Hello everyone; here is my introductory chapter.  I expect some confusion *smug grin*.  That is all part of the fun.

Please let me know what you think!

CHAPTER 1 - Ending

Debbie sat quietly, staring out the passenger side window of her red sedan while her dear friend, Abdul, drove. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see him glance over at her occasionally, concern written on his face. The beautiful wrought silver g
ates to her home had already disappeared from the rearview mirror, and now there were only fields, fields and cottages and low stone walls, and small herds of sheep dotting green meadows.

The peaceful beauty and pastoral orderliness of the English countryside was a counterpoint to the turmoil of anxiety and dread that Debbie was feeling inside. Her heart was beating wildly, as if her bird half had taken over, and her stomach was churnin
g. Her hair felt like it was plastered to her scalp like a bird caught in lime, but a quick check in the side mirror showed it still wafted about, for the most part. She tried to shift inconspicuously to relieve the discomfort of sitting on her tail. Her
purse lay open on her lap, and her hands absently wrung a handkerchief. With a great exertion, she willed her hands to stop betraying her emotions. Half wild animal, she wanted nothing more than to run away and hide.

Fear.

She was on her way to John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford for her test results. She was pretty sure she knew what they’d be, already. She was an experienced herbal doctor, after all, and knew the signs and symptoms of disease as well as anyone with an MD
tagged to his name. Also, this disease she’d seen before. The headaches had come upon her slowly and painfully, just like her mother’s had. Debbie had hid them as long as she could, wandering out into her garden when they came on so no one could see how
much pain she was in, but in the end, they’d found out. She didn’t try to hide the headaches anymore.

Recently, she’d become irritable and snappish, often lashing out at one of her children if they made too much noise near her. They usually complied and left the room, watching her anxiously until they were out the door. Probably they went to talk to th
eir Daddy about it, or Abdul or Tara, who helped care for them. She hated herself for this because in making noise, they were just being children. And children should not have to worry about the grown-ups in their lives.

It wasn’t just the children who worried. The whole household seemed to be a bit depressed of late, all because of her. Finally, Janus had asked her to please get someone to look at her. She couldn’t refuse him anything, even after sixty years of being
together. It didn’t seem like it had been that long, the house being what it was, and they being what they were. Time became fluid in the old house, focus of Faerie magic, and it also came to a standstill. It was like living in a dream. Anyway, Janus had
asked, and she had consented to go in to the hospital for CAT scans and things, although none of them knew quite what a concession this was for Debbie.

She was deathly afraid of hospitals.

It was all so unfair. Oh, to avoid this day.

She wondered if she’d done the right thing, in leaving Janus at their house. She would dearly love to have him along because his presence would make her feel safe and strong. She entertained the foolish though that if only he were with her, the news wo
uld be good. But she was very afraid of what the hospital would do to him... He’d never had to go to one, well, at least not as long as she’d known him, and that had been for a very long time indeed. But she’d been there; she’d sat by the side of a dying
woman in Intensive Care, and she knew how close it had come to destroying her. How much worse would it be for a Sidhe, so little adapted yet to the cold banality of the modern world? She did not wish to find out. She could never put him in such danger. >

Abdul looked over at her again. "Are you all right, Debbie? Are you sure you don’t want Janus along for this? I mean, it’s not too late to go back for him."

She turned and studied him, the network of fine wrinkles that covered his dark mahogany skin, the wise look to his eyes and their gentle twinkle that never dimmed, even now when he was so plainly worried.

"I’m sure, Abdul," she replied. "He hasn’t had to go to the hospital ever, before... I’m afraid it might hurt him."

"Debbie, I really don’t think he would mind. He cares for you a lot. A little discomfort on his part would be nothing if..." he trailed off, since Debbie had turned away and was looking out the window again, plainly dismissing him.

It was probably very rude of her, she knew. She held Abdul in high esteem; most Changelings did not make it to his ripe old age. But she really didn’t want to talk to him at the moment. And technically, she was his boss, since he and Tara had been hire
d to help care for her children. Over their long association, she had almost never pulled rank. Usually if she did, it was as a joke. In truth, she found the whole idea of ranks and castes quite deplorable but it was how Changeling society worked. When sh
e’d been younger, she’d tried to change things. Her efforts, and the efforts of her friends, had been like drops in an ocean.

Her friends. They were all gone now. They hadn’t made it to Grumpdom like Abdul had. She was the only one left, and had been for many years. She suddenly felt very old and very tired.

She rolled down her window and rested her elbow on the frame, perching her chin on her forearm so that any tears that might fly from her eyes might possibly be attributed to the rushing of the wind.

 

A silent half hour later, Abdul pulled into the hospital parking lot and found a spot close to the doors. Debbie collected her coat and purse and stepped out of the car. Abdul came around and gently took her elbow. She knew he meant it only as a kindne
ss so she refrained from telling him she wasn’t an invalid yet.

"We’re a bit early for the appointment. Would you like to grab some coffee in the cafeteria?" he asked.

Debbie cracked a weak grin, still hiding. "Are you kidding? Hospital food’s poison."

Abdul smiled back encouragingly. "Keep your chin up, girl. It could be nothing."

"Let’s just go find someplace to sit, OK? I’m kind of wobbly at the moment." She performed a peculiar little wiggle of her torso to demonstrate. She felt hollow inside, lying to her friend.

"That’s the spirit," Abdul said, approving of her apparently cheerful mood. Good, he’d fallen for it.

She lingered at the doors, the instinct to run from this place nearly overpowering her, but she steeled herself and entered. The moment she was inside the hospital, she could feel the death all around her. The smell of sickness and disinfectants made t
he churning in her stomach search for release. She choked it down. Everywhere she looked, Pestilence grinned back at her. Death stood over the old woman on the gurney, the child in its mother’s arms, the young man sitting over in a corner.

She had been strong enough to go to the hospital once before, when someone she loved dearly had needed her there, but she struggled now to find the strength to take herself another step into this hellhole.

Oh, to escape this place!

They took an elevator up to the third floor and found a waiting room close to Room 312, her appointed Chamber of Truth. Sitting in a chair, Debbie could not ignore the glimpses she’d caught of people lying in green-walled rooms, waiting patiently for l
ife to end. Some had tubes connecting them to whirring machines, pumping colourless liquids into their body while other tubes sucked red lifeblood out. Some sat up and read or watched TV, some lay unconscious, their self-awareness robbed by sickness or by
powerful drugs meant to ease their transition. Cold banality seeped into her flesh and bones, here in this place where the very act of living was turned into a tedious and unending chore, no longer beautiful.

She could not stay here like those people. She knew this, and despaired.

Abdul squeezed her shoulders comfortingly and smiled, a bit strained. So he was also feeling the chill, she thought. He was being strong though, for her sake, and he picked up a men’s magazine which he began to read.

She pretended to leaf through a copy of The Lady’s Home Journal. There were a few testimonial articles which she did make an effort to read: "I Survived Breast Cancer! Three Brave Women Share Their Struggles" and "When Mothers Grieve: The Loss Of A Chi
ld". She wondered if children’s magazines ever had articles on how to cope with the loss of a parent. She doubted it, and if they did, she was sure they couldn’t possibly help a small child overcome that loss any more than this article could help a mother
who’d lost a child. She thought of her little daughter, Rachel, who was around five years old, though closer to fifty. The house made her age very slowly. She wondered how she would explain to Rachel, Tally and Aidan what was wrong with their mummy when
she got home that evening. If the doctors let her go home.

Abdul laid down his magazine and checked his watch. She caught a glimpse of its face. Ten-thirty. Her appointed hour.

"Well, Debbie, it’s time. We’d better go. You know doctors, they’ll probably charge extra if we make him wait," he made an effort to sound cheerful. She tried to find some appreciation for this but could not.

She got up and lead the way to the room where she pushed open the heavy blue door. Once through, it closed solidly behind herself and Abdul like the door to a dungeon.

Inside, the office was pleasant enough. It was situated at a corner of the building and so had windows on two walls, letting in cheerful sunlight. There was a variegated fig plant in a pot by one window, some filing cabinets, a desk. Doctor Chandrakant
, a young, pleasant-looking East Indian man, straightened up from watering the fig. It could as easily have been a stock broker’s office, or a real estate agent’s, save for the illuminated display on the wall which showed rainbow-coloured pictures of her
brain.

It was odd, looking at her brain. It felt almost as if she were being violated, forced to uncover something deeply private. But the bright colours and their possible meanings also piqued a certain morbid curiosity. She wondered idly whether the colours
might possibly say something about her personality, like an aura. Were boring people’s brains all a dull muddy brown, for instance?

Doctor Chandrakant’s invitation to sit tore her attention from her brain to him. Abdul pulled out a chair for her and waited for her to settle before taking a seat himself. Enough with the show of respect, she thought to herself. I’m no foreign dignita
ry come to bestow gifts upon the populace, but a prisoner of my body, come to hear my sentence.

Doctor Chandrakant smiled warmly and took a seat behind his desk. "Good morning-" he checked her file on his desk, "Ms. Woodrow. How are you feeling today?"

Like a pig at the slaughterhouse, she wanted to say, but all that came out was "Pretty good, thank you, Doctor."

He nodded politely in response. "I’m sure you are eager to know your test results-" Well, I wouldn’t say eager, she thought to herself, but I would like to get this over with. The doctor pursed his lips, trying to find words to tell her what she alread
y knew. "I’m afraid I can’t give you good news. After analysing the scans, we are fairly certain that you have a malignant meningioma, in the cerebral cortex. We can’t say for sure that’s what it is until we go in and take a look around."

He says it as if it’s a covert operation into enemy territory, and not holes being poked in to my brain he’s talking about, she thought. She nodded. It probably made it easier for them, the doctors, to pretend they weren’t talking about living, breathi
ng people. People with lives and families and homes and cars just like them.

She tried to continue to listen to the doctor, but most of what he was saying just wouldn’t register. She didn’t need to hear it. She’d heard it all before. The words fell on her ears like a judge’s gavel. Malignant meningiomas were fairly common, acco
unting for fifteen to twenty percent of intracranial tumours. More common in women than men. Cause not always known. Some indication it’s genetic. Happens when cells in the meninges, a sheath around the brain, start muliplying rapidly. Can grow down into
other parts of the brain. Hers appears to be invading her cerebrum (he showed her where, with a pointer on the scan images). Symptoms will vary with what part of the cerebrum is being invaded. Headaches, for sure. Often seizures. Possibly blindness, perso
nality changes, loss of memory. Exact treatment to be decided upon after initial biopsy. May include surgery, radiation therapy, chemotherapy... Should know the possible side effects...

Detached and swimming in a murky pool of erratic thought, she could hear herself ask a few questions, and it seemed as if she were listening to a recording of herself, which had been made long ago and only now was being replayed. The chaotic thoughts c
oalesced into one: she didn’t want this. It wasn’t fair. Hopelessness.

Her mother hadn’t cried in front of her, and she wouldn’t cry in front of Abdul. She needed to breathe though, she needed fresh air. She was choking in here, in the poisoned atmosphere of the hospital. The doctor’s words assaulted her senses, her head
was reeling, and she could feel one of her headaches coming on.

She asked to go to the washroom. Abdul offered to accompany her as far as the door to the lady’s room. She accepted, needing someone to support her, keep her steady, as her stricken form made its way down the hall.

The heavy door with its ubiquitous stick-lady-in-a-skirt symbol slid silently shut on its hydraulic arm. Inside, there was only the quiet gurgling of a leaking toilet tank, and the steady drip-drip of a loose tap. Throat closed tight, body barely conta
ining the convulsions of sorrow, she crouched down to look underneath the doors of the two stalls, and stood up, relieved. She was alone in here.

Inside, the bathroom was painted that institutional puke-green that all hospitals and many other public places seem to share. The air was cool and damp, and if she closed her eyes, she could almost pretend she was outside somewhere, maybe in a deep gro
tto. A small window let in a bit of light. She opened it, letting in a questing breeze.

She leaned against a stall and allowed herself to slide slowly down into a squatting position before unleashing the twin tides of her eyes. It was the same thing, all over again. She wasn’t sure what was more terrible: watching her mother go through it
or facing it herself, now.

Debbie still could not come to terms with all the emotions, the pain, the loss, the despair she had felt as she had watched her mother progress from vibrant, beautiful woman in her early fifties to the weak, emaciated, thing she had been near the end.
The images, scents and sounds of her mother’s degeneration were burned into her memory. Before the end, she had not even recognized her own daughter. She had cried out in her morphine sleep, about things long past, cried to her own mother sometimes, in th
e voice of a young child. Her hair, that lustrous red mass of waves that Debbie had loved all her life, had all been lost to the chemicals they pumped into her body. Her strong will and inner spirit which Debbie had always admired had been sapped away by
the disease. Her smooth, rounded form, made more beautiful, Debbie thought, by the evidence of having borne a child, had wasted away to a skeletal mass, and her face, once marked by a few laugh lines which only hinted at the!
sense of humour her mother had possessed, had turned pale and gaunt, lined with black weariness. Her eyes, once so full of joy and life, at the end gave only silent plea for gentle death to come and relieve her of the burden of life.

And it had all been useless.

Debbie had been much older than her own children were now, when her mother had died. But still, the loss had left its indelible mark upon her, shaping her own future in ways she still did not understand completely. She remembered how betrayed she had f
elt when her mother no longer recognized her. She had known it was only the sickness and that her mother could never forget about her, really, but it had still hurt like a dagger being pushed into her heart. How much worse would it be for the twins Tally
and Aidan, physically and mentally only about ten years old, and tiny Rachel, practically a baby still? They didn’t understand sickness and death yet, and they should never have to, if Debbie had anything to say about it. In many ways, her mother’s death
had marked Debbie’s graduation to adulthood. It wasn’t right to steal away her own children’s youth.

They were too young.

There was also Janus. Debbie’s father had left the family years before his one-time wife had died, whatever spark of love they might once have shared long burned out. But Janus and Debbie were still very much in love, and he like a child in many ways.
Sidhe often were, their outward beauty matched by an innocence the Commoner races had lost centuries ago. She didn’t think he would understand or accept this disease any more than the children could. She could not force him to confront it. She had no righ
t, nor any desire, to teach him about death.

Why was life so hard?

No, she could not bear to think of any of them going through what she had gone through. She loved them all so much.

She wished she did not have to die. Not when everyone depended on her so much still. It was so unfair.

Debbie heard a tapping at the door. Abdul, asking if she was all right. "Yes, yes of course I am," she replied, voice breaking. "I-I’ll be out soon, very soon. Just as soon as I can compose myself. All right, Abdul?"

Her eyes dried up; so did her mouth, tongue growing thick and pasty. She had no tears left to cry. She could not go back out there. Could not face the pity in Abdul’s eyes, in the doctor’s eyes, the months of drugs and radiation and holes drilled in he
r skull all to no avail. Her insides looped up on each other, tying themselves in knots. She could not face the fear in her children’s eyes, the sorrow, the desperate loss in Janus’. She was not strong like her mother had been.

She felt so dreadfully tired then. So old and weary. She had gone as far as she could. She should let go of her stranglehold on youth, on life, and just fly away. She had always loved flying so...

She would not be able to fly, if she were hooked up to a machine, air pumping into her lungs, blood being forced sluggishly through her veins. She would not be able to fly if she were to forget who she was.

Maybe it /was/ fair- the price she had to pay for living on sixty years of borrowed time in Janus’ house. She had told him, the second time they had met, that she was not like him, was not meant to live as long as he would. The house, though- his house
. She realized how thinly stretched she felt. Chronologically, she was ninety-some years old yet her body was still that of a young woman. Time had caught up at last.

They’d all remember her as being young, young and vibrant, and full of joy. That was best, wasn’t it? To not have their last memories of her be as painful as her own memories of her mother’s death- this is what she wanted.

So old, so tired.

Her friends, her friends would be waiting.

A preternatural stillness fell upon her.

Peace.

Debbie knew what she had to do now. She thought of herself as a woodpecker, mentally moulded her arms into wings, stretched her nose and mouth into a bill. The old private pain of the transformation enveloped her, a welcome sensation for it blocked out
the pain in her head, and it meant good things. It meant freedom.

He would know, of course. Their bond was such that they knew, sometimes, what the other was doing, even over long distances.

Her beak gaped a bit as the last of the pain faded, and she spread her shiny black wings. This was fitting; she had come into the world of Changelings as a woodpecker and now she would go out the same way. She took off awkwardly in the confined space a
nd flew out the window. She didn’t really know where she wanted to go; she supposed it really didn’t matter. Anywhere but home would do. She flew north.

There was a freeway down below. She was a pileated woodpecker, North American species. How absurd it would seem for the British to discover a specimen such as herself in their country of dull brown birds and seagulls. What speculation it would bring. E
scapee from a zoo? Blown all the way over here by a storm? A last trick. It was fitting.

There was a lorry down below (why didn’t they call them trucks like everybody else?). It was carrying lumber. Even better. She flew down, down, down on an intercept course with the speeding vehicle. Please be quick, she thought. I think I won’t have th
e courage to do this again. It’s for the best.

The truck edged ever closer in a long-drawn out split second. She closed her eyes and made her peace with the world, waiting for the impact.

It never happened.