Kelton, Nevada. 1890.
Eden York. Nine-Years-Old.
When Eden found out she could phase through walls there were ten things she wanted to do once she mastered the power. The first thing she considered doing with her newfound ability was getting into her father’s office and stealing back the music box her mother had left her. Having weird powers wasn’t all that weird to Eden. She was always a little bit weird. She had vitiligo and patches of her skin were lighter than the rest. Eden had been called everything from Patches, Cow, Spot. The kids in her school knew how to be unusually cruel when no adults were around to listen. But then, she also had friends who didn’t care a lick if she was a bit colorful.
Out of her small town school she was the only one with only one parent, and not the parent that most people wanted to deal with because her father had little time for the trivialities of community event planning. Her father had been absent from the moment that she was born, so her aunt told her anyway, her mother had been little more than a trophy wife for the man and when Eden had been born and, according to the hearsay, been born imperfectly, her father had moved on to other things. Including courting mistresses from the city when he went to work.
It was midnight and her father was already snoring in his overlarge bed down the hall. With careful, practiced steps, Eden made her way up the stairs to the third floor where the tiny one room office kept her locked out and her mother’s most prized possession locked in. She’d been practicing at school and in the bathroom that shared a wall with her bedroom and had figured out how to make her body less so she could phase through the wall. Last year when she started losing grip on things, she thought she was losing her mind, because everything she held onto would slip away if she wasn’t paying attention. It wasn’t until her aunt caught her falling through a wall one summer day that she realized that something was up.
“It’s called phasing.” Her aunt Carole had said, absently fluffing her dress. Eden didn’t much care for the dozens of layers that most adult women wore and wondered if she could get away with wearing trousers the rest of her life.
“How do you know what it’s called?”
“Because I can do this.” Aunt Carole held out her hand and a little eddy of wind swirled around her fingers.
“Are we magic?” Eden asked, mystified.
“Not quite, we are called Kinetics, you have power because your mother had powers. I knew your father would never agree to letting me teach you so I hoped I would see what power you got sooner rather than later.”
“Mom had powers? Does Allen?” Eden wasn’t keen on using dad when referring to her father, and the word father was almost too formal. With Aunt Carole she was free to call Allen anything she wanted to.
“No, Mag wanted to tell him but after you were born she decided it would be better to keep it a secret.”
“Oh.”
“Not to worry, Eden, your powers are manifested and now it’s time to learn.”
One week out of the month, her father had to spend time in the city so she would stay with Aunt Carole and learn all that she could about her powers. Apparently she would one day be able to talk to people with just her mind, but Carole said that might take time since Eden hadn’t learned as a baby. Apparently there were people all over the world who could use different powers and Aunt Carole said she was waiting to hear back by post from a gentleman in Ontario who could phase like she did. He might have some insights into how she could better learn her powers.
The day she stood in front of her father’s locked office door wasn’t the first time she would use her powers, but it would be the first time she used them when there were high stakes. Eden had eshewed the billowy night dresses for a pair of trousers and a white dresshirt she’d stolen off a clothesline a few weeks ago when she was staying with her Aunt. Neither fit her terribly well, but she liked that her legs were more free to maneuver and she didn’t have to be afraid of knocking something over with a stray bit of lace. Later Aunt Carole would admonish her for the theft and offer to have a set of boys clothes made for her if she insisted on the habit. Her aunt was remarkably progressive the more she got to know her.
Eden slipped a hand through the door and she let the ‘molecules’ of her body loosen. Aunt Carole had explained what was happening to her when she phased using words that Eden didn’t think were actually real. But the explanation made sense so she went with it.
It was such a funny feeling, she was here but not here, she felt the energy rippling through her body as she passed through the solid wood door and popped out the other side. The dark office was disorienting at first until she caught a glimpse of the rafter window that framed the tiny crescent moon. She stood still, listening for the distant rumble of Allen’s snoring and when she was certain the logs were continuing to be sawed up his nostrils she began to search the office. Locked drawers and cabinets didn’t deter her powers but she was careful to put everything back the way she found it for fear the full weight of her father’s retribution would be laid on her head if found out.
The music box and its gold rim and porcelain lid should be easy to spot but the more she looked the more frustrated she became. She wondered if Allen had anticipated that she would get in here one day and look for the music box. The day that he had taken it, Eden had screamed and shouted out of anger and loss from her mother’s passing not one month prior.
“The sound is grating and trying my last nerve,” he had explained without looking her in the eye. Months of questions, promises to not play it, and requests to at least see it were denied and pushed aside. It had been just under a year now since her mother had passed suddenly from something her aunt called the Russian influenza.
“If you had lived in the city like your mother wanted, then a healer could have gotten to her in time, but your fool of a father insists on that desert so far from everything.”
Aunt Carole lived with her business partner Marcie in Pasadena where they manufactured fancy hats for society ladies and apparently kept counsel with other Kinetics. Aunt Carole said that after she had reached the age of maturity then she could attend those meetings but until then she was relegated to the top floor of Carole and Marcie’s home. That was perfectly fine with her, as Aunt Carole had a huge doll house and dozens of porcelain dolls no bigger than her hand for her to play with. She acted out the few abilities that her aunt had told her about and wondered what the adults talked about every Friday night.
Eden liked the desert but the city was so much more interesting. Just outside her window in Pasadena she could see the other houses and people walking the streets. In Nevada it was just the house surrounded by scrub and dirt for miles around. Her father had one of the fancy new motor cars to take him into town, but when they went to the city they had to take the train from Carson City. The sky was bigger in Nevada and with all the lights it was harder to see the stars at night, but it all seemed a bit of a trade off.
Right now, as the dark in the office started to aggravate her, Eden wished she could trade off her left foot for the music box. It didn’t seem to be anywhere that she could find it. Like everything that had belonged to her mother, Allen had made most of it disappear within the month of her passing. All the drawings of plants were gone, her favorite teacup, all her cosmetics and outfits. Gone. The only thing that had remained was Eden herself it seemed. All her clothes had been made by her mother, but now she was sadly starting to grow out of them even though she wasn’t fond of the very feminine clothes.
A thought occurred to her then, her father had hidden everything or given it away to the Carson City church for charity. If the music box was still in this room, it probably wasn’t going to be in plain sight. Eden got up onto her father’s desk chair and looked on top of the bookshelves. And there, a small brown paper box with a thin layer of dust. She started to scoot the chair over to the bookshelf but it made the most horrifying screech that she had to stop and listen for her father’s snoring. There were no sounds of footsteps or angry shouting.
Eden breathed a sigh of relief and wondered if she could apply the phasing power to the chair and move it across the floor quieter. She pressed a hand to the back of the chair and pushed. The chair dipped and as soon as her hands left the back it stopped. But it was now stuck in the floor at an angle.
She tried over and over to pull the chair back up but as soon as she used her powers on it it sank deeper and deeper into the floor until it was likely halfway into the kitchen ceiling downstairs. She wasn’t strong enough to lift it.
“Fiddlesticks,” Eden looked about the room for another option. There was a small foot bench near the high back mahogany chair that her father used when reading and looked small enough she could probably move it without making noise. Once again, Eden moved the bench but this time was careful to test it before moving. There were bits of fabric under the feet of the bench and it slid over to the bookshelf with almost zero problems. Eden looked back at the chair and wondered what she ought to do about it. She couldn’t leave it there. Oh well, focus!
She clambered up the bench and reached up, her fingers barely got the edge of the box, it was so far back. She grabbed a thin book off the book shelf and tried to use it to push the box closer to her. WIth no luck Eden stood back and glanced back at the half-in half out chair.
“Mistakes were made, but mistakes are just part of learning,” Eden said to herself. It was something her mother used to say all the time.
Eden pressed both hands to either side of the bookshelf and slowly eased her powers into it letting the bookshelf sink into the floor until the top of it was the same height of her nose. She plucked the box off the top and opened it. Pearl and gold, even in the non-existent light glimmered up at her.
Eden hopped off the bench and decided that she’d made a big enough mess that it didn’t matter if she left the bench where it was. She held the box close and phased through the door and out into the hall. The sound of snoring echoed down the halls and Eden sighed with relief. Tomorrow she would be getting on a train to the city and living with her aunt while her father went across the continent to New York. The hired car to take her to the station in Carson City would be arriving in less than three hours.
She would have to wait until she was fully alone, or even in her Aunt’s home before she could open the box, but if there was one thing she learned while trying to master her powers was that patience paid off.
Of course, come morning her father nearly called everything off when he found out that his office was in a state of disarray. He even made the driver of the hired car come and look at it to make sure he wasn’t going crazy. Eden huffed a little that he didn’t ask her, but really he didn’t even know she existed most days anyway.
When the driver complained about needing to go, Allen helped cart Eden’s bags to the car and didn’t notice the large lump in her day bag that Eden insisted on carrying herself. She let out little breaths of relief as each bag made its way into the car. She would still be going to Pasadena and she could leave the box with her aunt when it was time to return.
“For the best,” Allen said, barely looking at her. “Weird things happened around her too.”
The her he referred to had to be Eden’s mother. Aunt Carole had said that her mother’s power was to grow things, and that’s why she had named her Eden. She was her mother’s most prized creation.
“I think your father preferred the desert because it was more likely to kill all the plants that your mother liked to grow. Evil man, I don’t know why she liked him.”
Eden waved goodbye at her father but Allen was already headed back inside to do his own packing for his trip to New York.
As the car noisily drove away from the house Eden popped her head up to the front seat.
“Sir, can I open my music box?”
“Surely! I wouldn’t mind a little music for the ride.”
Eden opened the box and let the tinkling tune fill the small area. It was a cute, tinkling rendition of Ave Maria by Franz Shubert. Eden held the music box in her hands and swore she wouldn’t let this thing slip through her hands one more time. She let out a big breath and sank into the tune that reminded her of her mother’s flowery perfume and the way she could sing the opera along with the music box. That was all lost to her now, but at least she had this.
THE END
Notes:
Historical accuracy is questionable. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I regret nothing.
Arbor Winter Barrow 