My lost item found in the woods. Who is now more forest than boy.
I say the next thing before I can stop myself, before I can tell myself it’s a bad idea. “Okay.” A prick of unease cuts through me. “You can stay here tonight.”
One night, I tell myself. One more night, I’ll let him sleep here, this boy who speaks as if a soft wind stirs inside him, who can’t remember what happened to him the night another boy died. Whose eyes make me feel slightly unmoored in ways that make me want to scream. Walkers cannot trust our own hearts—our slippy, sloppy bleeding hearts. They are reckless, stupid things. Muscles that beat too fast, that cave inward when they break. Too fragile to be trusted. Yet, I let him stay.
I lock the front door and add more logs to the stove. And when Oliver settles onto the couch, I see he still has the bag of herbs I gave him, clutched in his hand. I was certain he wouldn’t keep it—but he did.
“Thank you,” he says to me, and I stall at the bottom of the stairs, chewing on the side of my lip, twirling the moonstone ring around my finger.
“Can I trust you?” I ask. Too late now, I think. I’ve already let him stay. I’ve already let my heart slip two degrees off-center, let myself believe he might be different. That he isn’t like the others. That he might have the same hole inside him that I do. And if he says no, will I force him to leave? Probably not.
He watches me with his moon-deep eyes, and my head feels fizzy and light, filled with feathers and dust, no rational thoughts skipping around up there. Only seasick thoughts. No compass or stars to steer me back to shore.
“I don’t know,” he answers finally, and my throat feels too dry.
A boy is dead. Dead, dead, dead. The words have now lodged themselves stiffly in my skull—planted there, where they will grow roots and thorns and venomous flowers, burrowing into my thoughts, becoming true.
There is a storm growing inside me, inside this house, and it darkens the doorways—the dark spreading out from corners and from beneath old, creaky bed frames.
Back in my room, I feel alone, out of place in my own bedsheets. The loft ceiling too steep and jagged, like brittle bones that might snap at the knees and shatter. I force my eyes closed, but I see only the moth, the memory of ash-white wings moving toward me in the dark. Hunting me.
Oliver has returned from the woods.
And something happened the night of the storm. Something bad.
When you see a pale moth, my grandmother told me time and again, her eyes like black moons, death isn’t far behind.
Spellbook of Moonlight & Forest Medicine
WILLA WALKER wailed and wailed and wailed.
She was born in 1894 during the winter of an ox moon. A restless baby, she cried even when the summer stars reconfigured themselves in the sky, dancing across her hand-carved crib. Her mother, Adaline Walker, believed something to be wrong with the small child—an omen of illness or bad luck.
When Willa was sixteen, she stood on the shore of Jackjaw Lake and wept into the shallow water. Her tears filled the lake until it overflowed—muddying the banks and turning the lake bottomless.
Willa’s nightshade was more dangerous than most. Her tears could fill oceans if she let them. They could drown men and overflow rivers and turn the forest to water.
The depth of Jackjaw Lake was forever unknown after that day, and Willa’s mother made her carry a handkerchief wherever she went, the thin cotton meant to catch every teardrop that fell from her cheeks. To prevent the world from drowning.
Willa fell in love twice, and twice suffered a broken heart.
She died on the second night of Beltane, after her twenty-third birthday. Cause unknown.
Cure for Heartache & Unexplainable Weeping Fits:
Two pinches skullcap
Powder of lemon balm and Saint-John’s-wort
Nectar from a milk thistle bee
One horsehair, burnt at both ends
Combine in wooden mortar. Drink or place beneath tongue.
NORA
I shouldn’t care.
It shouldn’t matter that Oliver was gone from the couch when I woke and came downstairs—just like the morning after I found him inside the woods.
But still, I stand on the porch looking out at a trail of deep footprints cut through the fresh layer of snow, veering around the twin pines that stand guard beside my house, then wandering down toward the lake. A ripple of déjà vu passes through me, just like before—the snow falling in familiar waves, every blink of my eyelashes is a second I’ve felt once, twice before. Time swivels and then lurches back into place.
Tick, tick, thud.
I steady myself against the porch railing, hands gripping the cold wood, and focus back on the footprints leading through the snow.
This is the second time he’s slipped out of the house while I slept, and maybe I should feel angry. But something nags at me instead, a disquiet that won’t go away—a pulsing curiosity just behind my eyes that wants to follow his path, see where it leads. I can’t be sure what time he left the house, but when I touched his pillow, the scent of woods and earth still lingered against the cotton. Yet the warmth from his skin was long gone.
Fin trots down the porch steps and out into the snow, sniffing at the ground.
The sunrise is a sickly pale glow on the horizon, and maybe I shouldn’t follow his footprints, maybe I don’t want to know where he’s gone. Yet, I push my hands into my coat pockets and clomp down the steps into the snow anyway.
A boy is dead. And maybe Oliver decided to leave in the middle of the night, tried to hike down the road to town. He’ll never make it if he did. Or maybe he’s gone somewhere else. Perhaps he has other secrets he’s trying to hide—a deep well of them.
Fin leaps through the snow happily, trailing Oliver’s tracks, and when we reach the lake, the footprints turn left, toward the southern shore.
The air whirls with flecks of ice; the morning sky is velvet—like fabric that was handwoven, marred by deep clouds and imperfections. Not machine made. And Oliver’s path around the lake takes me to the small marina, where docks sit frozen in the ice, waiting for spring. Canoes rest with their bellies to the sky.
In summer, tourists converge on this side of the lake, children sprinting down the docks to fling themselves into the water, orange and cherry and watermelon Popsicles dripping onto toes and down sunburnt arms. Normal kids with normal lives—a thing I never knew. The air always smelling of sunblock and campfire smoke, the afternoons burning so brightly that nothing dark and shadowy can possibly survive.
But now, the boathouse store sits boarded up for the winter, a CLOSED sign hanging crooked above the turquoise-blue door—the wind thumping it against the wood, a thwap thwap thwap that reminds me of a woodpecker searching for bugs in the trunks of spruce trees.
“Hello!” someone calls, and I whip around to face the lake.
Old Mr. Perkins is out on one of the docks, his green rain boots kicking through a layer of snow, the hood of his yellow slicker pulled up over his head—as if it were spring, as if the air were mild and drizzling.