The hag the girl the woods

The Worm

If she could talk between frantic breaths she'd tell you this: Leave me to the fields and trees. Let me run and fall and scab my knees and sing.

She wailed, shrieked, screeched in he-he-he's, and cracked her elbows and palms against the honeyed grass, falling into a manic cartwheel dance across the worksite as her bruises pounding in time with her breath. The girl's eyes always returned to the powder blue above her, not a care for where her bare feet would land. Spin after spin she found herself halfway across worksite and onto the field she had eyed from her new bedroom window.

Realising how far she's come from home she fell into a more subdued performance and walked with the confidence that not much could have followed her from the council estate, apart from the pigeons above. Between themselves they cooed with their bent necks as if trying to measure the whole of her, drawing their eyes down from her knotted brown mop to her pocket-sized feet, wondering what type of worm she could possibly be.

Only messes of memory held onto shapes from before the escape; the clumsy woman upstairs, the dogs in the shared hallways, the parents she lived with realising their new flat was no dollhouse on an island.

Before long she found the bramble hedge of the field and squirreled her twiggy limbs through, ripping at her hair every time it caught on thorns. From one world to the next, she pushed through the pulling pain and landed on the shadowed ground.

She took her first breath in the woods and sat for a while absorbing the energy that hummed with petrichor and mulched leaves. Looking up she watched the heavy sun make air weave between the branches, spotlighting dust and bugs ruining their own world. The woods, with so much life and death, filled the girl's stomach with a new kind of food.

At last, she felt at peace, her breath, her step, her woods.