“Hiya, did you miss me?” I asked him cheerfully, feeling the most intense happiness that I had ever had the pleasure of knowing.
He looked up at me, his face red and blotchy from the tears that had been streaming down it all afternoon. He looked to me in that moment, like a small child needing comfort and reassurance. I reached down and tasseled his hair in my hands lightly, showing him that I was real. I was here now, everything would be okay.
He reached up to touch my bare thigh with his dirt covered hands, and the touch burned us both mercilessly. Steam rose up in between us and disappeared into the cloudless sky above.
“Silvana?” He said my name like it was a question, no longer confident in me really being me. A feeling I understood only too well.
“We had a fire.” I said with sincere sorrow in my voice.
“Yes.”
“It killed you.”
“I don’t think so..” The doubt was evident in his voice.
“No. You did, you died, and then the tree that grew from your remains killed me too.”
“I killed you?”
I hadn’t thought of it that way, had formed a separation between him and the tree in my mind. His statement, though strange sounding as it rolled around my mind, was technically true.
“In a way, I guess you did.”
He reached towards me in anguish, but I stepped away, afraid of the burning sensation he had caused before.
“You don’t trust me anymore.” He responded in disgust as I backed away from his reach.
“I just…just don’t want to be burned again.” I wanted to lean into him, to allow his body to encase mine in its safe familiarity, but my fear of being burnt had magnified since the fire, and I knew now that for the rest of my life I would be hesitant about anything even potentially hot.
He stared at the ground with his chin tucked tightly against his chest, hiding his reaction from my watchful gaze. I used to love the way he held his thoughts close, and only spoke of beautiful things, but now it was frustrating me. I wanted to understand what he was feeling and thinking, so that I could better understand what I was.
Suddenly, before I could react again, he reached out and wrapped his fingers around my wrist, pulling me towards him. I fell to the ground as he swiftly pulled away in pain, our skin sticking together for a moment before he could.
I shuffled away from him on the ground, suddenly terrified of being so near. I held my burnt wrist with my other hand gingerly, as I kicked backwards away from him with my bare feet. His touch had left a bright red mark on my flesh, the skin burned raw in exactly the shape of his hand. I expected him to follow me, to try again, so I continued moving backwards until I reached the edge of the creek, looking only at the red finger marks on my wrist as I went.
When I finally looked up, I found he had not moved an inch as I retreated away. He only stared sorrowfully towards the ground, a pure sense of despair clear on his tear stained face.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry Silvana.”
I didn’t respond.
“Where is my mother?” He asked without looking up.
“I’m not sure, she was gone when I went to find her…”
“My mother thinks I’m dead.” I added quickly.
“Well you were, weren’t you?”
“Not when she thought I was.”
He stepped towards me and I winced out of reaction, even though he was still at least ten feet away from where I sat on the edge of the creek.
“Please don’t be afraid. I promise not to touch you without your permission again.”
His words had the warm smooth texture of the sap that flowed in the creek bed behind me. It caused me to ease into him a little, to let my guard down ever so slightly. Though I still remained in my defensive crouch as he began to slowly approach me.
“Everything burned, we even burned.” He said shamefully.
“Hey Silas..”
I had avoided telling him what needed to be spoken aloud for so long already that I felt that I might burst if I didn’t release it before he came any closer.
“Your father started the fire.”
Life holds an endless series of sorrows that everyone is destined to face at one point or another, but there is no sorrow that is more devastating to bear witness to than that of a young boy realizing his father was not the hero he had always imagined him to be. Silas Jackson, though he now resided in the body of a young man, was no exception.
“How?” The word wasn’t a question, it was a strict demand.
“My mother went to him, and I found them together at my house. He yelled at me, he told me I was a liar and a bad person, that playing games with your memory was twisted..”
“Why would he say that? What did you say?”
“I was just trying to stay here with you, I only wanted my mom to understand…I never thought she would do this.”
“What did you say Silvana?”
I was suddenly scared to tell him. It was the first time I ever feared telling him anything, and just that realization chilled me to my now, always warm, core. I looked away from him and out towards the endless stream of honey yellow sap. My voice was reluctant and timid as I answered him.
“I told him to screw off.”
I braced for anger, for a fight that I felt was now inevitable. My stupid angry actions had caused all of this, a fact I was already dreadfully aware of.
Instead, as I looked out over the yellow creek, Silas began to laugh manically.
My head snapped to his direction, where he now kneeled in the ash a few feet in front of me, clutching his sides in laughter. I hadn’t expected this reaction in even my wildest thoughts, could not even begin to understand it. Had my words made him snap? After all this time had everything finally become too much and caused him to go completely mad? Each chortle of his laughter sent a new shiver down my spine after the thought had crossed my mind.
“You, the girl who wouldn’t...” His uncontainable laughter broke through as he tried to speak.
“The girl who wouldn’t even go in the water if you saw a fish, for fear you would, ha-ha, for fear you would disturb it!”
“Yea.” I responded back simply, thinking about the way the words had invigorated me when I yelled them across the gravel drive at his father before slamming the door promptly behind me.
“That is gold. Really golden Silvana.” I couldn’t tell if his good-humored reaction was real or sarcastic, had never yet seen this side of him before. It made me feel as if we were strangers, whose bond was only physical, everything else imagined.
“I’m sorry.” I spoke to the ground, not wanting to look into his crazed eyes any longer.
“Don’t be sorry. I just…” He took a long pause as a smile spread across his ashy face.
“I just didn’t know you had it in you.” He erupted in laughter again as he said it.
Though I knew the joy would eventually wear away, his warm expression and joyous tone warmed my soul, melting away any fears or concerns I had about him. I was simply happy to be in this moment, to be alive together.
Just like that, our love story began again.
Chapter Seventeen
I would like to say that our innocence was timeless as our love, that now on the brink of adulthood we were still able to ignore the world as we had at thirteen, but that just wasn’t true.
Even when you have managed to sleep through a large fraction of your life, as Silas had, there is still no complete escape from inevitable harsh realities.
We had gotten only a few precious hours of being innocently happy just to be together again, to be alive, when those harsh realities began to crash over us like the green waves of the sea I could still remember so vividly.
We were alive, even if we never understood why, and we were thankful for this fact.
The rest of the facts, as we understood them, unfortunately were not so simple.
The first, and most prominent issue we faced, was our inability to touch ea
ch other without burning ourselves as if we had touched a fresh flame. Something had changed now, there was a shift in the air all around us since the woods had been turned to ash.
“I was thinking about it, we’ve gone through these woods a million times, and there was always only one oak tree.”
I tried to think back to a time before Silas as he spoke, to when I was a small child toddling precariously on the edge of the woods, but could never remember there being any towering branches other than the ones of the tree that Silas had fallen from.
“There was the one you fell from, and then the one I planted. There was another too, I’m not sure how it got there.”
“And the last one was yours.”
Though I had a much more vivid memory of death than Silas had, I still could not fathom that at one point, I had too been a tree. He had described it just as I had seen it happen before, but all I could see from my perspective was the sea of green. No matter what evidence remained, it was simply too hard of an idea for me to grasp.
“Now there are two.” I realized aloud.
“We aren’t trees Silvana.”
“Aren’t we though?”
Once we realized that we were less human, and more the last part of the woods that remained alive, things became gradually less stressful for us.
It was impossible to not feel the dense melancholy that rose up from the ashes of the trees. No matter how many happy moments we managed to produce, we always came crashing back to reality in the scorched section of earth we were eternally stuck in. Well, we assumed we were stuck here eternally. We knew that when Silas had tried to leave, the hot moss had overtaken him. Since I too held the blue glow within me and had died my own tragic death, we simply assumed it would be the same for me now as well.
Our desperation for water was overtaken by our desperation to not be encased in the forested floor of the burnt woods. We found that we could survive on just the light of the sun, but it was an uncomfortable existence. We were trapped in a vast burnt wasteland inevitably.
It didn’t take us long before we gave in and decided to just make the best of it with what we could.
From the creek that still flowed with hot honey yellow sap, the entire world looked burnt and desolate. It was as if Silas and I were the only two souls left to bring life back into the earth, and so that is what we set out to do.
Though we spent days searching through the ashes, our bodies turning black as night, we never found any sign of life left besides ourselves.
We had explored our little wooded kingdom endlessly in our youth, but we had never gone beyond the thick tree line that blocked the rest of the woods from ours. We could see now, since the fire had plowed destructively through, that the woods beyond ours were scorched and blackened as well. Although they mimicked our own woods in almost every conceivable way, there was something sinister and forlorn about them. We had avoided even glancing in their direction in the weeks that had passed as we endlessly searched for the life we would never find.
“Do you think it will pull me in like your yard?” Silas had finally asked aloud as we passed its edge on what I guessed was the beginning of our third month of renewed life.
“Technically it’s still the woods, just not our woods.”
“We won’t survive like this here forever, nothing will. We don’t have another choice.”
“Silas, I don’t trust those trees, and the last time I didn’t trust a tree it killed you so…”
“Well if you want to be technical, there are no trees, just burnt piles of bark.”
I had a love/hate relationship with his logic, sometimes it made things easier, sometimes harder, but it was always completely impossible to argue with.
“I want to go first.”
I knew he would argue, saw his lips already forming into a solid no, so I reacted before he could. I ran full speed into the woods beyond ours, stopping only when I reached the small pile of blackened bark that separated our kingdom from the rest of the world. I knew, that despite our similarities now, that I would have a better chance of getting out. The woods had not yet proven its hold on me as it had done to him.
I took one last dramatic step over the pile of burnt bark and touched my bare foot to the ground on the other side, nothing happened, and so I followed with the other. Still, nothing happened. I walked a few more steps, expecting the ground to begin the consume me in the hot green moss that had covered Silas, but it was only soft and unmoving under my feet.
Silas was watching me from just beyond the border of burnt trees, a look on his face like he was viewing a ghost.
A deep rumble coming from beneath the earth caused me to direct my glance to my feet again, making it so I did not see Silas as he began to step over after me.
“Does it feel hot to you?” His voice caught my attention, and I looked over just in time to see him with his foot hovering just above the ground.
“Stop!” I commanded him, and he obliged, retreating to our side of the woods. The earth immediately grew cold and unmoving again.
“You’re too much a part of it.”
I had wondered this since the day I first watched him lounging on the edge of the creek, and now the final answer was right in front of me.
I loved the woods, thought of them as warm familiar friends. Silas, on the other hand, was a part of them. He always had been, even before his untimely death. He was always meant to be here, eternally, while I was only meant to pass through.
He nodded in understanding, not needing to speak because he already knew too, he was more a part of the trees than the trees themselves.
I walked steadily into the burnt remains of the woods that lay just beyond our kingdom, Silas growing more and more distant, until finally I could no longer see him at all. The fire seemed to have passed through all the world, in a wave of utter destruction which I was now the sole survivor of.
After what felt like hours, I finally reached a break in the woods, it was the road that I knew would lead into town from my house. It looked so strange and unfamiliar to me now, as if I had no memory of ever driving down its winding path before, though I knew I had many times.
The road seemed to be a bridge between two separate worlds, the burnt and desolate one in which I stood, and a lively lush green one which stretched out onto its other side.
I was at a literal crossroad.
If I stepped onto the road, I could be stuck there for all eternity, encased in a neon green mossy prison. If I didn’t, we might not survive, Silas especially.
Surviving had become almost a silly concept to us. We knew too well the magic of the woods and its ability to reincarnate our souls now. The fire had changed all that we thought we had known, the only fact remaining being that ash could not grow from ash. This knowledge had been enough to propel me this far, but now I stood unsure of which way to go next.
I lifted one foot over the road, hovering just above it. I felt it then, the warmth Silas had commented on as the earth rumbled below us. I couldn’t cross, I felt it in every drop of the warm blue liquid that had replaced my cold blood.
I couldn’t go forward, and I refused to go back.
So, I went sideways.
I followed the road down away from my home and my wooded kingdom. I followed it till I could hear traffic and the buzz of the town that lay just a few curves away. I followed until finally, I reached the edge of a small wooded area left mercifully untouched by the flames that had devoured everything else.
I dove happily into the crunchy leaves that covered the soft ground, rolling into the hearty trunks of the trees in joy. I wanted to remain here forever, to never return to the vast wasteland that my kingdom had now become. The only thing that kept me from falling into a happy slumber under the lush branches was the thought of Silas still waiting for me in the ashes of our kingdom.
It wasn’t hard to find what I was looking for. The towering oak stood in the very center of the little wooded area, just the same as the one had in our kingdom.
Small yellow acorns littered the ground around its massive base, and I piled as many as I could into my arms, dropping a couple with each careful step I tried to take.
I had seeds, miraculous, glorious seeds!
Seeds weren’t really a triumphant victory unless I could find water too though. I raced back through the woods, back to where Silas stood waiting for me. A car passed as I ran along the side of the road, and I made eye contact with the driver, only for a moment before disappearing into the burnt remains of the woods.
It was Neil Martin, my almost-first-kiss.
Silas was waiting for me exactly in the spot I had left him, the sight made me sad for him. I may have been confined to the earth, but he was confined to only this small patch of it. I dumped the seeds over the pile of burnt branches that separated us at his blackened ashy feet.
“You’re not coming back?” He asked in surprise as he watched me step away from the barrier between us.
“Seeds aren’t capable of much without water.” I tried to tell him in a hopeful tone.
“Yea, I guess not.” He agreed glumly. I could tell he didn’t want me to leave again, but I knew he wouldn’t tell me not to go. So, I retreated, following the skinny path of the creek that still flowed brightly with the honey colored sap, hoping it would lead to water eventually.
I wasn’t walking for very long when the creek suddenly came to a halt.
A towering oak tree, the spitting image of the one Silas had fallen from, stood in the center of the creeks bed. The honey like sap seemed to flow directly into its roots, giving it a warm glow despite being deep in the shadows of the blackened hills.
I don’t think I will ever fully understand what propelled me to reach out and touch the trees rough bark in that moment, but that is exactly what I did. The heat that engulfed me the moment I touched it was what I imagine it would be like to have a firecracker blow up in your closed fist. It was only when I rolled my head in pain that I realized the sap was flowing the opposite way, coming directly from the tree.
I only had a moment to savor this realization, before the tree burst into flames before me, turning to ash in the blink of an eye.
Honey Roots Page 11
