The Ongoing Trials of Harmony Astor

Part 1

There are a lot of doors in this city that you can walk through and never be seen from again, but ours was fairly normal as far as those things go; it's what made never seeing Dad again hurt so much. Of all the ways you can disappear by accident, none will ever hurt as much as when someone disappears by choice. In the years since, Mom would only talk about him when she'd had a few drinks, and even then only on dates that she thinks are important.

"It's October 11th, Sara," she'd say, a glass of wine half drunk on the counter while she would carve into a hunk of store bought roasted chicken. "Do you know what that means?"

I would shake my head and try to concentrate on whatever was in front of me. Mom was the only person in the world to make math seem a good alternative to anything. We had a small apartment with little room for me to try and finish whatever I was working on which meant even less room that wasn't directly in her line of sight.

"Your father and I went on our first date on October 11th, sixteen years ago," a pause as she poured more wine for herself, nearly spilling it on my books. "He took me to the zoo. The zoo! And this was before the new one was built with all the cool nutso critters from the storybooks. Man no one even wanted to be near a unicorn back then! You kids are lucky these days..."

Her story would trail off, leading to a tirade about some injustice done to her that I could never quite block out until she fell onto the couch to finish the rest of her bottle for dinner. It wasn't easy to tell at first when she would get set off but I learned to avoid her and she learned to avoid the past.

When I was eight, I got my first real taste of magic. It was Ella Bessemer's birthday and so she had the biggest party of the year and everyone in our year was invited to her house. Ella was skinnier than some of the other kids and had an odd shimmer to her skin that you couldn't notice until the lights went dim, but not off, for watching movies. She didn't talk to many people but those who got to be her friend and, more importantly, those who got to go to her house refused to talk about what it was like.

"I heard her mom's a gnome so they have, like, a mini house!"

"I hear she's secretly a princess and has a whole castle just for her!"

"I hear her house is all made of glass and also it's pink."

Understandably everyone was suitably impressed and disappointed when the day came for the party. My dad drove me in there our old SUV, him ready to go play poker with his friends and me dressed in my best outfit with a gift of 124 crayons (with the built in sharpener) carefully wrapped. As we drove, I kept my face glued to the window, searching for the peaks of a Rapunzel-style tower or for the tell-tale sign of a giant storm cloud that hovered in a single space that would precede the appearance of a glass fortress. But we drove for twenty minutes until we were right in the heart of the city and in a leafy residential neighborhood. Perhaps bound for a park with a single toadstool house?

"Here we go, sweetie," my dad flashed the caution lights and pulled the parking brake. I scanned the concrete ground for a mystical puddle to another dimension or a purple tree to denote some kind of fairy castle but... we were outside a brown apartment building like any other. I knew my face fell as I looked up at it. It didn't even tower overhead like a proper rundown building should.

Getting out of the car felt like even more of a let down, the sidewalk too sparse to even offer up a forlorn pebble for kicking. My dad walked with me, taking my hand to lead me up the front steps and past the propped open front door. It took until we were halfway up the first flight of stairs for me to notice the carpet of flowers we walked on. The higher we climbed, the deeper the petals until we were shuffling up an avalanche of soft pinkness.