Mud Maidens Rise

At first, it was the not-quite-hidden things.

Worms suspended from sticky silk, tree-trapping the unwary. Glassine jointed lines, half-helical, hardly seen vitreous shadows. Diamonds caught in fallen leaves and blades of grass under midnight streetlamps after the rain, heavier and more multitudinous than dew, glittering fields of a fleeting harvest that slicks the skin, leaving nothing behind but damp disappointment.

Then it was the half-seen.

The echoes and shades, the empty rooms that still held the warmth of bodies only just departed, the calls on the edge of hearing. The cluster of stumps cut just so for a witches’ brew-off in the back woods. The lacey wafers of snowmelt that mark facades and balconies and windows and lovely scrollwork-edged doors for entire ice-faerie empires formed from white banks higher than your head yesterday that will decay by evening, collapse with the dawn, and turn to sludge soon after.

But then, oh then the mud maidens rise, wavering and beckoning and humming their low hypnotic tunes that speak of the cool dampness beneath the trees and the slow sinking freedom from striving that you crave.

Before you danced with the mud maidens, you knew what it was to fly.

Your feet fell slow, the wind rising, your progress hitching just for a moment, weightless. You ran and jumped, just to feel it, leaped the last steps to remind yourself gravity held you but lightly.

And you walked on water.

Reached for the trembling surface, pressed your soles to its coolness and felt it push back, playful, welcoming. Stand, oh human child, trust and walk, it sang, in its lapping against the pilings.

Perhaps you stood, perhaps you danced, perhaps you flew. Perhaps you crooned back to it, a waiting song, a not-yet song. A mud-maiden, not a lakeling, nor yet a seafolk song.

Perhaps you laughed, broke the surface with a kick and a splash and jumped in.

Was that before or after the mirrors?

Before or after (after) you stood (on your toes, so small, so quiet that no one thought to come looking and what if they had? What then?) and, stretching on your toes, you stared into (through? Through.) the mirror. Not just into the mirror, but into your own mismatched eyes, marvelling at the spattering of brown in the blue, the squiggles and bands and movement. The endless, shivering movement of them, even when you tried to hold so still.

And the eyes in the mirror stared back, moving (shivering, shuddering, constricting), drawing you in, alien and dark and other.

After that, every time you closed your eyes, you saw those others, endless others. Watching. Wanting. Now, oh now, you wonder if it was then that the world started cracking open around you. Or if it was always splintering, and it was only then that you learned to look. To really see the barely-theres and the nearly-almost-theres and the shouldn’t-be-theres.

To accept that, if most people went about their days ignoring or unseeing the one, why shouldn’t the others be just as there, even if they were neglected.

What sounds, what smells—what unacknowledged senses beyond describing—then, did all these well-formed willfully blind earth-bound plodders go about their days so careful not to ignore?

And what—oh, what—will become of those who forget that one should not look at hidden things?