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Emily eventually stopped for lunch, a homemade energy bar full of nuts and chocolate chips. She drank her water carefully. There really did seem to be no end to this field and she didn’t know when she’d encounter a water source—and even then, if it’d be friendly. Her pack continued to hang light as a feather on her back and she realised that her feet didn’t hurt at all. She was still sweating, copiously, plus her legs were tired, so it wasn’t her amazing physical health at work. Emily began to wonder if the backpack and the boots themselves had something to do with it. They’d been gifts for her journey, so did that imbue them with some sort of extra attribute in the Sidhe? What did that mean about the other gifts stowed in her pack?

Not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth, Emily gave herself a mantra, “don’t think about it, just keep moving forward.” She repeated it in her head as she walked through more and yet more grass and when the grasshoppers finally left her alone she muttered it aloud. The sun finally began to set, so she made a hollow in the grass and pulled out a sweater. Over the tops of the stalks the sun caught glinting on something at the horizon. Emily stood and squinted at it, wishing she’d thought to pack binoculars. There was no way to judge distance or time, so it was impossible to guess when she’d encounter whatever that was. In the last of the light Emily checked her compass, remembering to account for the setting sun. The glinting thing on the horizon was dead center to the compass’ needle.

The compass. Another gift, like the boots and the pack. Trying to actively not think about it, Emily pulled out two more gifts from her pack, the Polaroid camera and the writing desk. She aimed the camera at herself and took a picture. If it had some special fairy quality, Emily couldn’t tell. She wondered if the film was bad, or if she’d focused wrong. Her face was a glowing blur, casting a discoloured halo.

With a shrug she opened up the writing desk and dropped the photograph into one of the empty pigeonholes. In the last of the light she wrote a short note to her aunt, detailing the grasshoppers and her mantra. As she sealed the envelope, Emily noticed a strange little slot in the side of the desk that she hadn’t noticed before. Out of a perverse curiosity, she slid the letter in. Halfway through, the envelope was sucked from her fingers and she pulled back, startled.

Emily packed everything back away, marvelling in the back of her mind how easy it was to fit everything in the backpack. She curled up with the pack she wasn’t thinking about as a pillow, the knife at her waist in reach of her hand. With a last squint at the vanishing sun she said to herself, clearly, “don’t think about it.”

Mirrored from Journal of a Something or Other.