The Onion Girl by Charles De Lint

longer than I should be because I’ve filled a half-dozen pages before I finally put the sketchbook and pencil back in their plastic bag and stash it away in a nook made by some roots. I brush my hands and let myself go back.
    When I wake up as the Broken Girl it takes me a moment to get used to the fact that I’m trapped in my bed again. It always does. The paralysis on my right side is the hardest to reconcile. And the numbness. That half of my body’s just flesh on bone, nothing I can actually feel or relate to. Mobility and free will only exist in the dreamlands. I know that. But every time I come back, I have a little panic attack all the same. Then I remember and all the colors of the world go gray once more. That’s how I see life as the Broken Girl. In shades of gray.
    I think about my encounters in the wood. Randy little Toby in his leathers and tattoos. Jolene, as enormous in her serenity as she is in size.
    â€œWell, that was weird,” I say.
    â€œWhat was?”
    I manage to slowly turn my head and see that Wendy’s sitting in the visitor’s chair. She has her journal open on her lap, her fountain pen in her hand.
    â€œMy latest adventure in the dreamlands,” I tell her.
    She caps her pen, then uses it to keep her place in her journal.
    â€œSo tell me about it,” she says.
    I smile. There’s magic in this world, too, I remind myself. I’ve seen faerie girls who call themselves gemmin, living in an abandoned car in the Tombs. I’ve been to an underground kingdom of goblinlike creatures called skookin that exists beneath the city. I’ve met crow girls who can shift from one shape to another.
    And even my friends aren’t immune. Sophie has faerie blood. Geordie once dated a woman that he lost to the past, while the Kelledys—Cerin and Meran—came here out of the past. Sue had her dog Fritzie talk to her one Christmas Eve. Christy and the professor have had more magical encounters than I’ve got fingers and toes. And Wendy … Wendy grew a magical Tree of Tales from an acorn one winter and fed it on stories. Come spring she had to move it from the pot in her house to Fitzhenry Park where it’s this huge spreading oak now. But she still feeds it stories.
    â€œIt’s one for the tree, all right,” I say and tell her about Toby and Jolene and all.
    5
    Wendy watched Jilly’s face as her friend spoke. Sharing her adventures in the dreamlands was about the only time Jilly had any animation in her features or voice these days. But while Wendy was as afraid as Sophie of losing Jilly to the dreamlands, she didn’t begrudge the time Jilly spent there. At least the dreamlands were giving her some happiness in a world that had otherwise gone all desperate and miserable.
    Wendy had a different concern about the place that Sophie, and now Jilly, could visit in their dreams. It made her listen to Jilly’s latest adventure, half caught up in the marvel of it all, half in wonder at just how vivid Jilly’s imagination could get. Because the truth was, Wendy wasn’t quite so sure about the dreamlands herself. When she and Jilly listened to Sophie’s stories about Sophie’s time there, it was different. Then she had Jilly’s enthusiasm and unqualified belief to dispel any reservations about how real or not it might be. She was able to simply go with the flow of the story and it didn’t matter whether the dreamlands were a place that existed independent of the World As It Is, or only in Sophie’s imagination.
    But with Jilly telling the story, and no one sitting with Wendy to nod and smile and clap her hands in wonder, it was harder. Little nagging “as ifs” kept getting in the way of her enjoyment. But after a while she realized that today her discomfort didn’t have so much to do with believing or not believing, as it did with trying to listen and at the same time deal with the worries of