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Lottie Matthews stood on the edge of something terrible and tempting. Wraithlike mist wafted off the cold, grassy ground and swirled around her ankles, obscuring her boots. Making it look, at least if you were looking from a distance, like she was floating. (Floating into the sky that had burned up that day so many months ago, burned up with a brave blonde and Lottie's broken heart suspended in it.) She wasn't floating, of course, she was merely standing there, kicking at the dirt. Drawing arcs in the soil with the toe of her shoe.
The forest was dark and all-encompassing before her, familiar in intimate and inarticulable ways. It was like looking into a mirror of her own soul. (Lottie didn't know where she ended and the wilderness and all its divinity began. They had always been tied together, but now once clear lines had been blurred and blurred until Lottie was the forest's god and the forest's god was Lottie. And neither the forest nor its chosen prophet could separate, could ever go back to the way they were before, no matter who tried to tear them apart.) The wind was cold as it blew against her, but Lottie didn't feel a thing. She had become accustomed to the elements, her very skin toughened up like a big callus during those nineteen months out there. Survived, people say, when discussing the Yellowjackets. Thrived, Lottie thought, because she didn't come out the girl she once was, she killed that girl and ate her whole, and goddamn it she was better off - more powerful than anyone could ever know - for it.
Of course, her parents didn't see it that way. Her parents barely saw her at all - they saw the skin of a girl but not the godhood inside. They saw the shell of the daughter that first entered the all-encompassing wilderness (entered it in a crashing plain, her hands gripped so tight by Laura Lee's) and they didn't understand the creature that came out, the ruinous and ravenous woman anointed by antlers.
Then again, her parents hadn't ever understood what she was. How could they? They were only human, and the most ordinary, boring type of humans at that. Her dad was unable to see beyond his narrow, money-tinted view of the world, and her mom was too easily cowed, to weak to fight for what she wanted. They wouldn't have lasted in the forest, that was for sure. They didn't have what it took to make it out there. And even if they managed to get off their asses and try, they would fail, fail because the wild was Lottie's and Lottie was the wild and neither the girl or the god or the greenery would allow the couple to live. They were fools, and the wild did not suffer fools, especially not these two who had already served their purpose, already brought a prophet into the world. (Lottie would have torn them to fucking shreds, if they were there in the wilderness, she would have eaten them all up. They had denied her understanding, which was its own form of sustenance, for so long, it would be a form of retribution, to take the nourishment parents were supposed to give to their children. And, of course, there was always something so satisfying about devouring the nonbelievers.)
As it was, since they weren't here now, all Lottie could do was leave them in the past, where such trivial things always belonged. She walked into the forest - not exactly the forest she knew, but connected to it, the closest she could get - and she didn't look back.
