I.
In the spring, I used to love to climb trees. I’d swim up the branches, jumping fearlessly from limb to limb. I’d stop at the very top, stretched out across two or three tiny branches than didn’t look safe but I somehow knew wouldn’t break.
As a child, the woods were my kingdom. I’d dig out holes in the cavities of trees big enough for me to pull myself into, pushing aside the year’s worth of rancid pine needles and mulch, and build tiny houses for fairies that danced in the corners of my eyes out of twigs and moss. I was enamored with the idea of living off the land and spent many hours planning out exactly how and when and where I would do it, but I always tired of it, and returned to climbing trees.
The sunset from the treetop was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
Colors would streak out—delicate pinks, tenuous lavender, and a vibrant, glowing red—washing the waves and the small remaining patches of snow in a glorious gold. The air felt its calmest then, heavy and complete, stretching out across the almost endless trees and a cheerfully bubbling creek, bloated with the melting ice of winter.
I’d climb down then—mom would be worried if I wasn’t back before dark—the frosted bark burning cold splinters into my hands and wedging itself underneath my jagged chewed off fingernails, leaving rings of brown and seeping red that made my classmates screech in disgust. But it was a familiar pain, and I didn’t mind the burn.
I’d run back home on the side of the road, next to the deep drainage ditch. The ice was melting into a small burbling creek, carving its way around the ice, and along its edges bright green grass had begun to poke through the snow.
I wore bright pink boots and my Kermit the Frog rain jacket, tripping past trees and fire hydrants, shying away from the phantom of my faint fear of the cliff that tore itself out of the dirt and rocks by the road. Splashing wide halos of muddy water out behind me as I ran through the fields of puddles to home.
II.
When I was nine, we moved away from my beloved trees to a beautiful piece of oceanfront property in the terribly distant region simply referred to as ‘Out the Road’. I screamed and wept and sulked, and refused to do anything but lay around in the haphazard piles of crumpled newspaper and bubble-wrap for weeks after we moved. I spent many hours staring moodily out windows, sourly watching my life rearrange itself around me, before I first went outside.
I could only stay sad for so long, I was surrounded by the bitter sea air and hundreds of tiny little worlds, frozen in still water. I would scrabble on the edges of rocks, searching for tiny rockfish or eels beneath the large flat slate stones that seemed to litter my beach.
To my disappointment, there was only one large tide pool on our beach. It was small, and filled mostly with hermit crabs, which quickly grew boring. But after discovering that the springy alder trees on our property were too small to hold me, I went back to flipping rocks.
One day I remember finding a tiny gray worm curled up in a coiled, slimy pile underneath yet another rock. Unlike many young girls my age, I was quite fond of worms—my mother had told me that they were Cleopatra’s favorite animal, and entranced as I was with grand stories of beautiful ladies and kings and adventures I clung to her every word—and so I immediately reached forward to reach for it.
My fingers slid through it. It’s body was like a sickly oozing jello, and my fingers cut through it like a hot knife. A crushed piece of it dangled in one hand, and I stared at it for a moment as it oozed gray slime unto my hand.
Then, because I was a sheltered and spoiled and far to sensitive for my own good, I dropped it and ran home, crying until my mother came and held me.
I spent the rest of the summer in the grass, weaving bracelets and rings out of daisies and grass, and didn’t play on the beach.
III.
Now I am fifteen, and it is autumn. The trees are changing, the rich greens fading to sickly yellows and finally dry, dead brown. The wind carries a sheet of brilliantly colored leaves upwards, whirling them in a great sheet of russet and brown, before settling them in one of the great ditches with the rustling resentful sigh of things dead and dying.
The beaches are littered with dead salmon, hundreds of fins littering a grey beach, locked in a twisted pallor. Their ghastly white bodies rotten and twisted white, like death, or decay, or a shy girl with ragged fingernails who hides in heavy jackets and a thick mask of black tinted glass.
But it really doesn’t matter either way, because the birds are here, with their eager screams and clumsy claws scrabbling against worried stones, tearing the rotted flesh apart. Now there are only empty skeletons, lying abandoned on the beach, waiting for the sea to carry them away.
I would rather find life in death than death in life, but I’m not very good at either anymore. Somewhere in the last ten years you see, I became afraid of heights.
IV.
And then there is what might be.
Once upon a time there was a child, spoiled and sulking. A fattened lamb stumbling on a sidewalk. Once there was a shy girl, withdrawn and quiet, watching her fading breath fog cold windows. Once there was a woman, formed and gentle and unknown, standing on the edge of her future.
Once there is a woman, a child, a new-thing, with bloody brown sickles on the tips of her fingers, and a quiet old forest that no longer seems as large or frightening as it once did.
Gender:
Points: 1040
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