From the story shelf
The Long Way Home
Nell had been staying with her great-aunt for four days when they walked down to the village for eggs. It was October. Her parents were away for the week, and Nell, at fifteen, had been judged too old for a sitter and too young to be left, and so had been sent to Aunt Ruth, whom she had met perhaps six times in her life and who lived alone at the end of a lane in a house that smelled of apples and woodsmoke.
The eggs came from a farm at the edge of the village, in a box with a feather stuck to the lid. On the way back, where the road bent toward the lane, Aunt Ruth stopped at a gap in the hedge.
"We will go the long way," she said.
"Is it far?"
"An hour. Down by the river and up past the top field. It will be dusk before we are home." She looked at Nell sideways. "You do not mind the dusk, I think."
Nell, who had sat at the window of the spare room until nearly three that morning, said nothing, and followed her through the gap.
The path went down across a pasture to the river and then along it, under willows. Aunt Ruth walked well for a woman of seventy-four, steadily and without hurry, in a long brown coat and boots that had been mended more than once. She did not talk much. Nell had noticed that about her in the first days and had been grateful for it. At home everyone talked all the time, and asked how she was, and waited for an answer.
The light went gold, then gray. Mist began to lie along the water. Somewhere ahead a bird called, a short harsh sound, and Nell stopped without meaning to. She stood quite still on the path with her head turned and the egg box held against her chest, and listened. It came again, farther off. Something at the back of her neck, which had gone tight, let go.
When she looked around, Aunt Ruth had stopped too, a few steps ahead, and was waiting. She did not ask what it was. She did not seem to find anything odd in a person standing motionless on a river path to listen to a bird. She simply waited, as one waits for someone to finish tying a shoe, and when Nell came on, she came on too.
They had gone another hundred yards before Aunt Ruth said, in the same voice she had used about the eggs, "The foxes were loud last night."
Nell's face went hot. "Did I wake you?"
"No. I was up. I often am." A pause. "You were at the window a long time."
"I was just listening."
"I know," said Aunt Ruth. "I could tell by how still the floor was."
They walked on. The river turned away, and the path began to climb beside a hedge toward the ridge, where the last of the light was. Nell found she was holding the egg box very tightly.
She had not told anyone. There had been nothing to tell, exactly. There had only been a word, found on her phone late one night in the summer, and the long, dizzy weeks afterward of reading everything she could find, and a feeling, which was not new at all, of being something other than the shape she walked around in. She did not know what. That was the worst of it. The people she read about online seemed so sure. She was sure of nothing except the listening, and the night, and the way her whole body turned toward certain sounds before she had decided to turn.
"Aunt Ruth," she said, and stopped, and began again. "There is a word people use. Online. Therian. Have you ever heard it?"
"Is that what they call it now," said Aunt Ruth. It was not quite a question.
"You know what it is?"
"I know what it is," said Aunt Ruth. "I did not know it had a name. We are nearly at the top field. Come and meet the horses."
The top field ran along the ridge, and at its corner was a wooden gate, silver with age and worn smooth along the top bar, the way wood is worn by hands. Three horses stood at the far side in the dusk. As Aunt Ruth came to the gate and rested her arms on it, the oldest of them, a big plain bay mare with a white blaze and shaggy feet, lifted her head and began to walk over, not hurrying.
"That is Clover," said Aunt Ruth. "She is twenty-six. She belongs to the farm, but we have an understanding."
The mare put her nose over the gate and breathed on Aunt Ruth's coat. Aunt Ruth stood quite still and let her. Nell, watching, saw something she could not have put into words: that the two of them were standing the same way. The same weight, the same patience, the same way of looking out over the field, not at anything in particular, only at all of it.
"When I was nine," said Aunt Ruth, "I used to come up to this gate every evening after supper. My mother thought I was horse-crazy, the way girls were. I was not horse-crazy. I did not want to ride them. I wanted to stand with them. I knew, the way you know you are left-handed, that I was one. Not a pony. Not a racehorse. A big, plain, working horse, the kind that pulls things and does not complain and is glad of her supper." She rubbed the mare's jaw. "I have been one for sixty-five years. Nobody had a word for it then. There was just this gate."
Nell did not know what to say. "Did you ever tell anyone?"
"Your great-uncle Arthur, when we were courting. He said he had always thought I had a look of the big horses they showed at the county fair, and he meant it kindly, and I married him." She paused. "And now you."
"I do not know what I am," Nell said, and found that her eyes were stinging. "I do not even know if I am anything. Everyone else seems so sure."
"Then do not be sure," said Aunt Ruth. "I was not sure for years. Sure is not the important part." She took one arm off the gate and put it, briefly and a little awkwardly, around Nell's shoulders, the way people do who do not do it often. "You will know in your own time, or you will not, and either way you will be all right. That is the only thing I am certain of. Look. She wants to meet you."
Clover had moved along the gate and was regarding Nell with one large dark eye. Nell held out her hand flat, the way she had seen it done, and the mare breathed on it, warm and grassy, and then lost interest and went back to Aunt Ruth.
"She knows who her people are," said Aunt Ruth, pleased.
It was dark when they reached the house. Aunt Ruth lit the stove and put the kettle on and made scrambled eggs, which seemed to Nell the most comforting thing she had ever eaten. Neither of them mentioned the gate. When the plates were cleared, Aunt Ruth went to a drawer in the dresser and took out a small notebook with a green cover, never used, and put it down by Nell's elbow.
"When something happens," she said, "write it down. Not what it means. Only what happened. Where you were, what you heard. The meaning can come later. It keeps."
That night Nell sat up again at the window of the spare room. The foxes were quieter. She had the notebook open on her knee, and had written, after some thought, the date, and then: River path, dusk. A bird called twice. Stopped. Listened. Neck went tight, then let go. It did not look like much. It looked true.
Below in the dark yard a door opened and closed, and she saw the long brown coat go across to the wall at the end of the garden, where there was another gate, a small one, giving onto the fields. Aunt Ruth rested her arms on it and stood. She did not look up at the window. She did not do anything at all. She only stood there in the cold, looking out over the dark field, the way, Nell understood now, she must have stood on nearly every night of her life.
Nell watched her for a long time. Then she turned off the lamp, so that she could hear better, and listened to the night along with her.
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.