Young Writers Society

III. Ana

Ana slept for a very long time, and while she slept she dreamed. She dreamed this: a tiny human hazy like the breath between stations on the FM radio when Ana would sit in the cab of her husband’s pickup truck. She dreamed this: a life held with a light touch, like the tips of her fingers on the radio dial. She dreamed this: a husband throwing open the back screen door, shouting to turn the damn thing off already before you run the battery down.

Something had followed her to the edge of the forest. It loomed there, a shadow quaking, waiting for a blip in the frequency large enough to slip in.

IV. Esther

It had not taken long to find the trail Ana had carved between the trees. Esther traced it back through the forest, leading the old quarter pony along beside her. She wrapped her hand in the pony’s bridle in lieu of her walking stick - the rain had made her knees ache - and slipped the grimoire in a bag over the saddle just in case.

The pony - who she plainly called Jane - snorted. She tugged on her reins, pulling Esther back from where she had been about to step in an oval of sickly green muck.

“Unusual,” Esther murmured, and stroked the side of Jane’s head.

The forest where Esther lived was an unusual one in many ways, but in one it was quite normal: from the outside, it looked like any other forest in the Pacific Northwest. It was scattered with pines that grew tall enough to block the sun from the rocks and other fauna that did not die when the winter cold came. There were lakes and rivers and small animals who burrowed in the soil and wreaked havoc on every rose garden Esther had attempted to grow.It lived within the elegant crescent-moon of a larger, sprawling wood. Esther’s forest was the bit blocked out by the sun.

The things that were unusual about Esther’s forest were more difficult to pinpoint. This muck, dashed with a pregnant girl’s footprints through the forest, was one of them.

Esther and Jane pressed on. They didn’t stop again until they reached the place on the edge of the forest -- some half a mile before the highway that struck an alley between two strips of dense, towering pine -- which Esther knew as the Veil.

No one had ever told her what had brought the veil upon the forest. Frankly, it had never concerned her enough to ask. It had been her impression that the forest had been as long as the rest of the things that the world she knew had been built upon had been. She supposed that as long as there had been a forest, there had been a Veil.

Esther knew the Veil first not by sight but by the way it made her feel. It drew the static from her ears and danced it along the little grey hairs on her skin. She closed her mouth and breathed through her nose, waiting for the rush of static to dissipate into the dull, thumping morse-code-frequency of her own mind.

It was the Veil conducted through her.

A series of long and short sounds. Four long, short, long, short, long, short. Torn.

Tightening her grip on Jane’s bridle, Esther reached a hand into the Veil. It rippled and snapped at her knuckles, but above all things the Veil was greedy. It drew her in, pouring over her skin and smoothing the wrinkles from the back of her hand. Briefly, Esther glimpsed the mottled gleam of the engagement ring Tommy Porter has given her on a gloomy Sunday afternoon. Then, tucked beneath it, the antique wedding band Fanny Price had passed her beneath the pillow of Esther’s childhood bed.

This was the Veil’s magic trick: to weigh so heavily upon a heart it drove you home where you belonged. For Esther, there was no home left to belong to. She pressed her lips in a thin line and felt for a tear.

She found it, brief and jagged, where the air shimmered slightly the way a spiderweb could in the sun. A long time ago, Fanny Price might have pointed it out to her, bidding her to hold her breath and watch for fairies.

Esther withdrew her hand from the Veil. Her skin stung, as if it had been pulled to tightly around her bones, but the magic let her go. Jane snorted, disapproving.

Esther was the sole being permitted to pass freely through the Veil, though rarely by any means other than the gate Sebastian had built for her at the end of her lane. Still, even she was not immune.

In the bag with the grimoire over Jane’s saddle, Esther found an old ladies watch. It was the sort with a chain that could be worn around the neck by women like her mother who wanted to appear as if they had the kind of obligations that required a careful keeping of time. Esther knew that, in fact, time would wait for women like Esther’s mother.

She took the ladies watch and a small garden spade from the bag and dropped to her knees. She dug a small hole at the point the tear in the Veil met the earth, murmured her words, and buried it.

Ahead, the Veil sighed in relief.

Jane ducked her head for Esther, and she used the pony’s reins to haul herself from the ground. Ana’s murky footsteps steamed on the forest floor, though the muck lessened the further her path went. The Veil had let her pass, but the forest had not wanted her. Not at first, at least. Esther wondered what it could have been that made the forest take her.

“This is a dangerous thing, Jane,” she said, stroking the pony’s nose.

Jane searched Esther’s palm for a bit of apple or sugar. Esther took a hunk of dry carrot from her pocket and offered it.

“I don’t suppose everything will simply go back to normal, will it?” she asked.

Jane snorted, and turned back toward the cottage, tugging on Esther’s grip against her bridle.

“No, I thought not,” Esther said, and followed.