The Haven

Chapter 17

The man's skin was lined like bark, and his body was bent. His chest was bowed inwards, head bent down, arms crooked, resting on crossed legs. His head moved, just slightly, his neck straightening to lift it up, turning in Elsa's direction. But his eyes did not meet hers.

"Who are you?" he said again.

"My name is Elsa." She she shifted against the oak roots, pushing herself up slightly from where she had slumped as she slept. She blinked in the twinkling dawn light and rubbed her eyes, but the man didn't disappear. "I'm Elsa," she repeated.

The man shook his head. "No."

"Um, yeah, that's pretty much it." Elsa rubbed her eyes again and looked up at the bright blue sky in between the oak leaves. How long have I been asleep? "I guess... My mother calls me El. I don't have another name."

"That's okay," he said. "That's not the question."

Elsa was still looking at the sky, her head leaning back against the bark. She felt her hair catching on the knotty trunk of the tree. For a second she wanted to raise a hand to untangle the strands from the tree or sit up further into a more comfortable position. Or maybe stand up and walk around – was her left leg numb? Or was her whole body still in sleep-paralysis? Her body didn't seem to want to move any more. She felt... heavy. Her limbs weighed a ton, and her mind was slow, like when the obnoxious alarm went off at five thirty in the morning in wintertime before school and everything was still dark and her body rebelled against being awake...

"I don't understand," she said, the words coming naturally like it was totally normal to be talking to a strange old man in the deserted woods at dawn. "What did you say?"

"What. That's it," he said. "That's the word." The old lips on the man's face, wrinkled and cracked with age, streatched into a smile and the old man wheezed – was it a laugh? "What is the word... Maybe. Would you say 'what'?" his words rambled. "You have a very ethnocentric language."

"I'm sorry..."

His shoulders twitched in a tiny shrug. "So what is the question – what are you?"

"I'm a person, a girl." She couldn't think of another answer.

The old man stared, not quite at her. His lips didn't move, and he just watched.

Elsa watched back. What are you? Somewhere in the back of her slow-moving brain that seemed like a weird question. But in her sleepy, barely awake state, staring up at the happy dawn she didn't really care. And she kinda wanted to knew the answer for herself, too. What are you? "I... I like magic," she said, as if that explained anything. "Are you... are you like... a vision?"

The old man watched, quiet. He didn't answer.

"I think I'm a little Italian maybe?" said Elsa, the weird conversation somehow making sense in her sleepy brain. What are you? She didn't really know.