative museum than an active cemetery. This is a relief to me. Although I am without a body, I am not without feelings, and I used to find the wailing of grieving widows and the cries of children at the graves of recently dead loved ones very distressing. I would stand with them as they cried, wearing an invisible expression of sober and respectful grief.

Now, instead, I join the children as they crowd around information boards about local history, or in front of graves and mausoleums. On one information board, entitled ‘Coal Creek Settlement: 1890-1957,’ there’s a photo of some children from my schoolhouse, taken two years before I started there myself. They see us, but they don’t really see us, these children of the present day. I’ve watched, mere inches from their faces, as they observe my contemporaries. I can sense that understanding is lost somewhere in the colourlessness of the black-and-white image, or in our straight faces (smiling wasn’t in vogue in photographs at the time), or just by virtue of the clothing - which seems strange and old-fashioned to them.

“We’re not so different, you know,” I explain; although they don’t hear me.

The tour guide does nothing to help. My grave, for example, is used to describe the cholera epidemic which gripped the valley in the early 20th Century. It was allegedly caused by the town’s water supply running through the corpses of men crushed in a mining disaster - not a fact that I revelled in finding out about.

“Well, there’s more to know about me than that,” I say, irritably, but this woman was born in 1981, so I can’t blame her for knowing very little about history. There is a fir tree near my grave which outdates this alleged expert of the past by two decades.

She tells the children about my tragic death, at only fifteen years of age. This death of mine, she points out, was one year before the outbreak of the Great War. This provides a convenient segue to shepherd the trotting children to the next stand of graves. Some days I find it insulting that my death is used as merely a pivoting point towards more important and famous deaths, but perhaps I’m being overly sensitive.

The children, by this point, are usually glazed. This is unsurprising. How can children root themselves in the shifting sands of the past with facts and figures? Sixty men dead in a mine collapse in 1913 at Coal Creek. Twenty million dead in the First World War. Better to tell them that Bert Lawrence, visible in the front row of the schoolhouse photo, has a visibly wet nose because he cried on the first day of school. Or that the frizzy-haired Maggie Alderidge (middle right), sister of the aforementioned Alice, was in love with Thomas Woodburne (back right). Or that we would all have snowball fights outside of the schoolhouse when school finished on the last day before our Christmas break. If only I could tell them, I think, with wicked glee, about Alice - wet breasts glistening - smiling at me with sultry confidence. Then they would understand, I think, that the young people in the faded photograph were not so different from themselves.

On a cool autumn morning, one girl, from among another group of shuffling and sniffing school children, looked at my grave and said, to no one in particular, “Adelaide Quail. Adelaide, like the city in Australia, and Quail, like the bird.” Her alert green eyes regarded my name with interest. I felt seen, recognized, celebrated.

“Yes!” I cried, unheard. “Exactly! That’s me!”I followed the green-eyed girl, endeavouring to be helpful by giving unheard but correct answers to the questions on the worksheet secured in her clipboard. I reluctantly farewelled her when her group left through the wrought iron gates forty-five minutes later. I obsessed over the minutiae of this meeting for glorious and delightful hours afterwards.

Imagine my shock and joy when the girl, my new Alice, walked through again only a week later, wrangling an exuberant, golden puppy on a leash. I walked with them from one gate to the next, telling her about the changing of the seasons, about the hospital with its clean, white surfaces, about my family, and about the schoolhouse. I told her that we could run together through the long grass once the weather warmed again; we could run to the creek. I could show her the spot - the cool, sheltered spot where the water is deep. The air would be hot, and we could drape our dresses on the warm rocks while we swam together.

The first sprinkling of snow dusted the tops of the immense, distant ranges - an event I usually watch for - but I was too distracted to notice. Being unseen and unheard had previously only been a mild annoyance, but now it was torturous. Alice arrived most days in the evenings, dog on leash, travelling from gate to gate, presumably as part of a larger loop. I screamed in agonized frustration each day as she left me, yearning to be seen, to be known. To touch and be touched.

Inspiration came one morning when I observed a dew-covered spiderweb, branching and complex, ordinarily invisible, but illuminated by its wetness in the bright morning sun. Nearby, a hummingbird was extracting nectar from a group of flowers. I hardened my heart and reached for the small bird. Unsure what force my invisible fingers could produce, I was as shocked as the hummingbird when I was able to grasp its tiny, almost weightless body. I twisted its neck decisively. Raised it to my lips. My invisible and blunt but persistent teeth tore at the sinewy body. Feathers twisted and fluttered to the damp earth as warm, small organs burst against my lips. Blood and entrails ran down my chin, coating my mouth and face.

The wait for her was tortuous. I distractedly observed yellowed leaves fluttering to the ground from the oak trees on the hill. Finally, the light started to ebb from the afternoon, turning the sky into a dusty grey. I heard her approaching and stood at the gate’s entrance, willing my nervous mouth - the contours of which I hoped were now, at last, visible - into a smile of greeting.

At first I thought that my plan had failed- they were only a few steps away and continuing unconcernedly. Suddenly though, the dog stopped, eyes fixed on my face, and uttered a low growl. The girl, confused and worried, stopped as well. She looked at the dog, and followed its gaze to the space where I stood in front of them. My smile widened; I was exhilarated by my scheme, ready, for the first time in over a century, to be seen. My Alice stumbled backwards, her eyes wide and a scream beginning in her throat. There was a perfect moment, before she ran, where we looked right into each other's eyes.