The following flows from a simple premise. What if all the old stories are true. Or at least partly true. The stories we write. The stories we tell. Old World traditions of darkness, patriarchy, and other creepy lonely things that go bump in the night of someone else’s past notwithstanding. The nether world of myths and magic and ours have coexisted forever and ever.

Taking this much as read, then begs the question: Where would that magical realm and the points of connection between the two be hidden in the world around us. How could it have happened not to have been happened upon by now.

Or to put it differently, if any of us walked in a magical forest, if any of us did happen upon it in our everyday lives, would we have the eyes to see it for what it was. As it was hiding in plain sight all this time. Through the millennia. The magical in the mundane. The mundane in the magical.

What if, instead of a fairytale come to life, with dancing rabbits and talking dragons, it was less obvious and garish than that.

What if our life and all we held dear turned on the kernels of truth at the heart of a bedtime story overhead in a hallway, as a grandma tucks little ones into bed, in a cottage in a forest, late one summer evening.

I wrote this story the way I wrote the story, that is, I came upon the inspiration for the story, because I jumped a fence to impress a girl. Or rather we jumped it together to impress each other. Most all visitors to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco know about the trees on the panhandle and William Randolph Hearst. But my high school girlfriend and I found out something more that day. Something that almost no one knows or gets to see or hear about.

Backing up to the panhandle, Hearst famously loved trees. And he liked to collect things. When Hearst was traveling and he spotted a new tree that struck his fancy, he’d arrange to have a few specimens harvested and shipped home to be planted in the park and on one or more of his many properties. He liked to do things at a slightly larger scale than the rest of us.

As locals will tell you, if you ever stop to linger and look at them long enough, there are trees on the panhandle from all around the world. Any country you can name has an example of at least one of its indigenous trees growing there. Not all the trees in the world but an impressive and wide assortment of them. All thanks to Hearst. Like his own planetary herb garden or the city’s own worldly window box decoration.

So, the story goes.

We heard another story when we jumped the fence. Lesser told.

We had the park to ourselves, midweek under overcast skies with light showers. And had the rare experience of wandering in the Japanese Tea Garden and other features in the park as if it was our own private estate to explore. Ducking under a footbridge during the lightest of passing showers, we shared a first kiss.

Partly fueled by the energy of that kiss, looking for more hidden recesses for stolen moments to enjoy together, an overgrown field of stones caught our eye, possibly a sculpture garden we thought closed for renovation.

The chain link fence and tall hedge ringing it, without any walkways connecting to it, only further piqued our interest. We found one padlocked gate, in a small break in the hedge, and hopped it to have a look.

In the closed off field, we found stacks of stone and decorative masonry arranged in a grid, with slender footpaths running between them. All overgrown, ungroomed, and unpaved. We were also joined quickly by a security guard who told us that this section was closed to the public and who, politely overlooking how we could have gained access, offered to escort us out, unlocking another gate on the other side of the field.

He also told us the origin story of the stones. We had to ask.

Hearst was traveling abroad and came upon one of those beautiful towns in Europe with an extravagant church at the center of it. And he bought it. Unclear whether the town that sold it to him understood what Hearst’s owning the church might entail. But Hearst set about having it architecturally rendered and disassembled and crated up to be shipped home.

Ultimately, it was headed for one of his estates, but it entered through the port of San Francisco, and while arrangements were being made for the last leg of its travel and eventual reassembly, the many crates were stored in what was then an unused part of the park. That’s far as it got.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

While it was waiting for the next steps in its journey, a fire broke out, and all the crates and all the wooden beams and pews were destroyed, leaving only the stones and masonry and some scorched and warped and mostly melted metalwork.

Unfortunately, also lost in the fire, were the only copies of the architectural drawings of what it looked like assembled and specifications for its reassembly.

Leaving no one with plans for even the most well-meaning of reconstruction efforts. What would have been and would still be the granddaddy of all jigsaw puzzles with an unknown quantity of pieces missing and no lid to the box it came in to show what it looked like when finished.

The stones were left as they were, in situ, and that small area of the park had never been used since, as a kind of thoughtful homage to the historical events and the original structure and probably also as a simple function of no one knowing what else to do with them.

Those elements stuck with me. The trees, the church, and the kiss.

And the idea that such a story could be there, in the middle of everything. With millions of visitors to San Francisco and Golden Gate Park, each year, and hardly anyone knowing of the history that was lurking there in the middle of the public park. Behind a row of hedges and admittedly cordoned off by the attractive nuisance of a chain link fence.

Made me wonder how much else might be hidden in Hearst’s exploits. Elsewhere in the region. If his acquisitions or those of someone else like him, maybe someone who predated him, continued at scale and outside of our awareness.

Maybe they brought something home with them. Something they hadn’t counted on. Something old. Something original. Something magical.

I also asked myself the question and set out to see if one of several central storylines running the length and breadth of a novel could climax with a kiss. A kiss of similar proportions.

The last elements to gloss in the story’s own origin story by way of prefatory remarks are the central literary allusion, the old story written and told and taken as read, COVID, and its having started its life as a screenplay. Wait for it.

THE ELF KING

Literary allusions are wonderful and fun and exclusionary. So, being mindful of all three, I explicate the major allusion here as preamble to the text, respecting equity and inclusivity and the off chance that not everyone is reading my mind and thinking of the same works of art I’m thinking of deconstructing and retelling, before we begin. The literary allusion in question is to Goethe’s The Elf King.

In 1782, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote a brief ballad titled “Erlkönig” or The Elf King. It was famously set to music by Franz Schubert in 1815, and music too figures into the retelling and deconstruction that follows.

Goethe’s Elf King tells the painful story of a father racing through a dark forest on horseback, late at night, with a sick child in his arms. The child is delirious with fever, and we are left to imagine the father is racing to get the child to a doctor, or at the very least, somewhere out of the cold. The child is also being attacked by the Elf King as they ride, or so he imagines. The ballad, the reader, the Elf King, and the father all wrestle over the truth of what is happening, why they are in the forest so late at night alone, and the fate of the child.

Through twists and turns of phrase that grow ever darker, we never know if the Elf King in fact steals the child away, if the boy simply succumbs to a fever, or worst of all, if the father, desperate and powerless to save the child from either of them, accidently smothers his son, trying to calm him and keep him warm, in the impossible night. All we know for sure are the haunting last few lines of the ballad: “He held the moaning child, in his arms.” Followed closely by, “In his arms, the child was dead.” The reverse bookend “A—B—B—A” repeat of the phrasing underscoring the inescapable responsibility and accountability of parenthood, even when faced with forces beyond our ken and control; never knowing entirely what to believe and when to act, where to draw the lines and when to blur them to love them best and keep them safe. Our family.

ORIGIN STORIES

The underlying story also began as a screenplay. An early draft of which advanced several rounds in the Motion Picture Academy’s screenwriting fellowship competition. It didn’t win. However, for sketchy reasons, I had removed the animation from that draft of the script, prior to submission. Animation that depicted the magical characters.

I thought it was more ‘literary’ to merely to suggest the magical action. I also thought it was more screen-writerly and better evidence of my screenwriting chops, if that’s what was being assessed, to show that the scenes worked without any slight-of-hand fireworks, on the blocking, arcs, and dialogue alone.

That was a mistake and a weird bit of overthinking on my part. The underlying story makes more sense, and delivers on more levels, with the animation and magical action left in. Hence, it probably would have done better in the competition with the animation left in, though, we’ll never know, for sure.

I mention it here, because I turned around and made the same mistake with early drafts of the novel. I left out all the magical players and action. Or rather, I left it all invisible as ‘suggested’ for the wildly dedicated and diligent reader.

Cleverness is its own reward, and the early drafts were likewise clear to few. Finally corrected herewith. After some COVID shutdown quiet time, I dragged out the manuscript and had a reverse epiphany; realized the error in my earlier overthinking and set about the current revision that has the magical action layered back in.

Woven together with a few easter eggs for lovers of myths and origin stories and kisses in stolen moments right out in front of everybody in lazy summer afternoons playing hooky from school or over long weekends in the country with family.