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There is a window.
Older than old, its burled walnut frame dappled with age and smooth from years of polish and kind hands. The antique glass is rippled, with tiny bubbles clustered at the corners of its many panes, and the frame curves to a seven-pointed star at the crest of its arch.
Plutt says he found it at an estate sale. One of those stately mansions up the coast that all seem to be eroding into the sea. Paid fifteen bucks for it—and laughed the whole way home at the suckers who gave it away for a song.
But it’s been sitting here now for months, without a single sign of interest from their clientele, and Plutt’s been making noise about junking it.
Rey can’t say why exactly, but she’s grown rather fond of it. Having survived to adulthood in cramped dormitories and musty basements and tiny attic rooms, she can’t imagine what it must be like to live a life bathed in so much light.
It’s a great big beast of a thing, taller than her by almost a foot. It makes her think of castles and cathedrals and the fairytales she used to glimpse from time to time—when she was lucky enough to score a foster family fond of reading.
And of course, there’s its shadow.
Rey knows, oh, she knows it’s probably a trick of the light. Some odd way the light bends or refracts through the waves in the old glass.
But there are times, almost always around dusk, when it’s time to close up the shop for the day, that she could swear the window’s shadow changes shape. And if her eyes dart fast enough, she can almost glimpse movement beyond the window.
Which can’t be correct, of course. Rey spends a lot of time alone—Plutt often away scouring the coastline in hopes of striking it rich—and she’s always had an overactive imagination.
The only shadow the window casts is that of an arched frame.
The only thing that lies beyond the window is the next aisle over.
There’s been a series of break-ins in the neighborhood over the past several months, and Plutt has become convinced that A Portal In Time is overdue to be hit.
Naturally, predictably, he doesn’t hire security or install an alarm. Why, after all, would he go to that much trouble when he could disturb her sleep instead?
Instead, Rey’s been charged with safeguarding the store for the past week now. Every night, after closing, she pulls out her turkey sandwich, the carrots she carves into shapes to entice herself to eat them, and curls up in the blue toile Queen Anne chair to wile away the hours.
It’s lonely work and long, but Rey’s accustomed, and the shop seems somehow more alive after dark. Like the detritus and the memories from people’s lives are making friends with one another.
The music box, inlaid with malachite and lapis lazuli, huddling together with the cuckoo clock some ungrateful grandchild had thrown away. The silver tea set, carved with leaping bunnies and precocious foxes, nestled against a star quilt in hues of scarlet and slate blue.
And the window, with its shadows. They seem to dance after dark.
And Rey begins to watch them more closely.
She moves her perch from the corner by the register to a front alcove of sorts, made up of cloches and top-handle purses and two fur coats. The jumble creates a recess just deep enough for her chair to slide inside. Just open enough for Rey to peer out into the darkness of the street beyond.
But, more often than not, she neglects to observe the flickering streetlights, the drunken stop sign leftover from a car mishap, the moon’s journey ticking the hours of the time remaining in her shift. She chooses instead to watch her window’s shadows, marveling at the way its gleaming light and its shivering dark wrap themselves around each other, never overtaking, never retreating.
Equals.
The more nights the shadows dance, the more Rey begins to imagine that the shadows are pushing against the glass. Almost as if they are planning to break through. Almost as if they are beckoning.
Time and time again, she finds herself in front of the panes, fingers walking the pathways along the edges, the patterns the ripples create. Forehead tipped against the glass, she tries to peer through, to see what she can never quite seem to catch.
Time and time again, she fails.
She stands on her tiptoes and stretches with her arm to trace the seven-pointed star that sits like a crown at the top of the arch. She takes a picture of it to the library branch three bus stops away, in search of any sign of it in astronomy and history. Works her way down to folklore and symbology and the occult.
And there, in a footnote about magic and fairytales, she finds it.
Elven star. Faery star. Heptagram.
For thirteen days and thirteen nights, Rey keeps watch over the treasures and the trash of the shop around the corner—not the good corner, mind. The nasty one built too close to the alleyway, the one that floods every fall during the rainy season, washing half-empty sunscreen tubes and parking tickets that will never be paid to the edge of their front stoop.
On the thirteenth night, Rey eats her turkey sandwich. Tucks into her carrots—cut into the shape of a seven-pointed star—and sits watching her window, bare feet hidden beneath the hem of her sundress.
One of her carrots is particularly snappy, and as her teeth crunch through to its core, she thinks she hears a bell. No, that isn’t quite right. A chime, perhaps.
A toll.
She looks over at the cuckoo clock, trying to ascertain the source of the sound, but the cuckoo clock has never worked, and it just stares blankly back at her, its Bavarian band quiet and still.
There’s something heavy, persistent, oddly gentle pressing at the edges of her vision, of her brain. Of the boundaries and the margins of her personhood.
Her head swivels slowly, independently of her body, and she feels, more than sees, the gathering gloom. The rustling.
Her dancing shadows.
In the window, just beyond, where there has never ever been anything besides the refracted light, the aisle filled with mismatched china, and a dusty stack of third editions with tea-stained pages and curling covers, is a hand. A palm, twice the size of her own, pressing against the waves.
Perhaps she should be screaming. Perhaps she should be running.
But she stares at the hand in the window, preoccupied with the blunt fingers, the strong wrist. It trails off into darkness, no, into shadows, and when she can finally bear to tear her eyes away, it’s clear: they are coalescing into a form.
Human or not, it is still shaped like a person, and it flips its hand over to crook its fingers. A summons or a welcome.
Or perhaps… a plea.
Rey knows herself to be awake, to be in full possession of all her faculties. Even though this seems to be a dream, she can still hear the odd car siren, the screech of seagulls down the boardwalk, a child crying over fallen ice cream.
I am not living in a fairytale. I do not live that kind of life.
Whatever is pressing at the edge of her person quivers, softens. It feels almost like a kiss.
You could be, it seems to say, with a voice Rey cannot hear—and yet she knows the pitch to be tender, the timbre to be velvet.
The hand beyond the glass, the hand now attached to an arm draped in midnight brocade, is waiting, steady and sure. Rey sets down her carrot, lowers her bare feet to the splintery floorboards, and braces herself to stand.
The buttons she can now see at his waist glint gold, and she takes a step forward, and another after that. In three more, she can touch the outline of his hand, place hers within its shelter, and watch it disappear.
Glass, hundreds and hundreds of years old, suddenly seems as fine as spun sugar. If she blows hard enough, if Rey chooses to wish, she now believes—no, she now knows she could step right through.
The gold buttons at his waist now gleam brightly all the way up to a long throat, and still that hand waits patiently. It will not snatch her away. She must snatch herself.
Squaring her shoulders, chin tilting up to a still shadowy face, Rey breathes in possibility. Breathes out a farewell to a life she’s never loved. She places her fingertips in the palm of his hand and, with one final step, travels through to the beyond.
The shop, come morning, is only a very ordinary sort of shop. The music box is out of tune, and the band carved into the cuckoo clock lost its tuba player years ago. The tea set is bent and tarnished. The star quilt’s edges frayed.
They have never had a shopgirl minding them. They have never had a Rey.
You see, once, there was a window.
And now, there is none.