The Diary in the Apple Crate
It happens because Doris the hen finally achieves her dream of getting into the cellar, and knocks an ancient apple crate off the top shelf, and the crate bursts on the floor spilling straw, three petrified apples, and a small book bound in cracked green leather.
Beatrix, her book. PRIVATE, says the first page, in round girl's handwriting. The next page is dated fifty years ago this summer. You know you shouldn't. You do anyway.
There is a light in the orchard, it says. It opened in the split tree where the lightning went last month. Tonight a horse came out of it except NOT a horse. He is silver-white & his hooves don't bend the grass & he talked to me. His name is a sound like rain starting. He says his land leaks into ours when the sky is scarred & he has come to mend it. I am going to help him. I have decided not to be scared.
You sit down slowly on the cellar steps. Aunt Bee — Beatrix — her unicorn, her rift, the same split tree, fifty years to the summer.
And as if the world can't stand for the day to have only one miracle in it, that's when the wind presses something silver against the kitchen window: a handbill, printed on what looks like birch bark, in ink that moves. THE MIDNIGHT MARKET, it says. Fairground, tonight, moonrise till moonset. All needs met. All prices strange. First visit free to enter, wares cost what they cost. (You are expected.)