The Place No One Finds

Written by Mara Strang

She found The Place No One Finds only once - at least, she thinks so. The memory is hazy and

oversaturated.

Hurrying after her parents’, trying to keep up with their long strides, she was dazed by the city

whirling around her. In her memory the city was immense; teeming, densely packed into what might

have been a root system or a rabbit warren. It was easy to get lost in – a wild place, but without

anything green or awake at all, which was strange.

The city was a place that repulsed her – at least initially. It was smoky and loud, and everything was a unenchanting grey colour. She’d been afraid to lose sight of her mother and father in the smudgy, busy city and had tripped over the heels of their shoes at least a few times. She’d longed to go home– she wished now that she had. Home was green and quiet and still.

It happened then that all at once, and with no great anticipation or excited preamble, the three of

them stepped into The Place No One Finds.

It was an ordinary looking shop from the outside. The dark grey exterior blended in with the rest of

the shops on the street, and a few wet posters disintegrated on the cobblestones beneath their feet as they stepped up and through. She remembered that feeling with an uncanny clarity; stepping from the dim side street into an unexpected carnival of colours.

Jackets and coats hung all around them – rough wool, leather and tartan, feathered waistcoats with

gleaming sequins... top hats, berets and warm winter hats crammed onto strange heads made of

stone. She remembered one particularly shiny crystal skull wearing a headband with wobbly

antennae. Rows and rows of ties dangled like foliage, and belts wrapped like ivy around pillars. There were dresses hanging from the ceiling by invisible threads, underskirts and petticoats floated above as if she were looking up at the undersides of large frilly mushrooms!

Everything rustled and twinkled. A current of warm air caught a row of colourful shirts, and

candlelight gleamed off a large heap of bags of all sizes and shapes. The deeper she wandered into the different floors, levels, and side rooms, the more entranced she became. There were so many different colours she felt sick, like she’d eaten too much of something sugary. 

The only sound was a hushed but constant murmuring as people – what felt like hundreds of people – prowled past and circling around, fingering scarves and gazing hungrily at gowns and cloaks. 

She could have stayed there for hours, and maybe she did; she couldn’t remember leaving the city,

stepping out of the shop, or finding her parents again after she left them to explore The Place

further. All she knew was the city before, and then the city after she found The Place No One Finds;

smoky, vast, and lifeless and then all of a sudden, full of anticipation and what had felt to her like

magic.

“Mama I want to go to the city!” She’d begged again and again, “I want to go to the clothes shop!”

The earthy musk of the forest and the rustling wet branches were no longer her sanctuary. When

she went off wandering – as she had used to do all the time around their home with great

satisfaction – the bushes transformed into ballgowns and the tree branches into rich textured

scarves. She was obsessed. The dark magical corners of the forest she had once delighted in became doorways; she sought them endlessly, waiting to step from the wet dingy world into an exciting array of colour again... waiting to see the vast rows of jackets and cloaks, and to hear the excited murmuring of the crowd... But she never did, and the itching desire to seek out these dark and rotting corners of the forest worried her parents.

She’d come home covered in brown sludge or patterned with burs and sticky weed, her hair a

tangled mass of twigs and moss, a hungry, desperate look in her eyes,

“Papa,” she’d try again, “can’t we go to the city?”

It ruined her, that Place. She dreamt of it so often that it left a certain taste on her tongue when she

woke up. She’d draw for hours; smearing thick pastels into swirling sickening colours, trying to

capture The Place, to recreate the heart-pounding exhilaration that the endless rows of clothes and

the teeming rooms had sparked in her.

In those years after discovering The Place, the world seemed terribly strange. She’d forgotten how

to be still and silent, she’d forgotten the joy of a colour that didn’t sparkle with glitter.

It seems so cruel to her now, that in her childish mind The Place had appeared wild; that belts had

looked like ivy and skirts like mushrooms – how could she ever have seen that shop to be home to

anything natural?

As she grew older her determination and longing to find The Place evolved into disgust. Her childish naivety was replaced by truths about the world; The Place was a trap, if she wasn’t careful she’d always be tempted into seeking it out. 

Living in the city, now all she sought were the quiet forests and green parks; glad to escape into

them, away from the vibrant, intoxicating city. Her memories of the forest were disentangled from

The Place, and the strange spell that it had put her under was broken.

She went back to the clothes shop only once. Taller and less timid, the colours and the crowds

presented her with nothing more than a strange hollowness. The shop itself would never again feel

enchanting or magical, she saw it for what it really was.

It was her connection to nature that saved her from believing in The Place – from searching for it,

from living in a world of plastic and glitter and the promise of ‘everything’. The Place No One Finds

was unattainable; it lived only in childhood memory, in promises offered by advertisement, and in

impossible standards. 

She never found it again. She would never find it - no one ever did. And for that, she was glad.