Capture The Heart Of The Willow

I live in the forest where the shadows lurk, searching for something cold to feed on.

That is the only way I know how to describe it — the feeling of lying beneath the willow tree as the dark settles around me like a second skin. The roots curl up on either side of my body the way arms might, though nothing about this place is warm. The bark is silver-gray and weeping, its long, pale tendrils brushing my cheeks whenever the wind exhales through the trees. I call it the Willow of Death, though not because it frightens me. I call it that because it is the only place in this world where I feel the boundary between living and not-living go soft enough to breathe through.

Tonight the fog sits low and heavy over the forest floor, and my sapphire-blue hair fans out beneath me across the roots like something spilled. I stare up through the curtain of willow branches at the sky, and the sky stares back. I close my eyes. I let the Between-State come for me.

It always comes.

The forest dissolves first — the scent of pine and cold earth replaced by salt, by the sharp brine of ocean air. Then the sound arrives: waves, enormous and furious, crashing against jagged black rocks far below. I am standing on a cliff under a canopy of shimmering stars, and the ocean beneath me is wrong. The water should be dark blue, or gray, the color of a winter storm. Instead it carries a red tint, a thin, blood-warm hue that bleeds at the edges of each wave as it breaks apart against the stone.

There is a child standing at the precipice.

She is small, no older than seven or eight, with her arms loose at her sides and her face tipped upward toward the stars. She is not crying. That is the part that stays with me longest — she is not crying. She has been wrung dry by something, by words I cannot hear and cruelties I can only feel from the distance where I stand. The world had been unkind to her in ways that had left no visible marks, and yet she stands there on the edge of everything as though she has already made her peace with the falling.

I want to call out to her. My voice does not come.

She jumps. The stars don't even blink.

The mist rises from the rocks below, cold and misty and carrying the faintest copper trace, and I feel it against my own skin like a punishment. What a crime cruelty is. That thought moves through me, slow and aching, as the waves swallow what is left. May you rest in peace, child of beauty. I don't know if I think those words or if the forest whispers them through me, but they settle somewhere behind my ribs and refuse to leave.

Then the scene shifts, the way it sometimes does. The cliff pulls apart like smoke and something warmer bleeds in at the seams — a narrow alley lit by a full moon, a little white bench drowning in flowers, blue rose petals scattered across the ground like pieces of a broken sky. A couple walks hand in hand into that gentle dark, and when the man drops to one knee with a ring catching the moonlight, I feel something entirely different move through me. Not grief. Something that rhymes with longing.

"Oh, my darling, I love you. Would you do the honors and marry me?"

She tackles him before he can even rise, laughing into his shoulder, and the shadows around them seem to lean in the way an audience does at the best part of a story. I watch until the scene fades too, until there is nothing left but the cold roots of the willow pressing against my spine and the night air filling my lungs with a gasp I don't remember taking.

My eyes open. The forest ceiling hangs above me, all silver branches and black sky.

The scent of sea salt still clings to the inside of my nose. Dried lilies too, faint and sweet and with no earthly source for miles. I press my fingers against the bark of the willow and sit upright slowly, letting the Between-State drain out of me the way bathwater drains — gradual, reluctant, leaving a film of cold behind.

I am still here. I always am.

The walk back to the cabin is short but heavy. The trees press close on either side of the narrow path, their branches tangled overhead in a way that blocks out the last of the starlight, and I keep my eyes forward. The shadows at the periphery of my vision do something tonight that they do not always do, pulsing in a slow, rhythmic thing that feels almost like breathing, and I stop once on the path to look directly at a cluster of darkness between two oak trunks. It stills immediately, the way a cat stills when it knows it has been noticed.

I do not run. I keep walking.

The cabin appears through the trees the way it always does — small and dark and sagging slightly at the roof line, like a tired old creature that has given up on standing straight. I push through the front door and the familiar smell of pine cleaner and old wood wraps around me. Mandie's yellow rain boots sit by the door, muddy from this afternoon's walk. A single birthday card she made herself is propped on the kitchen table, drawn in crayon, showing two stick figures with blue and gold hair holding hands under a very large sun.

Tomorrow she turns ten. Tomorrow she leaves.

I stand at the small mirror above the bathroom sink and look at myself for a long moment. My hair falls over both shoulders, blue as a deep bruise in the low light. My eyes stare back at me from the glass, icy and pale and far too old for seventeen. My grandmother had the same eyes. My mother had them too, or so I am told. Some evenings I search my own reflection for something that feels like a beginning, and I find only the ending my family seems to specialize in.

Three months since my grandmother was buried in the churchyard at the edge of town. Seven years since the car accident swallowed my parents whole on a cold Tuesday in November. I survived. Alura Black, the girl who kept surviving, who kept waking up under willow trees and carrying the weight of other people's endings in her chest like loose change.

I press my fingers to the mirror's cool surface and pull them away.

The shadows in the corner of my bedroom move when I cross the threshold, shifting against the wall in a slow, deliberate way that has nothing to do with the wind. There is no wind in here. I watch them from the doorway until they settle, though settle is too generous a word. They wait. They are always waiting, folding themselves back into the corners with the patience of something that has never needed to hurry, because it knows its moment will come.

I know what they are feeding on. I can feel the grief sitting in the center of my chest like an open window in winter, and they press close to the chill of it the way a moth presses close to a flame. My sorrow is a resource to them. That is all it is.

I sit on the edge of my bed and listen to Mandie breathing softly through the thin wall between our rooms, that small, steady sound she makes in sleep, untroubled and even. She does not know what watches us. I have always made sure of that.

I lie back and stare at the ceiling until the shadows stop moving, or until I stop being able to tell the difference. The scent of dried lilies drifts back to me one more time, faint and source-less, clinging to the back of my throat like a question I have not yet learned how to ask.

Outside, the fog breathes against the cabin walls, slow and patient and hungry.

I wonder, in the dark quiet before sleep takes me, whether I am losing my mind or whether the forest is simply tired of waiting for me to come home to it for good. I wonder which answer frightens me less.

Neither does.