Magic Hour

ALICE PULLED AT HER HAIR AND SNORTED, SHAKING HER HEAD. A LOW, throaty growl seemed caught in her throat.

Julia was seeing true emotion. This was Alice’s heart, and it was a dark, scary place.

Julia opened the door and threw the dreamcatcher out in the hallway, then shut the door. “There,” she said in a soothing voice, moving slowly. “I’m sorry, honey. Really sorry.” She knelt down in front of Alice so they were almost eye-to-eye.

Alice was absolutely still now, her eyes wide with fear.

“You’re terrified,” Julia said. “You think you’re in trouble, don’t you?” Very slowly, she reached out and touched Alice’s wrist. The touch was fleeting and as soft as a whisper. “It’s okay, Alice. You don’t have to be scared.”

At the touch, Alice made a strangled, desperate sound and stumbled backward. She hid behind the plants and began a quiet, desperate howling.

The child had no idea how to be comforted. Another of the many heartbreaks of her life.

“Hmmm,” Julia said, making a great show of looking around the room. “What shall we do now?” After a few moments she picked up the old, battered copy of Alice in Wonderland. “Where did we leave young Alice?”

She went back to the bed and sat down. With the book open on her lap, she looked up.

Between two green fronds, a tiny, earnest face peered at her.

“Come,” Julia said softly. “No hurt.”

Alice made a pathetic little sound, a mewl of sorts.

It tugged at Julia’s heart, that whimper that sounded at once too old and too young. It was a distillation of longing from fear. “Come,” she said again, patting the bed. “No hurt.”

Still, Alice remained in her safe spot.

Julia started to read: “‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself,’ said Alice, ‘a great girl like you, (she might well say this) to go on crying in this way! Stop this moment, I tell you! But she went on all the same shedding gallons of tears until there was a large pool around her.’”

There was a sound across the room, a scuffing of feet.

Julia smiled to herself and kept reading.

IT IS A TRICK.

Girl knows this. She knows it.

And yet . . .

The sounds are so soothing.

She sits in the forest so long her legs begin to ache. Although stillness has always been her way, in this bright place she likes to move, if only because she can.

Don’t do it, she thinks, shifting her weight from one foot to another.

It is a trick.

When Girl gets close, Her will beat her.

“Comeherealis.”

From the jumble of sounds Sun Hair makes, Girl hears these special noises again. From somewhere, she remembers that they are words.

Trick.

She has no choice but to obey, of course. Sooner or later—sooner, probably—Sun Hair will tire of waiting; this game of hers will lose its fun, and Girl will be in Trouble.

Very slowly she steps from her hiding place. Her heart is hammering. She is afraid it will break through her chest and fall onto the floor.