Mary Mardle

Mary is the familiar stranger who came to remind me that I was dreaming what I perceived to be real. She came to help me wake up.

Some say it was the web that caught her when she fell from the sky and that she walks with ease across the fine silver threads between all worlds both real and imagined, though sometimes she is not sure which is which.

I’ve seen her rifling through the clothes banks. She only ever selects the brightest fabrics and only ever cotton and silk. She cuts the fabric into strips and weaves garments of multi-coloured wonder; hats, jackets, scarves and once even a ball gown. She calls it her Cinderella Glad-rags. A dress made of rags, fit for a princess. As she weaves the fabric so she weaves her tales of wonder to anyone who will listen. The listeners are few but grateful that they took the time because somewhere inside them, in a place they had forgotten long ago, they know they have been changed somehow by her words. Many don’t realise this for years but they always do in the end and it’s usually when their world has come tumbling down around them. Those that never find time for her tales don’t know what they’re missing. They have no space in their heads or their hearts for her stories. They already have too many of their own. Stories of the relentless tick-tock of time slipping away from them, of the pursuit of riches and decadent palaces filled to bursting with earthly riches but no soul. One day, I ask her to tell me a story. She responds by asking ‘what kind of story?’ ‘One with a happy ending,’ I reply. ‘Ah, they all have happy endings, child,’ she tells me, ‘although sometimes it may not always be apparent. But do you want to hear a story from the realms of fantasy, reality or the place in between?’ I’ve always sat on the fence so the answer is easy. ‘So you want to hear a tale from the world between the worlds,’ she says, ‘very well…Once upon a time, there was a gypsy girl who lost her heart to a fool…’

When I look into her eyes, I feel that she has slipped through a gap in time and is, perhaps, my future self come to visit me.

Some say that she made a pact with an angel and that the thread with which she weaves is the same fine silver cord that binds her soul to his.