SCIENCE PHANTASY

This is an exercise in fun with fan fiction; a tribute to the Hobbit's Shire not to the cannon of LORT or The Hobbit. 

Merridith Dunn had a talent for occupying the hollow between things. He lived there most comfortably, in that slender seam where a routine afternoon thins into a daydream. He could make a whole world from a single, unremarkable thing: the slant of light on a fencepost, the way a cartwheel sighed as it left the lane, the smell of baking that rode on the laundry wind. He kept small objects as markers of where his attention had last been, an unbanded marble, the stub of a pencil, a dried clover, and when the real world exerted itself too insistently, he would hold one between his fingers, and the day would loosen its seams. 

On an unusually humid June afternoon, when the air smelled of dusty lilacs and the sky had learned to drape itself in lazy white, Merridith found a new marker. It was not an object so much as a place: an old willow that leaned against the low wall behind his grandmother’s garden. Its trunk was furred with moss and rhuned by the tiny footsteps of beetles. It had been there longer than the lane; his grandmother liked to say, longer than the hedges, longer than the gate she always forgot to lock. Kids in the village called it Old Hush, because when you sat under its long, soft lashes of leaf and listened, the world outside the garden door muffled as if someone had turned down its volume. 

Merridith had sat under Old Hush a hundred times. He had once imagined it a pirate’s mast, once the mast of a ship built of cabbage leaves and straw, once the leaning shoulder of a kindly giant. On this particular afternoon he sprawled on his back in the grass; his schoolbooks closed beside him, one page thumbed as if to prove he had been studying. The willow’s thin leaves made a voice like the soft rasp of a pen on paper. He let his fingers find the dried clover in his pocket and held it flat against his palm, feeling the sun warm the edge of the leaf. 

The day thinned at the places where the willow’s shadow touched his eyelids. It was not sleep that took him, not the ordinary sleep of a child exhausted by lessons and chores, but a sleep that folded sideways into the world. The air changed tone. The smell of lilacs became the smell of warm bread. The distant barking of a dog became a chorus of small, contented murmurs. A river that had been a shimmer in his imagination unwound itself at the foot of the willow and, in the blink that separates a thought from an action, Merridith was not looking at a fence and a village lane but at a hedgerow that breathed. 

He opened his eyes to sunlight that felt older, as if it had been polished by many years of being kindly. The grass under him was softer; a green so rich it might have been stitched. Hedgerows braided with hawthorn and elder stood in tidy ranks like small, guarded houses. The river ran slow and bright, as if it had warmed itself over a hundred loaves. Children with hair like wheat and cheeks threaded with flour darted about; one of them paused long enough to tip his hat at Merridith as if he had always been part of the place. 

A child, no taller than Merridith, with a grin full of missing milk-teeth and a cap turned back on his head, popped out from behind a bush with a mug of something steaming. “You’re late,” the boy declared, which is what hobbits did when they had received no authority to speak. 

Merridith sat up so quickly his head felt as if someone had brushed it. He looked at his hands as if they might be different: neatly cropped, callused, filthy, clean, none of those words fit. He smelled the mug the boy held. There was the warmth of something herbal and bright. He felt a soft roundness at his waist where no roundness had been earlier. He tasted nothing, yet his mouth remembered the taste of suet and honey, and something baked with apples. 

“Where am I?” he said aloud, because he could not imagine that this was the lane behind his grandmother’s garden. 

“In the Reaches,” the boy said as if naming this were a simple enough thing. “Havenford. You must be one of those dreamchildren. Everyone’s been saying there’d be a new one.” The boy introduced himself; Pipson Halfpenny, and before Merridith could answer another child darted past, giggling, carrying a pie that almost slipped free of its tin. 

Merridith learned the rules quickly because children teach the world quickly and without pomp. The Reaches were a place given to families as a reward; they were told in passing, reward for something grand and dusty-sounding called the War, something that shimmered in the older folk’s conversation. The Reaches hugged a Great River, they said; its fords were known and its willows keen with secrets. Havenford was the market and the quay and an excuse for anyone from the Greyway to stop and purchase a slice of cheese, a stick of honeycomb, or a story. The Long Hedgerow kept the borders stitched and hummed in the way of things that have been braided with care. There was a Great Tree in Hobbiton where, if you were invited, you could eat so well that your dreams became embroidered with pies. 

Merridith’s initial astonishment was a small ember that settled quickly into delight. It was obvious that this was not the Shire he had only brushed in stories; it was more intimate, more domestic, the sort of place that sewed magic into marmalade rather than into thunder. There was wonder in the little things: the way a hedgerow shrugged open under a child’s hands, the manner in which ducks accepted bread with the dignity of a judge; the economy of a joke so old it had grown mended edges. 

Pipson took him by the wrist, a motion practiced among children the world over and led him along. They passed stalls where people sold willow-baskets with handles braided like hair, jars of preserve set with rings of wax like a crown, and small ironworks where chalices faintly stamped with a dwarven runework sat among pewter mugs and boathooks. A dwarven smith sat by the quay; his beard still ringed with soot despite the summer air. He looked up as Merridith passed and grunted a sound that was not unkind. The smith’s hammer tapped a metrical beat against a plank, and Merridith felt for a moment as if he could measure the heartbeat of this place by that hammer-song. 

“You’ll be wanting a pie if it’s your first day,” Pipson said. “And a story if it’s your first day. Old Bram’s got a tale that can make the hedgerows stand straighter.” 

They found Old Bram Underbough leaning on a cane by a low fence. He had the look of a man who had once been a ranger and then discovered that hedgerows were far more interesting. His eyes were quick and kind, rimmed in the way of someone who has spent nights watching comets. He smelled faintly of peat and jam, which in the Reaches was to be expected. 

“You brought a dream-child,” Old Bram announced, as if the arrival had been anticipated on a list. “That’s proper. Dream-children often have sticky fingers for pie and small courage for mending things. Mind your manners, lad.” He looked at Merridith as if he were measuring the small thing and found it to suit him well. “Name?” 

“Merridith Dunn,” he said, and the sound of his name in this place shocked him with a sudden, pleasant hollow: they had said it like it fit the hedgerow. 

“Then Merridith Dunn, you shall sit and listen,” Old Bram said. He told a tale of a night when men were making maps and a cunning had tried to pull the hedgerows straight, as if they were pieces of rope. At the end of his tale, he nodded at Merridith and pressed into his hand a small token, a strip of oarwood carved smooth and notched with years. “For the ways,” he said, smiling. “You may find you need to count the notches while crossing a river that wants to forget you.” 

Day unfurled as only days in the Shire know how to: in layers of food and ease. Merridith learned the pattern by fitting into it. He ate a slice of honey-cake so sweet it made his eyes water on purpose. He traded his marbled marble, an item he had treasured the way children treasure tokens, for a pocket-watch trinket that ticked only once, a joke to be used in a song. He learned the Hearthsong, a short melody that brightened a loaf when hummed while kneading. He laughed at jokes that flattened into new jokes that evening. He understood the Shire by its small pieties: the polite way to pass a neighbor, the ritual touch of a finger to a hedgerow before leaving a boundary, and the careful counting of steps when you crossed a well. 

The Reaches were so full of quiet wonders that Merridith stopped asking whether he would wake. In his daydream, he accepted the world’s terms and let himself be anchored in them. There was the matter of Wickland, a place of willow-swings and a small theater where children performed folk plays about great men and stranger beasts. On a whim of companionship, Pipson dragged him there that afternoon. The play was a wildly domestic affair, full of broom-sword fights and improvised chorus, in which Merridith was given, quite by accident, the one-liner that made everyone laugh so long that a woman dropped her knitting and pretended it was part of the scene. 

It was in the hollow of evening that the suggestion of other things arrived: a pair of half-elves by the Grey Havens who walked the Greyway with the upholstery of the sea in their hair, a band of dwarves who offered to mend a hole in the Long Hedgerow with iron staples and stout hands, and rumors, whispered by lads with noses for wonder, of a dragon somewhere far in the hills where the land hunched and frowned. None of this had the gust of peril heroic tales demand; it was instead the gentle threat of any place that must choose between secrecy and recognition. 

On the third day, or perhaps the second and a half, because days in the Shire gave themselves rounder numbers, Merridith was invited into a low, warm room that smelled of boiled fruit and beeswax. Mara Greenstock, Keeper of Hearthsong, had the kind of hands that made stitches of words. She wore her hair in a soft braid and had a habit of speaking in the balance of rhyme when she was pleased. She looked at Merridith with the same quick kindness Old Bram had shown and, when she lifted the Red Book from the shelf, Merridith felt as if a small bell had been lifted out of the air. 

“You may read a line,” she said, and the line itself seemed to settle into the room like a piece of bread placed on a table. The Red Book was not a book of paper and cheap binding but a stitched thing, its cover worn but loved. There were names written in crabbed hands, recipes hidden between the pages, poems that folded into themselves like napkins. Mara opened it to a page near the center where the script had the slant of an old family’s hand. 

Merridith’s voice faltered, small and unsure, but the moment he spoke the words something happened that was not a trick of sleep. The letters he read refused to float up and vanish; they sank into him as if into soil. A line of the Red Book formed into a memory, and memory, unlike dreams, left a small, muscular echo in the body. He remembered, afterward, the weight of a particular pie in his lap as if his own hands had baked it; he remembered the sound of a tune hummed under his breath while he swept the quay; he remembered the exact notch on the oar Old Bram had given him and could count its years by the sound his fingers made over them. 

This was the pivot of things. Merridith had expected the daydream to be a borrowed movie he would step out of at dusk with the bone-dry sensation of having read a book. Instead, the Red Book gave him what dreams seldom do: history in miniature, a package stamped to the marrow. He could not explain it; he only felt it: memory that would remain. 

Word of Merridith’s reading spread through the Reaches like a pleasant rumor. They did not ask how it worked. They celebrated the fact that the world had chosen to trust him with a single, small truth. Old Bram nodded with a secretive satisfaction as if a known program had run to its end. The children gathered to teach him games that involved counting hedgerow steps and the stealthy art of the hedge-step, that particular vanish former men had once mistaken for magic. 

Late that night, under a Great Tree in Hobbiton whose limbs were broad enough to hold a dozen good stories, the Reaches gave Merridith a party. He sat with a paper napkin the thickness of a blanket on his lap and tasted every kind of pie. Lanterns winked in the branches like stars that liked to be looked at. There was music of a quiet sort: a fiddle broken in sympathy, a flute whose notes were polished bright, and a chorus of voices that hummed in the way of people who have been singing for a very long time. 

It was then that the hedgeline rustled differently. The children thought it a performance trick. The adults, those attuned to the seam between land and story, straightened. From between the long, braided hawthorns walked a man whose presence seemed to carry the smell of woodland after rain and the mild mischief of mice. He wore a cloak flecked with leaves and bits of feather and carried a staff that might have once been a good walking-stick before it decided to be something more. His hat was silly in the most earnest way, with a sprig of thyme tucked into the band. He walked as if the ground knew him by name. 

“Good evening,” he said, and his voice had a robin’s lilt. He did not make a speech. He did not strike a heroic pose. He moved among them the way a person moves among friends, offering smiles and taking tea if it were offered. The children surged forward, enchanted, and the elders bowed like hedgerows making room. Old Bram blinked clear-eyed and named the man as if it were an old, comfortable thing to say. 

“Radagast,” he murmured, and everyone fell back a little with the kind of awe one keeps for rain. 

Radagast accepted a cup of nettle-tea and tucked a small feather into the cap of a boy who giggled and made a point of slipping it into his pocket to show his siblings. For Merridith the visit held a quiet tenderness: Radagast looked at him longer than politeness required, not with prying curiosity but with the gentle scrutiny of someone who has spent their life listening to birds. 

From a bag that seemed to rattle with the names of things happier than their own shadows, Radagast offered Merridith a small object wrapped in an old cloth. It was a seed, larger than a garden’s usual kin and warm as if it stored a summer. “Plant it where you first thought of the Shire,” Radagast said in that robin-voice. “It is a listening seed. It will not burrow you back into this place the way a tide brings a driftwood home, but if you ever forget a song, put your palm on its first leaf and hum the opening line of the Red Book. It will keep the song in your chest.” 

Merridith pressed the seed into his hand and felt for a long moment like a person who had been given a private map. Radagast wandered then, murmuring to ferns at the river edge, and a gull came and sat on his boot as if they had been in the habit of sharing tales. When he had said his goodbye, it was not a flourish. He stepped back into the long hedgerow and was gone, leaving behind a faint scent of pine and something sugary. 

There was a small magic in the way his visit changed things: even those who did not believe in miracles felt the world become a softer place. The children pretended the feathers would make them understand birds and argued about which bird said which word. The elders tucked Radagast’s visit into their stories and promised to retell the way a person promises to keep a candle lit. 

The Reaches thrummed with a felicity that pressed itself into Merridith’s chest. He slept in a bed of clean straw at a house that smelled of lavender and warm plates. He woke to a morning as gentle as a stitched promise. But the seam between dream and waking is a temperamental one. On the morning after the party, Merridith walked the hedgerows in a slow, sober way that made him notice things less like discoveries and more like truths he had always missed. 

When he was called by the hush of a certain, familiar leaf, Old Hush, he felt no surprise. The seam had chosen precisely that place to close. He said goodbyes that felt properly worded: he hugged a child who had taught him how to vanish between a cart and a hedge, he promised Old Bram that he would be careful with the oarwood, he left a small sketch of a pie as a token for Mara Greenstock. The Long Hedgerow braided itself as if checking for loose threads. Then, with a kindness that smelled like bread, the Reaches released him. 

The willow behind his grandmother’s garden welcomed him back with the same thin voice as before; the lane on the other side of the wall lay almost as if it had not been touched by anything at all. But there were differences, a small, unignorable set of them. The marble Merridith had traded was nowhere in his pocket. In its place was a notch of oarwood, warm and smooth as if still rubbed by a hand. The clover he had held when he had slipped away had been replaced by a dry leaf that smelled faintly of river. The memory of a tune hummed while kneading dough sat behind his teeth, insistent and clear. 

He reached into his pocket and felt the seed, wrapped in the scrap of cloth Radagast had used. A sudden, childlike impulse to plant it struck him then, an impulse like a physical thing that made his knees ache. He walked around to the front yard where the soil had been kept for the runner beans his grandmother liked. He dug a small hole with a wooden spoon and wound the seed into the earth. He tamped the soil down with the earnestness of a person who had been given a duty and kissed the spot in a ridiculous, private gesture. 

That night, after supper, Merridith pressed his palm gently to the dark soil where he had buried the seed and hummed the first line he could remember from the Red Book. The line rose in him in the way a tide can be remembered by the feel of wet sand. For a moment the leaf above his palm trembled as if hearing its name. There was no grand flaring of light. The garden did not rearrange itself like scenery in a play. What happened was quieter and truer: the dark became a little less empty, and the place where memory takes root felt fuller. 

Morning came with no fanfare other than the ordinary round of birds and the neighbor’s milkcart. But the seed had pushed, a shy green like a thought. Merridith told no one; he kept the fact like a private tune. He slipped on his way to school with the notched oarwood in his pocket and a boiled sweet he had been given by his grandmother. Sometimes in class he hummed the Hearthsong without meaning to and felt the paper he was meant to copy into lose its pall. He found himself less prone to boredom and more apt to notice the way a sparrow handled a crumb. Little things murmured to him all day in ways they hadn't before. 

The weeks turned in ordinary rhythms: chores, lessons, market trips with his grandmother. But the Reaches persisted in him like a warm stitch. Memories from the Red Book were not tidy souvenirs; they had weight and texture. Merridith could still recount the exact minsce Old Bram had used to notch the oar. He could still hum, at need, the tune that made dough rise friendlier. Once, when a classmate started to cry because of something rough at home, Merridith found himself sitting beside them and making a small joke about hedgerows that made the crying stop. He had not been a hero in any dramatic sense; instead he held a particular steadiness, a way of making the small world be right enough for the moment. 

Sometimes, when the river near his town caught the evening light just so, he would think he heard the faintest echo of a flute. Once he saw a gull fly in a way that made him remember Radagast's laugh and the way the bird had settled on a boot. There were times the seam tugged at him, a soft insistence at the back of his mind, as if the Reaches had left a finger gently hooked in his sleeve. 

Months later, when the seasons began to hush into their cooler garments, a cart came by the lane that carried a man from the Greyway. The man had eyes like the shore at dusk and a bearing that suggested travel between places with proper maps. He was pleasant and bored in the way of pedlars. He stopped at Merridith’s grandmother’s gate and asked about seeds for hedge-rows. Merridith, in a pleasant impulse that had nothing of artifice, walked him to the front and fetched the rooted sprout that had grown from Radagast’s seed. The man looked at it, his fingers turning the stalk as if the plant were a coin. 

“That’s a listening willow,” the man said, with no attempt at secrecy, as if the idea were entirely ordinary. “We plant them near the Grey Havens sometimes. Keeps the wind from telling secrets to the wrong folk.” He paid Merridith with a small pouch of spices and a tale about a dwarf in a far quay who had a hammer that could sing. Merridith did not correct him. The world, he had learned, contained many kinds of truth, and he had been given a particular one. 

Word, of course, travels between lanes faster than any map. Merridith’s pocket held the oarwood still, and his grandmother nodded in that way elders nod when a child returns from an errand and has done more than he was told. He found that he no longer slept the same way. Dreams came with edges, the rustle of hawthorn leaves, the coil of a fiddle’s song, and sometimes they smelled of suet. He kept a small sketchbook and in it drew the Long Hedgerow, the notch on Old Bram’s oar, the bright feather Radagast had stuck into the boy’s cap. He annotated his drawings not as proof but as an incantation against forgetfulness. 

Seasons passed and Merridith grew in small increments: a hand that could mend a tear, a patience for waiting out a rain that might ruin a harvest. He did not become a ranger, nor did he take to any grand calling. His life remained, happily, at the seam between chores and wonder. He told the story of the Reaches to friends while working at the baker’s stall and watched their expressions fall into that delicious space a listener makes for those moments when they are allowed to be entirely taken as a child might be. 

Years later, when Merridith was no longer so small that he fit entirely in a lap but still small enough to keep a pocket for tokens, he walked again to Old Hush. The willow had changed its bark a little; the lane had shifted its paving stones. He pressed his palm to the place where he had buried Radagast’s seed. The stump had grown into a slender sapling whose first leaf trembled at his touch. For a second the world dimmed into that particular hush and he heard again the sound of a robin’s laugh. 

He could have left the sapling there, an ordinary tree among many. But Merridith had learned that some things require tending as much as they require faith. He fenced the sapling with a ring of small stones and placed upon it a notch of oarwood as a guard. He read aloud, in a voice grown steadier with use, the line he had first read from the Red Book. The sound slid like a key and the sapling’s leaf shivered in response. 

In the years that followed other things happened: some of Merridith’s neighbors married and raised children who learned to vanish in narrow spaces; a storm once tore a length of the Long Hedgerow and a band of villagers braided it back with songs; a rumor came down the line of a dragon that had been seen in a distant fold of hills and proved, upon closer inspection, to be no more than the glint of an old miner’s furnace. But the essential fact remained: the Reaches did not fade into a dusty time because some had chosen to keep them hidden. They endured because people like Merridith kept the small memoried rituals alive. 

When he was old enough to have his own apprenticeship, Merridith taught the Hedge-Step in the way a baker teaches a knead, by repetition, by making the children laugh, by adding an odd rhyme to the instruction. He told the story of the Red Book and of the Notched Oar and of the man in the moss-flecked cloak who had left him a single listening seed. He never used the word “magic” in his classes; instead he called these things tools, habits and small pieties that make the ordinary world wide enough to hold wonder. 

And sometimes, on very still evenings when the village seemed to lean its head toward the long river, he would put his palm to the first leaf of the sapling and hum the first line of the Red Book. The leaf would tremble like an answering note, and Merridith would remember, as clearly as any time in his life, the face of a boy named Pipson, the laugh of Old Bram, the taste of a honey-cake, and the small, obliging kindness of a man who watched birds. 

There is a matter of truth in all stories of doors between worlds: people want to know whether one may return, whether the seam remains open for the asking. Merridith never found that seam obvious again; it Hrummed like a fine wire hidden in the field of an old fence. Once, so he tells the children who will hear him, he spied a gull on the quay that settled on the post as if it had been waiting for someone to come home. He smiled, and the gull bobbed once in a way that might have been a wink. 

Whether the Reaches are a pocket of Avalon hidden from men’s sharp eyes, or an accord between the land and those who love it, is less important than the practice of remembering that keeps it from being only a story. Merridith learned that a memory rooted is stronger than the most spectacular light-show. He carried the notched oarwood in his pocket until the point where an old gentility required the omission of such tokens. He buried his sketchbook in the box where his grandchildren would find it and say, “Granddad, did you make this up?” and he would only smile and tuck a feather behind his ear. 

In the end, the world keeps many seams. Some are intentional and narrow; others widen with the patient work of people who love small things. Merridith’s seam was exactly such a place: a bridge made of pies and songs and the patient insistence of hedgerows. It was, as he liked to think, the right kind of gift for someone who once learned to make a daydream out of a willow. He had been given a memory, not a kingdom, and he had kept it true. 

A single leaf of the listening-sapling, frayed at the edge from a late frost, still trembles when children pass beneath Old Hush. If you were to stand close, if you listened as Merridith once learned to listen, you might hear a quiet flute-note threaded with the sound of hands on pastry. You might catch the echo of a robin’s laugh and the faintest instruction about how to move so quickly that lumbering men think you have vanished. 

And sometimes, if the night is clear and the river quiet, a figure may walk the hedgerow line. He will accept a cup of nettle-tea if offered and tuck a feather into the cap of a child with the practiced kindness of one who has always been fond of birds. He will leave in the hedgerow’s fold and the world will sound, for one long moment, in perfect pitch.