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THE WINDOW WITHIN MY WINDOW
There is a window within my window.
I was four and three quarters when I first noticed it (five, actually, but I insisted that I was still in the "four" age-bracket—just). I had been conducting an experiment. Adults imbue their experiments with a sort of daunting weightiness; they feel the need to find a reason of some kind, a justification, an excuse. It will help cure cancer, or give us smoother skin. But I think the base drive of all experimenters is really just to find things out.
I wanted to find something out. I was curious, and I liked the idea of experimenting. So I just did it.
I wanted to find out what would happen if I crumbled a digestive biscuit in a cup of water, and left it on the windowsill.
I didn't have any specific thoughts about what would happen. Doubtless there was an element of childish mimicry involved. I was addicted to the magical mystery of the Open University. I wanted grow up to be an OU scientist, complete with flared trousers, tweed jacket, and a big, bushy beard. The beard didn't seem like too great a hurdle. Five year-old girls imagine they can grow up to be anything their hearts desire, and I wanted to be Just Like Them. I was enthralled by their vast understanding of lines and letters and figures; I wanted to know the secret of all those xs and ys.
Mimicry aside, though, I think it was just that I didn't know what would happen if I crumbled a digestive biscuit in water and left it on the windowsill; so I wanted to find out.
I checked every day. It didn't do much. I could hazard a guess, now, as to what would have happened, but at five years old (four and three quarters), such knowledge was not to be mine.
One morning, the cup was gone.
I was not best pleased, and I thought I knew who to blame. It must have just seemed like a dirty cup to Mummy; she knew nothing about my experiment.
Small comfort.
I sat disconsolately by my windowsill, confronted rather starkly with the limits of my knowledge; knowing that if I were to try again, parental short-sightedness would interfere once more. I'd probably never know what would have happened. How many billions of other things would I fail to learn in my lifetime?
It was then that I noticed the window within my window.
I suppose most people wouldn't even think to look there. Why would you, from an adult point of view? It lay in the part of the window we have no earthly business to look at most of the time: the inside edge, where the glass meets the frame. Nothing to see there, except—there was.
A tiny sliver of brightness that looked out upon a whole new world. My heart beat faster in my chest as I thought of all the stories that had been read to me—stories in which children escaped into other worlds full of new things, new delights, real adventures.
With trembling fingers, torn between excitement and fear of being foolish, I touched the side of the pane . . .
Nothing.
What did I expect? The gap was plainly too small for me to fit through.
I sighed. There would be no magical adventures for me. Not that day, at least. Although, it was still my wonderful secret—a piece of magic that was all my own. That little sliver revealed more than you might think: an uninterrupted vista of grass sloping off into rolling hills, the occasional lonely-looking cluster of pines, and in the distance . . . mountains.
It looked absolutely enchanted.
Children get bored of things, even magic things, so I didn't watch it every day. Sometimes I waited hours, longing for something to happen. Other times a quick glance revealed nothing new, and I turned away. Sometimes, in the far distance, there was what looked like a flock of sheep, and a taller, darker speck, that I liked to think of as a shepherd boy. Oh, the pre-adolescent silliness that shepherd boy sparked! But for all my fervent wishes, he never became more than a speck.
The next house had no window.
Well, okay, it had windows, but if they held inner windows, I never saw them. I oscillated between thinking I'd made the whole thing up and blaming it on the double-glazing. I never have seen a hidden window in double-glazing; not that I suppose that means very much.
I didn't see another one until University. It surprised me, because it was in my boyfriend's room. I told him about it one night after our first (and last) go at tequila slammers. Once he realized I wasn't joking, he surprised me. He showed real interest. I assumed he'd have forgotten in the grey, awful tones of the hung-over morning. But when I awoke to nausea and delicate, slow movements, he was crouched by the window, peering and prodding, unable to see a thing.
I could still see it: the edge of his windowpane dark and speckled with the eerie starlight of foreign constellations.
He always could take his drink better than me. He barely seemed hung-over, and he probed me with questions. Said para-phenomena was quite the hot topic—especially doorways into other worlds—but he'd never heard of any research on the edges of windowpanes. He was excited; said it made sense, when you thought about it—something about angles and refractions, and things I didn't understand. Maybe it was the hangover, maybe it was his eagerness to rip away my little shard of magic and expose it to the world . . .
I blew up at him.
We raged at each other; I said stupid things and so did he.
And that was the end of that.
He never did see any windows within windows, but they continued to fascinate him. He made a success of it, you know, my ex-boyfriend. Learned how to force an "Edge Fractal Anomaly" (that's what they call them), and they've made this huge glass block with an inner window the size of a door.
But it's not a door, and I don't think it ever will be.
After the argument, I stopped looking. Didn't want to see, didn't want to know. What had seemed magical and personal had become painful and jagged.
Until three years ago (two years and three quarters), that is. Oliver and I (colleagues and lovers) had bought a converted barn together. The attic bedroom is mine; the view is stunning. I used to sit for hours staring out at the rippling corn. Sometimes deliberately, pen in hand, in search of inspiration. Sometimes I'd be halfway through a stanza, and some commotion amongst the stalks would catch my eye, and I'd be lost in corn and the cloud-mottled sky again.
One time I looked up to peace and stillness in the fields. It wasn't the view from my window that had caught my eye. It was the window within my window—the one I hadn't even known was there, all that time.
Once I'd seen it I couldn't unsee it—that hidden window, and the deep brown eye staring back. I don't know who she is. She tried to write her name down and show it to me, but I couldn't read it.
She's a child. I don't know how old. Pre-teen, I guess, but beyond that . . . ? I couldn't say. She's curious—watching her watching me.
I've written poems about her, but not ones I could share, not even with Oliver.
And that's adults. We imprison ourselves to ward off pain, asking only the safe questions: the ones we can justify, the ones we're sure we want answers to.
Maybe Michael's doing something right after all: not stopping just because he mightn't get much besides a pretty view, just wanting to see what we can do.
I can't help feeling we wouldn't develop this grown-up caution if there wasn't something to it. And yet . . .
I hope she doesn't—the girl in the window within my window—not fully and completely, and not just yet.
Ro Smith is a young writer with a taste for SF&F and related speculative genres. Although she mostly writes novels and short stories, she's also done a small amount of poetry (some of which is in print) and has a regular column in Word Salad & Art Chips (University of York student literary magazine) reviewing quirky internet sites. In her spare time, she's a part-time philosophy PhD student, editorial assistant for Mind (the journal, not the charity), and proofreader for the European Journal of Analytic Philosophy, as well as holding down an admin job and occasionally teaching.
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