A friendship is nurtured through a series of entries in 'The Guestbook'. Then, one day, the friends meet each other and things take a magical turn.
Somewhere between waking and sleeping on our journey towards the unfathomable deep, there comes a thin moment where we have one foot in the waking world and the other is in that other world where we relinquish conscious control.
Pausing here and straddled between two planets that drive one another like gears, the attentive traveler will notice a narrow door only wide enough to sidle through.
This is the border of sleep, where imagination and reality are braided together, a chasm in the crust of consciousness, venting the hot pumice of imagery into the irresistible magma of narrative.
Welcome to episode 52 of Stories from the Borders of Sleep, Curious Tales and Original Stories by your host Seymour Jacklin.
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The beautiful harp soundtrack to this episode is by Diana Rowan from her album the Bright Knowledge, which is available on Magnitude.
So if you are ready to journey with me, then I shall begin the Guest book by Seymour Jacklin it has often been given that the little people, the fairy folk, were volatile and have no real affection for humans, preferring to ensnare them or make them the butt of their caprice and wit.
But it's simply not true, in spite of how it might seem to us.
It's merely that they are different from us and marching to their own tune is not malice.
At worst they are neutral.
Yet more often they have our good at heart, knowing better than we do what that means, and are therefore unjustly slandered.
Mirabel left a guest book in the tiny shed by the entrance to the nature reserve.
It was just an old exercise book with a hole punched in its spine and a pen on a piece of string threaded through three or four times in a year, somebody might write in it.
Mid January that year she went down on one of her less frequent visits, battling through the cold.
There was little to do in the dormant parcel, but she liked to see if all was in order, and she would replenish the suet balls she kept hanging in the trees for the birds.
She checked the shed Damp had got to the little pamphlet guides that she'd put out for visitors.
They wilted in their boxes untouched, but the guest book lay open on the potting table.
Somebody had been and written in a round open hand on January 1st I came for the sunrise on the new year, early before the owls went home.