Welcome, friends!
A quick word about this unusual short vignette…
In this piece, inspired by the mysterious nature of the solstice, the holiday season, and the longest night of the year, I wanted to experiment with a very different form of fiction. A much more personal piece, though still set on Ferris Island. I have heard this form called “unfiction”: presented as truth, though it’s wrapped in a fiction story.
I know this experiment won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, and that’s perfectly fine! But if you do enjoy more personal pieces like this where fiction and reality blend a bit, please do let me know, and perhaps I will work more Notes From Deerhaunt into the rotation on an occasional (likely infrequent) basis, as and when I get the urge.
As always: if you enjoy this story, let me know with a like, comment, or restack!
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We took a walk on the longest night of the year. The dog, the fog, and me.
This was out at Deerhaunt, the cabin for rent on the Mothwood side of the lake, a place I know well. There are many good places on Ferris Island to visit, but Deerhaunt is where I often go when I need peace. A tiny cabin, well-stocked with coffee and a good, bright, lake-facing window to write next to. There is no one near. All is calm.
And calm is what I needed. The elusive white horse had been much on my mind as it is every winter, all spotless fall of mane and muddy hooves. The horse of legend—Archangel Michael’s steed, eight-legged Sleipnir, mighty Bucephalus, martyred Artax, the kelpie, the pegasus, the pooka—thick-limbed and strong, yet always ducking out of sight whenever I thought I caught a glimpse. Faint as cloud.
But no time to search for my ghosts. The holidays were approaching fast, and December had disappeared in a blink. At home, there were still plans to make, decisions, questions, worries. Adding decorations one day at a time, wondering when it would be enough to feel like Christmas. The old songs in the grocery store aisles felt inscrutable, wrong-headed, like hearing your own voice played back on a recording. New year never feels new enough. I held the approaching holiday in my hand and could not recognize it, a sort of Yuletide prosopagnosia. Something was missing. Something had fallen off, rolled under a table, gotten lost in the cupboard where I keep the wrapping paper and ribbons. I could not retrace my own steps.
So I took a walk on the longest night of the year, the dog running eager ahead of me to disappear into the ferns, no flashlight, and the fog settling thickly upon us like a sleeping cat. No sound except steady dripping in the limbs of the trees. A bright half-moon grinning, hidden by the leafless tangle. All was soft-edged, dreamlike. Cold.
No matter what I write about it, I am never afraid to walk alone on this island at night, and certainly not in her woods. You are more likely to be haunted by the ghosts you bring with you than by anything she can dream up.
As I walked, I thought about Christmases as I had known them when I was a child, driving every year to choose and harvest our tree from a farm far away from the city lights, a farm that sold local honey in their barn and gave out free cups of cocoa and candy canes. Dad tied the tree to the top of the van; somehow, he always knew how to do it. The presents gathered under the tree, slowly, slowly, then all at once. The family dinner with the grandparents and the cousins on Christmas Eve, scalloped potatoes and city chicken, and service at the Lutheran church, and then a can’t-hardly-sleep, and then… Oh, Christmas morning! A scavenger hunt to find our biggest gift of the year; Dad wrote the clues on little pieces of white paper, Mom filmed us on the video camera, smiling. Every year, the doorbell: our neighbor brought over her homemade braided bread studded with candied cherries and fragrant with cardamom. The long-ago cats sat in the opened boxes, the long-ago dog napped beside the gas fireplace. And always the hoofbeats of the white horse drumming, drumming, impossible to ignore. There, and there! On the roof! In the hall! In the kitchen! In the sacred sanctuary, the congregation softly singing Silent Night by flickering candlelight!
But I can’t hear them anymore.
Bark!
The now-dog yaps, muffled in the mist, breaking my reverie, and I paused on the forest path. I should have brought a flashlight, but I was caught up in the poetry of it, the holiness of night vision, assuming it would be enough. It wasn’t, and I could barely see the dog’s dark outline up ahead, sitting, staring into the trees.
I made my way down to him, resting my hand on his head, damp from sniffing around in the underbrush. He was rigid under my touch, alert, whining softly.
I looked.
The moon was framed perfectly in the trees, bright enough to break through the fog and throw the woods into sharp relief, pouring down into a clearing. And in the clearing, a shape. The kind you can only-just-recognize, could only be a trick of the light.
No matter what I write about it, this island is not haunted.
But sometimes…sometimes…I am less than sure.
For I saw it there, the white horse of the memory and the mysteries and the marshland, singing softly in the moonlight, giving me a stare somewhat more than a horse is capable of giving.
Kelpie! Pooka! Spirit! Asfaloth! Phantom!
And it occurred to me, then, that perhaps the horse had not shied away from me so much as I had lost the ears to hear it. The white horse of invitation, of unanswered questions, of winter mysteries…the white horse of solstice. Of long nights. Of death before dawn. The horse whose voice all children know, and some grown-ups strain to remember.
This white horse of the marshland, all spotless fall of mane and muddy hooves.
So, I listened. I remembered.
We paused for a while, letting our regard for one another turn to stillness, and the dog sighed in the windless quiet, turned to scratch behind an ear.
Finally, the song of the white horse faded. There was an invitation in it, but we all know how that story ends: with teeth and cold water. Solstice is not always kind. Mystery and mischief go hand in hand. You listen, but dare not follow.
Kelpie! Pooka! Will-o-the-wisp!
I bowed my head with gratitude, and took my leave of that place. We parted then, each to our fates. The white horse one way, myself another. Whole, somehow. Found.
We carried on, into the longest night of the year.
The dog, the fog, and me.
END
I really loved this. As you wrote, it could be read as a personal narrative inside a fictional setting. But it could also be read as entirely a memory of trying to remember. Both the seen details like the braid of the bread and the unseen/barely seen horse.
Call me Oliver Twist: More, please.
A lovely Solstice-spun tale. And I do know how those stories end, in that dark chasm between the worlds of humans and fae...