If a tree could muster the courage to leap with all its roots towards the sun, this one would have been more likely to singe its crown than I was to reach the branch outstretched across the path. I thought its leaves would sooner clear the gap from October to April, but then I saw her eyes’ moss-tempered glint flow into the day from behind their little glass lenses.
I don’t know where this slobbering dog came from, but she didn’t bring him. She walks alone through the woods whenever she can escape whatever tragedy she’s trapped in for long enough. She barely even brings herself, if it’s just a mask that hides her from others and their cryptic human demands. He’s been waiting for me to slip into his jaws since before this morning’s viscous mist lifted from its pit in the forest floor.
Under cool dawn shadow, I heard him shuffle through the litter first, snuffling in its dew-clotted dust and leaf-burst. Maybe his silhouette was perceptible in the dual glow between moonlight and a new day, but I didn’t dare lower my frozen gaze. Only my ears could find a quick escape, so they followed a solo bird on a slow stroll into duet, then gathered distance from the spectre below with every voice that joined the thickening chorus. When it spread on ripples of warmth into the day’s mature hum, I remembered myself. An ache in my neck came into sharp focus and, when I nervously bent it, so did the dog’s patient stare and his tail’s menacing swish.
Even if he hadn’t appeared, crossing this path would have felt like one of those gambles where my heart might crumple to a stone on its next contraction. I’m very small. Nestled in reverence for the forest’s roots and rhythms, I’m smaller than my own fear of such a weather-haunted home. Sometimes it leaves me with no option but to dash to the other side, but I’ve never been forced to jump. I didn’t know the air would push so vigorously back against me. If it’s too heavy with the scent of earth to carry me across, her pity might be the last ever master I revere as I’m shaken out of all my awe.
Not just because my little tufted ears are pinned back in the breeze, but probably because the sound is trapped between a future and a free fall, I can only hear the empty space that a thundering rush might fill. Wasps’ grumbling complaints and robins’ whistled taunts disappeared, stuck with my worries in the branch’s sap when I leapt. The daylight is at rest against my fur. At such a weightless remove from sprawling grasses and ferns that drink it, light as the flash from murky puddles that it gilds, I might adjust well to this flight in static luminance; I might even fall asleep in time to miss my spine’s crunch between those insatiable teeth.
I’m always glad to share the childlike mirth that walkers exude when they spot me scuttling across a trunk or lifting an acorn to my nose, but the lady with glasses bathes our encounters in a humane and honest warmth that soaks all the way to the stillest core of my conscience. She smiles at me with that subtly imploring head-tilt, cradles me quietly in a pocket of solitude and with a muffled thud, the future that my fear bleeds into shuts its gate.
She wants me to achieve the nameless peace she’s chasing along my home’s leaf-shaded streams. I’m still as ice and certainly, I’m melting, but never truly frozen in her gaze. I can feel in the steady flow of breath between us that she only wants my fragile body to thrive. The tree beckoning from the other side of the path could have been further away; if this one stood alone on a hilltop, bent under the wind’s insistent gush, I’d float from my branch like hot air with her support, as high as the sky would allow before cooling and feeding my solid limbs back to the earth. Safety is close enough to align me with her kinder fantasies, though. I can almost feel it reaching through the thrum.
Last time she appeared, I was on the ground, watching water clamour to drain from the funnel between two plunging tree root ridges. The rain was attacking as if it meant to burrow straight to the source those arching roots were poised to tap. I didn’t hear her footsteps, or anything other than the incursion of relentless, lashing water. A sodden shoe sloshed into my muddy view and stopped, sinking slightly before I had time to look up at its owner.
That was the closest we’ve come to each other. She would never invite herself into my reach, the way some people do. Framed by a dripping hood, her face beamed down at me with the same adoring smile as ever. She had taken off her wet glasses, so the green-infused smoulder disclosed its unscripted self; it addressed itself directly to my soft and breakable flesh.
Normally, I would dart into the canopy to escape such raw mutual comprehension. Shrunken beneath layers of fur and foliage, I’m not even known to myself. That day, her search illuminated a dormant resistance to nature’s teeth and tears that I could only pause and passively indulge. Just enough cloud-glow wrapped our leaky shelter. The rivulet tumbled forwards.
I’m not clamped in this lost stranger’s jaw, or falling towards it any more certainly than I was when a firm branch bowed beneath my feet. I’m profoundly safe; unbound from its motion, my diminutive place among bodies bristles with pride wherever she finds it. I couldn’t have settled more joyfully into my own dreams if they weren’t floodlit in her uplifting regard. Ears of fluff hover on the clouds and in the dog’s determined gait, but both are equally distant from my quiet contentment and the tongue I wouldn’t pester to call to them. I’m here, crossing the stony path like mist on a morning’s breath. Let the sun take me.