From the story shelf
The Gate at Dusk
The traveler came to the garden at the hour when the swallows hand the sky over to the bats. She had been walking since morning, and for a good deal longer than that in another sense, and she had stopped expecting to arrive anywhere.
There was a wall of warm stone with something flowering along the top of it, and in the wall an arch, and in the arch a gate. The gate was open. It did not look as though it had been opened. It looked as though it had never learned how to shut.
An old gardener was sitting just inside on an upturned pot, cleaning a trowel with a handful of grass.
"You will want to sit down," the gardener said, without looking up. "There is a bench by the water. Mind the fox on the path. He thinks he owns it."
"I do not know if I am allowed in," said the traveler.
"Nor do I," said the gardener comfortably. "Nobody has ever told me who is not. It saves a great deal of trouble."
So she went in. The path was pale and still held the day's heat. There was indeed a fox on it, lying exactly in the middle with his chin on his paws. He opened one eye, considered her, and moved over by about the width of a hand, which she understood to be a courtesy.
The garden was larger inside than the wall had promised. There was a great tree at the center, hung with small gold fruit, and from between its roots four thin streams went out to the four corners. Under the tree a wolf lay asleep. Against her side, also asleep, was a lamb. The traveler stood and looked at this for some time.
"They sort it out among themselves," said the gardener, who had come up behind her with a watering can. "I do not interfere. I only do the watering."
"Is it always like this?"
"It is always like this at dusk. I cannot speak for the rest of the day. I am usually weeding."
The bench was where it had been promised, beside a pool so still that the first star was in it before she had found it in the sky. She sat. Her feet stopped hurting, which she had not known they were doing.
After a while the gardener sat down at the other end of the bench, and the two of them watched a heron stand in the shallows and do nothing with great concentration.
"I ought to tell you why I have come," the traveler said.
"You may, if it would be a relief."
"I do not think I am what I am supposed to be."
The gardener nodded, as one nods at a remark about the weather.
"I have not got the right shape," she said. "I have never had it. I do everything a person does, and I do it well enough that nobody notices. But there is something else under it. It has ears. It has always had ears. I have come a very long way hoping somebody would tell me what it is."
"Ah," said the gardener. "No. I am sorry. We do not do that here."
The traveler's face must have fallen, for the gardener went on quickly and more gently.
"It is not that we are unwilling. It is that we would get it wrong. I have been in this garden a long time and I have seen a great many creatures come through that gate, and I will tell you the one thing I have learned. Nobody was ever told what they were. They sat on this bench. Some sat one evening and some sat every evening for years. And one day they stood up and they knew, the way you know your own name on waking. All I ever did was keep the bench dry."
"And if I sit here for years and never know?"
"Then you will have sat for years in a garden," said the gardener. "There are worse fates. The plums are very good."
It was nearly dark. The fruit on the great tree had begun, very faintly, to give off its own light. Somewhere behind them the fox got up, stretched one leg at a time, and walked off about his business with the air of a householder making his rounds.
The traveler found that she was leaning back. She found, with some surprise, that her ears, the ones she did not have, had come forward of their own accord and were turning a little, this way and that, sorting the small sounds of the evening: the water, the heron shifting its weight, a moth at the lavender. She let them. No one here was going to ask her to stop.
"What do I owe you?" she said. "For the bench."
"Nothing. You might shut the gate behind you when you leave."
She turned to look at the gardener in the dusk.
"I thought it did not shut."
"It does not," the gardener agreed, and smiled, and got up to see to the watering. "But I always like to see who tries."
She did not leave that night. In the morning there was dew on the bench, and a plum beside her that she had not picked, and the gate, as far as she could tell from where she sat, was still open.
Pieces in the stacks are written under pen names. Personal pieces are composite accounts that gather experiences commonly described by therians and otherkin, and are offered as illustration, not as testimony about any one person. See the editorial principles.