I ran into the woods to tell Silas of the plan we had concocted, proud of what I had accomplished in finding his mother, expecting him to be excited that everything would work out. I searched all down his hillside and then back up mine, I walked the edge of the water to the very ends where the dense bushes and tree trunks blocked the path form continuing, but he was nowhere to be seen.
I trudged back up the hillside to my home, eager to see if Silas mother had spoken to mine yet, wondering where he might be, had he left the woods as he had been told not to? Was he ever coming back? Had the universe simply swallowed him back into its depths again? I took a last fleeting look back down the slope of the hillside to see if any new trees had suddenly appeared just in case.
I took the few final steps out of the woods and onto the narrow yellowed grassy patch that separated the magic of the trees from the reality of my house, and promptly tripped, smacking my face into the rough gravel that lay beyond the grassy patch as I collided with the ground.
Looking towards what had tripped me from my spot on the rough dry grass I realized instantly what it had been. A thick oval of lime green moss had seemingly grown up out of the ground overnight, terrifyingly similar in shape to a soft blanket covering the body of a young man.
Silas had stepped out of the woods after five years of being contained within them, and had instantly been frozen back into the earth.
I didn’t stop to think, I jumped over the form of his body, ripping away at the thick mossy layers as my knees pressed painfully into their hot spongy surface. I didn’t notice my mother approach behind me, nor Silas’s mother as she rounded the gravel drive to our home. I concentrated on nothing but setting Silas free from the dense moss and roots that continued to bind him to the earth, unmoving.
“What is that?”
My mother’s voice came from directly behind me, she was looking over my shoulder as I crouched over the mossy mass, curious at the strange site that was now emitting a soft pink steam and I dug my fingers deeper into its depths. I whipped my head around at the sudden sound of her voice that protruded my desperate frenzy, but my eyes looked past her, at Silas mother whom had stopped just a few feet from the edge of the narrow strip of grass. I begged her with only my eyes in pure desperation, silently pleading for her help.
She shrugged a sorrowful glance at me as she approached my mother who was still focused on the strange mossy heap that was now creating a pinkish haze throughout the entire yard. I turned back towards the lime green surface that contained Silas and began digging more feverishly as she placed her hand on my mothers shoulder, gently pulling her back away from where I crouched on the earth.
“Its Silas.”
She whispered, her voice soft and strained.
She gave my mother a gentle squeeze as she said it, then crouched down to help me. Instead of viciously digging her fingers in to the surface as I had been attempting, the burns of my fingertips now fresh and raw with a burning pain again, she simply laid her open palms against the hot spongy surface. Her light touch caused the moss to emit a hot pink steam so thick that my mother who still stood in place behind us was blinded by its color. I watched as she glided her hands gently over the surface, touching every inch, and as she did, the moss began to melt away, becoming the blue lava like substance that had poured from the tree on the first night of my return. It flowed away down the hillside, pulling his body into the entrance of the trees, and I watched as the scorched path it left in its wake was quickly overgrown by fresh weeds and daisies, leaving no trace of its fiery path behind.
Silas, my mother, and I all gasped simultaneously, Silas’s mother however, stayed silent and calm in her demeanor as she stepped away from the still scorched ground. She raised her hands up towards to balconies of the trees as she stood just below their edge.
“The woods are a part of him now, and he is a part of them, they are one in the same, you made it so.”
She spoke directly to me, though my mother and Silas had diverted all attention to her too as she spoke. The next question she directed instead, at Silas.
“How did you come to be here this way?” She asked him, a loaded question with so many meanings behind its core.
“I was waiting for Silvana…she walked away from the woods, I wanted to follow her…”
He looked at the ground in shame of disobeying his mother’s one wish that he remains hidden in the woods.
Before anyone could say another word though, my mother fell to the ground, her body stiff as a board, making an audible thud as she hit the driveway causing clouds of dust to lift from the gravel below her.
Chapter Twelve
Seeing Silas resurrected from the earth just beyond her own yard had caused my mother to have a minor heart attack. When she awoke in the lilac colored hospital room she did not waste a moment trying to question what I myself had begun to accept I would never begin to fully understand.
My answers offered her no comfort as she trashed manically in the mechanical plastic bed.
“I mixed his ashes into the soil, he grew into a tree, or within a tree I guess, and then the bark cracked and he returned.”
“He is dead.”
“No, he’s alive, just like you and me.”
“Impossible Silvana. You’re just imagining it.”
“So, then Silas Mother, You, and me, somehow all managed to have the exact same image in our imaginations at the exact same time?” I was growing frustrated, how was I supposed to explain the unexplainable?
“Impossible.” She concluded with finality, as she always did no matter what answer I could give her.
When we arrived home, her speculating confusion only became worse, and I realized within hours of being back in the house where we could clearly view the woods below, that to her, Silas had become an enemy. The only saving grace of her having seen him was that I had missed my school orientation while she was being kept for observation in the hospital, and now I would be too far behind to go, thus granting my wish of remaining here with Silas.
When I would try and sneak away in the early hours of the morning, as had become my routine since returning home, she would follow me to the very edge of the woods, begging me not to go, saying that whatever Silas now was, is not right. It was an evil entity, trying to steal her only child as the woods had once stolen the Silas that she had known.
My mother’s hatred and disbelief towards Silas did nothing to curb my affections towards him, if anything, it only made me more fiercely passionate about him.
The first night my mother was home, after returning from a short walk into the woods to see Silas after being cooped up in the hospital with her for days, expecting to find her asleep, I had walked into an ambush.
She popped out from the darkness of the hallway and grabbed my face in both her hands, holding me at eye level while she screamed and prayed and demanded I never enter the woods again, I had never seen the terrifying stranger that my mother was becoming in wake of finding out about Silas and I couldn’t bear the pain it caused me.
So, I fled.
I ran blindly into the woods, hot tears blurring the outline of the trees in the dim moonlight that broke through their balconies, slamming into Silas with enough force to knock him to the ground as I reached the edge of the creek. We made love, for the first time then, in the shallow cold water of the creek. The heat from Silas’s blue lava filled body warming the ebbing stream to the point where steam rose from its entirety. We lounged in the hot spring our bodies had turned the creek into, watching in silence as the light of the moon projected the blue swirls that now seemed to be darkening beneath Silas’s bare torso.
We slept propped up against the muddy edge of the creek, waist deep in the water, until it grew cold and the sun began to rise in the sky.
I didn’t return home for two days. I lived off the wild apples and water from the creek as Silas did, high on infatuation and dazed by the strength of a young love now ripe and matured. In the dark of the night, as I leaned
into him for warmth on the cold ground, we had finally spoken of all the things we had been questioning of ourselves in silence.
“Do you believe I am really alive?” He had asked me.
“I don’t believe you ever died at all, your soul simply hid in the trees.”
“Why can’t I remember any of it?”
“Maybe you slept through it all.”
“Slept through five years?”
“You were an awfully wild boy, perhaps you needed the rest.”
I would always try and end these conversations on a laughable note, a futile attempt in lightening the morose state of confusion, thinking about all we still did not understand could bring upon us. Though we joked and avoided the seriousness of the events that had taken place, there were things we had slowly begun to learn, secrets of the magic of the woods we had slowly been unwinding in our minds, holding onto each piece of information trying to connect the dots to make any sense of anything.
We had learned that Silas had no choice but to stay in the woods, the second he would try and leave the earth would engulf him again, each time allowing him to come back to me, but he was weaker. The translucency of his skin showed more of the inhuman qualities hidden within now than of the normal flesh of his tan skin. We learned that he never grew hungry, and could survive as the plants did, purely off the water and sunshine. We also learned that though the nights were growing icier every day, he never felt cold, his body constantly heated by the strange colorful lava it contained.
When I finally returned home, caked in dirt, sunburned, and hungover from the long hours of sunshine I’d endured, my mother was waiting for me patiently. This alone did not scare me, I had expected it.
What I had not expected however, was Silas’s father.
His presence loomed over our bright living room like a dark ominous rain cloud. The years of drinking had done significant damage to Mr. Jacksons appearance, no longer was he the clean picturesque 90’s sitcom father figure who had built tree houses and mowed his vast perfect lawn every Sunday like clockwork. He wore a grey sweat suit paired with black sandals over dirty white socks, his large belly pouring out between the sea of scratchy grey. Worst of all, was the wave of the scent of his sweat as liquor seeped from his body all over our spotless suede couch.
“I don’t know what sort of games you’re playing little girl…” He started at me angerly the moment I walked through the doorway.
“You don’t need to speak to her that way.” My mother calmly interrupted him.
“Silas is dead, he has been dead for a long time, and your dredging up the past again is only hurting everyone more than they’ve already had to suffer.”
“I’m sorry…” I began to say, but he cut me off before I could continue.
“Damn right you’re sorry, I don’t care what your childish issues may be, you won’t drag the memory of my dead son into your antics anymore, are we clear?”
I didn’t respond, only nodded in agreement as I stared at my dirty bare feet. I didn’t look up again until I heard the door slam behind him and the sound of his feet as he stomped away down the rough gravel drive. When I finally looked up and saw my mothers smug smile, I snapped.
“Hey Mr. Jackson!” I called to him from the doorway, he turned around at the end of the driveway, almost out of sight, hearing my call.
“What?!” He yelled back gruffly.
“GO SCREW YOURSELF!”
I screamed with all the power my voice could summon, and I slammed the door behind me, not allowing him to respond.
I was an adult now, I would use my voice, instead of cowering like a child the way everyone seemed to still expect from me.
My mother stood to approach me, shocked at my words, a deeply concerned look now spread across her pale face. I put up my hand, as if to say stop, and made my way passed her up to the stairs to the bathroom, where I planned to quickly humanize myself before returning back to the woods. If it weren’t for the dreadlocks forming in my hair and my desperate need for conditioner I may have never returned at all.
I was leaning against the cool green tiles of the showers wall, allowing the water to flow over my body lazily. Feeling clean and renewed, when I first smelled the faintest hint of smoke wafting in from the narrow window in the shower stall.
My mother had been a smoker early on in my childhood, in the nineties when it was still mildly acceptable for the mother of a toddler to carry a pack of cigarettes in her oversized purse, that also double as a diaper bag. She had picked up that habit for a short time again after my father had passed, but quickly quit due to the judgmental glares she received as she puffed away. It made sense, that in this stressful moment, she would sneak out an old hidden pack of her long white cigarettes and steal a few puffs to ease her troubles, hidden on the narrow side area of the house. Though I was mildly surprised at the smell, I didn’t feel the need to investigate further, she would have her secrets, and I would have mine.
I dressed slowly in my room, brushing my hair back lazily, not bothering to hurry, for I knew Silas would be right where I had left him when I returned. Every single pair of my jeans had now been cut into jagged edged shorts by Silas, and I slipped a pair on, admiring how tan the skin on my legs had become. I strolled down the hall and out of the back door to the deck, hoping to not run into my mother on my way into the woods.
The heavy scent of smoke that smacked into me like a brick wall, knocking the air from my lungs, was the first thing that alerted me that running into my mother had soon moved to the bottom of my list of concerns.
Our beautiful wooded kingdom, was burning bright with thick red flames.
The heat from the massive fire was already pushing out into our yard as I sprinted into the woods, my mother screaming behind me as I flew down the hillside, whose trees were already speckled in flames.
“Silas! Silas?!” I screamed as I ran, stuttering as I choked on the heavy black smoke that now spread through the entire woods like the dark of night descending.
I ran with my eyes closed, my shirt held tight over my face, relying on only my feet to remember the path down to the creek. I didn’t open them or stop until I felt my body spring forward, toppling into the cold water.
From my place now deep in the shallow water, I could see to either end of the creek, but a deep grey haze that hovered just above it blocked everything else from view. I had expected Silas to be in the water, the only sensible place for a boy who could not leave the woods during a forest fire.
“Silas!” I screamed again into the grey haze, but it was not his voice who answered.
“Screw me? Nope! Screw you, you little brat!”
Mr. Jacksons voice came out of the distance, heavily slurred but still simple enough to understand. He had started this fire, in retaliation for my attitude towards him. His words left me freezing cold despite the fire burning bright all around me.
I was stuck in place under the waters safe ripples as the burning embers of the sweet maples began to fall to the earth all around me.
“Help! I’m in the water! Silas!” I screamed again just as the burning trunk of one of the larger maple trees crashed over the creek only inches from me, creating a wave of embers that blew into my face, clinging to my hair, burning me with a horrific smell almost instantly. I plunged into the water, soothing the burns, my mind racing with why I was here, yet Silas was nowhere to be found. I’m not sure whose survival I was more focused on.
I could hear the earth-shattering thumps of the towering maples as they fell to the ground from my place under the water. When I finally came up, gasping for air, I found that I had become trapped even further, two brightly burning maples laid across the creek on either side of me. The white flames were the only light that showed through the dark black smoke that had engulfed the entirety of the woods around me.
I could hear Silas’s father laughing somewhere far off in the distance, as well as the faint cries of my mother still in her place on the edge of the woods among the cr
ackling of the flames and thumping of the trees breaking.
“He!” I had meant to scream for help, but was quickly cut off as the flaming bark of a falling tree came into view, headed right towards me.
I had no choice but to plunge back under the water.
I could feel the heat of the flames from the tree as it connected with the ground on either side of the creek above me. I gripped my hands into the slimy brown tendrils that grew on the creeks soft floor, dragging my body under the water, trying to find a place where I could come up and finally breath again without being burned alive. I was panicking, my thudding heart beat now the only sound that filled my head.
Suddenly, as if someone had switched off the only lamp left in the universe, everything went black.
Chapter Thirteen
While I had been in the shower after our confrontation, Silas’s father had been in his large backyard that overlooked the woods he hated so deeply, chugging down a plastic handled bottle of whiskey. Within the time it had taken me to wash the dirt out of my hair, he had finished the entire bottle, turning it upside down to savor the last few precious drops before cracking open the top of another that he had ready at his feet. The second bottle he drank with more care, taking hearty swigs and swirling the hot liquid around in his mouth, relishing the burning sensation it brought him. As I was scrubbing the layers of dirt from my arms, he stumbled, with the bottle in hand, into the woods below, for the first time since he had carried the broken body of his dead son out of its yellow veil. He walked to the place where he knew he would see the tree that he had broken the ground, the tree that had taken the life of his only child.
Perhaps the moment could have been one of resolution and acceptance, if Silas had not been sitting atop the very center of the tree his father now looked down upon.
Mr. Jackson had screamed in a disbelieving drunken rage, the sound echoing all the way to my house, though under the steady stream of water I had not heard it. He had waved the bottle in front of him, as if to throw it, but instead thought better and fell to the ground in order to catch it. He crawled back up the steep hillside in a drunken stupor, the contents of the bottle slowly pouring out behind him in a steady trail as he made his way up. When he had finally reached the top he pulled himself up on the last of the trees that separated his yard from the woods. He had smashed the bottle into the ground, its empty plastic shape simply bouncing down the hill, angering him even further.
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