Birdie's Book - Andrea Burden [30]
Suddenly I felt a tingling in the center of my palm, where the firefly was. Then the golden glow from the firefly grew brighter and brighter, until it had thrown a halo around me. I got up from the carved bed and sat at the table, bathed in the firefly’s light.
Now I saw that beside the book there was a peacock feather with a pointed tip—a fancy quill pen. Next to the peacock quill was a shell with a silver lid. I took off the lid and saw that the shell was filled with silver ink.
The Book of Dreams opened all by itself to a blank page.
The fairies had given me a pen and ink, a blank page, and privacy. It was my turn to write. I picked up the feather.
I wondered if Emma had sat in this very spot when she had written in the book. And perhaps Dora and Mo had, too. How far back did my family go? Had all my ancestresses sat here and written their dreams? I tried to flip through the book to check, but the pages wouldn’t budge.
I sighed, and dipped the tip of the feather into the shell. I brought the tip out, and the silver ink shimmered in the moonlight. I wrote the date. It was going to be hard to write something, knowing that someday my own daughter—or granddaughter!—might read it.
I heard the breeze whoosh-whooshing through the gauze curtains. I heard whir-whirring in the willows and the firefly buzz-buzzing in front of me. My mind wandered into memory.
I remembered the tree house that Mom and I built when I was little. We hammered planks onto the thick oak tree branches to make a sturdy floor that wouldn’t fly off when the Santa Ana winds blew.
“Sorry, tree,” we said every time we hit a nail.
“Is it okay, tree?” we’d ask, for permission.
My mom said that as long as we didn’t nail too deep and we only put in the few nails that were needed, the tree would be okay. I was so happy to be in a world of our own, just me and Mom and the big oak tree. I dreaded having to come down out of that tree house to go to school, to go to bed, to go back to regular life. I wanted to stay in that tree with my mom forever.
I found myself writing, images rising unbidden to my mind. And I described them. I didn’t mind that I had to dip the pen into the ink a lot. It left beautiful thick lines and slender curves, so my writing looked ancient and important. I put the pen down at the edge of the book, feeling a little strange. I closed my eyes to think. Where were these images coming from? Was I really dreaming, or was this some fairy magic?
I thought of how it felt as if Mom was deserting me when she first went back to work. Somehow her job had felt wrong to me, like she wasn’t being herself. I wouldn’t have minded her being away if she had been a gardener or a landscape architect. I had a vague recollection of my parents arguing about my mom’s job, but I can’t remember who was unhappy. Maybe they both were.
I opened my eyes. The firefly was hovering again. I picked up the feather pen and wrote.
Finally, I signed my name and set down the feather pen. I didn’t want to see any more. And I thought I understood now what the dream was saying—I hoped I understood. I looked around for the fairies or the fairy queen. The firefly whirred around the book.
I looked down at the page I had just written. My writing was now illustrated with drawings of the tree and the shadow! Not only that, pressed flowers were embedded in the paper, glitter made sparkling stars among the words, and bits of satin, lace, and ribbon bordered the pages. It was beautiful.
I pressed my hand on my page. The firefly’s glow faded. The moon was gone, and the sky was light purple.
It was time to go.
I found the opening in the curtains and walked into the fairy ring. It was empty: no tables, no fairies, nobody at all. I looked down, and I was wearing the clothes I’d chosen from the wardrobe again. I looked back. My fairy bedroom had been on the raised grassy circle where the queen’s table had