The Halfway Spaces by Emlyn Meredith Dornemann

Jenna did things in halves. She only ate half of a PB&J a time. She read either the beginning or ending half of books. She wore miss-matched socks, so she wore two halves of two pairs. Her dad called her Rabbit. Her mom thought that was offensive, because Jennifer is a family name, and called her Jenna instead. Rabbit spent a lot of her time at the park that sits halfway between her mom’s house and her dad’s house. She went by herself and stayed there until it became the halfway point between day and night. Each time, she tried to find the point that is exactly halfway into the park, but the park is big, and she can only count so many steps before she loses her place.

            The crow flew into Rabbit’s path on step one-thousand-and-seven. The sun was just starting to set and the path was getting darker. The red light covered both her and the crow in blotchy spots. The crow followed her as she continued to count. At step one-thousand-one-hundred-and-two she realized that the crow had gotten much larger. It was about as tall as her hip. At one-thousand-four-hundred-and-twenty-one she lost count and the crow almost looked like a child.

            “Hello,” Jenna said as she searched for its eyes. She found them, blackish grey, set too far apart for a human, too close together for a bird.

            The bird-child did not reply.

            “I’m trying to find the middle of the park. Do you know where that is?”

            The bird-child was silent again, but continued walking down the path. When Rabbit didn’t follow, the bird-child stopped and waited for her.

            Jenna followed the bird-child to a small pond where the bird-child knelt and dipped the fingers at the end of its wings into the water to touch the koi in the pond. The school swam quickly away from its touch, but the bird-child managed to brush its fingers against one of them. The fish slowly swam away, attempting to catch up to its comrades.

            “This is my favorite place,” the bird-child replied in a voice somewhere between a whisper and a squawk.

            “Is this the middle?” Rabbit asked as she sat at the edge of the pond.

            The bird-child nodded.

            Jenna took off her shoes and dipped one of her toes into the water. It was pleasantly lukewarm. With both feet submerged, she gently started kicking and making small waves in the water. The koi hid themselves between the stones on the other side of the pond. The one the bird-child had touched was struggling to find a place to hide. It seemed to be struggling to swim altogether. “This is nice,” Rabbit said, finally. “I’ve been looking for this place for a long time.” She looked up at the sky, which was now a purplish red as the sun set.

            “This is my favorite time,” the bird-child said quietly.

            Jenna looked at the bird-child, who was curling and flexing the tiny black fingers at the tips of its wings in tiny waves. “Why?” she asked.

            The bird-child’s eyes softened and the edges of his shrinking beak pulled up into something like a smile. “Because I get to be nothing. And I get to be everything.”

            Rabbit thought about that for a moment. “Sometimes I’m Jenna and sometimes I’m Rabbit. I think I’m always both.”

            “And neither.”

            Jenna nodded. “I guess so.”

            “This halfway time, it’s too short.” Already the bird-child’s fingers were attached to palms and its beak was almost lips. “It always comes too fast. It becomes one or the other.”

            Rabbit furrowed her brow and willed the sun to stop setting. She wished with all her might that the sky stay reddish-purple forever, that the two of them could stay in-between forever. She could be happy in the middle, and so would the bird-child.

            “I don’t want to go back. I want to be Jenna/Rabbit forever.” Jenna whispered.

            The bird-child put its newly-formed hand on hers. It felt warm, but it was getting colder. The cold was creeping up her arm and towards her head, but she focused on the lukewarm water that covered her toes and didn’t shiver. Rabbit looked back to the pond to see the fish that the bird-child had touched floating belly-up.

            She gripped the bird-child’s hand. “I’m scared,” she whispered.

            The bird-child’s eyes were closed, closer together on either side of the beak that was almost a nose. The cold was spreading across her chest and down her leg. She didn’t want to be cold anymore. She didn’t want the bird-child to be cold anymore.

            Jenna quickly stood and pulled the bird-child with her into the lukewarm pond. Her feet slipped off an edge she hadn’t realized was there and suddenly they were both submerged in the water. Rabbit opened her eyes and saw the bird-child staring back at her, floating under the water completely still. The cold in its hand was falling back, balanced out by the almost-warmth of the water. Jenna knew that somewhere, her mom or her dad or both were looking for her. She must have been gone so long. Somehow not feeling the need to breathe, only feeling the sense of being in the exact middle of something, Rabbit looked up at the purple-red sky through the top of the pond, and realized that the sun had been setting for a long time.