[Fiction] The Secret Keeper

The Secret Keeper

by Alice Stephens

Small children are very pagan! Is something I heard said recently.

My friend and I were small. I remember looking at a clock with black wiry hands. And thinking - it is four o’clock, and I am four.

Age was a very important number. There was none of this mid-twenties, late sixties hedging. I was four years old, and the difference between that number and the one following was the distance between stars.

We’d enter the garden alone. Outside was a wide and troubling place, especially without the cool hand of an adult. I was made mercurial by freedom, tipping and dizzying about the place, always a shriek at my lips. Olive was more reticent, playing quietly on the swings. Olive, I said, from some distance away. If you care to look down here, you’ll see a tree which has died.

Olive was enchanted by possibility. The tree had been lopped off at the base. Its pale rings were visible. Despite mutilation, two desperate little shoots sprung from each side of the stump. I walked around, taking upon myself the straight back of an Inspector. And, oh - a great knot, called a burr in our local parlance, revealed itself as a nose.

As the summer months gathered, Olive and I left trinkets at the mouth of the stump, who we left as nameless and powerful. Blue beads. A chip of pottery. Wishbones (broken) from dinner. Once, a plaster from a cut elbow left without a word to Olive. I wanted the stump to know me better.

As we got older, I started to whisper things into the wood. Secrets, and dreams. The stump took on a name, bestowed by Olive - The Secret Keeper’. The Secret Keeper was left behind when I moved at thirteen. Welded to the ground by its roots, our adolescent dreams sat deep in the dead wood.

Small children are very pagan. Today, I watched my young nephew play in his own garden. He drew lines in the cloudy dirt with sticks, until rain turned his symbols into glorious paint for the skin of self and others. After the rain left, I walked to where he stood. I took his discarded stick, drew the outline of a stump. Bent closer and whispered.

Alice is a 24 year old writer from Yorkshire in the UK. In between writing, she is studying to become a lawyer, so that one day she can quit and write full time!

This piece was written in response to the theme Creative Side Quests.