With Fair Ease

C.C. Parker says of "With Fair Ease": (This) was initially written for my wife, Zoe, as a Christmas present. She is blessed with a sensitive imagination and has always believed in fairies. I, too, share this belief. Reality becomes tricky and contagious when we stop believing in the unseen and I think the story reflects this fact. It is about the loss of innocence, yet the ability to regain it, but not without trial.

     Slumbering your sleepy daze...
     She sips on a cup of coffee. She watches outside her window. She is animated in an inanimate world. "I think I will go away today," she says.
     "Where?"
     She shrugs a sublime shrug and recollects the time when she was still a baby crawling across the floor with fair ease.
     "I didn't know you then," I say.
     "That's true."
     I think she is trying to tell me something. I think it has something to do with the way she looks ahead into a diminishing light and lifts her hand physically, fingers bending. I think she is trying to grasp something.
     "What is it?"
     She walks out of the room; she is on the other side of something.
     No matter how far away she goes, I think I will be able to sense that she is there. "Hello," I say. "Hello. Hello."
     Her voice is an echo tumbling through space. "Hellllooooo. Followed by: "It'sssssss beautiful here."
     I'm sure it is, I think.
     "Buuuutt it'sssss mostlyyyyy darknnessss."
     There are faces in the trees and the moon is breaking apart. Warmth radiates from the center of her; I can see it rolling off her skin. "Can I ... may I ..." I reach out to her. "You're all wet," I say, "But ..." I want to hold her, but she seems so distant to me now. "Where did you go?" Is it an impossibility for all humanity to flicker like this? But she does.
     I am trying to peek inside the other room. That room is obstructed by her fair ease. I discover a crack in the wall and whisper through it: "Are you trying to be a child?" I try and fit a few fingers in there, and the crack diminishes around them. You better get your fingers out of there you dummy, I think to myself.
     "I'll be out in a whiiiiiiiiiilllllle."
     Is she falling into an abyss? Is she ... "Are you okay?"
     Nothing. I'm getting nothing.
     I move back into that first room. There is a couch. Was it here before? I don't think so. I sit on it anyway. I guess I was made to wait. I wait. But I am looking, searching, for her appearance in anything and when I see it I will go to it.
     "Hello." It's my own voice. Every minute, every hour: "Hello." Is this couch broken down? Is it? My back is aching. I feel like I've been sitting here forever trying to get at something. "Hello." I feel this is my final attempt, still, in a way, they have all been final attempts.
     Until: "Hellllooooooo."
     I look to the wall that is the barrier between us, and through the many cracks that have manifested there over time. Through them I see a dozen or so tiny faces; all the faces are hers, and they are determined to see me. "I'm right here," I say, standing up. The couch dissolves behind me, the floor opens up beneath me. How much time has passed? How many hellos? I try to take a step, but my body informs me that this is impossible; all the laws of physics have been eliminated from this place ... Could this be the very end of it?
     "Come on," says the voice.
     She flits around me with fair ease, and at once I can see her. "Christ," I say, "you look so old."
     "I've been through a lot," she remarks.
     "I tried to find you," I say.
     "You found me."
     "Earlier I mean. When you needed me the most."
     "That's okay," she says.
     "Who did this to you?"
     "It's a lot of things," she says, "but mostly I want you to know that I love you."
     "I love you."
     "Even like this."
     "Of course," I say. "Still, I can't move."
     Taking my hand, she guides me through the darkness. With fair ease, she takes us down through the years. "This is how we are born," she remarks. "I've always thought of this being like death."
     "Then you see that we have much time."
     ...and slumbering up from nothing.

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