Cecilia’s Fate
by Kayleigh McKay
It was cold, and the sidewalks were
coated with a layer of slush so that she had to step in the footprints left
behind by others to keep her shoes dry.
No one had expected it to snow that day, it was too far into spring.
The snow had only recently
fallen—during the last few hours of the school day. She had spent all of her fifth grade Arithmetic’s
class craning her neck to watch the flakes come down and then melt on the
street below. She had been in a world
where snowflakes were solid pieces of air, and when there was too much air in
the world, some of it turned to snow and fell out of the sky.
She was an average looking girl—her
long dark hair fell loose and tangled down her shoulders. She wore the same pair of black leather shoes
that all the other girls wore. Except
her family didn’t have enough money to buy her new shoes that fit, or to repair
the ones she had. The soles were worn
and along the seams there were holes.
When the school day was over and
groups of students poured out the doors and over the steps of the school, she walked
home by herself—no one else lived where she did.
There was only one set of footprints
in the slush, and she hoped that whoever came before her was going was going
the same way she was.
Her walk home to her family’s
apartment was only a few blocks, but the wind and the weight of the books under
her arm stretched out the streets and slowed down time. The walk became too long.
Across the street from her apartment
building was a dumpy old fairground.
She’d heard that the city was going to tear it down as part of the president’s
New Deal plan. They were going to build
another apartment complex.
Today, there was something new to
the fairground, a kind of light and sparkle that she’d never seen before. Just inside the rotted wooden gate was a
horse-drawn wagon. It was colored a
bright and obscene green. The paint was
old and discolored such that it appeared in different shades as she approached
the wagon.
The lurid green color was so out of
place in the endless gray of the city that she was drawn to it, heedless of the
cold soaking into her shoes. Her
footprints veered off the sidewalk and crossed into the road.
It wasn’t like the wagons that sold
vegetables at the markets—this was like the wagons in the photographs of the
pioneers who first ventured out to the west.
It wasn’t roofed however, by canvas, but rather with wood—it even had
its own tiny chimney jutting out from one side.
It was more common for vendors to use automobiles, but not unheard of
for horse-drawn wagons to still come to market.
As she crossed from the road to the
opposite sidewalk, a young man appeared from out of the wagon. He clambered down a set of rickety stairs
extending from the rear of the wagon to the ground.
The man came around to the front of
the wagon and stopped short when he saw the little girl. He was too tall and too skinny. He father would have called him “a
beanpole”. There was a mess of
earth-colored hair that fell somewhere between his shoulders and his ears. He was a funny looking man—his eyes seemed
too big for his face, and he wore boots furrier than a mink coat—
“What?” the man said, looking down
at his feet, “They’re better in snow than those ridiculous holey things you’re
wearing!”
She blinked. “I’m sorry, I—I didn’t mean to be rude.”
He waved her apology off, “I’m not
really offended.” He turned and took a few
steps back towards the wagon, then stopped.
“Aren’t you coming?” The man
turned again to look at her.
She shook her head.
He sighed. “What’s the difference between over there,”
he indicated the sidewalk, “and over here?”
She stood just shy of the open
gate. The girl shook her head again.
The young man looked
exasperated. “But I’ve got something for
you! It’s very special and I don’t think
anyone else should have it.”
The girl crossed her arms. “What is it?” she asked with the voice her
mother reserved for haggling with shopkeepers.
“I won’t show you if you don’t come
over here.”
The inside of the man’s wagon was
the strangest thing she’d ever seen.
There were two workbenches running
opposite each other on either side. Above
the workbenches were shelves, cluttered with strange and obscure books with
symbols on the spines that she would never see again in her life. In between the books were haphazardly placed
gadgets. They were mechanical in nature,
and defied all the young girl’s attempts to guess their function.
There was a small fire towards the
front of the wagon—no doubt attached to that odd little chimney. The light from the flames lit the small space
with a strong orange glow.
The young man sat on a wheeled stool
and flew from one bench to the other with an air of much practice. The spaced was cramped and the man hunched
over—with his over large eyes, this made him look bird-like. He was rummaging through drawers and looking
under stacks of paper. Finally, he found
what was hers.
It was a key. It was old—antique—and had mother-of-pearl
laid into the handle. It had her name on
it—Cecilia. The letters looped and curled
into themselves. If she had tried to
trace the path of a single line she would’ve gotten lost and stared at it
forever. The lines of her name would
begin to dance and shift if she stared at them for long enough.
The man didn’t want any money in
exchange for the key. He said it had
been hers for quite some time and she pretended to believe him.
“This key will fit into any lock,
but the doors it opens…they will not take you to any place you know. Listen to me because this is important,” he
leaned in close to her and she realized that she could not name the color of
his large glassy eyes. “Are you
listening?”
“Yes,” the girl squirmed
uncomfortably.
“Good. Once you use this key, and enter—you’re not
paying attention!”
Her eyes snapped back up to
his. She had been watching the letters
on the key writhe around. “Sorry,” she
set the key down on the workbench. It
was heavier than she expected it to be.
“Nothing that you see will ever be
the same way again. What you choose to
do with this key is the most important decision of your life.”
She didn’t want to be around him
anymore—he was now no longer simply intriguing.
Now, he was talking nonsense, as her father would say. He was probably one of those people that
belong in a sanitarium. “What are you
talking about? You’re not making any
sense.” said her mother’s haggling voice.
The man became impatient. “It’s a place,
another place. Don’t you read adventure books?”
“They’re not real,” she insisted, petulantly, like an adult.
“This place is real.”
“Oh yeah? Well, show me a map of it then.” This was a child’s voice.
“Only madmen make maps of the other
world.”
“Why?”
“Because it is impossible to know.
It has many different…layers—levels.
It doesn’t function the way this world does.”
She decided then that he did belong in a sanitarium, and the
young man could sense that he had lost her.
His thin angular shoulders drooped.
He sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said
“but that key isn’t yours anymore. You
should go now.”
Her eyebrows came together and she
opened her mouth to ask a question, but the man waved her off and slid the key
away from her. It fell into his pocket.
So the girl went, and stepped back
into the footprints on the other sidewalk, and felt relieved when she passed
the fairground the next day on her way to school and saw that the wagon was
gone and the old wooden gate was closed.
The snow had melted away and so she
was free to walk wherever she chose.
Neither the man nor the wagon was there when she went home in the
evening. None of her friends had noticed
them at all. She suspected it was gone
forever.
It wasn’t until years later, when
she was a mother of three screaming children, that she wished she had taken the
key.
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