The incredible urge to tear my stomach open came to my mind again with a reckless insistence. My entire body burned as the light grew brighter, creating an aura of watercolors that encased the tree and I in its hearty glow.
I had survived the fire only to be burnt alive from a light that now resided within me.
I had asked Silas of what he remembered of his death often in the first days after he had reappeared, but he had always told me the same thing. He remembered nothing, there was only a black void, as if he had gotten a good night’s rest. Only he awoke from that rest nearly five years later than he thought he did.
Where Silas’s death had been a dark and silent void, mine was exactly the opposite.
All the colors that did not belong in the rainbow appeared before me, swirling and dancing, making my eyes move restlessly as I tried to follow their paths. A soft melody played, the melody of the woods as they had been, the wind in the leaves and the birds hidden beneath, our laughter under it all.
I lost grip on reality gracefully, as if I were floating away into the clouds of radiant colors. I felt strong and confident, sure and delicate, I felt everything I ever had been and everything I ever could be all at the same time.
Perfection, I had thought, was the feeling of lying in the cool breeze of the late afternoon, your feet in the water and your face in the sun, the love of your life lounging lazily at your side, beautifully hungover from the sun and radiance of young love, but I had been wrong.
It wasn’t so much peaceful as it was invigorating, I vibrated with excitement as I floated through the endless stream of colors.
Dying was the first time I ever truly felt alive.
Chapter Fifteen
Silas awoke in the cool shallow hole where there had once been a large oak. His untimely death had caused looks of pure anguish to spread across many a person’s face, but none even came close to comparing to the utter despair that was clearly written all over his own as he took in the sight of the now burnt and barren woods that surrounded him.
When he tried to look down into the hole, away from the horrible sight of the remains of the woods, he was momentarily blinded by the bright blue light that glowed from beneath him.
He did not remember the fire, did not remember pulling me out of the creek and becoming engulfed in flames as he pushed my body with all the force he could into the hole. All he remembered was the sound of his mother’s desperate voice, and the strong smell of whiskey in the air.
The blue lava like substance had burned me from within, turning my body to nothing but a pile of fine ash that radiated with a swirling blue glow. I was lost in the never ending colorful clouds, unaware of Silas presence on earth. All that remained to signify that I had once stood in the place he was now curled into were the metal button of my cut-off shorts and the gleaming dull blade of his broken knife, which I still carried with me always.
Silas had become used to the blue glow of the light that came from inside him, and wondered only of how it had secreted out of his body as he slept. The thought that the blue light was no longer his, but mine too now, never crossed his mind.
Though there was very little Silas Jackson understood about the magic that had reincarnated him, he understood perfectly what the sight of the tip of his old broken blade meant.
I was gone, diminished to nothing but ash, just as the woods he loved had been.
In the blink of an eye, everything he had loved had burned away. He pulled himself out of the hole, clutching my hot blue ashes in his tightly clenched fists. He stumbled in his despair, my remains beginning to melt the flesh of his palms.
Silas had been spared all the hardships that are unavoidable in youth for most, he had simply slept through all the troublesome years, awaking as a child in a young man’s body, never really aware of the time he had missed out on. This fact shone brightly as he began to react to the unfathomable realities he was now forced to face. He responded in the only way his childish mind knew how. He fell to the ground in a desperate tantrum, screaming with all the power he could muster for his mother.
He fell into a deep sleep on the edge of the honey colored creek, exhausted from his futile effort to receive comfort. Unknowing that is mother would never hear his sorrowful pleas, as she was far away now, in California, where my mother and she held each other in the warm sand of the beach, grieving for their children who they believed had vanished forever in the towering flames that devoured the woods between their homes.
It was an odd pairing, my mother and Mrs. Jackson. My mother still refused to believe that Silas had ever returned, and Silas’s mother still refused to not believe it. They were unified only in their all-consuming grief.
Silas’s mother had watched from behind an impassible wall of flames as he lifted me from the creek and threw my body into the safety of the shallow hole where his tree had been. She had watched as the fire consumed him, a steady stream of blue smoke permeating the otherwise black clouds that filled the sky. She could only assume then, that she had truly lost her son for good this time. She relived the grief that she had only had a short moment of solace away from in the time he had returned before once again being snuffed out.
She had gone down to the creeks dry edge, only once before departing.
She had walked right past my blackened body, as I slept in the ashes of the woods, unable to see me as I blended into the ground below. She had found the solitary oak tree that remained in the vast wreckage of ash. She had hugged the tree with all her strength, holding on until her muscles finally seized her away under the pressure. She stared at the tree, at its rough bark and low hanging branches, and became consumed in the idea that it in no way could be her son, despite the magic she had bared witness to before.
A single tear fell from her face into the base of the trees hearty trunk before she turned and left, feeling that her son would never come back to her again.
My mother had heard my screams, my desperate pleas becoming fainter in the distance as firemen were forced to physically hold her back from running into the flames after the sound of my voice. She believed in her broken state, that the sounds she had heard had been my last. The firemen told her there was no hope, no body that had been recovered, I had been reduced to ash. They had been wrong at the time, but it was enough to keep her from investigating herself. She folded into the familiar grief that had encased her after my father died, pulling Silas’s mother along with her.
Neither was sure if they would ever return to these woods that they believed stole their children. Their houses now lay abandon, identical in their vacancy’s.
Silas awoke in the heat of the sun. He listened to the yellow liquid flow in the creek bed beside him, afraid to open his eyes and once again be thrust into this new harsh reality. His mind was clearer now, the grief having begun to set in. He thought of the stories his mother and I had told him, of how I had mixed his ashes into the earth, bringing him back into the world with the power of a small trees budding life. Though I had felt alone in his abscess, I hadn’t been, his mother had always secretly been there watching me, pushing me forward into the ideas my brain couldn’t quite grasp. Unlike me, he was truly alone in the world now, left to fend for himself. He had no one to place a potted tree beside my heap of ashes, no one to silently encourage him to bring me back.
A single word blinking in his mind’s eye propelled him upward suddenly.
Seeds.
The woods were an unrecognizable black wasteland as he raced over the ashy forest floor. Though he had once been a part of these very woods, had died and grown back to life within their confines, he now felt as if he were an extraterrestrial stranger. One whom was seeing the earth as if for the first time. The familiar paths his feet had known so well had been scorched away, heaped with the grey ashes of the trees that had been consumed in flame, causing him to stumble and slide as he stepped.
At the very edge of the woods, beneath the scorched remains of what he could not see was once his father, he found wha
t he was looking for. A single acorn, partially scorched and cracked, its surface grey and faded from the soot he pulled it from.
He rubbed away the grey ash that covered it, inhaling the scent of the whiskey that had poured from his father as he had been burned alive. He couldn’t place the scent, only knew it gave him a warm familiar feeling as he caught a whiff.
He kept his hands cupped together in a delicate grasp around the small yellow acorn as he made his way steadily back to the hole, that glowed with the blue light of my ashes.
He gently placed the acorn in the center of the pile of my ashes, folding my glowing remains over it, burning his hands mercilessly as he mixed me into the earth.
There he waited, the hope of a small child illuminating him as he sat cross legged eagerly in front of the hole, but nothing happened.
He pressed his palms flat into the surface of his mixture of me, willing the earth to bring life back to my dusty remains as it had done for him. Still, nothing changed.
Silas was growing frustrated quickly, still having the patience of a boy of only fourteen. He slammed his fists into the earth that contained me, scorching his knuckles with each heavy blow. He continued like this until, finally exhausted, he laid his heaving body over the shallow hole. Utterly defeated.
He laid heavily over the base of the shallow hole, his body aching from his unsuccessful efforts to revive me. He wondered what he was doing wrong, if there was some step he couldn’t remember me telling him. He pressed his face into the scorched earth below, where the small blue droplets of sweat that fell from his torso into my mixed remains, remained unseen by him.
I couldn’t see Silas where my soul now floated, suspended in the warm embrace of the interior of a sunset. The only change that occurred in my world was a slight shift in the colors that surrounded me, bright green streaks now appeared on the endless horizon before me.
In the world where Silas still frustratingly remained however, the changes beginning to take place held a much less subtle presence.
The blue droplets that fell from Silas’s bare torso sunk into the ground beneath him, and continued down until they found the small yellow acorn. The acorn sprang to life as the blue glow consumed it. It radiated brightly underground, casting the light of a thousand suns beneath the dark earth in which my remains were mixed in. It stole my soul from the earth around it and encased it in its yellow base.
In the world of endless colorful clouds that I floated in, the light began to turn radiant shades of gold and red. The colors of our wooded kingdom. I recognized them instantly. The golden glow became brighter and brighter, until finally it consumed me, blinding me in its stark whiteness. My mind went blank, blank as the white walls of Aunt Molly’s pristine beach house.
Though I floated, unthinking in a vast sea of white, I could still feel the steady breeze of the earth as my soul sprouted from the delicate acorn in the ground.
Silas felt it too.
He arched up and away from the hole, taking into view the small sprouting of an oak that had popped up as he burrowed into the ground inconsolably. The sharp arch of his body caused more blue beads of sweat to drip away from him and into the earth. The small starting of the oak tree growing slightly as each drop was consumed by the earth below it.
I was coming back to him, he could feel it.
For the first time, Silas Jackson truly believed that the stories he had been told about him having died and been resurrected were undeniably true. This realization set a fire within him that burned even brighter than the one that had devoured me.
Suddenly, he wanted to learn. He wanted every answer to every question that passed his mind. He wanted to discover, to understand all that he now was. He began to keep a running log in his mind, containing all the questions he could think of, but was not yet ready to ask himself.
The most important question of them all being, was this existence he perpetuated in really living?
Or was it simply the bitter reality of life after death?
I had only experimented with the magic of the woods out of sheer reckless urges, Silas however, experimented with a more careful and curious approach. He searched through the dirt, looking for evidence of any abnormality in the remains of the trees. He stuck his fingertips into the burning flow of the honey like liquid that had replaced the water of the creek. He used his small broken blade, that he had plucked out from the pile of my ashes, to slice a small cut on his torso to better see the light blue substance that glowed within. After all these experiments he was still no closer to understanding what was not meant to be understood, but he was beginning to devise a wishful plan.
The small beginnings of the oak tree, that now contained my sleeping soul, had not grown a spec since he had hunched over it and watched as it sprang to life.
His first plan was to cut himself, just enough to let a small amount of the blue liquid, that replaced his blood, out. He stood above the little oak, letting the small blue drips sink into the ground around it.
Nothing happened.
His second plan was less simple than the first. He wanted to scoop up the honey yellow sap in the creek bed, and carry it to small tree, where he would slowly dribble it into the earth. The liquid was too hot to hold in his hands without melting away his flesh, so he went in search of something in which he could carry it. He tried the black crispy branches of burnt maples, and the sharp rocks now layered in a coat of grey ash, but both burned away under the heat almost instantly. He tried to use the earth itself, creating a layer between his palms and the liquid, but that failed too. No matter what he tried to use, everything was burnt to a crisp and gone before the liquid even coated its entire surface.
His third plan was mildly sensible. He ran in place over the hole, laid across it as he did pushups, jumped back and forth over its base. He tried every exercise he had seen in his life, trying to sweat blue droplets into the earth around the tree as he had before. He did not cease movement for hours, and though a fine layer of sweat shined on his dirty skin, only a few small drops actually landed in the hole. The little oak sprouted up a few inches taller, but then went back to its unmoving state.
Proud of his small success, he had continued this vigorous pattern for weeks on end, but after a month the little oak was still barley a few feet tall.
His fourth and final plan, was not so much a plan at all. Instead it was a desperate salute to the failure of his first three plans. He lay on his side in the hole, curling his body around the small oak as I had done so many moons ago with the small tree that had contained him. He allowed all his anguish to release from where he had been tightly holding it back, allowing his tears to flow to the ground beneath him.
He was soon so consumed in his own grief that he did not notice that the little oak was now beginning to tower high above him, reaching towards the sky.
Chapter Sixteen
It does not seem fair to me, that dying would be so painless, and rebirth so painful.
It did not matter what I believed was fair however, I was sprouting back to life without a choice in the matter.
A sea of colors flowed into the blank white walls that contained me, splashing into their sides in rainbows of earthy pastels. The picture that now consumed me was a watercolor painting of my wooded kingdom, its colors leaking away as if their painter spilled their water cup onto it. The colors flowed steadily into my body from my every orifice. The murky contents pushing into my mouth, up my nose, and even into my ears, where it invaded my brain, changing the color of my very thoughts.
Unlike Silas, who had slept through his death, life, and rebirth, I was acutely aware throughout the entire journey.
The earthy ocean of colors overtook my body, turning me beneath its waves as I fought to reach the surface for air. When I finally reached its top, I found myself in a stormy green sea, crashing angerly with the colors of the woods. The sea went on as far as I could see in either direction.
I was an island, lost in the sea of my own mind.
> As a small child, I would have dreams of a giant tidal wave rising into the sky, blocking the light of the sun. The wave would grow until its top disappeared, then it would crash to the ground slowly, consuming entire towns and cities. I would always remain safe from its touch, hidden in a shallow hole in the sand that somehow had an impenetrable forcefield around it.
The green wave that rose before me now was pulled directly from my childhood dreams. I was sure of this as I watched it loom over me, preparing to crash. I decided to stay still this time, and watch its decent.
After all, I was already dead, I doubted I could drown.
I was wrong.
The sting of the wave as it smacked into me contained the pain of a thousand accidental belly flops. It pushed me into the cold depths of the murky water, which became thicker and more paint-like as it deepened.
I suddenly found myself encased in the same impenetrable sandy hole that I usually retreated to when I would dream of these waves. The waves crashed over the bubble of protection that encased me in the hole, casting a dark green light into my hiding place.
After what felt like days, my body now stiff and sore from being crunched into the hole awkwardly, the darkness of the water began to fade to a hazy light green. I could see the outlines of leaves blurred in its colors. I could feel the warmth of the sun on my face again. When I tried to look down, all I saw was blackness, as if I were suspended above an endless dark abyss. The green light faded to a yellow, and then into a brilliantly blinding white.
There was a sharp earsplitting crack, and then I was suddenly thrust back into the burnt remains of the woods.
I looked down to see that I was naked, my no longer burnt flesh casting a light blue glow in the sunlight. I could see the light caramel highlights of Silas’s hair as he kneeled on the ground before me.
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