This is part 3 of Liminal, a short story in serial form. If you haven’t already, start with Part 1 here.
Perhaps when you hear me declaim myself enchanted you take me to mean enchantment in some abstract sense, as one might use the word upon hearing a gloriously dulcet passage of birdsong or spying an autumnal moon slipping through luminescent clouds.
If so, you misapprehend me.
I do not mean enchanted in any abstract sense, nor to denote delight or beguilement. Rather, I speak the word in its most urgent, original, and archaic sense, to wit: I find myself the subject of an incantation. Or should I say victim? Yes, victim of an incantation. For I am bewitched. Ensorceled.
Enchanted.
What’s more, I believe most fervently that the speaker of said incantation is none other than the object of my most florid ardor, that flaxen-haired but black-hearted sorceress Mathilde.
No, I go too far. Certainly her heart is as lovely as the faint splash of freckles across her nose. She is merely naive, she plays at sorcery, it is an amusement, a girlish game to pass the time. It is my fervent belief that she knows not the meaning or the ends of the words she speaks, her cheek pressed tight against me, her voice a whisper, her breath warm.
Nevertheless, the result of her thrice-whispered words is evident, inarguable. “Make him mine,” she breathed, and even the birds halted their song, the crickets ceased their chirruping. “Make him mine. Oh, make him mine.” And with that, the spell was conjured, and I found myself stricken.
Immobilized.
Frozen.
I hear. I see. I feel. But I am trapped inside this form, unable to move, to reach, to touch, to speak. I want to enfold Mathilde in my arms, sing to her of her beauty and her grace, banish her shadowed doubts that I am anything but hers, deeply, completely, eternally.
But I cannot. I cannot! I strain, with every fiber of my being, my thoughts a chaotic storm of rage, of fear, of uncertainty, of confusion. Surely with force of will I can cast off these invisible fetters, but wherefrom do I draw my strength when all has been drained away?
Mathilde, seemingly blind to my entrapment — though she be the cause, I feel this most certainly — lingers, then sighs, then pulls away, turns a melancholy pirouette in the streams of late afternoon sunlight, and strides off along the footworn path.
And so I entreat you: Should you happen upon me here, in these rapidly darkening woods, standing still and silent, do not pass by. Do not leave me alone.
For I am heartsick. And I am afraid. And it grows cold.