I was born with the unremarkable nose of my White Milwaukee Dad and the “exotic” skin tone of my West Asian Mom. Thanks to this ethnic mélange and my Turkish name of Esra, college friends seemed to find me mysteriously attractive. But the uncertainty of my appearance went well beyond race-typing. The friends who fixated on my facial features would also argue over my gender identity and sexual preference, noting first the bristly vibe of my short-drop fade, and then the sassy sway of my hips.
Dad, too, recognized the ambiguity. In my second year of college, he pushed me away from the “freaks and queers” of the theatre department and into the semicolons of journalism, despite Mom’s concern that the change would rip out my soul. Nevertheless, I continued to haunt the theatre, where I was known for an enigmatic sketchbook of costume designs I kept close and shared when I felt a connection. They were color renderings, fantasy character studies for unstageable stories, such as lady knights in armor, winged queens, Indigenous dancers. One drawing, in particular, I treated like a badly kept secret, tucking it away in the back pocket of the sketchbook where it was sure to draw attention. It was a picture of a young woman with long black hair and a tall, brimmed hat, banded with striped Petersham ribbon. Her eyes were provocative, her costume verging on steampunk, but I was most enthralled by the shape of her knees, pointed at the tops and bottoms like a Marquise-cut diamond.
Friends often asked about this folded drawing, and to make myself seem edgy, I’d say it posed questions about the artist she simply couldn’t answer.Then, one day, it disappeared, slipping out of the pocket somewhere on campus.
I rendered the final piece of the collection in Prismacolor the week I left college, and it was far different from the one I lost, or any of the rest. The last of the drawings depicted a simple nude, reclined in the grass, a spent yellow sundress beside her. It seemed a little basic, to be honest, but my red-head friend from high school—I’ll call her Christina, though that’s nowhere close to her actual name—became preoccupied with the nude when I moved back into my parents’ house in Wauwatosa. She spotted the similarity of the model’s skin tone to my own and admired the subtle cleft of the chin, resembling hers. With no encouragement from me, Christina read the image as a merger of our two bodies, and on a Friday night, she surprised me in the rumpus room with an extended kiss. Her cheeks were cushioned perfection, the bottled essence of a chubby child’s thigh. My hands glided over the hairless undersides of her arms. The gloss of her lips stuck to mine like bubble gum, popping nectar onto my tongue.
I didn’t return her calls.
For days I grappled with excitement, fear and dread. Friends had considered me unattainable, and yet I’d never actually been touched. I was still recovering from the rumpus room, stirring cardamom into yogurt, when I glanced through the kitchen window one morning to find Christina The Red naked in the grass, her moist feet committed to a dancer’s fifth position, a medieval sword poised in one hand.
My escape from Wauwatosa began that day. Job boards revealed no nearby journalism gigs, so I reached out to a contact at the press association and learned of a solo paper for sale in the Victorian village of Shadetree, Arkansas, 667 miles south in the Ozark Mountains. Pictures of the village were quaintly Alpine, with narrow, hilly streets winding around turreted homes.
Barely a week later, the retiring Marge and Harry (those actually were their names) accepted an absurdly low $1,500 for the Shadetree Herald, selling all that was left of value: the paper’s name and flag, two yellowed computers, random office supplies, and three months’ rent. I made the deal by Cash App after teaching Marge and Harry how to install it on the single phone they shared, and I packed the essentials into the little space my Miata offered. Leaving town, I passed Christina the Red in the opposite lane.
My journey south reversed the progress of Autumn. Red leaves reverted to yellow, and the browns flew back up to their limbs, reclaiming a ruby glow. Balmy air swirled through the open top of the car, and as the light faded, toads croaked for the first time in weeks. I stayed awake in the latter part of the drive by singing Ani DiFranco, backed by the final cicadas of the year.
At the end of the half-day drive, Shadetree emerged from the Ozark hardwoods, lights glistening from the occupied rooms of the old Hotel Magnificent. The clock in the tower chimed several hours too fast, while tourist couples kept a watchful eye on the feral skateboarders storming the streets. One of the teens eyed me scornfully as I passed in the Miata. The streets belong to us, said the quiver of his lip.
Beside the newspaper storefront was a steep alley stairwell, and at its entrance, the dark figure of a woman flickered in the gaslight of a wrought-iron lamp. “Greetings,” I said, closing my door. But I felt so foolish when I realized it was only a painted silhouette. The outstretched arm of the figure pointed down the stairs in mock horror, beside a marquee that read “Spooktacular Ghost Tours.” Taped below was a smaller, faded sign:
COME BACK, AERIE
Studiously, I pulled from my backpack a notebook, open to a page marked Questions About Town. Underneath the title was scribbled Best Coffee? in blue ink and Where to Hike? in green. Clicking the button on my Bic 4-Color retractable ball pen, I added What is Aerie? in red.
The new town offered me the chance to role-play my appearance, so I kicked off the makeover with a blue knee-length cotton dress, lashes, and lipstick. A blonde wig, stolen from the college theatre in the waning weeks of the final term, hung just beyond my shoulders, concealing my short, scrubby locks, but I left my eyebrows dark and thick, just as they were. It wasn’t quite the plan, but in two days I had casually attracted a man: Mark Graham York, my downstairs neighbor, the owner of Spooktacular, and the strangely authorial user of a three-part name. On my fourth day in town, I proudly taped to the front window of the newspaper a sign with my name and title, “Esra Taylor, Publisher,” right beneath the classic logo of the Herald. As a new young professional with an intriguing look, I quickly earned the role of town curiosity.
One afternoon, Mark of York, as I called him, ordered a pizza that we devoured together in his dark basement office, where the stone-and-plaster walls were lined with odd photos from Shadetree history. “Porcini mushroom oil,” said Mark of York, answering the question that was forming in my eyes. Something, presumably the porcini oil, drizzled off the pizza and onto my dress, so I asked for the bathroom and was led down a creepy hall warmed by simulated torchlight. In the tiny, tiled lavatory, I dabbed soap on the spot and checked the makeup I was almost conditioned to wearing. Then, in the mirror, I spotted the framed photo of a woman. Her tall, brimmed hat was perched atop shiny black hair. Her costume was uncomfortably familiar.
Oh no.
The woman’s top hat was fashioned from distressed cordovan leather, its crown dimpled like the waist of a gherkin, sides slightly bent. Jutting from the striped ribbon of the brim was a glorious ostrich feather, evoking a trail of smoke about her head. Fingerless gloves of black tatted lace stretched halfway to her elbow, matching a corseted bodice that was cleaved at a broad angle and ringed at the neck with a leather choker. A single bolded word was printed in the space below the photo:
Aerie
Oh no, no, no, no.
~
As a publisher—heck, maybe even as a person who has seen just one single horror movie— I might have known to look up “Aerie” in my own newspaper’s morgue, which had been carefully tended by Marge and Harry for decades. It turned out that Aerie had only been in the town for two weeks before disappearing for the better part of a year.
“I wish to do something spectacular!” she had told Mark of York in the job interview, dazzling him with eye contact. Mark later relayed to Harry that he didn’t ask what the “something” was, or why she talked that way; he simply sensed her charisma, felt the inappropriate touch of her hand, and witnessed the flash of excitement. He handed Aerie the script with a walking map of the quirky tourist town. She threw it in the trash as soon as she left his office.
What followed over a series of two weekends, Harry reported, was a display of charisma and story craft never before witnessed in the town. Aerie’s tales were entirely singular and utterly unverifiable, with the most surprising element being the seductive touch of close-up magic. Woodland animals were said to emerge from her hat, including at least one indignant raccoon. Ancient Roman coins found their way into the shoes of incredulous spectators. A twenty-foot feathery pink boa was theatrically drawn from the ear of a reluctant assistant by Aerie’s agile fingers.
Shadetree had only begun to promote this storytelling marvel—drawing up plans for billboards, inviting TV crews from neighboring cities—when she poofed away without warning.
Two days after I spotted her photo in the Spooktacular bathroom, there was a ruckus outside the newspaper and I spotted the elusive Aerie herself crossing the street toward my alley stairs. Motorists stopped their cars in the street. Merchants pumped their fists like victorious athletes. The sneering skateboard punk leaped off his wheels, launched a handspring off the hood of my Miata, and landed back on the board with both feet. Aerie snatched the “Come Back” addendum from Spooktacular’s sign and threw it into the bushes.
Through the side window of the newspaper, a live-action version of my lost drawing descended the stairs. Her torso was girded by a black, impenetrable fabric, framing her abdomen as the base of a pointed shield. A gold-fringed overskirt was bustled to draw my attention to her muscled thighs.
Mark of York laughed through my floorboards as he reunited with his talisman, and the cheers of the crowd outside told me when their meeting was done. Aerie clopped past in chunk-heeled, lace-up boots that rose within three inches of her pointy knees. At the top of the stairs, she ignored the mob and found my green eyes through the window. Feeling discovered, I shoved a lens and filter between us, and she tipped her hat through the safe little rectangle of my viewfinder.
Her tours resumed the very next night.
“Who among this hallowed group knows the Tale of Honest Sam?” Aerie asked the gathering. No one raised a hand.
“Honest Sam was a handsome woman,” she began, commanding the crowd’s attention, and already provoking me. Handsome woman! Such a cunning little phrase. You say handsome when you can’t bring yourself to call a woman pretty.
“Sam was born Samantha McGee,” Aerie said, the only child of her parents. She was sturdy and smart, tutored by her father in the ways of tinkering. One day, a local farmer accused her of stealing a cow. In those times, a famous judge practiced liberal use of the gallows to cleanse the county of sinners, but to that point, no woman had ever been hanged in the square.
And here my mind began to wander: Was it petty to worry that Aerie had usurped my role, the part of the town’s enigmatic newcomer? Even if she had arrived first?
Sam insisted to the judge that the farmer was jealous: “Hadn’t the farmer’s wife brought me a lemonade?” she said, “to thank me for installing a new well pump on the property?”
“Jealous of what, exactly?” asked the judge, rising from the inky doodles of his blotter with the very same question I was pondering. Sam raised an eyebrow and smiled. Pointedly, the judge asked Sam if she had looked the wife “straight in the eyes.”
Now Aerie stopped, and I, Esra, rose again from my notebook to meet her gaze. She seemed to be diving into me, taking stock.
What do you want?
Oblivious to our silent duel, the crowd huddled around Aerie’s thrilling pause. Birds stopped flapping their wings but remained suspended in the air. Aerie leaned forward on a silver-handled cane, the lone embellishment to my design, and an outrageous improvement. The others stayed lost in stunted time while Aerie waited for me to speak. Her face went dark as a cloud filtered the moon.
“The artist has questions,” Aerie said. “Questions about herself.”
My nostrils flared.
“But the answers are here,” she said, opening her hand. My mind wrapped those words like the end of a whip, but with the flip of her cane, moonlight and motion resumed.
Honest Sam had indeed made eye contact with the farmer’s wife. How could she not? Sowithout delay, the judge ordered that Sam be hanged on this spot—Aerie pointed to the ground below her—the very next morning when the tower clock chimed six. At six forty, when her body no longer twitched, poor Sam was covered with a pile of dirt. Later that day, a feeble old flower woman passing the mound was startled by movement in the soil and stumbled away like a frightened toddler as Honest Sam rose from the pile.
Sam was returned to court, but this time the room was packed with excited citizens, and hundreds more circled the courthouse outside. The judge thought the villagers would be terrified of Sam; instead, they clamored for her release. The Lord has the last word in justice, asserted one, and if He returned Sam to the world of the living, it was proof enough of Sam’s virtue.
In the square where Aerie entertained, the clock tower had undergone a change of heart, as it now ran two hours slow.
The judge was no fool, so he freed Honest Sam, but he was driven from the town when his tawdry affair with the farmer’s wife came to light. Honest Sam became so popular that she was encouraged to run for mayor. Instead, said Aerie, Sam opened a tavern, right there: Aerie rolled the cane around her wrist, gesturing rakishly to the post office over her shoulder. Tradition obliged the men of Shadetree to toast good fortune when visiting the tavern. “… so long as they left their wives outside…” Aerie paused. “…’ere the women glimpse the charming eyes of Sam and be seduced from the jealous clutches of men.”
I succumbed, at once, to raucous applause, squeezing my Field Notes brand steno pad under the flesh of my arm. Aerie glowed at the sudden suspension of my doubts. She went on to relate two more tales that night, but to be candid, I didn’t record a word: I’d given up my notes to admire the smooth muscle of her calves, the crane-like curve of her gesturing arm. I pondered my romantic near misses, the hows and whys of my ambivalence.
Reaching the end of the tour, Aerie halted on the sidewalk in front of my home and office, an odd little spot where concrete was replaced by a polished slab of pink granite. Her closing jokes made the crowd guffaw, then she placed her hat on the slab for tips and implored us to spread the word.
But by now my objectivity had rallied.
“What became of the immortal Honest Sam?” I bellowed, ruining the night.
Haha!
“That is if she even was immortal?”
The crowd regarded me with scorn.
“And why did the tavern close?” I added. “Also, what of the missing cow?”
Oh, was I clever!
“Did it jump over the moon? Did the dish run away with the spoon?”
But the stomp of Aerie’s boot ended my rebellion. She slashed the cane and spun like a skater, puffing lavender fog from her feet as her features blurred. Aerie arrested her motion by extending a leg, and at fog’s rise, she was gone.
Bystanders screamed, hands to their faces, and friends gripped each other by the shoulders. Up and around, the crowd searched for Aerie, but only the overturned hat remained, quickly attracting a tidy pile of cash. One hopeful man even left a copy of his hotel key in the hat, wrapped with a personal note.
Mark of York snatched the hat and ran down the stairs, while I hustled into the Herald to hammer out a breathless account, the thrill of the adventure keeping me up until the early morning hours.
Shortly after I fell asleep, a raspy sound outside nudged me awake. Then it came again.
Esssraaaaaa.
Wearing only my brushy, natural hair, I emerged from behind the folding screen that defined my makeshift office bedroom. I parted the curtains of the front window to find Aerie back on the slab, smiling into my eyes.
“Leave,” I begged, blinking back tears. “Let me find my way.”
“I am the way,” she said, and I snapped the curtains shut.
~
By 9 a.m., Mark of York had 184 reservations for Saturday night’s tour, and the flames of profit flicked in his eyes. “What will she do next?” he asked, capturing my hand. That afternoon, he lettered a striking new sign for the entrance:
The Finest Ghost Tour in Town
I told a lie then, convincing Mark of York that I’d heard an animal in the walls of the newspaper that night—perhaps one of Aerie’s woodland creatures!—and that I needed to sleep elsewhere for a while. Of course, he called up Marge and Harry, and the pest control company arrived to find absolutely nothing. And naturally, Mark suggested his own place for safer slumber. Instead, I booked a room in the Hotel Magnificent, promising to pay them back in advertising trade.
As I rested at the hotel that afternoon, Mom texted to ask how I was doing. I replied hastily with happy emojis and a thumb’s-up sign. “Wait,” she quipped. “Aren’t you some kind of respected journalist now?” I doubled down with an emoji pumpkin pie. Somewhat later, my phone rang and it was Mom again. They were driving in the car this time, and I heard her muffled voice speaking to Dad. A letter had come from Christina, and he wondered if he should bother forwarding it to me. Mom was convinced he should. I’d never had many friends, she worried, and Dad had separated me from the few I genuinely enjoyed.
“Mom, I can hear you!” I shouted, but on and on they went.
Aerie returned that night for an encore no one could have anticipated. More than 250 enthusiasts gathered impatiently on the square—many of them without tickets, as Mark of York bitterly noted. They felt the ground rumble as the odd slab of granite in front of my office actually rose from the ground. Smoke puffed from the rectilinear crypt, and the stone hovered as Aerie levitated from the depths. She followed her now-legendary success with “The Tale of Honest Sam and the Preacher’s Daughter,” a sequel that was quite a bit less theatrical, in my opinion—ribald, but thinly plotted, if I’m being honest, though the silly crowd was completely taken in by it.
By now, the masses were gluttonous for entertainment. Two of the assembled turned out to be competing owners of the hotel-based ghost tours. These jokers were in disguise, jealously hunting for secrets. They couldn’t fool Aerie, though; at the end of the evening she called them to the front to suffer the laughter of the crowd, and at the finale, Aerie haughtily disappeared them both, along with herself. Smoke rose and tourists screamed with delight, but I kept my focus on the pink granite slab, watching for the trick. When the slab settled down on the crypt, a single word was engraved upon its surface:
AERIE
Next came the manhunt. As far as we knew. Aerie could have been floating in time and space, torturing the rival tour operators in the Between Lands. A week passed while investigators combed the town, interrogating Mark of York in endless sorties down the narrow stairs, guided by the accusing finger of the alley silhouette. They ransacked every closet and basement in town, even removing the granite slab, finding nothing beneath but a dump of old mosaic tile. At the Herald, I produced special editions with increasingly alarming headlines. I hawked them on the street myself each afternoon, sporting a jaunty hat.
On the seventh day, the rival tour operators turned up in the neighboring town of Rutteville, wandering the streets in the feathered costumes of a giant gobbler and hen, with no recollection of their disappearance. But Aerie herself remained missing. Shadetree became inundated with tourists, who kept the restaurants and hotels hopping late into the night as they listened to hot jazz bands and guzzled signature cocktails the likes of “Aerie Fairy,” and “Sexy Specter.” Some theorized that Aerie was an alien. A few maintained she was Honest Sam incarnate, though historians found no reference to the character. What a trick! I thought: to author one’s own mythology.
On the twelfth day of her disappearance, I donned a sundress I had frivolously purchased on the square. I was showing off my sun-kissed shoulders in the yellow cotton fabric, interviewing inebriated tourists at the Rusty Nail when Mark of York erupted through the door. “She’s back!” he roared, sweat beading up on his forehead, and my heart fell through my shoes.
Word quickly spread as patrons poured out of their hotels to witness. Aerie was strolling down the center of High Street, flinging flowers to the throng that swelled behind her. I kicked off my impractical shoes and raced ahead of her on the sidewalk, camera bag in hand, dodging fire hydrants and lowering my shoulder to flatten the snarling skateboarder.
Finding the door at the bottom of the tower clock open, I hurried up the spiral stairs to gain the best vantage. Humanity flooded the square. Aerie camped at the midpoint of the lawn, the site of Honest Sam’s illusory demise. Members of the crowd grew rowdy, and three of them, dressed in white acolyte robes, lay prostrate on the ground before her. In the far distance, police sirens approached.
Through my longest lens, I surveyed the street, the thousands packing it, the exalted Aerie on the mount. I fiddled with settings and fired off shots. The din of the revelers swelled, and when Aerie lifted her arms, the crowd leaped and danced. The swing of my lens found hundreds of tourists holding hands. Some had traveled far to catch sight of her, while others had stumbled onto the scene without warning. The recovered skateboarder now weaved through the crowd, leading a wheeled army of punks.
Then came a volley of shrieks as a riderless horse galloped onto the square. The magnificent beast pranced the street, a large sword with a jeweled hilt sheathed on her left flank. With a gasp from the crowd, the horse reared up, fluttered its muscled legs, and rode away.
The beating of heavy drums commenced, and a fire was lit on the square. Around the flames danced an orbiting legion of dark-skinned women in the greens, yellows, reds, and blacks of their ancestral traditions. Soon they were joined by little girls in school uniforms and middle-aged women in gauzy vacation attire, all united by the freedom of the dance, the honesty of their movements.
From the highest windows of the Hotel Magnificent, something plunged. It swelled in size as it fell, sprouting dark wings that curved and puffed against the rushing air. Its wings beat and the creature gained altitude, setting off something akin to a spawn. In varied colors, hundreds upon hundreds of the creatures filled the air, each wearing the silky cape and jeweled crown of a queen. As if stirred by the wingbeats, dry leaves whirled through the square like a waterspout.
Finally came the thrilling entrance of the stairwell silhouette. The shadowy figure loped across the square, growing loftier with each exaggerated step—a great black taffy, stretched four ways at once. Rising as high as the Hotel Magnificent, the silhouette unfurled its hand and pointed a stretchy finger to the clock tower, right where I had hidden.
But I was no longer there. Above the pulsating chorus of the crowd, the fierce timbre of my war cry resounded, and when the horse reemerged on the square, I, Esra, was in the saddle. I squeezed my loins around the beast and rode fast circles around the clock tower, carving the air with the glittering blade.
Then there was nothing, and silence chilled the town.
Police sirens quieted. Each person on the street, every head in a lighted window, all the children running to catch the hands of their parents, had vanished, leaving only the cries of frogs and insects. I held myself still on the horse as Aerie surveyed the square.
She turned to me, transformed. Suspended from her shoulders was a gown of white chiffon, a sentimental notion I wouldn’t have sketched at gunpoint. Her hair had been restrained by a wreath of whimsical flowers. Her eyes lifted, arms extended, palms unfolded. The clock bonged above me, shaking my teeth and altering my spine.
Soon I slid down the horse’s silky hair and walked barefoot in the grass. I drove the sword into the soil before Aerie. I felt the touch of her hands as she removed my wig, pulling her fingers through the bristles of my dark, natural hair. The straps of my dress splayed and the soft fabric fell.
There, beside my crumpled yellow garment, in the heart of the silent square, we moved to become one. I closed my eyes and felt her acceptance, a finger brushing my lips, a kiss upon my brow. But when I opened my eyes, Aerie was gone, leaving only a tingle on my skin.
All that remained was Esra, the artist, free in the grass.