Page 99 of Our Crooked Hearts
I used to read so much poetry, old and new. A fluency with language and metaphor and outdated forms of speech was good for magic. A memory rose like an apparition: my mom reading a hypnotic bit of Tennyson aloud and then laughing, telling me a story about how she and my dad met.
I physically shook the memory away. Sorrow wasn’t speed. Pain wasn’t invisibility. I sensed Marion could follow the drift of grief, the perfume of anger.
I heard her, not far behind. Then closer, so close the edgesof the leaves I raced through were whitened by the light she carried. Some kind of glowing wizard orb, probably. Or maybe just a flashlight.
I’m Nobody. See me not.
I wasn’t just running away. I was runningtowardsomething. I felt an unnamed destination pulsing ahead, with a sense of nightlight safety and reaching arms, and when I got there it was a hazel tree.
Beneath the tree’s summer crown I pressed my hands to its bark, breathing its good green breath and feeling the rootless pieces inside of me settle. All the Ivys I was or used to be. Marion was so close I saw the hard arc of the light she carried, but it didn’t penetrate the circle of the tree.Mytree, that had called out to me in dreams when I was ten. Seven years ago my mother and I untangled it from a piece of bad work some other witch had woven; now it would protect me. I palmed its trunk and closed my eyes and heard Marion run right past us.
When she was gone, I said my thanks and set off again.
I’m Nobody. See me not.
I fell into a rhythm of words and the tattoo of my toughened feet. I felt my path corrected by an awareness of the moon, and tasted like sugar in my molars the places where human things cut through the trees. I followed that ache back to the road.
Don’t see me,I thought, as I dashed onto black asphalt.
And screamed.
