Despite the magic the woods had shown me it was still capable of only hours beforehand, I refused to believe it was Silas. Instead I categorized my thoughts into probable solutions as I had learned in my years of weekly therapy sessions in California. Maybe the Jacksons had another child that I hadn’t known about, a product of his mother’s affair with a milk man perhaps? Or maybe it was a long-lost cousin, paying his respects after being told the tree still remained? Or worse, a stranger, an intruder in our wooded kingdom, defiling the spot the Silas would never leave?
I was instantly infuriated at the thought, running past the towering impassable manzanita bushes towards the tree that passed over the creek. All thoughts of the night before out of my mind as I raced with blind fury towards the hostile intruder, who just by his presence had become an enemy. I stopped abruptly on the middle of the tree that posed as a bridge connecting the wooded kingdoms, nearly falling off into the water below as the wind was knocked out of me by the sight of what, or who I should say, laid just across the water.
I blinked spastically, pinched my bare thighs until I drew blood, held my breath until my head grew heavy but the sight before me was undeniably, indisputably, unfathomably there.
Lounging against the heavily rotting tree trunk, face tilted happily towards the rising sun, water gently grazing the bottoms of his bare feet, where I had always found him that long-lost spring of our thirteenth year, was Silas Jackson.
He looked so much the same, and yet there were subtle differences that refused to be ignored, much like the woods. His hair was slightly longer now, messier, though still the same warm honey touched color that still haunted my dreams. His eyes and smile hadn’t faltered, but a shady stubble now shadowed his light freckles. His skin was still warm and sun kissed, seemingly glowing as he lounged against the soft earth, though his body was longer now, more toned and defined, as if he had aged along with me this whole time, never having been snuffed out by the tree I now stood atop.
The lime green moss that had burned me so brutally was the most obvious change that could not be overlooked. It covered his flesh, rough patches of it invading the sunny glow of his skin, growing into the soft waves of his hair. The unearthly moss covered his feet, which also had small roots seemingly growing directly out of them, and wound up his legs, the patches getting fewer and father between as it seemed to grow from the bottom of his feet upwards. It seemed that he was more a part of the earth itself than simply a boy laying atop it now.
I couldn’t move, could scarcely breath, it was all I could handle to keep standing and staring in shock and disbelief.
“Hey there, have you seen my knife anywhere? I’ve searched through the whole kingdom, even checked under that fallen tree there. Hey how’d that happen anyway?”
A voice I was never supposed to hear again spoke in a warm casual tone as he squinted at me against the sunrise. I rubbed my raw fingertips over the shape of the broken blade in the pocket of my cut offs, unable to speak. I stared at him open mouthed, a fish out of water, still and shocked at looking death in the face.
“Silas?” I barley whispered the name, couldn’t believe the sound as it passed my lips to have any potential of truth in it.
“Yes Silvia?” He asked in a mocking tone of sarcastic seriousness, chortling to himself after.
“Are you going to come lay with me or do I have to come get you?” He continued without looking at me, a playful threat in his familiar voice now.
Though I still refused to accept that here was here, speaking to me, lounging on the water’s edge as if not a day had gone by, I could not make my feet move in any direction other than towards him. A warm and comfortable familiarity flowed through me, heating me to my core, devouring all my thoughts and fears and propelling me forward with ease, just as it had that first day that he had asked me to come to his side of the kingdom so many years ago. I floated towards him, stopping only once I’d reached the rotted stump, in sight of the tree whose trunk was still dug out to the core.
From this precariously close distance above him, I could see what my eyes had not been able to take in from my spot on the tree. His skin was still the same warm tan skin that I knew so well, but at the same time it was entirely different in every conceivable way possible. Beneath the normal sunny glow, a bright blue tone penetrated through. The lava as I considered it to be, from the night before, could nearly be translucently seen through the humanly tan tone, moving with its sparkling swirls beneath his bare flesh. I watched his open palm as it hovered over the ground, making rainbows as it made spider like movements against the leafy surface.
I laid on the ground beside him, just far enough away to stay out of reach, an unusual coupling for us.
“Why are you all the way over there?” He asked looking over at me, showing me that his eyes too, were exactly the same while somehow being entirely different.
“You died.”
I said simply. What else was there to say as I stared up into the vast sky that had once been blocked from view by the very branch that had killed him? He laughed in response.
“How are you here? Are you a ghost?” I backed away a little further.
“Do I look like a ghost?” He responded bemused. I looked him over. He didn’t look like himself, there was an unhuman presence about him that while I couldn’t directly pinpoint, was impossible to ignore, but he also did not look like a ghost I admitted to myself begrudgery in utter confusion.
“You died…You died right here. The morning after you kissed me, you climbed the big oak with looming branches to hang a rope swing, the branch fell and you died. You died, I held your ashes in my hands, I was at your funeral, your father broke the tree to the ground, you were in a blue urn…. You’re dead.”
I almost thought the words alone would make him disappear, as if he were only a dramatically lifelike figment of my imagination that if I only rationalized and accepted was not real, would vanish.
He didn’t.
“You broke your knife when you fell…”
I continued in desperation as I pulled the broken blade from my pocket to show him. He stared at it curiously, reaching up to grab it from me but stopping before he could reach, as if he were rooted to the earth below him.
“That’s no good. That must be why I’m stuck here, I must have hurt my back from the fall. Hey how’d you get the knife though?”
“You…You fell five years ago Silas…you died.”
“I’m not dead, I’m right here, just as alive as you are.”
I stared at him incredulously. He was here, there was no denying it.
“Guess we can’t put up that swing now.” He stated discouragingly, looking in the direction of the big oak that now laid across the creek.
I began crying hysterically, gasping in loud sobs as hot tears poured down my face. I had wished for so long that he would come back to me, that the magic of the woods would carry his soul back to the place in the earth he had love so deeply in his life, the place where he had taken his last breath. I had watered the ground beneath the small tree I had planted with his ashes with my tears every night for months, pleading with the universe to return him. I had left for California, and while I had not forgotten the magic of the woods, overtime I had lost hope that it could grant the one wish that I begged of it repeatedly.
I inched closer to him on the ground, claiming the place beside him that my body still knew the familiar form of, resting my head against his chest as I had on those long spring days that were now only a faded memory, closing my eyes and allowing the sun to warm my tear stained face.
“They tried to lock you away, the urn was blue…”
“Silvana, what are you talking about?”
“I mixed your ashes in with the oak behind us, that’s why it’s so big now…”
“What oak tree?”
I swiveled my head around to look in the direction of the towering oak whose trunk was now dug into and scorched from the night before, but it was gone, all the remained
was a large black hole in the earth. Just as it had been before I had found the small potted oak and the blue urn on that fateful night five years ago.
I looked away from the site of it, refusing to wrap my head around how it could have disappeared so suddenly. Concentrating instead on the faintly swirling galaxy of blue lava that hid just beneath the warm flesh of Silas arm, which somehow was a more acceptable abnormality in comparison.
“You were a tree.” I stated sternly, suddenly extraordinarily confident in the statement.
“Well that explains the moss.” He answered humorously, he laughed to himself as he grazed his hands over the neon bright moss the seemed to grow straight out of his flesh.
I turned on my side to take in the full view of his body beside mine, looking closer than I had before, still too petrified to reach out and touch him, fearing it may make him disappear, or worse, confirm his ghostly presence. Though his body lay in the same familiar cradle against the earth, I could see that this was now no longer an optional choice. Growing out of the dense mossy patches that speckled his bare back, were identifiable roots that connected him the ground below by their thick brown tendrils. The moss that seemed to grow straight out from the tan flesh of his bare waist flowed onto the earth beside him, as if it had grown over the space binding him to the earth below its damp texture. I realized then that he was nude, save for the neon green that speckled his body and covered his feet and waist in a thick springy blanket. Beneath the moss where his flesh should have been hidden below, was the lava like galaxy that had been within the moss in the tree. I realized then, that pulling away the bright layers of moss in the towering unrealistically large oak had somehow revealed Silas’s soul back into the world.
Out of reflex at the realization that somehow ripping away the moss had brought him back to me, I reached forward and dug my tender raw fingertips into the foamy green maze that covered his hip nearest me, and pulled away with all my strength. A small droplet of the blue lava substance dripped out, burning me again fiercely as I pulled away from him, letting the moss I had ripped out fall to the ground beside me, where it promptly denigrated into a fine grey ash. In the half a breath it had taken the moss I pulled away to turn to dust, more had grown in its place, denser and brighter now than it had been before my touch. Silas writhed in pain in response.
“Why would you do that?!” He screeched, his eyes wide with question. I held up my hands in between us, facing the burned raw flesh of my palms towards him.
“This moss was on a tree that I planted with your ashes, it grew in the place that big hole now lays, bigger and more alive than any tree we’ve ever seen. The bark cracked away from it as I sat here last night, and I dug my hands into the moss that hid below it, a blue lava poured out and disappeared under that tree over there, the tree that you died on…and now you’re here.”
I wasn’t sure what I was doing, attempting to explain impossibly unrealistic magic to the ghost of a dead boy, but I couldn’t stop myself.
“You died, years passed, you became a tree, and now somehow you’re back and the tree is suddenly gone. Nothing makes sense anymore.”
“But doesn’t it?” He responded to me knowingly. I used to love the way he spoke as if every sentence were a riddle. Now I found it frustrating, wanting so desperately to understand all the impossible things that now surrounded me.
“Hey Silvana.” He said softly, reaching up to push the hair away from my face.
“I’ve missed you.”
He tilted his head down and kissed me then, just as he had the first time he kissed me, a day before he had been unfairly taken by the woods we now lounged in once again. Heat poured into my mouth and though my body, tingling even the tips of my toes with the warm flow of the blue lava that seemed to transfer right from his lips into mine. As we kissed, ignoring that strange reality that now claimed us, the moss began to retreat away from his flesh. The roots that held him to the ground by the small of his back gave in a little, loosening their grip. It was as if the love that now radiated through us once again, gave into him a second chance at life, humanizing his body and bearing him back into life with a heavy breath as if he had never left.
Chapter Ten
There were now four undeniable truths that the small amount of sanity I retained within me could no longer ignore. One, Silas Jackson was now back in all the flesh and warmth of life, seemingly risen from the dead. Two, he was confined, deeply rooted into the soft ground of the woods beneath him. Three, he had, as he had wished, become a tree following his untimely death, and somehow, I had torn his body from the confines of the massive trunk that had now disappeared, as if its roots had never touched the hole that now shadowed the space where it had grown from the earth. And four, he had absolutely no hint of a memory of any of it, to him, not a single day had passed since he had fallen from the looming branches of the old oak.
Though we were once again beautifully intertwined together within our kingdom in the woods, I was solemnly alone in my insanity.
I gave into the pure madness that had suddenly become my all engulfing reality. I brushed my lips softy against his, sweating from the heat of the galaxy of lava that seemed to pour from his mouth like an overflowing faucet into mine. As we kissed, the dense moss and tough roots that held him to the earth disintegrated in the warmth that came from the combination of our embrace and the sun that had now risen high above us, unobstructed as there were no towering oaks left to shield us from its rays. He sat up, freed as the earthy remains turned to dust on the earth around us, his lips never leaving mine.
When I finally pulled away from his tight embrace to take a breath, dizzy from the lack of air, the only inhuman semblance that remained within him was the dull blue glow of the substance that now flowed through his otherwise average and lifelike body in place of where mine contained blood. My gleeful excitement over the resurrection of my first love brought tears back to my eyes, the impossibility of it all incredibly painful to bear witness to.
“I’m perfectly fine see? Why are you crying?” He asked, gently pulling my hand towards him to rest it on his warm chest, where I could feel his heart that felt as if it had never skipped a beat beneath my touch.
“This is impossible. You’re not real.” I told him, making a move to pull away from his grasp.
“I am as real as I could possibly be.”
“But…You can’t be, you died, the evidence is still all around us.” I gestured to the rusting pieces of his father’s old tractor, and to the oak that now laid across the tree, tall weeds all around it, showing how long it had laid there forgotten.
“You never made it passed thirteen years old, I moved away to California, I mourned for you for five long years. I’ve lived an entire life without you now.”
He stared at me in confusion, his eyes working out the words I had just spoken, furrowing his brow into a thoughtful frown as I stood before him in total and complete exasperation.
“I’m here now, we are together in this moment, alive and well and infatuated with love, is that not enough?” He finally concluded with a bright smile that radiated with the light of the sun.
I wanted to argue, to dig into the facts as they stood presently and divulge the information that would make sense of all the impossibilities that buzzed around us, but the simplicity of his words had discouraged my curiosity into a dust finer than even his ashes had been as they flowed through my fingers into the earth.
“Silvana? Is that you down there?”
His mother’s familiar voice broke through the silence of the woods like a rock though a glass window. She had journeyed into the yellow labyrinth of trees that she had not entered since the night she had silently watched me in secret as I spread her son’s ashes into the earth, curious as to why the looming branches of the magically large oak tree no longer stood in view of her window as they had for so many years now. The sound of voices had propelled her quickly down the slope of the hillside towards where we stood, and from the sound of her feet
haphazardly crunching into the dry leaves that blanketed the ground below, I knew she was only moments from reaching the clearing where she would see what I still could not fully comprehend. Her son, glowing in the light of day with life as if his heart had never stopped beating.
I thought of hiding, of convincing Silas to retreat into the depths of the tree trunks away from her view, but he was quicker than me. He bounded towards the sound of her voice gleefully, stopping in exactly the spot she had found his stiff lifeless body five years before.
“Hiya Mom.” He cheerfully greeted her as she appeared from behind the veil of the wooded hillside.
The years that had passed had not been as kind to her as they had been to my mother, her face was now graffitied with a maze of deep lines, her hair had become a dull and limp gray, and her body was more fragile and elderly than that of a woman of her age. Her presence was now one that reflected the grief she had held within over these long sorrowful years, weak from the persistent depression that had plagued her home since Silas’s laughter had left it forever. Though his face now shone brightly with life, her own bore a resemblance much closer to death.
She stood in shock, pale as ice from seeing what she believed was the ghost of her son, somehow aged in his death. She looked past him at me, searching my face for a confirmation that I was not prepared to give. I shrugged ever so slightly, unsure of even my own thoughts as she approached him. Though I could not voice any sort of closure or confirmation to her, her pale presence had swept away any belief I had in all the events of the last twenty-four hours simply being a lively figment of my imagination. The final realization sent chills down my spine, freezing the warmth I had retained in my blood from Silas’s hot lips on mine.
She stood in place, still and unblinking as a stuffed lion, so inanimate, I thought for a moment that she may drop dead from the shock.
“Silas..” She breathed the name, her voice hardly even a whisper just as mine had been.
Honey Roots Page 6