Slumber of the Woodland

The Breath Of July

The fragrance of scotch pine and blue spruce is pungent in the air, amplified by the heat of late June. Or so you think it is June. This place feels oddly void of time. You open your eyes to see a sun hazed over by stratus clouds. From all angles you spy familiar wooden structures.

You are back.

You sit up with your legs tucked under your bottom and bask in the estival air and all of the scents that waft within it. You furrow your brows, thinking that it is not as clean as before. Even so, the place hums with earthy energy. A stronger gust of wind picks up the hem of your shirt and flutters your hair. You notice for the first time, the string of beads and feathers woven through strands of it.

When you check for your rope bracelet you notice a faint fir-green glow on your palm. It is a circle with a shaded dot in the center and another smaller shaded dot that lies out side of the circle and to the right. There is a third hollow dot at the bottom.

The sigil of Mother Earth.

You can feel that earthy energy buzzing in your hand. Behind you, at the edge of the forest is an elf, in her arms she carries a prismic bouquet of flowers with pastel petals strewn of thin diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, and amethysts.

She sets them down beneath a cypress.

You sense a vacancy in her soul.

She has lost someone and the cypress guards their soul.

You take a deep breath, but it is smothered and you find yourself hunched over with coughs. The elf woman moves to catch you.

The grating and groaning in the distance is louder and when you look up again you notice the smoke hangs thicker in the air.

Like the flowers you wilt back over.

***

Your parents find you staring at the forest's corpse. You are slumped over and alarmingly cold, but somehow you don't feel the chill. You squint hard, trying to remember how you got here to this bleak place. You're shivering and your parents have to help you to your feet. You are dazed.

You think that you may have fainted.

You spend the next day in a doctor's office, where you are diagnosed with the common cold. Leave it to you to get sick in the summer.

You fill your sick days in your room, trying to paint the symbol you saw on your palm. But no matter how hard you try, how many times you blend the colors, you can't seem to capture the right shade of green. You never were much of an artist anyways. So you tear the sheet out of your notebook and fetch your journal. You try instead to jot down your journey to the Weeping Forest. The name isn't your best creation, but it will work for the time begin. Like the title you have made for the far off land you keep visiting, your recount of it, isn't up to par with your past works. You wonder how it is that your younger self seemed to have produced more creative and colorful works than the you in the now. This time instead of tossing your journal to the side in frustration, you fight through it, scrawling words on the paper. In the end you have a very messy story that seems all too forced.

You suppose that such is better than no story at all.

At least you wrote something again.

You are about to give it another shot, but your phone buzzes and you decide that you're due for a break anyhow. You grab your mug of honey-laced tea and pick up. Juniper asks if you'd like to join she and Alexi for a night of clubbing. Under normal circumstances you might have said yes but tonight you have to explain that you're still feeling ill and rather drowsy from the medicine you took a few hours ago. You can hear the disappointment in Juniper's voice as she says, "okay." She wishes you a quick recovery and hangs up, probably to pretty herself up. Juniper always was crafty with a makeup brush. You sip your tea and try to get some sleep.