The nascent path wound in a mazelike spiral that seemed to take me deeper toward the heart of the wood. Instead of gnarled branches, the trees here had smooth and stately trunks. I reached out to stroke one, and was pleased to find that my touch had no effect.
After years of tripping over things and taking special care to watch my footfalls, of plastic tarps and varnishes and waves of shame each time I looked down at my body, I had stumbled into a world in which I was welcome. Here it was easy to push past my thoughts of Mrs. Blott, her nephew, my frustrated father and his rules. I touched as many tree trunks as I could, stroking their bark, kissing them. They grew so tall that their leaves hung far above my reach, or else I surely would have touched those too. At one point, overcome, I lay facedown in the grass, inhaling its sweet scent, removing my jacket and spreading my arms, moving them up and down by my sides like a child making an angel in the snow. The blades tickled my bare arms and neck. The world that I had watched from my window, separated from me by protective glass, became real in those moments; the difference between reading a story and embarking on adventure, between dreaming a kiss and receiving one.
Eventually, urged on by Marlowe’s whimpering, I stood to follow him farther. Faint birdsong reached us through the branches. I noticed a spotted chipmunk dash across my path, a plump pink earthworm slink over my shoes. Luscious moss blanketed stones, ferns growing intricately patterned in soft, paler greens beside them. Unlike in the forest by Urizon, no dead leaves crowded the ground. The air was clear and sweet and dry; the sun was tender.
Not twenty minutes after we had started down this trail, Marlowe barked with glee and turned a corner, disappearing from view. I raced to join him, and to my surprise saw Urizon just ahead of us, marvelous against the evening sky.
Shifting Galaxies
It has been so long. It has been such a long time. Alys can stand, still and silent, for years, watching the trees sway in the breeze. She can practice the movements—a flick of a wrist, a glyph drawn in the dirt—that bring her closer to her clansmen. Ask the oaks to stop and listen, call the poplars from their clearings, murmur old words that tell even older stories. The twitch of a finger reroutes a vine that has trapped a little wood mouse. A whisper calls forth a limb that holds a nest of owlets: their mouths stretched wide, forever waiting for their mother to return. Alys struggles to remember a life before this forest, cannot remember why she conjured this eternity. She is ready for the life that comes after.
The girl in the bower, the girl with red lips, creamy skin, smooth black curls—the girl who does not shiver in her nakedness, but wears it calmly, proudly. If Alys leans in very close, she can watch the girl’s heartbeat flutter behind the supple breast, the dark pink nipple, the row of ribs climbing from waist to sternum. If Alys leans in very close, she can hear the purr of the girl breathing, in and out, out and in. If she holds her hand up to the lips, she can feel the bursts of breath, vital and warm.
The breath stops. The girl coughs.
Alys steps back. Something is coming.
THE OTHER BLAKELY women sense the change—the networks of roots and fungus that keep trees in communion sending messengers: vines tugging their shirtsleeves, paths rerouting at their feet. Come at once, the wood says, something is different. Eager, the Blakelys arrive.
From close by—could it be coming from within?—a distant, inconsistent shuffling, strewn with labored breathing and occasional canine grunts, sounds from the foot of the girl’s pallet. In front of the women the dirt swirls without impetus, collapsing in on itself like a home with a rotting foundation. The child Emma gasps. Imogen reaches for her hand.
It is a sinkhole, thinks Imogen, an undertow of darkness that has finally come to eat us. She gives Emma’s stubby fingers an instinctual pat.
“Where is it all going?” Kathryn asks of the twigs, the unmoored seedlings, the scurrying wood lice that struggle to escape the deepening hole. Mary kicks Kathryn’s ankle with the heel of her boot. “Ouch!”
“Hush.”
An object is appearing, a shape molting out of darkness, shedding soil. At first Imogen thinks it a leg of mutton, a rotting piece of someone’s half-eaten supper. But as it emerges, this odd flower, from the ground, Imogen sees it is the knee joint of a human: a wrinkled calf, an engorged ankle, five plump toes. Imogen shudders. Her eyes dart around the circle to gauge how her companions will respond. Though they’ve spent centuries together, they have long behaved as bears, solitary creatures mostly content to roam separate domains. Imogen does not know their histories, though she assumes all have known some sort of darkness. Who comes from carnage? Not Kathryn, who hides her eyes under her palms. Not Mary, who swallows heavily, nor Lucy, whose pale face tinges green. Not Emma, who cries out again, but this time finds no comfort. Perhaps Helen, unblinking. Or Alys, who stares at the shinbone, eternal serenity unwavering.
Swift as it appeared, the shinbone once again is gone, buried under the dirt that rises fine as sand into their eyes.
“Look,” says Emma, moving forward. She takes a step to break the circle but is brushed aside by Lucy, sweeping ahead, hovering over the black-eyed girl, whose lids, for the first time, twitch faintly of their own accord.
The girl’s eyes open. They are an inky pitch, an endless dark.
Leaning down toward the black-eyed girl, Lucy tells her, “Do not be afraid.”
6
Moving forward, I frowned at Urizon’s silhouette, so abrupt, interrupting the tree line. I looked back to view the path I’d traveled, trying to determine how I’d suddenly found my way home. But though I’d only gone a foot or so since turning that last corner, behind me, the route had quite fully disappeared. My spiral path was gone; the wood was the same unruly wilderness it always had been. When I turned again to observe it from the lawn, it looked as it had looked for all sixteen years of my life.
I squeezed my eyes shut, let them open, but the trick had no effect. There was the knot in the old oak tree where robins made their nests. There was the rotted, peeling fence post, cocked at its odd angle. Everything was as it should be, as it had been when I left.
Was the other wood a dream, I wondered, a delusion? Chilly and damp, I put on my coat and peered through the tangle of trees. Nothing seemed especially unusual. I reached into my pocket for the blade of fresh grass I had hoarded upon its discovery, and understood the extent of my desire only once it emerged, still green, unaltered by my hand.
My forest was real—a shadow forest that existed alongside my everyday wood, intangible and shifting, but always beside me. It had not exiled me entirely. I wanted to return at once, but I supposed that its caution was fitting: I was a foreign body, to be excised until the wood knew more precisely what I was. It had spat me out and then contracted its long tongue, but was not closed to me forever. The blade of grass was proof.
My stomach gave a violent growl. Soon, I promised myself, I would return to decipher the wood’s meaning, but for now I was hungry, back at home, shivering. Dry clothes and dinner were my most pressing concerns.
I stepped over the fence onto the Blakely property and climbed the steps to the back terrace, suddenly worried over what I would tell Peter about the day’s events. He would be angry, of course, that I’d so obviously disobeyed him, but I hoped that the distraction of my new discovery would save me from a lecture. A lamp was on in his study, and I expected to find him there frowning, muttering, absorbed in the papers he’d been staring at that morning when I’d left. He’d be mourning Mrs. Blott as much as I was, though he likely wouldn’t show it. Perhaps I could be of some comfort.
I hung my jacket on a hook in a back closet, where it dripped comfortably onto Peter’s boots, and made my way down the dark hallway, rehearsing an explanation of the afternoon inside my head:
I got lost chasing Marlowe.