Sunday Scribblings: Dare

When things got too crazy in the city Micaela moved.  Fair Haven.  She had not been back to Fair Haven since she was eighteen.  It was one of those towns with one main highway running straight through. If you weren’t careful you found yourself leaving it before you arrived.   The kind of town you can’t wait to grow up and leave. Sixteen bars, five gas stations and a drug store.

Of course, that wasn’t counting the marinas.  She knew this was where she would stay.   Water fed her soul.  The wooded areas and the miles of coast land with the cattails and shallow marshes held more magic than most entire cities.  That’s where Micaela needed to be.  Near the magic and out where she could sit on a pier and let the rhythm of the waves soothe her.  She was back.

But the waves would have to wait for summer.   For now the waves slept under the snow and ice and the whole town was quiet.  Micaela walked through the streets, hands in her pockets.  She wished she had remembered her gloves  Her feet crunched on the snow as she strolled towards her new home.  She was renting an old boathouse with living space upstairs.   On summer evenings she could sit in the old rusted metal lawn chair in back and watch the fisherman slowly bringing their boats back home at dusk when the mosquitoes would be swarming in the willow trees, coolers full of fish, happy tired guys all sunburnt and smelling like beer.

The boats were put up for winter and the canal was frozen over.  The ice was black but where snow had drifted you could see the moonlight reflected and it was easy to walk along the canal towards the lake.

She started hearing the voices when she hit puberty.  She was sent to visit her grandmother who knew what was happening and taught her how to begin controlling and separating them.  These days she often slept through the day and stayed up at night when most people were asleep.  She had learned to close her mind to much of the chatter but night brought a relief and peace that came with not having to control it.  Her grandmother was fae and had been through much of what Micaela had experienced but Micaela had surpassed her by the time she was twenty.

At first she hated people.  Hated the petty things they thought.  Hated knowing too much. Over time, she had learned to love them.  They were weak but they fought it.  They fell, but they kept trying. They were confusing, wonderful, and endlessly changing.

This night, there was no sound except the skittering noises of a muskrat, the creaking of the ice,  her own footsteps, and the wind in the ice covered branches of the trees.  She walked along, alone with her thoughts except for the occasional ghost.  Old fishermen who had passed on but refused to pass over, to give up their lake.  They grumbled about noise scaring off the fish as she passed by, but she ignored them.

There was power in this place.  It was situated on a natural border, there was water all around, and the spirits of the Old Ones still lived this place.  There had been People here for thousands of years.  Not the whites, though they claimed this winter wonderland.  No, the People Of the Land, the Potawatomi, though they had been herded up and now were mostly confined to an island out in the St. Clair River.   Power tends to concentrate at borders and here it was enhanced by the spirits of the Old Ones.

Micaela had reached the end of the canal and stared out over the dark expanse of the lake.  She could feel the power gathering around her.  It came to her with no effort on her part.  Did she dare?  She held her hands out and with a slight movement of her fingers, the snow began to rise from the ice.  She closed her eyes and waited and when she opened them, there stood Brother Wolf.  The spirits of the Old Ones stared out at her from ice blue eyes.  She lowered her head slightly to show respect.  Brother Wolf howled once and turned and trotted away. Micaela turned and walked back down the canal to her boathouse.  Summer was going to be interesting.