I am not supposed to play favorites, as the keeper of all the stories that ever were, ever will be and always are, but I do. I have a favorite. My favorite are the curious who end up in extraordinary situations. Situations they never would have experienced had they the sense to sit still at dinner time and go to bed when told.
There are many such stories in the lighthouse, for there are many curious beings across the universe. But this one is my favourite. It is full of curiosity so deep it makes stars light up at night.
****
It is autumn, the apples in a large orchard are heavy and shining in shades of green and red. The air is just cold enough for a little girl’s breath to dance in silver swirls in front of her nose as she slips through the trees to greet the apple fairies. She is supposed to be collecting today’s eggs from the family chickens.
She skips up to her favorite tree and says, “good morning Mr. Spartan, you look pretty.” Then, looking up at the apples in the tree she says, “good morning apple fairies! You made super shiny apples this year. I can’t wait to eat them!”
She continues to talk as she climbs the tree. Up and up until she is at the top branch where she can see the distant pumpkin field and fallow fields, of her family’s land. She can see the hills of other farms, the forest, the snow-capped mountains and the soft blue sky, empty of any clouds.
She smiles, “I love sunny days! They are so happy, don’t you think?” She says this to the fairies in the apples. They twirl around her head, laughing in agreement.
As she watches the blue sky, thinking about all the things she is going to do today, because today there is no school, she sees something dark, but sparkling, appear in the sky. It shoots across, making an arc like a bow, and is aimed for the ground.
It disappears somewhere behind the hills. The ground and the tree the little girl is in, shake. She shrieks, grabbing the branches tight, but the shaking is finished as quickly as it starts.
“What was that? Was that a falling star?” She says, not speaking to anyone in particular. “I hope it was! I can wish on it then. Can you wish on a star after it has landed? I know, I’ll go find it and ask!” She says as she scrambles out of the tree and back to the ground.
“See you later Mr. Spartan. Fairies!” She waves and begins to run in the direction the star fell.
She runs and runs. As she runs the line of light from the rising sun grows and grows in front of her. By the time she is up over the first hill, the second and the then the third, the pumpkin patch is a field of orange dots and the sun has chased away the night. She stops running when she finds herself at the edge of a crater. Like someone had dug a great hole into the fourth hill ahead of her.
There is a grey cloud of smoke rising out the crater in a long column. Roots from heather bushes poke out all around the inside of the crater and the long trunk and roots of a tree are exposed to the air. The little girl does not see any sparkle, shine or glitter that indicates a star, in her mind. She frowns, disappointed.
She is ready to turn back, her curiosity squashed when she hears the sound of a very human groan. Like her parents, when she used wake them up in the morning by jumping in their bed when she was very little. Her curiosity blooms into a flourish of action.
The little girl climbs into the crater, but in her haste to find out how someone got here before her, she slips and slides the rest of the way down on her bottom, landing in the crater with a shriek. Her surprise lasts only for a moment however, as she can see a very human shape through the grey smoke as it starts to clear.
“Hello?” She says, creeping toward the shape with the slow careful steps she uses when trying to get close to the deer who come into the orchard.
She is answered by another groan. Then, as the shape moves, the smoke swirls away and she can see the person who is in the crater with her. A bundle of silver clothing and silver hair.
“Are you looking for the star too?” She says as the person sits up.
It is a man who is every colour of winter. The snow, the ice, the warm fire, the stories, the songs keeping the nights alive and a mouth that is quirked just so, like he is permanently laughing with the universe.
The man rubs his nose with long, musician’s fingers and says something in a language the little girl doesn’t understand. It is pretty though; it sounds like a choir of bells. Not like any language in the world, and she knows the sound of most because her dad works with all of them.
“Hello,” she says, again. Practicing the polite tone her parents have taught her to use, even with strangers. This man is absolutely a stranger. He does not look like anyone she has ever seen before, but his presence feels like a snow globe or a night-light, so she steps closer and tries another question. “Are you okay?”
The man squints and frowns at her. He gestures for her to come closer. The little girl sits with crossed legs instead. She isn’t afraid of this man but she does remember what he mom taught her about strangers. This prompts a smile from the man and a laugh. He says something else in the same strange language that rings through the crater and makes the little girl shiver.
“Who are you?” The little girl says. The smoke has fully disappeared now and she cannot see any star, anywhere. No sparkles and not even a big, boring rock like her brothers say stars actually are. Nothing, though in the morning sunlight, the man seems to sparkle. The light arcs off his silvery hair, making it glitter like tinsel. Was he the star? The little girl really, really wanted to meet one.
The man knocks the side of his head with a hand, as if he’s trying to dislodge water like the little girl has to do when she goes swimming in the pond.
“Ah, that’s better. That’s the language I want,” The man’s voice cuts through the crater with a cheerful tone. It vibrates up through the little girl’s feet.
“You can understand!” She says with a grin. “Why didn’t you say so?” She waits a beat, because it’s only polite to let questions sink in. Her mom’s words, not hers. Then she adds because she really, really cannot wait, even if it’s maybe a little rude (she hears her mom in this thought), “did you fall out of the sky?”
She has examined all the facts in front of her, just as her brothers like to remind her to do. There is only one reason for a strange man who looks like no one she has ever seen, even in pictures, and who speaks a pretty but strange language, to be in a crater where a star was supposed to fall. After all, what else falls out of the sky than stars?
“I know every language,” the man says, “and yes, I seem to have fallen out of your sky.”
“You didn’t know you fell?” The little girl scoots closer on her bottom and leans forward as she asks what she has really been wanting to know. All reminders from her mom cannot stand up to weight of her question: “Are you a star?”
“No, I am not a star. I am me.” The man says this with a tone that sounds like her teachers when they correct her at school. The little girl feels her stomach sink with disappointment, but the man is so strange she laughs in despite of it.
“That’s silly. Of course you are you. But what are you then?” The little girl says. She scoots even closer, wrinkling her nose as she breathes in a bit of dust.
“Someone who was Nowhere and is now Everywhere,” the man squints at the little girl with the same expression used by her brother who is always analysing his fingernails for dirt. “Are you a human?” The man says after a long silence, “you look rather underdeveloped.”
“Yes! I’m a little girl!”
The man nods and his face scrunches up. He doesn’t say anything else as he shifts his cross-legged position so that his legs stretch out in front of him and he leans back on his hands. He tips his head toward the blue sky and the little girl wonders what he is thinking about.
Instead, because she is trying to be polite, she is really trying, and her mom always says it’s rude to ask about people’s thoughts when you’ve just met them, she says, “if you are everywhere, don’t you know everything?”
“Well, I haven’t been Everywhere for a while. I’ve been… away,”
“Where?”
“Nowhere.”
“Is that a place?”
“Yes. You don’t want to visit it. Horrible tourism board. No concept of fun,” the man says. The little girl giggles, imagining a little information hut made out of coconut trees on Mars. She wonders if that is where he is from.
“Are there trees on Mars?”
“Not in this moment,” the man says, and he snaps his fingers. Then he waits a beat and snaps his fingers again, “although, in this moment, yes, there are trees.”
The little girl leans closer, excited. She’s always loved Mars. It is her favourite planet and one day she wants to visit.
“And I’m not from Mars,” the man’s eyes twinkle and he holds up a finger, “you humans did used to always think we were.”
“Where are you from?”
“I told you, Nowhere,” the man says.
“No one is from nowhere, everyone comes from somewhere,” the little girl scrunches up her nose at the grown-up logic and sneezes because of the dust.
“Well, then, there you have it. I am from Somewhere,” the man winks and then stands up, straightening his clothes. “Shall we depart from this dreary place? Mud puddles are wonderful but dust is itchy. Besides, I’ve got to get back to Somewhere.” He bends and offers the little girl his hand.
“Home?” The little girl says, grabbing the offered hand. She stands with a little jump.
“Home,” the man says. “You wouldn’t know it. You humans have gotten far but not as far as my home. Remember, I’m not a Martian. There aren’t any right now, I’m sorry to say.” He snaps his fingers and gives the little girl an apologetic look.
“I never wanted to meet a Martian, just visit Mars. I want to meet a star,” the little girl crosses her arms, feeling her disappointment rise up again despite herself.
“If you help me get home, I can take you to visit a star,” the man says. “I know them all. We’re very good friends.”
“You know the stars?!” The little girl’s disappointment drops off her face and she jumps up and down. “Please take me, please!” She starts scrambling up the side of the crater, intent on getting up to the top and getting on with meeting a star.
The man chuckles, it is the sort of laugh adults do when children are being funny. The little girl stops trying to climb up and turns around with a scowl. The man is floating above the ground. He stands straight and tall with his feet are in the air, but as flat as if he still stood in the crater. He bends down, offering the little girl a hand.
“Take my hand, we can fly out of this silly hole,” he says.
“You can fly?!” The little girl shouts and twirls on the spot. She doesn’t grab his hand. The man sighs and laughs at the same time. “Well, I fell didn’t I? Can’t fall without flying first.”
“Oh,” says the little girl feeling silly.
“Now, now don’t make that face. I expect you aren’t used to strange men falling out of the sky and then getting up to whizz about. All without a broomstick?”
The little girl laughs and takes the man’s hand. He puts her up on his shoulders like her dad used to do only last year. He’s stopped doing it because she’s too big now. The little girl begins to laugh and laugh, as the man who fell out of the sky, zips up like he is swimming and then lands on the grass, straight and tall.
He sets her down on the ground and raises his hands to the sky, “see, I can fly! I just had wonky steering because this atmosphere woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning and knocked me sideways by mistake.”
The little girl laughs again. Not even the apple fairies make her laugh this much. As she laughs he says, “well, shall we be off, my little adventurer? I need a pair of scissors.”
“To get home you need scissors?” The little girl scrunches up her nose and forehead trying to think of all the ways someone could use scissors to get home. No matter how much she scrunches her face she can’t think of any reason. A girl at school always says when she scrunches up her face she gets all the best ideas.
While the little girl bemoans the untruth from her schoolmate, the man starts to walk. His tread is long but slow as he moves through the grass and away from the crater; toward the pumpkin field and orchard. The little girl follows at his side, taking three steps for each of his slow, single strides.
“Yes,” he says after five long strides in which the little girl keeps so patient she’s going to tell her mom, proudly, about how patient she was.
The man looks down at the little girl and explains while he walks, “I need scissors to cut a doorway through the fabric of this reality. Well, I don’t really need scissors, but it makes it far more fun to use something of this world rather than just thinking my way home. It’s fascinating.”
The little girl opens her mouth, but she isn’t sure what she means to say. Too many words and thoughts and questions are tangled up in her mind. The man stops walking for a moment and cocks his head to the side, looking confused himself.
“Oh dear, I didn’t break you, did I? I can never remember how much you humans know and when you know. It’s a giant ball of Time happening all at once, and I’ve been down in Nowhere for a long string of it. That is, if you feel like spending some of that string of Time, just to untangle a moment. Which apart from right now, being quite crashed, I’d rather not. Stars are about all I can show you right now since they’re everywhere and everywhen. It’s fascinating how even here, on your little bubble of a planet, you humans can see them…”
The man continues to talk and walk but his words run like melting snow over the little girl. She stops walking. Her face scrunches with lines of confusion, rather than lines of thinking, this time.
His whole monologue has flown over her head, like her teacher’s lectures about numbers always do. She doesn’t understand why numbers are needed when the world is made up of smells and sounds and things that feel soft or scratchy or red and yellow. Numbers don’t feel like anything.
She expects the understanding is a grown-up thing, and even then, her dad sometimes complains about grown-ups who don’t know things. It makes her head hurt like when she thinks too hard about numbers. Deciding the topic is not as important as helping the man find scissors so he can go home, but also introduce her to a star, she interrupts (despite what her mom would say) and says, “what’s your name?”
This stops both the man’s monologue and his walking. He looks down to where she would be had she kept walking, and then, spinning on a heel, he turns and catches sight of her. His expression mirrors her confusion from a moment ago.
“Yes, right, that. I always forget you humans like names…” he trails off with a hum and then he crouches down, so that he is eye level with the little girl. His eyes are just as strange as the rest of him. Bright silver, purple and gold flickering light that seem to be as big as the universe and as small.
“You may call me the Magician,” he says. The little girl wonders if the Magician is magic. He still hasn’t said what he is and she can see whole galaxies in his eyes. But then, the thought and the moment is broken as he stands and claps his hands, “so where might I find a pair of scissors? It smells like they must be in this direction,” he gestures toward where the little girl’s home sits beyond the pumpkin patch and orchard, “but as I am a visitor, it is only polite to be shown about a home by the occupants. You do live on the planet, yes? I haven’t mixed you up with the — ” he says a word that sounds like a choir again, and the little girl cannot understand it.
“Oh dear, my apologies. There isn’t a word in your language for them.”
“They are a wonderful people, of a bright purple planet. But they don’t have bodies like you humans. They are made of clouds and they can compress themselves into physical shapes when they come to planets like yours. If they want.”
“Are they why we have clouds?” The little girl asks. The Magician laughs, but it a happy laugh, not like her brothers when she asks questions they think are silly. Then leans toward the little girl whispers, “yes, I expect a few clouds are not always just clouds. Keep your eyes peeled. You never know what you might catch,” the Magician winks. Then he straightens, stands and says, “so, where are we going, my little adventurer? Where can we find a pair of scissors?”
“At home,” the little girl says, and she starts walking, trying to take big steps like the Magician. He is now ambling along beside her with his hands crossed behind his back. As she talks he bends to listen to her and straightens when he responds.
“You’ll like my mom and dad,” she says, “mom knows everything about space and the stars. Don’t tell her you’re taking me to visit a star though. I know she’ll worried. She thinks stars are just balls of gas and are super hot.”
“It remains our secret,” the Magician taps the side of his nose with one long finger. “And your father?”
“He knows all the words in the whole world. He studies them and translates things that other people say. He likes to fix clocks too.”
“Likes Time does he? Hmm…” the Magician says and doesn’t say anything for two long strides. “Time is a funny fellow. He is very odd, even more odd than me. He lives on only a few planets, you know, and he is always having tea at four o’clock with scones, cream, jam and cucumber sandwiches. He has this wonderfully tall, top hat with a great big rainbow ribbon. I expect your father would love to have tea with him. But you are right, I would love meeting your father too.”
“Because you know all the languages in the universe?” The little girl makes a guess and giggles when the Magician says, “clever little adventurer. I do.”
“Neat! Have you ever counted them all?” The little girl says.
“I don’t know,” the Magician shrugs as he takes a long stride forward. They have come down over the three hills and are almost at the pumpkin patch.
“With every word anyone speaks or anyone thinks, languages grow and shrink. And remember, Time only lives on a few planets, he doesn’t live in the universe. So way out there…” the Magician gestures up to the sky and to space beyond. The little girl wonders what else there is outside of even space. Her mom doesn’t even know any of this!
“Everything that ever happened or ever will is happening all at once.” The Magician pauses and stops walking. Then he bends down and rolls a pumpkin between himself and the little girl. He points at it and continues his explanation. “Languages are like these pumpkins. You know there are lots, you can see them all, but you could never count every single one because they just will keep growing and growing.”
“They stop in winter,” the little girl crouches down to push another pumpkin back and forth. This one is getting big and is a lot more orange than green now.
“Oh yes, of course. You have seasons. Well, pretend that’s not part of my analogy?”
The little girl scrunches up her face and says, “numbers don’t make sense, so it makes sense you can’t count all the languages.”
The Magician laughs and stands up, offering the little girl his hand, “yes! Now, shall we continue? I can smell us getting closer.”
“What does my home smell like?”
“I’m not smelling your home. I’m smelling the scissors. I can smell your home though,” the Magician makes a silly face and sniffs loudly with his nose. “Mmm, it smells like a lot of love and words and stories and brothers too. Four brothers. Dear me, that’s quite a lot of brothers for a little girl to have. What a wonderful experience!”
“They smell annoying,” the little girl says with a pout, “they are not wonderful.”
“Now, now,” the Magician says, and he starts up on another of his monologues but this time it is all about families and experiences. The little girl interrupts to ask how he can smell emotions and things and he continues with explanations more elaborate than the last which leave the little girl laughing through her confusion.
She doesn’t mind being confused with the Magician though because he makes her laugh and he talks to her like she is a grown-up. She knows the things he talks about would even confuse her mom and dad.
Too soon they are back in the orchard and the little girl is introducing the Magician to the apple fairies when she hears her mom shouting her name.
“Oops,” the little girl grimaces, remembering the forgotten egg basket.
“Let’s not keep your mother waiting,” the Magician says, pushing the little girl lightly forward.
“But…” the little girl stops and looks up at the Magician. “You’re a stranger…”
“I gave you a name, and we have talked and we have walked. I am not a stranger. Besides, I’ve been to this planet before,” the Magician crouches down and whispers, “Just don’t tell your mother it has been a Time, and I’ve never crashed before. But…” the Magician adds, as he stands up and straightens his clothes, “I smell a tree fort nearby. I will wait there. Don’t keep your mother waiting. I can wait,”
The little girl nods but to put off her mom a little longer she adds, “I’ll show you,” and she starts to run toward the tree fort. She doesn’t wait to see if the Magician follows. The tree fort is built in an old oak tree which sits in the center of the orchard.
“Hide up there!” The little girl says to the Magician. The Magician nods and climbs up the rope ladder. Once inside the tree fort he pops his head out and says, “go see your mother! But do bring back scissors.”
“I can’t wait to meet the stars!” The little girl waves to the Magician and runs toward her house, shouting, “sorry mom!”
Despite her excuse of chasing a falling star, the little girl is admonished by her mom, teased by her brothers and made to finish the chore of collecting eggs. Then she is set to work folding laundry, practicing her sums and sorting harvested herbs to be dried in bundles over the coming winter.
It is night before she can visit the Magician. Her dad has just read her a bedtime story and tucked her when she can finally pocket the scissors from her craft box and sneak back outside. She stops in the kitchen, raiding it for snacks. She is not sure if the Magician needs to eat or what he would like so she gathers a bundle of cookies, crackers and cheese.
Then she pulls on her coat and slips outside, using the sliding door that leads onto the porch because it’s the only exit that doesn’t squeak. She skips the third step down the porch because it creaks and hurries toward the orchard.
She realizes halfway down the trail through the trees she forgot a flashlight. Though the moon is almost full, and the sky is clear; she stops running. Ahead, it’s all just trees and fairies and the Magician, but the moon is making the trees into strange shadows.
She sees light out of the corner of her eye. It is gold, round and bobbing. The little girl shrieks and stumbles backward. She drops her armful of snacks and lands on her bottom. The light floats in front of her and it nearly touches her nose. She flinches back. The light flinches away too.
“Magician?” The little girl calls. The light begins to bob up and down much faster, as if it is happy. The little girl watches it for a moment, decides it is as safe as anything and asks, just to make sure, “did the Magician send you?”
The light makes a quick circle in the air before pausing to bob up and down.
“What are you?” The little girl asks.
The light glows brighter. The little girl giggles. That doesn’t explain what the light is, but it acts as silly as the Magician. She picks up everything she dropped and then says, “can you take me to the Magician?”
The light bobs up and down and darts ahead, moving into the orchard. Following the light, the little girl isn’t scared. The light continues to make circles, and it draws pictures in the air as it guides her toward the Magician.
All too soon, the little girl finds herself at the base of the tree fort. The light flies up and disappears through the window. A second later, the Magician fills the space as he peers down at the little girl.
“Ah, there you are! Have you my scissors in that treasure trove you’ve brought?”
The little girl nods and then realizes she has so many things she cannot climb the ladder. The Magician catches on to this at the same time and says, “don’t worry, Lucy can carry things up for you.”
The light flies out of the tree fort and stops in front of the little girl, bobbing up and down.
“Hello Lucy,” the little girl says to the light and then, toward the Magician she asks, “what is she?”
“She’s light of course,” the Magician says.
“But light can’t have a name. It just is,” the little girl frowns, but she holds out a package of crackers for Lucy to take. The light engulfs the package and flies up to the Magician. It is back in front of the little girl a moment later.
“Yes, yes,” the Magician says, popping away from the window for a moment. When he reappears, Lucy is carrying up a block of cheese. “Lucy,” he says, “just doesn’t have form. She never wanted to take one.”
“What does that mean?”
“We’re all just a bundle of light, bobbing about this big and beautiful universe,” the Magician grins as the cheese comes within a distance of his reach and he plucks it out of Lucy. “Fascinating things you have brought. Fancying a midnight snack? I’ll just have the scissors please, but thank you.”
The scissors are the last thing Lucy bobs up to the Magician. The little girl keeps the tin of cookies inside her coat and climbs up the ladder. Once inside, she flops onto one of the big pillows that cover the floor of the tree fort. The Magician is seated on one next to the window. He is spinning the scissors around his fingers but stops as the little girl sits.
He grins at her and then stands, though his back is bent forward because of the low ceiling. His winter colouring seems to glow like Lucy; bright and sparking as spreads his hands out, as if he is actually a magician at a party, about to do a trick. “Ready? I’ve never shown anyone how I cut through the worlds, or what it looks like when I do. You’re the first, my little adventurer.” The Magician winks at the little girl.
He raises the scissor to his eye level and begins to cut the air, just like when the little girl cuts paper. As he cuts, the air peels back and the little girl sees sparkles and light begin to billow from where he cut, as if a window has been opened in the space between them.
The Magician steps forward, half disappearing into the sparkling space when he turns and says to the little girl, “coming? I did promise to take you to meet the stars.”
The little girl laughs, and she does not stop as she follows the Magician through the crack. The stars are everything she imagined and so much more. She and the Magician stand, suspended in the deep black of space and the stars move like fireflies. Fireflies that are excited to see the Magician. He laughs too and dances with a group of stars that bob close.
The stars are like Lucy, but even brighter and they sing. It sounds like the language the Magician spoke when the little girl first found him in the crater. The stars are not just yellow either, or white — they are red and green and purple and gold. Some are colors the little girl doesn’t have a name for and when she asks the Magician, he puts a finger to his lips and says, with a wink, “who knows?”
The little girl and the Magician dance and dance with the stars. She does not grow tired and here, Time does not tread. Out here, among the stars there is only singing and dancing. There is light that bounces like a thousand rainbows, that loops and twirls and twists around the little girl. She is content.
But then, in a moment when she is floating on her back with stars bobbing all around her, she sees a planet of blue and green. The little girl remembers home.
She misses her bed; she misses her mom and dad. She even misses her brothers. The Magician is busy conducting a group of stars through a rendition of some multi-layered song that paints an ocean full of sea creatures; kraken, mermaids and giant sea serpents in space. He raises a finger, the song fades, and he says, “you wish to return.” It is not a question.
As the little girl nods the Magician is already cutting through the black of space and a great, shimmering crack opens up. The little girl can smell apples, wet wood and pastry baking in the oven. They step through and the little girl is back in the tree fort and it is night. Frozen upon the exact moment they had left.
“Well then,” the Magician says, “that was quite a lovely trip. I thank you, my little adventurer for helping me re-acclimate. You have a wonderful curiosity.”
The little girl frowns at the large word but she does know what to say to a compliment, so she says, “thank you.” It sounds final, like “the end,” when the last page of a book has been reached. Biting her lip, she adds after a moment, “will I ever see you again?”
“You will, just not this way,” the Magician says. The little girl frowns in confusion. She doesn’t like the confusion this time because it feels permanent.
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll know, one day. You, my little adventurer will have to wait on that one trip. But don’t worry. You have plenty to keep you busy and should you ever wish to talk to me, just look up at the stars. I will be up there, among them and I will hear you.”
“What will keep me busy? I want to see more than just the stars, I want to travel with you!”
“Growing up takes quite a lot of work. You’ll need to direct all your curiosity toward being the best grown-up ever,”
“Grown-ups are boring. They don’t even believe in the apple fairies,”
“That’s because they forgot to be curious. It’ll be your job to remember and teach all the adults all about it,” the Magician pats the little girl on her head and glances toward the crack which is still open and sparkling with light. Then he looks down at the little girl and adds, “In fact, little adventurer. Can you do one last thing for me?”
The little girl nods, eager to keep the excitement going.
“Can you promise me, you will tell everyone about who I am?”
“I promise,” the little girl says, knowing at long last, who the Magician is. He is magic.
The Magician pats her head one last time, “good girl,” and then he turns toward the crack, waves, winks and is gone. The crack snaps shut with a sparkle and the little girl is left with a story.
****
That little girl did good on her promise to the Magician and for all Time ever after there are stories about the Man Who Fell from the Sky, the World Walker, the Winter Visitor, the Star Singer.
He is the busy Magician who keeps all the stars happy and bright, so that there are always lights to guide you home at night. He even has his own constellation that sparkles with mystery.
Best of all, though it is a little girl who started the story, the Magician and his magic belongs to everyone.
