Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter by Alison Wearing Page A

man played.
    I closed my eyes. And there they were: all those notes, underneath my skin all this time. Resonating in my body as though I were the piano and my ribs the strings. I folded myself down over my thighs and plugged my ears with my fingers. The notes were still there, even stronger than before. Like a thousand purring cats all over me.
    I stayed so long I fell asleep, my cheek hot against the carpet when I awoke. From the open window, I could hear a game of kick-the-can starting up in the backyard with some neighbours, so I got to my hands and knees and crawled out of the living room, down the back hallway and out through the flap of Ida’s doggie door, until I was safely outside.
    I never spoke to anyone about “feeling the sound.” It was a discovery that I kept to myself, perhaps my first exploration into the sanctuary of solitude. Whatever it was, music danced into me in a new way that day. I never listened to it the same way again.
    The forests and fields at the end of the road soon became my roaming ground and I delighted in walking through them alone, and for hours. Those moments are castings of light across my memory, sparkles of ever-dancing details, impossible to grab at or isolate. What I remember most is that I would hum. And that I felt as much a part of the place as a note to a song.
    When I snapped a stalk of tall dry grass between my fingers, the reedy crack would register in my knuckle. Lying onmy back, my skull like a mossy cobble in the mud, I would feel whorls of clouds drift through my chest, swelling and shape-shifting across my heart. Crickets rang in my cheekbones, and the calls of cardinals plucked the tips of my ribs. My chapped lips were the peeling bark of the birch tree, its branches tall limbs I would grow into. And the garter snake that once slithered into the cove of my neck as I lay in a spray of ferns became, in that moment, a ringlet of my own hair.
    I didn’t know I was absorbing the language of place, just as an infant does not consciously train in the dialect of his parents. He simply listens, babbles back, and becomes part of the verbal geography. Similarly when apprenticing in the particular pitch of spruce, the tone of grackle and granite, weasel, aster and snow, we effortlessly tune into the surrounding chorus and grow up with the anthem of the land.
    Only when I grew up and began to look for a home beyond my own did I notice that while I resonated with other places, I did not seem to
contain
their resonance. I could learn the language of a country, yes, eat its foods, partake of its ways, wear the fabric of its clothes, but I would live in these new places with a hollowness I found difficult to name. Its leaves were not connected to my skin, I would say; or, its winds did not contain the flavour of my sleep.
    For comfort, I would lower myself down the well of memory into the body of that child, the one lying on her back in an August meadow with a black-eyed Susan blossoming between her toes, one arm crooked under a mop of muddy curls, and the elegy of a mourning dove blowing sound rings across an infinite sky.

DOGS AND SEX
    One day I came home from school to learn that Ida (diarrhea dog who had, by then, increased her repertoire of pleasing habits to include: drooling into my grandmother’s shoes after she’d slipped them off to play cards, and snapping at neighbourhood children) had been taken off to that mythical place known as A Farm. She would be happier there, my mother said. Besides, my asthma was triggered partly by dogs. Then, adding insult to injury, she added that we should be happy she went to such a nice place. I wept bitterly.
    The following day, a small white Bichon Frisé arrived. His face was a 360-degree fan of frizzy, hypoallergenic hair. Instantly, I fell in love with him—Sebastian, my comrade in curls—and decided to believe that Ida was romping happily on her Farm and that we were all better off for the new