Free Figgs & Phantoms by Ellen Raskin

appear on the horizon.
    There was no horizon. The gray sky, if there was a sky, was bound to the gray land by an invisible seam. All was silent.
    â€œAn island that’s surrounded by the sea,” Mona remembered, and then she heard the sea washing unseen rocks on an unseen shore. Undulating. Surging. Pounding. Faster, faster the waves crashed and thundered; the ground shuddered, beaten by an angry foam.
    Orange blotches again mottled the palm’s thrashing fronds, spreading its color as if to devour the pink. Lashed by the winds, Mona wrapped her arms around the swaying trunk. Some invisible power was trying to tear her from the tree. Some force was trying to blow her back into endless space. Mona refused to go.
    â€œPink palm, pink palm,” she cried over and over as she hung on to the one tangible reality in her unformed dream. At last the storm subsided; the waters calmed. The orange blight faded, and once again the palm stood tall and pink.

    Exhausted and confused, Mona sank to her knees and rested her head against her palm tree. Where was Uncle Florence? Who was trying to frighten her? Was she really in Capri or was she lost in her own nightmare? Lost.
    â€œIt was night. I was lost.” As Mona remembered the words of the diary, the gray darkened to starless night. Black, impenetrable night that only magnified her fears. She tried to think of something to free her mind from the terrors that lurk in the night. She remembered a small book in the secret hoard; she remembered the blue in the illustration bordering a poem; she remembered trying to decipher the cramped lettering. And then she remembered these words:
    Frowning frowning night,
O’er the desart bright,
Let thy moon arise
While I close my eyes.
    Mona opened her eyes to the dark blue of the sky. A full moon nested in the “welcoming arms” of the pink palm. From afar she heard the lapping sea, and from farther still, the faint tap-tap-tapping of dancing feet.
    â€œUncle Florence,” Mona shouted, but no figure crossed the moonlit sands. The tapping faded away.
    Mona rose and started across the desert in search of her phantom uncle.

    The moon glowed brightly, hotter and hotter, until it blazed into the ball of a scorching sun.
    Mona squinted back at the far-off palm, now suffused with orange light, then slogged on through the heat and glare. Her feet sank deeper into the sand with each step; a searing wind penetrated her every pore. Something more than the blistering heat and sucking sand was trying to hold her back.
    Defiant, her mouth parched, her tongue swollen, Mona shouted her mother’s song:
    â€œ ’Twas on the Isle of Capri
That I met her,
’Neath the shade
Of an old apple tree....”
    Mona shouted—and remembered. There had been an apple tree in her yard at home, an old, twisted apple tree no longer bearing fruit. She knew it well, having stared at its leaves so often from her bedroom window.
    Now she stared at the apple tree again as it rose in all its knotted glory before her.
    The grass was long and cool in the shade of the old apple tree. Mona wished for a tall glass of lemonade, and it appeared in her hand. She took a tasteless sip, then recalled the tart, thirst-quenching flavor and drank deeply.
    Leaning back refreshed, reveling in her new-found power of wishes-come-true, Mona laughed with delight. She knew what her next wish would be.

    Mona gazed into the desolation bordering her apple-tree world, wishing. Wishing. Wishing.
    Slowly he appeared, a four-foot six-inch shadow shaped by remembered details: the round face, the sad smile, the graying hair, the gnarled hands. The yellow sleeve garters.
    Mona hid her face in her hands and dismissed the vision. Uncle Florence had not taken his sleeve garters with him; he had long arms now, he was taller, different. She had to find him as he was now, as he looked now, in his own dream, in his own Capri.
    Mona set one foot on the scorching sand and