The Time-Space Door, Part One: Birthday Surprise

Elisabeth Jane Spencer was trying to count the stars as she sat on a broad windowsill, knees pulled in to her chest, her bare feet tapping the blanched wood, upraised head almost buried in her arms, but still unburied enough to see above her elbows. Fatigue couldn’t stop her from staring in wonder at the starry sky through the open window. The pungent aroma of cut grass wafted up on a breeze to her face. Grass never changed, nor did breezes, and maybe the constellations moved in their orbits in the sky, but only over a period of months. Moonbeams cascaded onto her, lighting her hazel eyes and dark auburn curls. All of the world outside was beyond Elisabeth’s reach, and completely indifferent to her admiration of it.

A crash sounded below, coming through the air vent by the wall. Aunt Judith was in the kitchen, finishing the dinner dishes Elisabeth usually did. As the clattering sound died, the night sounds took over. Crickets sang in the high grasses, and the wind chimes played in the wind on the back porch. Melodies so enchanting, she would stop the world and keep it this way if she could. So what if she was being silly.

Lizzie swung her legs around and dropped her bare feet onto the cold, hardwood floor. Her room was small and relatively comfortable, overlooking the back garden. The leaves of the great oak tree on the green rustled. No more temptations to go outside tonight, please, she thought back at it. Oh how she wanted to go outside. Her modest room, always in disorder and sparsely decorated, seemed today like a prison of four walls she was doomed to inhabit until Aunt Judith cast her out into the world.

Lizzie had come to live here three years ago at the age of eleven, when her parents died in a fire. Grandmother Spencer and Aunt Judith had been the only ones willing to take her in. Not that she wasn’t glad to have them, but Elisabeth would wish for her parents more than she had ever wished for the moon, until she accepted the fact that there was no point in wishing for something foolish and impossible. She would have to stop wallowing in what had been, and start paying attention to the present and the future. Grandmother Spencer was a kind elderly woman with thick glasses, a cheerful but absent minded nature and a particular fondness for black and orange tabby cats. Aunt Judith was nothing like her mother and seemed totally devoid of any feeling remotely pertaining to motherly affection. She didn't like children. In her own misery after a failed early marriage, she seemed to have resolved to make the lives of others as miserable. Elisabeth even felt moments of sympathy for Aunt Judith, though it was hard since Aunt Judith wouldn’t allow anyone to feel sympathy, much less for her.

But Grandmother Spencer had died this spring, just a few days before, shortly after the daffodils she so loved shot pale new buds from the ground. Today had been the funeral. A miserable occasion for Lizzie, who felt that no one but her had truly appreciated the old woman, that no one but her would continue to mourn her. All of the relations and mourners kept discussing things like savings accounts and life insurance. Lizzie was outraged by it all, and protective feelings of her grandmother’s memory welled within her, but she had no choice but to keep her tongue. She was only a child, a little nobody. What did her feelings count? So, an unhappy Lizzie had returned to her room early that night and deliberately skipped dinner, listening instead to the sounds the night. Grandmother Spencer had called it "the song of the wild", perhaps mistaking the title of a popular novel.