Page 32 of Into the Heartless Wood
And yet.
You have changed me.
I’m listless through dinner. Distracted charting the stars with my father.
He goes to bed, and I do, too. I pull the covers to my chin. Close my eyes.She’s a monster!I scream inside my own head.It doesn’t matter that she’s beautiful.
You have broken me. You have changed me.
I know it’s inevitable, but I lie here as long as I can bear it, longer, before at last I get up and shove my feet into my boots.
You have changed me.
I have to know if that’s true. I tell myself that’s the only reason I step from the house and pace up to my father’s wall.
I can’t quite justify scrambling over it, so I sink to the ground, my right shoulder pressed up against the stone. I sit there as the summer night grows deeper, as the chill of the earth and the wall shiver through me.
I sense the moment she’s there, on the other side. There’s a change in the wind, a subtle difference in the way the leaves rustle over the stone. The slightest hint of sap and flowers.
“Tree siren,” I say to the wall.
“Boy.” Her voice is muffled by the stone.
The grass ripples in the breeze, and I forget what I want to say to her, why I thought it necessary to have a wall between us when I said it.
Monsters can be beautiful.
“Why did you leave the violets on my windowsill?” It’s not what I meant to ask.
For a while there’s silence from the wood, though I know she’s still there. I would have felt it if she’d gone.
“I wanted you to remember me,” she says at last.
“Why?”
The wind picks up, branches swaying wildly over the wall. Somewhere deep within the forest a wolf howls at the moon.
“I did not want you to think me only a monster.”
Her confession makes me uneasy, far too like the thoughts that won’t leave my own head. I force out the words I came here to say: “Thank you for saving me and my sister. But I’m not coming back into the wood anymore. I shouldn’t even be this close to the wall.”
“Are you afraid of me, Owen Merrick?”
The wind whips wilder and wilder, and I have the funny idea it’s picking up on her mood. My name on her lips makes me shiver. “Yes.” It’s the truth, even though I don’t quite fear her in the same way as before.
“Do you always run from the things that you fear?”
I don’t know why she’s asking me this, if she wants some sort of confession in return. That isn’t something I can give her. I stand up, and on the other side of the wall, she does the same. I forgot how tall she is—her face is visible overtop of the wall, her hair tangled with leaves and petals in the wind.
“I am what my mother made me,” she says. “But I do not wish to be. I am—different than I was.”
My uneasiness sharpens. Her words are seductive—they’re what I want to hear. But that doesn’t make them true. “I have to go.”
“Stay.” There’s a longing in that one word, a loneliness that knifes into me.
I shake my head. “I can’t.”
“Then come again tomorrow.”
