The Other Fawn

Founder's Week - Part Three of Three

Welcome to Founder’s Week!

This is Part Three, the final part.

(Start here or read Part Two.)

I hope you enjoyed this bonus flash-fiction saga!

For more fiction like this, subscribe for free!

---

Light. There was light. 

Tamsin burst through the treeline, shielding her eyes from the glare. The sea spread out in front of her, a vast and sparkling line of gray-blue. 

She was halfway down the rocky beach before she finally stopped, bending double over her knees, her lungs burning. Then, in a panic, she whirled around and waited, trying to catch the flicker of a ghostly form or the shadow-shapes of the twin deer following her. 

But there was nothing. The woods were quiet, the trees on the forest boundary wind-swept from Pacific storms and leaning, seabirds calling. 

Tamsin sighed and sat down right where she had stood, hugging her knees. The narrow, rocky beach stretched as far as she could see on either side of her before vanishing around the island’s coastline. The waves were choppy and unsettled the closer they drew to the beach, and Tamsin could see the dim outlines of large stones hidden in the surf. Just ahead and slightly to the right was a rocky outcropping, slicing through the tide, and at its tip stood a lighthouse, long abandoned. 

As her breathing slowly returned to normal, it dawned on her:

I dropped my phone. 

She looked around, patted her pockets, but she knew the truth: her phone was still in the graveyard, where she had let it fall from her fingers in her haste to get away.

Tamsin turned to look over her shoulder. The trail into the woods yawned black and she briefly considered going back in to look for her phone, get back to her car. 

But the memory of the empty, white eyes of the fawns and the rising face of the ghost—her own face—kept her seated in place.

She could walk the beach, hope to reach the edge of the woods and find civilization again. But she had no idea how far she was from help in either direction, and she certainly had no idea which way to try before it eventually got dark. 

Before she could make her decision, Tamsin looked out at the old lighthouse and saw a flicker of movement. It was someone exiting the door at the lighthouse’s base, looking out over the sea with their hand to their brow. Then, as though satisfied, they began to pick their way along the spit of rocky land to the beach. 

They were heading straight for Tamsin. 

Conflicted, Tamsin watched them approach. As they drew closer she could see a pale dress, long hair wild in the wind. Perhaps this was someone who could help her. But the memory of the ghost was still fresh, and she was wary. 

As the woman drew ever nearer, Tamsin could see that her feet were bare on the rocks and barnacles, but seemed not to mind. 

“Don’t run,” Tamsin told herself, her mouth going dry. “Wait and see. Maybe she can help me."

When the woman was just close enough to make out her face, Tamsin’s blood ran cold. 

It was her. It was herself. It was another Tamsin, a twin. 

The Twin stopped at a respectful distance, held up a hand. 

“You don’t need to run,” she said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

Tamsin couldn’t speak. 

“May I sit down?”

Tamsin nodded. The Twin sat, her back to the sea. 

Finding her voice, Tamsin said, “Who…are you? Are you me?”

The Twin cocked her head. “That wouldn’t make any sense. My guess is that you decided I should look like this. But I could have looked like anything.”

Tamsin swallowed. “I don’t understand.”

“What happened to the other fawn, Tamsin?”

Tamsin blinked. “What?”

“The other fawn. At Grandma and Grandpa’s cabin. What happened to it?”

Tamsin opened her mouth to speak, closed it again. Then she said, “I don’t…know. It was just gone.”

The Twin gave her a sympathetic glance. “We both know that isn’t true. What happened to the other fawn?”

Tamsin felt tears pricking her eyes. The waves whispered against the rocks. Down the beach, a seagull dropped a clam on the stones to crack it open. 

“It died,” she whispered, so quietly. “Dad hit it with the car. By accident, on our last trip out to the cabin. I was seven.”

“Your first brush with death,” the Twin said. “Your first taste of the real world, of the wildness on the edges, the unfairness of life. But you turned it into a tidy story that you tell yourself, because stories are easier. History is just a folktale. Ghost stories are there to be used, displayed.

“You’ve done your homework, so they say,” the Twin said. “Do you know the story of Ferris’s landing?”

Tamsin cast about in her memory, her mind racing. “Oh, uh…William Ferris was a young sailor on the HMS Discovery. And, uh…in August of 1792 he was swept off the ship in a storm, and George Vancouver named the island after him as a…tribute.”

The Twin nodded. “So simple, so tidy when you put it like that. Just like your fawn, Tamsin.”

The Twin gazed at Tamsin, then, and Tamsin realized with a jolt that the eyes did not belong to her. The face was identical, but the eyes were wrong. 

“You don’t like to look at things head-on, do you?” the Twin asked. “You prefer to look at them through a screen, don’t you?” 

A tear spilled over, and Tamsin was too afraid to lift her arm and wipe it away. “Are you going to hurt me?”

The Twin looked out at the sea, those strange eyes unreadable. 

“No,” she said, finally. “I’m just going to tell you a story.”

Then, without warning, the Twin reached out a hand, and everything went black. 

*******

Drowning. She was drowning. 

Tamsin kicked and struggled desperately, surrounded on all sides by cold, heavy blackness. She pushed and reached and clawed until, finally, her head broke the surface of the water and she sputtered and coughed, the waves tumbling over her scalp and her limbs numb with the shock. 

The sky was heavy with dark stormy clouds, but there was just enough light to see land ahead, so she swam for it, desperate to reach safety before the fatigue and exhaustion overcame her. 

When she finally reached the rocky beach she collapsed on it, shivering. She lay there for a long time, just breathing, before finally pushing herself up and looking around. 

She realized slowly that this was the very same beach she had just been sitting on with the Twin. But the lighthouse was gone, and the trees felt closer to the shore. 

Tamsin looked around for the Twin, but did not see her. Instead, another figure lay nearby on the beach, as though cast there by the sea. 

“Hey!” Tamsin called, approaching. “Hey, are you okay?”

She drew closer to the figure, but as she approached, it slowly pushed itself up, weakly coughing into the stones. 

It was a young man, wearing the strangest clothes Tamsin had ever seen. They were very, very old-fashioned, a style she did not recognize. His long hair was loose around his shoulders.  

The skin on the back of Tamsin’s neck prickled. William Ferris. 1792. 

The young man looked around, and Tamsin realized with a start that he couldn’t see her. 

“Hello?” she said, but he did not respond, did not even act as though he had heard her. 

Ferris rose to his feet, shakily, and looked around, wrapping his arms around himself. 

Tamsin realized: he was alone. Completely, utterly alone. 

He wandered up the beach toward the woods, seeking shelter, and Tamsin followed.

For days, Tamsin wandered behind William Ferris like a shadow. She walked in his lonely footsteps. She felt no hunger or thirst, simply haunted him like a ghost as he traversed the vast and empty island, for no humans made it their home.

Days passed, weeks. Ferris survived off of late summer berries and animals he hunted. Tamsin watched it all, her hair growing long, down to the leaf-litter ground, and her eyes turning wrong, not quite her own. Barefoot, she could feel the island’s curiosity at this newcomer, its tentative welcome. She felt its generosity, at first, its desire to help.

Then, one day, the native people of the coast landed on the beach in their cedar canoes to gather berries for their winter stores and catch fish in the shallows. When they saw Ferris, they took pity on him, and brought him back to their camps on the mainland. 

Tamsin was left alone. Completely, utterly alone.

Months passed. Years. Decades.

History swam before Tamsin Cunningham’s very eyes, and she was there for all of it, slipping unseen through the settlements of the European trappers as they arrived to hunt and trade, sending shivers up the spines of lumbermen cutting down the island’s trees. The pioneers landed, building their log houses and filling them with family, children, their woodsmoke perfuming the air. She watched them build the lighthouse on the rocky spit. She watched them build Old Damascus in the very heart of the forest. 

She felt the land’s pain, its confusion, its betrayal as trees fell and humans spread.

Through it all, Tamsin walked the rocky beaches as a spirit, her long hair trailing in the saltwater, her empty eyes glassy. A ghost story. A fable to tell to children. 

Then, one day, in her wanderings, Tamsin looked up at the lighthouse, and the Twin stood beside it, looking out to sea. 

Tamsin joined her, the two standing side by side, gazing out at the gray. 

“Who are you?” the Twin asked, the first words spoken to her that Tamsin had heard in so many long years. 

A memory stirred in Tamsin’s mind, then. 

Only the bones remain.

“Who are you?” the Twin asked, again. 

The ghost of the girl opened her mouth to speak, her eyes clearing. 

“I’m Tamsin,” she said. 

And then it was over. 

*******

Tamsin woke on the rocky beach, curled in the fetal position, and someone was shaking her shoulder. 

“Miss Cunningham? Are you with us?”

Tamsin blinked up at the person gently shaking her awake. It was that bearded sailor from Port Salish, Reyville. Fish & Wildlife, Dan had said. Coast Guard, Search & Rescue…

She sat up. The lighthouse in the distance was its old abandoned self. Just to the outside of the rocky shallows a big blue boat bobbed at anchor and a white dinghy was pulled up to the beach. 

Tamsin looked up at Reyville. His face was a mask of concern. 

“How long have I been here?” she asked. 

He shook his head. “Couldn’t say. Cora Phelan up at the Crab & Crumble called me, said she was concerned you might be coming out here. But that was only an hour or so ago. Where is your car?”

Tamsin rubbed at her eyes, looked around. “It’s…in the woods,” she said, quietly. 

He nodded, gave Mothwood a nervous glance before he looped his hand around her arm to help her stand. “Well, don’t you worry about that. We’ll send someone in to get it. Let’s get you back to Port Salish.”

Tamsin let him lead her to the dinghy. As Reyville rowed back to the blue boat, deftly avoiding the rocks from years of practice, Tamsin watched the forest get smaller and smaller, the decades she had spent there working their way deeply into her mind, into her very cells. The island’s pain, the island’s betrayal, the island’s deep desire to understand and be understood. 

Was it a dream? She couldn’t be sure. 

As they neared the boat, Reyville asked over the rhythmic clunk-splash of the oars, “Did you at least get what you were hoping for?”

But Tamsin didn’t reply. 

She truly didn’t know. 

*******

Ferris Island’s Founder’s Week Centennial was its best-attended yet.

The tourism board had started a new blog, and the stories of island history posted there over the previous weeks were so evocatively written that readers felt they could only have been crafted by someone who had seen it with their own eyes. Inspired by these tales, fascinated tourists came from all over the region to visit, soak up the beauty of this hidden Northwest gem in its summertime glory.

In Seavend, the Founder’s Day Fair was booming. White vendor tents stretched all along the lawn beside the marina, and the windows and doors of the Crab & Crumble were thrown wide open as people filtered in and out, buying ice cream and other treats. 

Tamsin Cunningham moved among the crowd, peeking at the different wares for sale, picking up handmade pottery and admiring the art of local painters and crafters. 

She loved the buzz of the people around her, the chatting and laughter, dogs barking in the nearby park, the kids playing hide and seek around the tents. But there was a thrum that she was convinced only she could hear, a murmuring as of a story being told softly in another room, carrying on around them all without their noticing.

Satisfied with her exploring, Tamsin left the fair and wandered past the marina. She waved to Cora and Ivy in the mercantile where they were busily serving customers. They waved back.

She walked down the road, leaving the crowd behind, entering a seaside neighborhood where little ramshackle houses crouched, peering wide-eyed over the sea with their big picture windows. She passed folk in their gardens, cats curled on welcome mats in the sun, bees buzzing in the hydrangeas and wild, raucous patches of calendula. 

At the end of the lane, a familiar old driveway curved around and down to a small house on the beach. CAUTION tape weakly barred entry, but Tamsin dipped under it and strode onward.

Her grandparents’ cabin had been sold years before, but proved to be unsaveable. The sea, it seemed, was trying to reclaim it. The land was essentially without obvious use, resold to the county, and the old house was just a shell, its feet licked by the tide. 

Only the bones remain.

Tamsin walked down to the cabin and sat in the overgrown meadow-grass beside it, gazing out to the sea. All was quiet.

She thought, briefly, of her phone, still lying—fittingly, perhaps—in the graveyard of Old Damascus. It had been a few weeks; she had not replaced it. She wasn't sure when or if she would.

Tamsin felt the ground beneath her, solid, the grass soft under her fingers, the chill breath of the wind on her shoulders, the sun warming her face. Real things, true things. Not tidy, but true. Not a story, not simple. A place, where pain and death walked hand in hand with joy and triumph. A place, like any place, to be experienced fully. 

To understand, and be understood.

A shuffling in the woods at the side of the cabin caught her attention, but she was not afraid. 

The underbrush parted and a yearling doe-fawn stepped out of the trees, chewing blithely on sweet summer leaves. 

When she saw Tamsin, she froze.

Tamsin and the yearling regarded each other for a long, long time in silence, the sea whispering, the old cabin sighing into time, before the deer leaped back into the woods and vanished.

Thank you for reading!

Want more Talebones flash fiction? Try this: