An old minivan slowly grumbled its way up the ugly, concrete driveway, passing an old clump of purple-brown wisteria vines, rumbling by a dingy hedge shielding the moldy garbage can, full of old holes where squirrels and raccoons had once tried to nibble their way in to eat the trash. “Well, here we are!” said a woman in a falsely cheerful voice, dragging an old, moth-eaten suitcase. A girl of about eleven adjusted her hat and coat. She brushed back her dirty-blond hair and said, “Are we really? My, I think I expected it to be a bit grander, didn’t you? But I suppose it’ll have a simply lovely garden to play in, won’t it, Mother?” She said all this very fast, in a bossy-ish sort of English accent. “Yes, I’m sure it will,” her mother replied. She gave a tired smile and seemed to be trying to convince herself as much as her daughter. This girl’s name was Iris Stellar-Lupos. Her mother, Jill Stellar, was a widow. Iris’s dad, Robin Lupos, had died of cancer a few months ago. Before Mr. Lupos had died, he and Iris’s mum had planned to come to Germany for a year, so that Iris could learn a second language. But then Robin had died, and Iris’s mum decided that they should come to Germany anyway. A change of scenery, she thought, might help Iris forget about… well, she didn’t want to think about that. Iris took her small suitcase and followed her mum up the stairs. As they entered the grimy glass doors a robotic female voice said, “Willkommen im Wunderhaus!” Iris looked enquiringly up at her mother. “It’s German for, ‘Welcome to the Wonder-house,’” her mother replied, trying to smile. They walked up five flights of stairs (there was no elevator) until they came to a door saying “Stelar Lupus.” Great! Iris thought. They can’t even spell my last name! Mrs. Stellar opened the door, saying, “Home, sweet home!” She was always too positive. “Now, honey,” Iris’s mother said as they trudged down the hall, staring gloomily at the peeling orange wallpaper, “you go into this room and unpack. Finally you can have your very own bedroom!” Muttering indistinctly, Iris opened the bedroom door and slipped quietly inside. She didn’t want to be disturbed. “I expected it to be a bit grander, didn’t you?” Iris didn’t bother unpacking. She took out her diary and a stub of pencil, threw herself onto the little cot in the corner, tried to make herself comfortable by pulling the thin, moth-eaten covers up to her chin (but abandoned that quickly as the faded orange wool was itchy), and began to write: I hate it here… I miss my dad… Why did he have to die?… I want to be at home with him, not here… * * * Iris awoke to the sound of shouting. She opened the window and leaned groggily out. “Please! I’m trying to sleep!” Two boys stared at her from the outdoor corridor that ran around the inside of the building. One was roughly Iris’s age. The other looked about six. “Oooooh!” the older one yelled. “She’s trying to sleep! Has the little baby got enough rest? Little ones are very delicate!” he mocked. Iris closed the curtains, hoping they weren’t so faded that they were see-through, pulled on her dress, hat, and coat, and stormed outside. “LEAVE… ME… ALONE… IN… FUTURE!” “Hey, don’t shout!” said the elder of the two. “I’m James Rickmann. But please, dear lady, do call me Jamie.” He made a fake bow. “And this charming young gentleman is Molasses.” “Huh?” Iris stared at him, unable to make sense of what he’d said. She was still very jet-lagged and felt slow and clumsy. “His real name is Milo, but everyone calls him Molasses,” Jamie explained. “We’re from New York. Our family is staying in Germany for a year.” “I,” Iris said, trying to shake off her tiredness, “am Iris. And please don’t shout. It disturbs the magic.” She smiled annoyingly, in the I-know-something-you-don’t kind of way, which is very different from the I-have-forty-three-dollars-in-my- pocket way, or the it’s-my-birthday-and- I’m-getting-a-video-camera way. “Aw, you don’t really believe in magic!” Jamie said, “People only believed in that before there was science and stuff.” “Yes, I do!” Iris retorted. How could they know that she had believed in magic ever since she was nine, when she had first read the Harry Potter series. They had been her favorite books ever since. How could they know about everything that had happened to her in her short, eleven-year- long life? About how her dad got cancer and died? Her head throbbed, but she tried to ignore it. “I’ll prove to you that magic exists! Wait here!” Iris dashed back into her apartment, filled an empty jam jar with water, and grabbed her Hermione Granger wand and some irises from a vase in her room. She ran back outside, dropped the flowers into the jar, and pressed and twisted and squeezed them until she had dyed the water the purple of the flowers. “This,” she said, trying to imitate Hermione’s bossy voice, “is Draught of the Living Death, from Harry Potter. It…” “We know!” Jamie interrupted. “We’ve read Harry Potter.” Iris sighed, then said, “Abracadabra!” and pointed the wand at the “potion.” Nothing happened. Iris tried not to burst into tears as Molasses giggled and Jamie whooped. “I’ll prove to you that magic exists. I’ll prove it to you!” she said. “Meet me here in a few days and I’ll show you!” She stormed off towards the rusty metal apartment door that must once have been painted orange, snatching up her mother’s half-finished tea and some paper from the printer. (She hoped her mother wouldn’t notice; paper was expensive.) Then Iris sat down and began. * * * Of course magic exists!” Iris hissed. It was the next day, and Iris’s first at her new school, Gruene Grundschule. It was made of concrete with
Fantasy
A Girl Called Helena
It had to be the worst storm the town of Seaport, New Jersey had ever experienced. The rain struck the earth like pins piercing a pincushion, so keen and strong that there was only a foggy sheet of gray encircling the ocean. Flashes of lightning brightened the sky, and thunder sounded all around. Wind swarmed, howling at the ocean and tumbling through the air, sending a chill through our house. Behind it, the mangled ocean tangled with the thunderstorm. Even the stars and moon were shielded by opaque, blackening clouds. Meanwhile, I, Linda Fortinger, sat trembling by my bedroom window. I was wearing lavender fleece pajamas. Covering my quivering shoulders with the orange sheets on my bed, I peered out into the gloom from my bedroom window. I heard my younger sister, Kaitlyn, snoring from across the room, honey-blond waves scattered on her pillow, and my parents sleeping silently in the next room over. I was alone, too awed to sleep, to tear my eyes from this scene. In my eleven years of life, I had never seen the ocean like this, a wave of fury fighting, an angry mob rampaging through the streets. The ocean was my only friend here on vacation in New Jersey. I swam by its shores, surfed along its waves, sailed its surface, but never saw it in frenzy. “Linda, don’t you love the ocean?” Helena said suddenly And then I saw it. My eye caught a blurry silhouette emerging from the ocean. As I squinted to get a better look, I saw the figure slowly bob to the surface and glide toward the sandy beach. I gasped in fright. No, it couldn’t be . . . I rubbed my eyes, and the figure had disappeared. I lay back on my bed, amazed. I assured myself it was only a wrecked sailboat, or perhaps an unlucky sea creature. Maybe my eyes were fooling me. I couldn’t bring myself to believe it, but I was sure I saw, through the darkness, the profile of a girl, with a shadowy stream of black hair tossing in the wind behind it. * * * “Linda! Come down to breakfast, dear, it’s nearly nine o’clock!” At the sound of my mother’s voice, I rose hesitantly from bed, thrust on a lime-green T-shirt and denim shorts, brushed my hair and teeth, and went downstairs to the kitchen. There, my mother was bustling over by the stove, her brown ponytail skipping along with her, adding brown sugar to my hot cereal. Kaitlyn sat at the table, stirring her own cereal with one hand, and holding her dainty head with the other. My father had apparently already left; an empty bowl lay on his placemat. He was probably down the street fixing the Fervents’ old fence or down at the old boardwalk, nailing stray boards into place; he was an engineer and was always volunteering for something or other. I pulled out a stool and sat, glancing at the small television in the middle of the table. “Here you go, sweetie,” my mother smiled heartily, handing me a bowl of hot cereal. “Now girls, today I was planning that we could spend the morning at the beach, then try this new Asian restaurant at the end of town. After that, we’re free to do anything, unless your cousins in Ocean City call us . . . Anyway, I was hoping that—oh no, not another one!” Her head was turned to the television, announcing that a certain Hurricane Helena was likely to travel northwest from its current perch in the Atlantic Ocean and hit New Jersey in about a week. “These storms . . . just all popping out of nowhere, and on vacation, too! Now we might have to go grocery shopping this afternoon instead . . .” my mother grumbled, clearly annoyed. She began to slice a peach in silence. I simply gulped down my cereal. “Well, it looks as though some new folks are moving into the Melbournes’ old shack,” Kaitlyn piped up. It was true; moving vans were parked along the road, and many people were unpacking sofas and mattresses and bureaus, heaving them through the open door. This was good news; the Melbournes were an old, quiet couple who lived across the street from our beach house in an unkempt two-story house that wasn’t in very good condition for a house right next to the ocean. After Mrs. Melbourne died, her husband left the ocean, and for three years the building stood alone and untouched, until now. “Let’s go watch!” Kaitlyn suggested eagerly. The pair of us trotted across the street, where the family was just getting settled. A surge of envy filled me as I caught a glimpse of their daughter. She was beauty beyond belief, with shiny black hair that fell to her hips, a long sheet of dark silk. She wore a velvet magenta skirt that dragged behind her and a ruffled, white shirt. Then I saw her eyes flash toward me, blue-gray, with a hint of green and silver, identical to the ocean on a sunny day. My curiosity drew me closer. “Hi,” I muttered shyly, “I’m Linda Fortinger, and this is my little sister, Kaitlyn. We’re staying for the summer at our beach house across the street.” “I see,” the girl replied, in a tone so soft I could almost feel it. “I am Helena.” “Helena . . . ?” “Helena Crest. This is my mother, Lela, and my father, James. Pleased to meet you. I’m sure we’ll become good friends.” Helena held out a tanned hand, and I took it. “It’s our pleasure.” I grinned, my hopes rising. I’ve never found a true friend in these parts. “Well, I’d better get back home now. I’ll see you later!” I dashed off across the street, too excited about my new neighbor to think about anything else. * * * “This is Helena. How may I help you?” a soft voice spoke
Iristerra
At the very western tip of the world lies a land of clear waters and cold winters, where wild storms turn the sky and sea to dark gray, and white-sailed fishing boats once glided like swans over white-crested waves. During one particularly fearsome storm, where thunder crashed and lightning lit up the sky for miles, a group of travelers huddled in an inn. “Tell us a tale then,” urged one cloaked traveler, nursing a cup of something hot and nasty smelling. “Something to take our minds off this dratted thunder!” The flimsy wooden shutters rattled open, lending the occupants a view of huge waves pounding relentlessly against the rocks and cliff where the inn was perched, punctuated every few minutes by another bright flash of lightning falling out of the sky The innkeeper’s wife hurried forward to bolt the shutters closed, replacing the view of storm-tossed ocean with badly-painted shutter. “Come on now, Fion,” added a raggedy-looking woman in a faded red cloak smoking a pipe, “best make it quick though, before this whole cursed rock falls into the sea.” “It just so happens that I know the perfect tale for nights like these” “All right then,” conceded Fion, a younger man with a mane of long brown hair tied back at the nape of his neck, who wore a battered hat with a feather. “It just so happens that I know the perfect tale for nights like these,” he said, standing up and bowing grandly to the other inn’s guests. A storyteller by trade, he made his living by keeping audiences enthralled. The woman, Nell, told fortunes, and the other man, well, he made sure that no one bothered their small band. Together they lived their lives traveling, surviving off the small coins tossed into his cap after a performance. ” As I was saying,” Fion stepped forward into the firelight, casting dark shadows over his usually handsome face, “storms like these bring to mind a certain tale I heard a while back. You folks ever heard of Searain?” he asked, mentioning a rocky peninsula a little ways north and east of the inn. The inn’s guests nodded. “Funny name for it, eh? Seeing as there’s been no rain there for over a decade, nearly thirteen years it’s been, now, hasn’t it? Well, it wasn’t always like that. Used to be the wettest point around here, and that, my friends,” he said, as the rain pounded on the roof and the storm still raged outside, “is saying something. Now the Fisherfolk used to be quite common here in Iristerra,” he continued, naming this land where the colors of the sea and land shifted and changed like the rainbow. “Few years ago, the Fisherfolk were as common as seagulls and as good at fishing too, but then came that huge storm, you remember that one, Nell? Nearly washed her wagon off the road, it did. I was only a young man then, just starting out on my own, before I joined up with the Travelers. Wiped most nearly all of the Fisherfolk out, and the ones that survived left after that. Nowadays it’s rare to see those beautiful boats with sails like wings sailing down the harbor.” He surveyed his audience, the inn’s guests ignoring their drinks and turning their faces to the storyteller. Even the innkeeper’s wife had stopped wiping out glasses to listen. “Once, not so long ago, when the Fisherfolk sailed these waters, was a young woman who lived on one of those boats, one of the Fisherfolk, yes, but different. Most of those in Iristerra have light hair, pale brown or yellow as daffodils. Her hair, though, was dark as midnight on the water, and some said that it shown with blue and green lights when the firelight hit it. “These people live by the sea, off the fish they catch. Most never leave their boats except to trade in the town. Rather like us Travelers, in some aspects. She, however, could often be seen wandering along the shore or in the town whenever her boat wasn’t anchored too far off shore. She never learned to fish; how to haul in a net or fillet a catch. Refused even to watch a hook and line, something even they let their youngsters do. “She could swim, though. Swim like a fish or a seal, her eyes glistening blue-gray like the sea itself. She could even catch fish with her bare hands, but would always let them go. Odd, that was, considering that most of the Fisherfolk never learn how to swim. Say that if they can’t trust their boats from not sinking, then what’s the point? Uncanny, they said. Unnatural even.” He paused, taking a sip from a mug that the innkeeper’s wife offered him. One day though, as her man was pulling in the day’s catch, the woman saw something strange “Some even called her a weather-witch, one who could tame the winds and ride the storm. And it was true that on days when the wind howled and the rain nearly washed the paint off their boat, she could be seen balancing on the bowsprit, right above the figurehead, and that dolphins came to her call. But the Fisherfolk all have their way with the ocean; it’d be considered uncanny and unnatural if dolphins didn’t come to their call. Half-dolphin already, the whole pack of ’em, leastways they were. “Some called her a Selkie, one of the seals that could turn into people, and that one day she would up and vanish to join her kinsmen beneath the waves. She didn’t though. Maybe she was a very patient Selkie. Maybe she was just human. In time she took up with a feller from Searain, a handsome one by all accounts, not one of the Fisherfolk, a merchant lad he was. He fell in love though, as all who met her did, and left dry land to join her and her family on their boat
