​
 
Dark clouds were crouching on the horizon. They had been gathering all day and I was in a hurry to get the sheets off the line before the rain.  (There are some things I will not give up and one of them is hanging the sheets to dry, much to my neighbor’s chagrin).  It had been beastly hot all day and the air was oppressive to breathe. As I stepped outside and crossed the yard, they suddenly began flapping and waving furiously. I grabbed at them and began to remove the pins but a howling wind ripped them from my hands. Dust and debris began to swirl around me and suddenly I was lifted off my feet. I was more amused at this than frightened as I was accompanied by my laundry basket, the neighbor’s rooster and my cat. The rooster and the cat appeared calm, enjoying this chance at a fluff and buff to rid their bodies of unwanted detritus. I myself could use a fluff and buff and released my pony tail to take advantage of the fingers of air that now we’re roaming through my hair. All the while I could hear a strange music, rather like a fiddle being played at rapid speed. The tune sounded very familiar. Looking up I spied the farmer who owned the rooster sitting in his porch chair fiddling away.
What’s that tune you’re playing? I called up to him as we spun merrily around.
It’s The Swallowtail Jig!
My, that’s such a lively tune I want to dance.
Go ahead he called to me.
Here?
Why not? We’re not going anywhere as far as I can tell. The weather vane off my barn just passed me and it pointed northeast - if we continue we’ll circle around eventually, so we might as well enjoy ourselves, he said as he continued to play.
I tried to tap my toe but there wasn’t anything solid to tap on. The rooster and the cat passed by again. This time the rooster was sitting on top of the cat that seemed to be enjoying a back scratch. I looked down and saw my sheets sailing along below me.
Sort of a tumble dry, I thought. Good grief I think I’m losing my mind! How can this be happening?
Just then the wind began to subside and the farmer, his fiddle, the cat, the rooster and my sheets settled gently to the ground. We stared at each other and I asked him if he could play the jig again. Now that I had firm footing I could really kick my feet up. The rooster crowed as if in agreement and the cat sprang into the basket to watch. I looked up through the remnants of the tornado and watched as it dissolved into fragile, feathery fingers that slipped out into the most beautiful blue sky. The farmer struck up the jig and we laughed and I danced a few steps under the clothes line.
Whatever are you doing? My husband called to me from the porch door.
His voice broke the spell.
Just enjoying this breezy day, I called back, sure that if I looked behind me there would be no farmer, no fiddle, no rooster and no cat.
Instead I would see my basket of sheets waiting for me. 

 
We saw each other at the same moment. 
He froze. 
I froze, waiting to see when he would make his move.
The rain had let up a while ago and my walk had taken me here to this spot where the woods meets the tall grasses.
There he crouched, watchful, waiting for me to move along. 
He was handsome. A thick crest of hair on the back of his head rustled in the soft breeze left behind by the rain and his black eyes darted this way and that, which was rather disturbing.  I wasn’t sure where to look. The muscles in his legs were tensed, his feet firmly planted and I felt as if he was about to explode out of his stance. His tall, black tipped ears moved like the cupped hand the Queen of England waves while passing her subjects, almost compelling me to wave back. Suddenly he was gone.  One second he was there, the next the tall, wet grass had swallowed him up.
Curious as to how he managed this sleight of hand before my very eyes, I slowly approached where he had stood.  There at the knees of tightly wound bittersweet branches, compacted dead grasses and brown, wet oak leaves was a perfectly constructed passageway. Tufts of soft brown hair caught here and there on several brambles that wound through it.
Where did it lead?
How far to home?
At that moment I longed to be small and step through that passageway too.

​My mother’s guardian never quite left the Victorian Era behind and I dreaded being dragged to her house every Sunday to visit. Her pale skin stretched across her cheeks and smelled heavily of lavender powder bathing the many creases in her face.  Her skin always startled me with its translucence, as if you could read a newspaper through it, if you had to.  She wore her long gray hair in a tightly curled braid on the top of her head, and secured it with several pins with butterflies at their tips.  Her home was an ancient mausoleum, tall, dark and foreboding, badly in need of a coat of paint.  I always thought she liked it that way, but my mother said she never painted it again after she was widowed in the Great War, and so it returned to bare wood over the years, aged and soft, rather like her skin.
Whenever my mother and I would visit, I was uneasy sitting in the parlor on the stiff velvet settee, hands in lap, listening politely to their conversation. I had to peer over the tall black lacquered table with a heavy marble top that stood in the center of the room just to see them.  There was an inkwell in the shape of a large crab, pinchers raised, that sat in the middle of it.  A terrifying posture that always made me feel I was being warned. It was carved from a cannon ball, my grandmother said, an honest to god cannon ball.  How could this be?  To one side of the room sat an ancient upright piano I was never allowed to touch.  An enormous Christmas cactus in a massive pot sat on a stand in front of one of the two windows in the room, obscuring the daylight and only adding to the gloom inside. A heavily carved black lacquered coat rack stood in the opposite corner, covered with old coats and hats that appeared to have last been warn in the WWII, covered as they were in a fine dust.  The entire ensemble gave off the unmistakable aura of a place that modern time had forgotten, and an unmistakable sense of decay and doom.   All this I observed as I sat listening to their conversation, focusing on the butterflies in her hair.   They were beautiful, jeweled insects that appeared to move their wings every time she moved her head.  Trembling and shaking as if they were alive. But of course they were only paste and glass, mounted on springs to great effect.  They were fascinating to watch.
The hours dragged, but my focus kept returning to the butterflies in her hair. Moving their wings magically up and down and quivering in the way butterflies do when there is the slightest breeze.
They want to fly away from here, I thought.  They want to be free. 
At last it was time to go.  Standing on her porch, I knew this was the time for me to embrace her warmly, if only for my mother’s sake.   I hesitated a moment, knowing my cheek would soon press against her translucent skin, fearful I would somehow tear it. I leaned in and wrapped my arms around her ample waist. It was then from the corner of my eye I saw them take wing and disappear into the sky. 
​I was right about the butterflies.

Mazy looked at herself in the mirror.  Girl, what are you doing?  Since her divorce three years ago, she had placed herself on a shelf.  Now, it was time to get back out there.  Never mind that she was on the far side of 60, pulling it pretty hard some might say; she was determined.  So when her much younger colleague suggested she hook up with Mr. Wonderful, a really nice neighbor, who, like Mazy, had divorced and who, she extolled, would be so right for you! Not knowing exactly what her young colleague meant by that, Mazy threw all caution to the wind and agreed. She agreed to the blind date just to show the young millennial that women of a certain age still had the right stuff.  But this morning, as she looked at herself in the mirror she had to give herself a talking to.
 
You’re feeling good about being a woman! You’ve been around longer than God, but you still fill out your C cups!
 
So it was that the ritual of disguise that women had been using ever since Eve offered Adam the apple, telling him it was good for him, began. 
 
First on her list of to-do’s was the requisite spa appointment. She arrived early.  Who arrives late for “instantly transforming their skin to youthful dewiness?” as the salon advertised.  So, she booked the works, facial, manicure, a sugar scrub and bikini waxing.  Who knows? I might get REALLY lucky.
Someone should tell the uninitiated that facials, manicures and sugar scrubs are so yesterday compared to the REALLY revitalizing experience of having your hair follicles ripped out down there. The facial was relaxing until the esthetist reminded her that she really should have come in more often as her blackheads were alarmingly large, but “she was sure she could extract them if she wanted her to do so.”
 
Sure! What’s the sense of getting a facial if you leave with blackheads the size of Montana around your nose?
 
Mazy drove herself home from the spa, with an unbearable stinging in her crotch and her face plastered with red welts.  The esthetist had advised to use cold compresses on both.  There’s an irony for you.  The very part of a woman’s anatomy that she grooms to attract a man are flaming red and screaming at her for subjecting them to this torture.  O my god, Mazy thought. What have I done?
 
By the time the appointed hour of meeting her blind date had arrived, Mazy had wriggled herself into a sophisticated little black number with a not-too-revealing neckline that enhanced her well defined décolletage.   Her Spanx underwear was doing wonders for smoothing out the occasional ripple over her hips and tummy.  The welts on her face were well disguised under the new Boom Sticks she had purchased: “cosmetics for women who want to reveal their genuine beauty with an honest and realistic approach”.  This consisted of a lipstick, blush, eye shadow and bronzer all in one.  (I’ll let you figure that one out.) The final touch was slipping into a pair of 3-inch black pumps.  If you haven’t worn heels in three years, you might as well say these were spike heels. Anyway, no pain. No gain, right? Mazy was as ready as any trussed-up turkey could be to meet her date.   
She didn’t want to make an entrance and figured the best thig to do would be to get there early and watch him approach, the better to gauge his height, breadth and width.  She arrived at the restaurant 15 minutes early and ordered a white wine. Not too alcoholic, right?  Problem is, she didn’t regularly have wine and this glass of chardonnay was making her feel flushed, accentuating the welts on her face.
And then, there he was, all 5 feet of him, and that was his width.  Shaking his clammy hand and looking into his bloodshot eyes, Mazy knew this would be a long evening. Apparently Mister Wonderful had prepared for this evening by getting royally sauced. While she had prepared by getting royally plucked.
As the conversation between them dragged to the point of throwing itself over a cliff, she thought, I waxed my nether regions for this?

​
“Remember when I told you I thought I saw something out on the road last night?”
Mariah touched him on his arm to get his attention. He looked at her then, that vacant look that says; get on with it why don’t you?  He waited for her to say more; she waited for him to ask. It was always this way.
Mariah had a great imagination, was a notoriously light sleeper, had difficulty staying asleep and often stood at the window at night, surveying the shadows and wondering who else was awake at that hour.
Last night, looking out across the lawn she again thought she saw someone pacing back and forth along the road, then disappear into the woods across from their home. This time, whoever it was appeared old and bent like withered winter grass, walking slowly as if they were dragging a monumental sack of memories behind them.   Her imagination was always on full alert.
“Another of your suspicious person sightings?” he said dryly.
He said everything dryly. Her husband had been here before with Mariah. He knew she could be imaginative. That used to excite him about her. But that was many, many years ago. Their marriage had faded into a blank outline that they both had trouble coloring in. She had called the police so many times to report someone outside their home at night that the officers who interviewed her, while appearing to be concerned and do their due diligence searching the woods, could never find anything, no footprints, no discarded gum wrappers, or God forbid any clothing or encampment.  They always thanked her for alerting them and told her to lock her doors at night, just to be safe.
Each time she tried to tell him, she would sit quietly, waiting for him to ask her what she saw, her hands resting in her lap like two dead sparrows and look out across the road and wonder what was out there. He would remind her that these were wild imaginings that robbed her of her peace of mind. She never thought to suggest differently.

     ​The sun was well and truly up now, beating down with a hammering intensity that melted the tar squiggles on the street and stuck to her shoes with each step. Caroline had waited a bit too long to take her morning walk.
      A hazy shimmer on the horizon made the air quiver in that way that reminds you of desert wanderers who see an oasis.  In that haze, Caroline was sure she saw something in the middle of the roadway.  As she came nearer, she made out its shape and purpose.  A remote, out in the middle of the roadway?  An object could not be more out of place than this. Caroline began to imagine scenarios for it being here:  A wife fed up with her husband’s constant channel surfing?  A father at the end of his wits by children arguing over the remote? A child pretending to beam himself up to outer space? 
 
     In this age of social distancing and extreme sanitation measures, should she pick it up? She wasn’t wearing gloves.  Her mask was in her pocket in case she should encounter another human being coming too close.  The remote appeared to be intact.  In fact, a green light on the front was pulsing.
 
     It’s turned on? What the heck? How could it be picking up a signal?
 
     Caroline looked around.  The nearest house was a few hundred feet away. 
     I guess it’s possible, she thought absentmindedly. She kicked it over. The back of the remote appeared in fact to have been dropped several times from some height as there were cracks and scratches and a well-worn piece of tape, pealed half off, coated with tar, gravel and debris. Her curiosity got the better of her and she picked it up.

     The label turned out to be a humorous message written in a child’s scrawl:  “If you want to see the future, press the green light.”
     She laughed out loud at the prank an industrious neighbor’s child had obviously planted on the street. 
     I’d love to see my future.  Who wouldn’t?  It’s got to be better than what we’re going through now, every day the same as the last, quarantined or sequestered for who knew how much longer. 
     She pressed the button. Instantly she was gone.  Seconds later the remote fell to the street.
 
     Brenda turned from the window and said to no one in particular, “Well, that was strange.” 
     “What?” answered her long suffering husband as he reluctantly looked in from the kitchen.  Brenda and Ralph had been married 12 years, and by now he was numb and quite honestly bored with her constant people watching habit from their living room window.
     “Caroline was standing there, looking at something in the street”
     “What?” 
     “I said she was looking at something in the street!” she shouted.
     “I heard you the first time.  Why is that so unusual?”
     “Well, one second she was there and the next, she was gone.”
     “No kidding!” he chided her and returned to the kitchen where he was slathering mayo on brown bread in preparation for his lunch. 
     Brenda hated that he was always ignoring her; always finding ways to dismiss her curiosity about the goings on in their neighborhood.  When she bought binoculars, he practically guffawed in her face.  She’d had enough of his dismissive attitude toward her and would gladly make him disappear if she could.  Still, she was curious about what had happened to Caroline.  Maybe she fell down and needs our help?  Brenda wandered into the kitchen and snatched the sandwich from his hand. 
     “One of us should go out there and see if she fell or something.” 
     “Well, be my guest,” he snorted snatching the sandwich back again.
 
     Upstairs, they could hear their 12 year old son, Danny, moving his desk chair to the window.  Like his mother, he was a curious child.  Always watching.  Always observing.  He hated to hear his mother constantly picking at his father, and berating him for any perceived misdeed, and he longed for peace and quiet.  Most days he would escape her constant nagging and retreat to his room, where he would disassemble and reassemble random pieces of electronic equipment he picked up at the dump.
     Danny could re-engineer a circuit board, but he couldn’t tie his shoes. His mother referred to him as the idiot savant and berated him for bringing home that filthy detritus. 
     With the help of online research and how-to videos, he had become quite the engineer and had several theories he was working on. One was whether the human body could really be broken into its component parts, teleported and reassembled elsewhere? “Beamed up” as Captain Kirk so often commanded?  Downstairs, Brenda stomped from the kitchen and out the door to where she had last seen Caroline.
      Danny was looking out his window, watching his mother pick up the remote, turn it over and read the message written in a child’s script on the back.  She immediately recognized her son’s awkward hand.  She looked quizzically up to his bedroom window and saw him watching her, motioning for her to press the button.

     The last thing Brenda saw was her son gleefully waving goodbye.