Abracadabra

by Paul Illidge (June 2025)

A cool, grey, late September afternoon on Lake Huron south of Pointe au Baril, the strife, the shrieks, the food battles done on the deck of the Buchanan family cottage, a flock of seagulls in a mad beating of wings takes to the air when Maddy Buchanan paddles by about twenty feet from the deck in a red cedar-strip canoe, naked now, having removed and hidden her orange coveralls under a large flat rock on the beach as she made her escape from Pinehurst Psychiatric Prison in one of the facility’s canoes that her friend Vi had secretly arranged to have stowed in the bushes a little way up from the beach. She’s naked except for a sparkling beauty pageant tiara on her bald head.

Dipping her paddle quietly as she glides past the family cottage, staring sadly at the dead gull that must have flown into the sliding glass doors during the storm, its white feathers ruffling in the afternoon breeze, nothing but a few remnants of food left on the deck that not even the flies are interested in.

A safe distance past the cottage, Maddy paddles into shore, runs the canoe onto the beach, pulls it up the sand and further up into the woods where she covers it with fallen pine, spruce and cedar bows in case she needs to come back for it.

“Princess?” a voice calls.

Maddy spins around in alarm. In the woods not far off to her right it’s a grey-haired sylph of a woman in a long white nightgown, barefoot, arms tight around and hugging a birch tree, peeking out from behind it confused, wary, unable to take her eyes off naked Maddy and the sparkling beauty pageant tiara on her bald head.

“Princess?” the woman asks again.

Maddy touches the tiara, shaking her head.

Out from behind the birch tree, the woman advances, smiling.

“I once went to Neuschwanstein Castle in Austria. Did you ever go, there?”

Maddy puzzles the name in her head. “I don’t think so.” She sees tears forming in the woman’s eyes as she continues staring at Maddy’s glittering tiara.

“Maybe,” the woman says, lowering her eyes from the tiara, staring down at her hands. “Maybe. Not you. I don’t know. Maybe.”

She looks too sad to continue, and Maddy senses how unhappy she must be. The woman is suddenly in tears, twisting her fingers together, gazing off through the silent green forest.

Soon regaining some composure, “I’m lost,” she sobs. “Are you lost too?”

Just as her mother used to when she was a little girl, Maddy takes off the tiara, fits it on the woman’s head and picks the light-as-a-feather woman up in her arms and runs off with her through the woods.

“Poor girl,” says Maddy moving swiftly along, the woman with her arms around Maddy’s neck—laughing suddenly, letting out a triumphant shout, “We killed her, Walt Disney! We did!”

Maddy joins in, shouting along with her.  “We killed her Walt Disney, we did !” the two of them laughing and shouting as they go.

Neither of them hearing him close by, in his gold-rim spectacles, mane of white-hair and bushy white-beard, Charlie Hudspeth, the spitting image of Ernest Hemingway, follows their voices, distressed and confused.

Still in his workshop apron, a saw in one hand, a hammer in the other, anguished that his wife with her Alzheimer’s has gone missing. Down to his basement workshop an hour earlier when he needed tools, forgetting too late that he’d left the kitchen door unlocked, running upstairs to find the spoon still in the cereal bowl on the kitchen table, Merelda gone.

Moving as best he can through the woods behind his cottage, miles of dense forest beyond, he shouts “Merelda!” over and over, frantic, his worst fears confirmed when there’s no sign, no response, only deep forest silence. She’s disappeared, he’s beside himself Charlie Hudspeth is—when up ahead through the woods he notices a brief sparkling flash.

He stops and stands listening while more flashes of sparkling silver bob along, moving faster through the trees, two female voices not quite in tune singing —“ Land of the silver birch, home of the beaver. Blue lake and rocky shore, I will return once more—”

Charlie lunges forward through a thick copse of evergreens to head them off.

The singing stops.

No sign of the other woman when Charlie bursts through the trees into a clearing,  Merelda standing alone in her nightgown, the sparkling beauty pageant tiara on her head, eyes closed, smiling, swaying to the song.

“Blue lake and rocky shore, I will return once more . . .” 

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