time the room was in motion around me, carrying me from this place to that.
My body shook, and my eyes snapped open. I found Matilda hovering over me.
As she came into focus, strength returned to my arms and legs, and my entire body came to life all at once, flailing this way and that, then finally pushing off the top of my bed with such power I left the surface altogether, hovered in the ether for a brief moment, then came crashing back down.
Matilda stared at me, her mouth agape, and I suddenly grew both embarrassed and afraid all at once.
* * *
? ? ?
“DID IT HAPPEN?” I asked.
Before I finished the sentence, Matilda was nodding her head. “The last thing I recall is running from the dragonflies in the forest. Then I awoke in my bed with the light of morning against my cheek. I do not know how we arrived home, and I don’t remember getting undressed or crawling into bed. Yet I awoke in my bedclothes, tucked in under the blankets as I would any other night. At first, I wasn’t sure, either, but I found my coat covered in burrs from the forest.” She paused, then frowned. “You’re bleeding—”
“What?”
She wiped at the corner of my mouth with her finger. “It’s dry. A few hours old, at least. I don’t see a cut, though; only a little dried blood. Did you bite your tongue?”
“Maybe,” I said, although I felt no pain.
“What is the last thing you remember?”
I thought about this, for I, too, remembered running through the forest in an attempt to escape the dragonflies. I also remembered the hand reaching up from the water of the bog and snatching one of the flies midair. The hand was fat and wrinkled like a prune, as if it had spent an eternity beneath the water. And the way it grabbed that dragonfly! I was reminded of a frog’s tongue striking out lightning fast.
But then I was home, back in bed—the time transpiring between these two events utterly lost to me.
And then there was my encounter with Nanna Ellen.
“You must tell me what you remember,” Matilda said, as if divining my thoughts.
So I did; I told her everything.
When I finished, she was not staring at me with the disbelief I expected; instead, her face only deepened with concern and worry. “I found your window ajar when I came in. Look, the rainwater is still puddled beneath . . .”
Ma would have sealed the window before going to bed; she always did. Even during the most stifling of months, she shut my window and locked out the night air for fear of me catching a cold, or worse. My ailment simply wouldn’t tolerate such conditions. I had opened the window last night, just as I remembered.
* * *
? ? ?
“SO WHY DON’T WE remember coming home?”
Her question lingered in the air, for neither of us had an answer.
Matilda’s eyes shifted; she looked down at my arm. I scratched at it, in an absence of mind. I stopped and tried to move my arm under the blanket. Matilda would have none of it; she grabbed my arm and pulled it towards her. “You’ve been scratching at this since you got better; you must let me see!”
I pulled the arm back with such force my hand cracked into the headboard with a loud thwack. So loud, in fact, I would not have been surprised to find a crack in the oak. Yet my hand seemed fine, unmarked. I quickly tucked it under the blanket.
Matilda stared at me in awe. A few days ago, she was much stronger than me—easily able to hold both my arms back with a single hand, as she had done on so many occasions, yet now I pulled away from her with such ease.
“What has become of you?” she said in a low voice. “Did she do this to you?”
I did not respond; I simply didn’t know what to say.