She lived in the attic of a purple Victorian set back in a wood. The bare floorboards were a crunch of autumn leaves and sweet-scented flowers. She would sit at a big scarred wooden desk and scrawl out poems and draw pictures.
She created little wind-chimes out of bits of glass and metal and would secretly hang them from tree limbs around the town late late at night. In the forest she liked to make little sculptures from twigs and moss and stones, create little mandalas, secret patterns, fairy altars that others might stumble upon and at least briefly have to wonder if indeed magic did exist.
Her days were spent pacing up and down the dark silent aisles of the town library where she worked, cracking the spines of dusty old volumes, shelving books, caring for the trickle of readers as they checked out their hopeful piles.
There was a cat, too. A great fat cat with the softest long white and black fur so warm and sweet there was nothing better than nuzzling her face into that wonderful soft belly. The kitty liked to sit in the windowsill and look out onto the terrace she'd filled with flowers and birdbells and windchimes. Little lights from the chimes danced like fairies all about the lawn below.
When autumn came the trees caught fire - all red and gold. Then the rains came, the skies were grey and the leaves fell. She could see the pond glittering through the windowpanes then, usually hidden by the trees. The sunrise would blaze in the pond, a gold flickering between the dark bare tree limbs.
When the snow came she ventured out in her fake-fur trimmed green velvet coat and crept down to the pond. It was a sheet of black ice. She walked carefully over the frozen water to the island in the pond's center. The ice groaned and creaked beneath her boots. She made a fairy altar but was dismayed when she noted that her boot tracks had given her away. Ah well, perhaps the altar would not be discovered until spring.
She remembered in college how she and her friends would drop acid and sneak through the pine forest and out into the neighboring farmer's corn field and make crop circles. How she missed those friends! Such fun they had together! Always running around being crazy, staying up all night talking and laughing. But for the cat she was so alone now. So alone. Each had scattered to a different part of the world. None kept in touch.
One day the people who owned the purple Victorian knocked on her door and said she would have to leave, they had sold the house. She had planned to haunt that attic for years to come. She was very sad.
She found another attic across the pond, one with slanty ceilings, a small slanty bedroom whose ceilings and walls were already covered with glowinthedarkstars, a magnificent year-round view of the pond and the lights of the city in the distance.
Only she could not have the cat. The wonderful cat. She had a friend down the street take the cat for a year and got birds.
Little colorful birds flew through the air around her from windowsill to the young tree that grew in a pot in the corner. They sang and burbled from dawn to dusk and would gather on her head and shoulders and sing and she was a bird tree.
She missed the kitty and cried every night for several weeks. In the winter the kitty died. They burned the wonderful soft fur and sweet face little freckled paws warm belly bones and all. She ate little slivers of bone to keep the kitty with her forever and cried and cried.
She stood alone in her slanty attic covered with birds and bird song watching the pond turn to fire and cried and cried.