Night: Colbie and Her First Kiss

Thrice (Scenes 1-2)

Keeping time, time, time,
⁠In a sort of Runic rhyme,
⁠To the throbbing of the bells—

—Edgar Allan Poe,
“The Bells”

1

It was now 5:54 p.m.

The moment Leslie passed the threshold, she found herself in the middle of an overgrown forest beneath a canopy of large trees overhanging her head. Moonlight streamed into her surroundings in jagged shards of chiaroscuro as she groped her way on sandaled feet. Shapes flitted by her through the darkness, and the crunching sounds of her own footfalls capered behind her like a stalker’s tread. She fought the urge to turn and look for fear of phantom eyes leering at her when she passed, leering with intentions that struck drumbeats through her heart.

Then a howl arose from afar, somewhere up ahead towards her left, and the night woke up with a thousand eyes. More howls echoed through the night from afar, somewhere behind her to her right side, and the night stirred and breathed around her with every step she took.

A wave of goosebumps washed over her limbs, and she cursed.

All at once, the howls gave way to distant footfalls crunching on the forest debris, and just beyond her range of hearing was something else wafting on the whispers of the wind.

She halted, thinking of the clang of bells.

And with them came the half-heard silences in the nighttime breeze that interspersed the lulls, whispering wordless premonitions in the air. She walked on in hurried footfalls, crinkling dead leaves and dirt under foot, looking for a clearing in the trees or even just a gap in the canopy of fluttering leaves and swaying branches. And so, she walked and skipped and walked and skipped, peering up at the rustling canopy for big gaps of moonlit sky, as images of predatory wolf-eyes kept flashing through her mind.

“What time is it?” she said under her breath, wishing she had taken her watch with her. It was probably still early in the evening, but time tended to get weird in dreams without a watch or a timepiece to ground her astral senses.

For a time, she kept looking for a clearing of sky before halting at something in the distance.

Something like running water and maybe . . . crying.

“Hello?” she said. “Is anybody there?”

She paused when the crying stopped for a moment. When the crying resumed, she said, “Helloooo?”

The crying stopped for another moment.

A child’s voice said, “I’m here.”

“Where?” Leslie said, walking towards the sound of running water. “Are you hurt?”

“No,” the voice said. “I don’t think so.”

“Tell me where you are, sweetie,” she said, walking towards the sound and crunching through decaying foliage. “Just keep talking, okay?”

“Okay,” the child said.

Leslie kept on walking, trying to peer through the moonlit darkness of tree trunks and overhanging branches. “You there?”

“You’re getting closer.”

“Just keep talking okay, sweetie?”

“Okay,” the child said.

She kept walking, crunching over leaves and listening to the running water getting stronger in her ears, and spied an opening near a brook. And on the other side of that brook at the water’s edge, where it pooled and widened into a gentle current, she saw a little girl with long dark hair, wearing what seemed to be a Sunday dress and skimmer hat.

She waved her hands, catching the girl’s gaze, and said, “Hey, I’m over here.” The girl stood up, and her eyes shimmered in the darkness. “Don’t move, sweetie. Just stay still, and I’ll come over there, okay?”

“Okay,” the girl said.

Leslie walked along the margin of the brook, spying a narrow part of the brook a little ways downstream from where the girl was, and skipped over the running water at a single bound. She then hurried along the bank of the brook toward the girl.

“Hey,” Leslie said, walking up and squatting down and facing the girl at eye-level. “Sweetie, are you okay?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you lost?”

“Yeah,” the girl said.

“What’s your name?”

The girl paused for a moment, as if wondering if she should talk to this stranger, then said, “Auna.”

“Okay, Auna. My Name is Leslie. You’re not hurt, are you?”

“No,” Auna said. “I don’t think so.”

Her words made Leslie pause, and when she got a close look at the little girl, she said, “What’s wrong?”

“I’m scared!” And the girl cried again, wrinkling her brows, squinting her eyes full of tears, and grimacing her cheeks. “I don’t want to be alone!”

“Oh, sweetie, it’s okay. It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not!” Auna said, pushing her away and wiping her eyes with the hems of her dress. “Please don’t hurt me!”

“I won’t, sweetie. I won’t.”

“But you might,” Auna continued. “He hurts me when I cry, but please don’t hurt me!”

Leslie gulped, feeling her heart skip a beat, and looked at the little girl. “Who hurts you?”

The girl said nothing.

“Who hurts you?”

Again, the girl said nothing.

“Sweetie, I won’t hurt you, okay?” Leslie said. “I’ll never ever hurt you.”

“Even when I cry?”

“Even when you cry.”

“Promise?”

“I promise, so it’s okay,” Leslie said. “Tell me who hurt you.”

“Dad,” Auna said.

“What does he do to you?”

“He pinches me,” she said.

“When you cry?”

The girl nodded and said, “He hates me.”

Leslie gulped, feeling her heart beating drumbeats in her chest, her heart going out to this little girl. “Why?”

Auna stayed silent, but tears trailed down her cheeks.

“Sweetie, I promise I won’t hurt you, okay?” Leslie said, reaching out and wiping away the tears from her face. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

But she said, anyway, “Dad hates me because of what I did to Mom. He hates me because I . . . I . . .”

And the import of the girl’s meaning flashed across Leslie’s mind like a snapshot of a cruel fate. Losing someone so close was hard for anyone to take, let alone for someone at such a young and impressionable age, only to face the bitterness of someone else for something she had no control over. So she kneeled down on one knee and hugged the little girl close to her, rubbing circles around her back to comfort her.

“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” Leslie said.

“You won’t tell Dad I cried?”

“No, I won’t tell him. Listen to me,” Leslie added, eyeing the girl in the face. “I’ll protect you from him, okay? I won’t let your father hurt you anymore, okay?”

The little girl paused for a moment, then reached out a hand and wiped the tears from Leslie’s eyes, and said, “Did I hurt you?”

Her words broke Leslie’s heart, and tears flowed from Leslie’s eyes. She grasped the girl’s hand and kissed it, then hugged her close, saying, ”No, sweetie. It’s okay.”

She lied. It wasn’t okay, not when the words of such an innocent little girl could cut her so, not when this girl’s dread lurked on the edges of her words and capered on the tip of her tongue. But for this girl, Leslie suspended all pain, wiping away her own tears and then the girl’s tears, and gave her a reassuring smile even when it felt like agony. And if she could, even for just the span of this very dream, she’d protect this girl from all things that hurt her so.

For the next hour and thirty minutes, she comforted the girl with reassuring words, till her words and her dream sequence faded into the oblivion of slow-wave sleep. And for a time, she lingered on the cusp of oblivion as words from an old poem filtered through her mind:

Lo! 'tis a gala night
⁠Within the lonesome latter years!
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
⁠In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
⁠A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
⁠The music of the spheres.

2

It was now 7:55 p.m.

Before she could make sense of these words, Leslie found herself in another dream sequence, accompanying the little girl along a yellow-brick path through the forest. The moonlight streamed through the canopy above their heads along the path, and a river of twinkling stars peered through the leaves and swaying branches, lighting their way as Leslie asked Auna about her family and friends. At first, Auna was reluctant to tell her, so Leslie introduced her own, starting with her daughter Colbie, then Colbie’s friends Kendra and Celia, and then Celia’s sisters Katherine and Madison. Leslie told her of their many misadventures when they were all little, especially with Celia and Colbie antics driving Kendra and Katherine and Madison crazy.

This seemed to break through Auna’s reluctance, but when asked about her father, she paused and just said, “Rubin,” and when asked about her mother, she paused and just said, “Bridget,” and started crying before wiping tears away with the hem of her dress.

Leslie dwelled on the name, ‘Bridget,’ feeling a sense of nostalgia wash over her at the name. She then got a closer look at the girl, who bore a resemblance to someone from her past, till she realized that this girl was referring to a brief acquaintance she had met years ago. So she apologized for making her cry and said, “Your mom’s name is Bridget? As in, Bridget Barton Wenger?”

Auna’s eyes lit up, and she said, “You knew my mom?”

“A little bit.”

Auna paused, as if wondering if she was lying, then said, “What was she like?”

Leslie thought of her words in conjunction with her first and only meeting with Bridget Barton Wenger seventeen years ago when she had asked to join the Sisters’ Brigade, but Leslie didn’t want to dig up painful memories, so she said, “I only met her once. She was pregnant at the time, but she was a strong woman, and I’m sure you’ll grow up to be as strong as her some day.”

For some reason, Auna stayed silent, but when Leslie asked about Auna’s friends, she got a different reaction. Auna lit up with a smile, and Leslie wondered at Auna’s imaginary friend as she went on and on about her with the imaginary games they played, as though they were more than just friends—more like sisters.

During Auna’s account of her imaginary adventures, Leslie remembered to ask and said, “What’s your friend’s name?”

And like before, Auna paused, as if wondering if she should tell this acquaintance of her mother’s the name of someone so close to her, then said, “Alice.”

Leslie noted the girl’s one-word answers to her questions about names (the names of her mother and father, as well as her imaginary friend) and thought of the reason why. Names singled out who people were, so speaking someone’s name was a kind of invocation. And knowing someone’s name (even just the first name) gave the knower power and influence over the one bearing the name, such as parents giving their children given names, or women adopting the surnames of their husbands in marriage, or strangers introducing each other’s names to become acquaintances and later friends. Yet Auna’s reticence raised goosebumps on Leslie’s forearms, as if her friendship with this “Alice” left the girl at a disadvantage somehow.

“Did Alice ask for your name?” Leslie said, feeling her heartbeats quickening at the hunches churning like knives through her stomach, wanting yet fearing to know.

“She knew my name,” Auna said, but said no more.

Leslie paused when a chill tingled through her stomach, but she still couldn’t pinpoint its source. “Did you ask for her name?”

“She introduced hers first.”

Leslie stopped at this detail and grabbed her hand, looked at the girl before her, and said, “Did she do anything to you?”

Auna remained silent, shaking her head and looked up at the older woman with curious eyes and said, “What do you mean?”

Her question was a tell of something far deeper than Auna was letting on, and as far as Leslie was concerned, she had a hunch that Auna’s imaginary friend had done something.

“Did she make any promises if you did something?” Leslie said, rolling more questions through her head. “Or did she—”

She stopped herself short when a breeze of howls rustled through the forest, coming closer on silent footfalls over the forest floor, their huffs closing in around them yards away from the moonlit yellow-brick path, their shapes like hallucinations somewhere within the curtain of shadowy woods. Yet their howls never approached them, only ran past them to a different animal sound up ahead of them.

“Stay close,” Leslie said, gripping Auna’s hand in a firm grasp and walking at a brisk pace down the yellow-brick path in the opposite direction, looking out for the flash of glowing predatory eyes and wishing Colbie or Celia were here. Either of them could teleport Leslie and Auna out of here in an instant, but they were nowhere in this dream sequence. She and Auna were on their own, but when Auna struggled, she said, “I know it’s hard, but we have to keep going, okay?”

But that didn’t stop Auna from yanking herself from Leslie’s grasp, halting the forced march down the path.

Leslie turned. “Why’d you stop? We have to keep going.”

“They won’t attack me,” Auna said, “but they might attack you.”

“What do you mean?” Leslie said, grabbing at Auna’s hand. “We have to—”

Growls resounded beyond the bend of the yellow-brick road ahead of them, growls that didn’t resemble any canine Leslie had ever heard. Instead, they sounded more like a tiger’s growl, but deeper somehow, like that of a lumbering bear. More howls rustled through the curtain of trees, again running past them to the source of the ambiguous sound—the growl of a tiger or a bear.

“What are we dealing with here?” Leslie said under her breath, tightening her hold on Auna’s hand, but her hand dissipated from Leslie’s grasp. Leslie turned this way and that way, but saw no sign of the girl anywhere. “Auna? Auna, where are you? Where did you go?”

Leslie cursed. She looked down at her hand, still feeling the warm tingling sensation of Auna’s presence lingering in her palm, so she said, “Oh Winds, show me Auna’s whereabouts. To the West, to the East, to the North, to the South, where is she?”

And she took a deep breath and blew over her hand as if she were blowing a dandelion into fluttering pieces. So out of the fluttering pieces of Auna’s residual warmth misted the Auna’s image in Leslie’s mind, but it dissipated in an instant, followed by a voice.

“She’s not yours, Leslie.”

Leslie turned behind her and saw Aaron Rancaster a few yards off with another girl, an older girl who seemed around Colbie’s age standing beside him. This older girl had bobbed hair, but when her gaze lingered on her face, the resemblance clued Leslie in on who she was. She took a step closer and said, “Auna, is that you?”

At the sound of her name, Auna manifested a gun in her hand, aiming it at Leslie’s head, and said, “Don’t come any closer.”

“Sorry, darling,” Rancaster said to Leslie. “This child here is a bit of a coquette.” Then to Auna: “Be more courteous to one of my old acquaintances, bambina. She did manage to find you for me, for which,” he added, facing Leslie again, “I am eternally grateful.”

“What did you do to her, you bastard?” Leslie said, her words steely and cold, all of her hatred directed at the ‘bastard’ before her.

“I have a heart, too, you know,” he said, then placed his hand over Auna’s gun and lowered the muzzle to the ground, dissipating it in her hand. “I only saved Auna from a ghastly predicament.”

“And how do I know you’re not lying?”

“Were you there when it happened?” Rancaster said, waiting for Leslie to respond, but she never did. “Can you make judgments on things you haven’t seen?”

“What happened to her?”

“It’s not for me to say,” Rancaster said, then raised Auna’s hand and kissed her knuckles like a prince from a fairy tale. “Auna here is a woman now. She can make up her own mind on how much she wants to say to a stranger like you.”

Auna said, “But, father, I don’t—”

“Go on and say what you need to say,” he said. “She’s the closest thing to a mother you’ve ever had, bambina, even if it’s just a dream. I’ll be waiting when you’re finished.” With that, Rancaster left the girl and walked off into a shrouding mist and disappeared out of the dream sequence.

Leslie ran up to Auna and found her crying and said, “What did he say to you?”

Auna stayed mute, but her brows scrunched up as if she were digging up words from an unhallowed grave, words she had been meaning to get off her chest since the day she was born.

“Auna, what happened?” Leslie said, placing her hands on Auna’s shoulders and looking in her eyes, and saw the light snuffed out like empt lamps. “What did he do to you?”

“He saved my life,” Auna said, “because my mom wasn’t there to protect me.”

“From who?”

“From my father,” she said, “from my real father.”

Leslie gulped at the implications of her words, words that dug through her insides like knives, words that opened the door to all kinds of atrocities. She thought of saying, ‘What did your father do to you?’ But with every pulse of her heartbeat, she knew. She knew the way she knew something had happened to Colbie this morning when she woke up at 5:10 a.m. in a panic, dragged herself out of bed in search for her phone, and called Colbie’s smartphone before Colbie and Celia and Kendra decided to go to the nurse’s office to talk to Connie Davis. She knew, even when Colbie tried to assure her that nothing had happened when she woke up, that something had happened, and she knew, even when Auna tried not to show her vulnerable self to a stranger like herself, that something had happened—something painful for anyone to bear.

“I’m sorry,” Leslie said, and hugged Auna close to her as though she were her own daughter, shedding tears for the tearless Auna. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there to protect you.”

“Why does my dad hate me?” Auna said.

“I don’t know, sweetie,” she said, “I don’t know.”

“Was it my fault? Was it because—”

“No, sweetie,” Leslie said. “Don’t ever think that.”

“Then why weren’t you there to protect me?”

Leslie paused on those words, feeling the weight of a crime she herself knew nothing of, a crime of absence linked in the mind of a despairing daughter between Bridget Barton and herself. She weighed the truth in her mind, took a deep breath, and said, “Listen, I’m not your mother, but I’m sure your real mother loved you more than you know.”

“How do you know that?” And the first traces of Auna’s humanity welled up in her eyes.

“Because you’re alive, and her blood beats through your veins,” Leslie said. “She gave her own life, so that you can live.”

That’s when Auna let go of her deadpan facade long enough for tears to trail her cheeks. When Leslie let go, Auna looked at the older woman’s face, wet with her own tears, and said, “If I was your daughter, would you have protected me?”

“Yes,” Leslie said.

That one word was all it took for the dream sequence to desynchronize, for the spell of bitter nostalgia to break and fall apart around them like shards from a broken dream that was never to be. Leslie lingered on Auna’s tear-stained face, blooming with the residual traces of Auna’s younger self.

“Will I see you again?” Leslie said.

Auna shook her head. “The next time you see me, I’ll be a different person. When you see me, when you see Alice, remember me as you see me now. Goodbye.”

And the image of Auna cracked and shattered into shards and dissipated into nothing, but her words lingered on through the doldrums of Leslie’s unconscious sleep. For a time, Leslie lingered on the cusp of oblivion as Auna’s words faded into another set of words from the same old poem filtering through her mind:

Mimes, in the form of God on high,
⁠Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly—
⁠Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things
⁠That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their Condor wings
⁠Invisible Wo!

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