Newford Stories
Authors: Charles de Lint
Tags: #newford animal people mythic fiction native american trickster folklore corvid crow raven urban fantasy
by
Copyright © 2015 by Charles de Lint
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for MaryAnn
CONTENTS
Someplace to Be Flying excerpt
Introduction
by
Joanne Harris
I first came across the
work of Charles de Lint in the early nineties. I’d just given
birth, both to my daughter and to my second book,
Sleep, Pale Sister
, a
dark little tale about ghosts and the Victorian art community. I
was already writing another book, whilst working full-time as a
teacher, having taken only two weeks’ maternity leave. It wasn’t a
wonderful time for me. I had terrible headaches. I barely slept. I
felt I was living a different life to the one I was meant to live;
I used to look at the evening sky and dream of simply flying
away.
One day I pulled out a
book at random from a shelf in the city library. It was
called
Memory and Dream
. As I leafed through the pages, two glossy black feathers
fell out. That was my first introduction to Charles’ curiously
evocative, uniquely quirky, urban and yet wistful depiction of
otherworldly spirits in human form, living in plain sight in those
places where dream and reality intersect. I read the book, and
found that it put into words thoughts I’d had about my life, but
hadn’t known how to articulate. It was a breath of unpolluted air;
a whisper of everyday magic.
Since then I have sought out Charles’ books
wherever I could find them—although they are not always easy to
find in the UK—and have read them with admiration and joy. No other
writer does what he does in depicting the process of making art—be
that painting, sculpture, writing or music. He writes with a
passion and authority that only experience can give, and his words
have hidden cadences that echo the rhythms of the music he loves,
and conjure the secret landscapes between the world of what we know
and the worlds we dare to dream.
His books are filled with
characters we feel we must have met before; and maybe we have
(those two feathers were certainly put there by
someone
); but in any case, the crow
girls and their kind, once seen, are impossible to forget. Wild,
but curiously childlike; wise and yet playful; existing outside the
confines of conventional morality, and yet bringing hope and
clarity to everyone whose lives they touch. Like Odin’s ravens,
Hugin and Munin, they seem to be an expression of our collective
mind and spirit, of freedoms lost and instincts suppressed; of a
simplicity of purpose and connection with the natural world that
modern living has taken from us, and that we now find only in
dreams, in art, in the wilderness and just occasionally, in stories
like these.
This collection of Newford stories offers a
glimpse behind the scenes of the everyday world into a modern
dreamtime, in which the spirits of the First People cast their
shadows across our lives, leaving in their wake a sense of
something lost and something found—a breath of other places; a
possibility of reconciliation between Man and the natural
world.
Coleridge imagined a scene
in which a sleeper, dreaming of Heaven, picked a flower there, only
to find it in his hand as he awoke. These stories—ephemeral,
bittersweet—are a reminder that what has been lost may also be
re-imagined; a token of the bond between mind and spirit; body and
soul; a flower picked in Paradise
—
Or, just maybe, a feather.
Crow Girls
I remember what somebody said about
nostalgia. He said, “It’s okay to look back, as long as you don’t
stare.”
—Tom Paxton, from an interview with Ken
Rockburn
People have a funny way of remembering where
they’ve been, who they were. Facts fall by the wayside. Depending
on their temperament, they either remember a golden time when all
was better than well, better than it can be again, better than it
ever really was: a first love, the endless expanse of a summer
vacation, youthful vigor, the sheer novelty of being alive that
gets lost when the world starts wearing you down. Or they focus in
on the bad, blow little incidents all out of proportion, hold
grudges for years, or maybe they really did have some unlucky
times, but now they’re reliving them forever in their heads instead
of moving on.
But the brain plays tricks on us all,
doesn’t it? We go by what it tells us, have to, I suppose, because
what else do we have to use as touchstones? Trouble is, we don’t
ask for confirmation on what the brain tells us. Things don’t have
to be real, we just have to believe they’re real, which pretty much
explains politics and religion as much as it does what goes on
inside our heads.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not pointing any
fingers here. My people aren’t guiltless either. The only
difference is our memories go back a lot further than yours do.
* * *
“I don’t get computers,” Heather said.
Jilly laughed. “What’s not to get?”
They were having cappuccinos in the
Cyberbean Café, sitting at the long counter with computer terminals
spaced along its length the way those little individual jukeboxes
used to be in highway diners. Jilly looked as though she’d been
using the tips of her dark ringlets as paintbrushes, then cleaned
them on the thighs of her jeans—in other words, she’d come straight
from the studio without changing first. But however haphazardly
messy she might allow herself or her studio to get, Heather knew
she’d either cleaned her brushes, or left them soaking in turps
before coming down to the café. Jilly might seem terminally
easygoing, but some things she didn’t blow off. No matter how the
work was going—good, bad or indifferent—she treated her tools with
respect.
As usual, Jilly’s casual scruffiness made
Heather feel overdressed. She was only wearing cotton pants and a
blouse, nothing fancy. But she always felt a little like that
around Jilly, ever since she’d first taken a class from her at the
Newford School of Art a couple of winters ago. No matter how hard
she tried, she hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that she
looked so typical: the suburban working mother, the happy wife. The
differences since she and Jilly had first met weren’t great. Her
blond hair had been long then, while now it was cropped short. She
was wearing glasses now instead of her contacts.
And two years ago she hadn’t been carrying
an empty wasteland around inside her chest.
“Besides,” Jilly added. “You use a computer
at work, don’t you?”
“Sure, but that’s work,” Heather said. “Not
games and computer screen romances and stumbling around the
Internet, looking for information you’re never going to find a use
for outside of Trivial Pursuit.”
“I think it’s bringing back a sense of
community,” Jilly said.
“Oh, right.”
“No, think about it. All these people who
might have been just vegging out in front of a TV are chatting with
each other in cyberspace instead—hanging out, so to speak, with
kindred spirits that they might never have otherwise met.”
Heather sighed. “But it’s not real human
contact.”
“No. But at least it’s contact.”
“I suppose.”
Jilly regarded her over the brim of her
glass coffee mug. It was a mild gaze, not in the least probing, but
Heather couldn’t help but feel as though Jilly were seeing right
inside her head, all the way down to where desert winds blew
through the empty space where her heart had been.
“So what’s the real issue?” Jilly asked.
Heather shrugged. “There’s no issue.” She
took a sip of her own coffee, then tried on a smile. “I’m thinking
of moving downtown.”
“Really?”
“Well, you know. I already work here.
There’s a good school for the kids. It just seems to make
sense.”
“How does Peter feel about it?”
Heather hesitated for a long moment, then
sighed again. “Peter’s not really got anything to say about
it.”
“Oh, no. You guys always seemed so…” Jilly’s
voice trailed off. “Well, I guess you weren’t really happy, were
you?”
“I don’t know what we were anymore. I just
know we’re not together. There wasn’t a big blowup or anything. He
wasn’t cheating on me and I certainly wasn’t cheating on him. We’re
just…not together.”
“It must be so weird.”
Heather nodded. “Very weird. It’s a real
shock, suddenly discovering after all these years that we really
don’t have much in common at all.”
Jilly’s eyes were warm with sympathy. “How
are you holding up?”
“Okay, I suppose. But it’s so confusing. I
don’t know what to think, who I am, what I thought I was doing with
the last twenty years of my life. I mean, I don’t regret the
girls—I’d have had more children if we could have had them—but
everything else…”
She didn’t know how to begin to explain.
“I married Peter when I was eighteen and I’m
forty-one now. I’ve been a part of a couple for longer than I’ve
been anything else, but except for the girls, I don’t know what any
of it meant anymore. I don’t know who I am. I thought we’d be
together forever, that we’d grow old together, you know? But now
it’s just me. Casey’s fifteen and Janice is twelve. I’ve got
another few years of being a mother, but after that, who am I? What
am I going to do with myself?”
“You’re still young,” Jilly said. “And you
look gorgeous.”
“Right.”
“Okay. A little pale today, but still.”
Heather shook her head. “I don’t know why
I’m telling you this. I haven’t told anybody.”
“Not even your mom or your sister?”
“Nobody. It’s…”
She could feel tears welling up, the vision
blurring, but she made herself take a deep breath. It seemed to
help. Not a lot, but some. Enough to carry on. How to explain why
she wanted to keep it a secret? It wasn’t as though it was
something she could keep hidden forever.
“I think I feel like a failure,” she
said.
Her voice was so soft she almost couldn’t
hear herself, but Jilly reached over and took her hand.
“You’re not a failure. Things didn’t work
out, but that doesn’t mean it was your fault. It takes two people
to make or break a relationship.”
“I suppose. But to have put in all those
years…”
Jilly smiled. “If nothing else, you’ve got
two beautiful daughters to show for them.”
Heather nodded. The girls did a lot to keep
the emptiness at bay, but once they were in bed asleep and she was
by herself, alone in the dark, sitting on the couch by the picture
window, staring down the street at all those other houses just like
her own, that desolate place inside her seemed to go on
forever.