The Highlands

Three times the highlands called, and three times she answered.

It happened first on a gray Wednesday, when she was eleven years old. Heavy rain clouds loomed overhead as she trudged along the narrow road that connected her grandmother’s house to the village. She had a bag slung across her shoulders, filled with enough bread and cheese to last them three weeks, and her back ached under the weight. The rest of her felt numb. Eleven years was a young age to begin feeling trapped, but begun to feel it she had. The death of her parents had made her world shrink to a narrow point, one she couldn’t envision herself escaping. It was an idea that hung on her at all times, like the heavy moss of the tree branches outside her grandmother’s home. A shrill, unexpected whinny punctured the busy noise of her mind, and her eyes swiveled up from the dirt.

Not far off stood a young horse, a glossy, glassy dark green, and dripping wet. She froze, and her heart began to rattle in her chest. Her grandmother told her never to touch strange horses that came near roads or lingered close to creeks and rivers. She had ruefully laughed it off as one of her grandmother’s silly ghost stories, designed to make her feel like a child again and not a girl who had seen her whole family die.

The horse cocked its head at her, the way she’d seen dogs do. She felt a strange desire to go to it, despite knowing she shouldn’t. It whinnied again, pitifully, and with a twist, pointed its chin at its foreleg. There was a slimy, greased wedge of wood lodged in the watery sinews. She put down the heavy bag, and put her hands on her hips.

“If I help ye,” she said, “you shan’t eat me.”

The horse vigorously threw its head up and down, in what passed for a nod. She approached cautiously, gingerly kneeling on the grass and wrapping her apron around the gnarled piece of wood. The horse shrieked, and so did she as she used all her strength to pull on the wedge, toppling backwards when she finally managed to rip it out. As she shakily picked herself up, the horse’s muscles and skin snapped back together, the gaping hole repaired. It stamped its feet, prancing in place, before swooping down to grab her collar with its teeth. It threw her up into the air, and she landed on its back.

She tried to scramble off, but found every myth and legend her grandmother had told her had been right: once you touch them, you’re stuck. Nothing could pry you off, save a friar with some holy water on hand. The horse galloped into the nearby woods, breaking over the green hills like water flowing downstream.

She was gone for a year.

People found the unattended bag in the middle of the road, and called her grandmother. They sent out search parties, and trampled over the few tracks the horse had left. Folks set up vigils, but eventually, gave up.

When she came home one evening, walking up the twisting road to their home under a full moon, her grandmother thought she was hallucinating. That maybe Death had sent her granddaughter to come and get her, to make the passing just a little easier. But no: the girl was real. She spoke, she ate, she hugged her weeping grandmother and comforted her as best she could. The town rejoiced and held parties, but soon found the little girl wasn’t quite the same.

In the early mornings, before the sun rose fully, she’d be at the back fence, talking to the birds. At night, she’d sing to the wind and it would sing back in strange words, gossiping with her and trading secrets. She danced around tree trunks like other children would, but the trees held her hand and twirled her round and round in ways that made her childhood companions endlessly envious. When townsfolk would round up people for to hunt for the creatures of the deeper forest, she’d spit on the ground at their feet and they’d always come back with nothing.

She grew up strong. She chopped her own wood, herded her own animals, and built room after room onto her grandmother’s old home with her own hands after the old woman died. She didn’t seem to like leaving the shade of the hills that surrounded her and didn’t seem to like any of the men in town either–-so people assumed that she’d turn into a spinster, what with her strange ways and her stubbornness.

On the eve of her twenty-seventh birthday, she disappeared again.

With a small song on her lips, learned in the heart of a place no mortal had been since she herself walked there, she danced around her kitchen. A small rap came from the window on the other side of the room. She looked up, and there was the horse. Her horse. At first, she burst out laughing. Of course, it would show up to celebrate her birthday with her. But it didn’t whinny plaintively or neigh in its comical way; it just stared at her, before beginning to frantically kick the wall beneath the window. She rushed outside, but stopped at the threshold of the kitchen door.

There, in her back garden, was a long-eared man with thin, elaborate gold lines patterned across his face. He held his arm tightly against his side, pressed against a large, dark red stain seeping through his shirt. She began to breathe very hard, hands twitching at her sides.

“S’no where else for us to flee,” he said with great effort, through a mouth full of blood.

She opened her mouth to say something, but was cut off–on one of the high hills above her home, a low horn blew. A litany of shrieking voices echoed down. She balled up her fists, took off her apron, and wrapped it securely around her bleeding visitor’s side. Under the bright moon of that summer’s night, she looked up and saw the shadowy shapes of the horde moving towards them. The trees would hold them off, but not for long.

With a groan, she lifted the injured man, placed him on the horse’s back as it kneeled (this wasn’t its first time with her, it knew what to do), and jumped on behind him. They took off down the road, down past the place where she had first disappeared, down through the village, down across the green, flying through the highlands with shadows on their heels, until they reached the coursing waters of the nearby river and vanished.

She was gone for five years.

Someone in the village suggested they auction off her home. They tried, twice. Both times, the new homeowners would run screaming back into the village, babbling in a terror about the trees attacking them when they went outside, the plates throwing themselves, the birds deliberately shitting in shoes and on food, and the house itself muttering cursewords at them. Everybody gave up, and the house was condemned as haunted, its owner either lost in the woods or dead.

It was on a strangely balmy autumn day that she returned. She rode through the village on a tall, chestnut-brown horse, clad in strange armor. She held a babe in the crook of right arm. She spoke to no one, other than briefly stopping to buy bread and milk before going home. Just like before, she returned different than she had been prior to her disappearance. More reserved, but kinder. Less outwardly full of fire and spite, but somehow immensely more intimidating. She radiated authority, and a kind of icy, silver-darkness born out of seeing and living things that no one else had seen and lived.

She wandered around the edges of the village, placing strange black stones on its borders. Whenever anyone complained of bizarre things happening in their home, she arrived, unasked, and fixed it. Young and old were free to roam her property and pick whatever they found growing, and soon it became a habit–-villagers milled about her property, constantly greeting each other, for some reason feeling safer there than they did in their own homes. Years passed, her daughter grew, and though they were the pair of them considered strange as could be, they were beloved. Her girl, who, under the full moon seemed to have a face that glowed with faint gold lines, moved away to have adventures of her own.

But the trees were still there, the wind whispered, and the sleepy village of frequently confused men and women was safe and sound. She missed her daughter terribly, but understood the need to see what lay in the hidden places of the wide world, and wander until contented.

The last call came three days after her eighty-second birthday.

She had been sick. Severely so. It had been days since she’d been out of bed and in her gardens, or walking among her dearly beloved friends out in the woods. Shakily, she managed to get to her kitchen and set the kettle over her small fire, when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw something dark and glossy green.

Standing in the open door of her rambling home was the horse. It fixed her with such an expectant expression in its black eyes that she laughed.

“Haven’t ye heard?” She creaked, struggling a little to find her next breath. “I’m naught but an old woman now.”

The horse cocked its head at her and trotted out to the edge of her garden, before swiveling back around to look at her. It stamped the ground with its front hoof. She smiled, and slowly retrieved a hooded gray cloak from the hooks next to her door. Gently, she pulled it on and shuffled out into her yard. The first steps were the hardest. Her heart hammered in her chest. Her lungs burned, and her chest hurt. The horse always danced a few steps ahead of her, just out of reach, but impatiently bobbing back and forth, waiting for her to catch up. She would’ve told it to stop being so damned silly and give her a ride, but all her spare energy was put into placing one foot in front of the other.

As she hit the border of the woods, she found it easier to breathe. The horse paced a little further out in front of her. Dewy moss and grass under her feet, whispering trees above her head, she began to feel alive again. Truly, alive. The ground sloped up through the thick mess of tree trunks and grown-over stumps, blending into a dark, carpeted green in which she was only a tiny gray speck, moving further and further on.

She was never seen again.

Lili and Her Flowers

Magic was no easy thing to do.

It was ironic, really. Her grandma had always called her “my sweet little desert flower,” and here she was, hunched over potted cacti, making them bloom.

The flowers were luminescent shades yellow, pink, and orange, highlighted by the lush, glossy green of the cacti themselves. A small breeze fluttered the curtains of the tiny home she now occupied, chocked full of yellowing books and botanical diagrams of various plants: some recognizable, some so strange that they defied their own explanations.

Lili sat at the rickety wooden table, and hit ‘play’ on her grandma’s cassette player. The old woman’s voice crackled and popped as it came through the speakers, speaking the same three lines again and again before moving on to something else. Lili would hit pause and then rewind, each time repeating her grandmother and flexing her hand over the flowers. A few seemed to bubble with blossoms, quickly sending sprawling tendrils out from the lip of the pots and down onto the table. Lili hopped up and immediately added more water and fertilizer.

She wiped her brow, accidentally smudging it with dirt, and stared down at the plants. It was good enough. She retreated to the garage and delicately poked through the neatly ordered stacks of her grandfather’s tools. After his death, her grandmother had taken meticulous care that everything of his should remain in its place, a little like a shrine. Lili eventually managed to lug a sturdy wheelbarrow out into the front yard without disturbing anything. She turned to go back into the house to retrieve the necessary supplies, but lingered on the bottom porch step.

It had been a hot day. The dirt outside was dry and loose, sun-baked to the point that Lili wondered if it was actually burnt, but luckily she had no wilted plants to worry about. Her grandmother’s front garden was nothing but succulents and other desert flowers; she had often said that, unlike that fool of a neighbor (three miles off), there was no way in hell she was going to try watering a lawn in the middle of a goddamned desert.

Lili’s mouth curved into a smile. A warm wind blew up from across the curving, wild stretch of desert that surrounded her grandmother’s home and ruffled her hair. She was free, out here. She knew what her family would say if they could see her now, following in grandma’s footsteps. She didn’t care. She knew they were already angry that she was out there at all, the sole inheritor of that isolated, little desert property. But it served them right. For trying to lock their grandmother up in a madhouse; for trying to lock both of them in a madhouse. Her smile began to fade and she leaned heavily against the paint-chipped railing of the front porch, absentmindedly picking at it as she tried to blink away the memory of being dragged towards the Institution’s doors, nails digging into the ground and throat ragged from screaming.

The sun was beginning to dip down and cast long shadows. Lili drew in a shaky breath, and strode up the porch steps back into the house. Minutes later, she reemerged with bags of fertilizer and seeds, the potted cacti, trowels, and watering cans. She loaded them into the wheelbarrow, straining to push it forward, and nearly tipping it over twice as she walked north of the house and into the desert.

Tucked behind a low hill was a single tombstone, etched with the name Mariana Liliana Salgado. The ground, having being disturbed only a month earlier, was glaringly absent of the whispering, hardy grasses and dry brush. Lili pushed the wheelbarrow right up to the edge, stopping for a moment to wipe tears out of her eyes with the back of her hand. She bent down and began pulling out all the plants and gardening supplies. Around the edge of the grave, she dug little holes in the ground with her grandma’s trowel and put wildflower seeds in each. The cacti went on either side of the tombstone itself as well as in eight distant points, circling the spot. She added water and fertilizer, checking each mound and each cactus before finally coming back to kneel at the foot of her grandmother’s grave.

“I don’t know what you saw in me back then,” Lili said simply. “Or how you knew I needed you, needed this.” She stopped. Getting the words out was harder than she’d thought it would be. It was difficult to breathe.

“I’ll never be able to repay you,” Lili finally continued, brow furrowed, determined to say what she had come there to say, “for saving me, but I’ll do my best to make you proud.” She waited in silence for a moment, before closing her eyes and lifting her arms. In a small, quiet voice, she sang-whispered the words from grandmother’s tapes.

The wildflowers came first. They burst out of the ground with the glorious fury of a sudden spring, almost glowing in the orange-gold light of the sunset. The cacti followed soon afterwards. Like they had done in the house, they bubbled upwards and out. Lili opened her eyes just in time to see each unfolding, putting forth luminous, intricate flowers. She put her hands down, and went quiet. It was a small, blooming ocean of color, adorning her grandma’s grave, just as it should be adorned.

She stood, pressed two fingers to her lips, and pointed them in the direction of the headstone before shoving her hands in her pockets and turning back in the direction of the house, head bowed.

She’d come back for the wheelbarrow tomorrow.

Slowly Shall You Grow

“Slowly,’ she chanted over barren ground. ‘Slowly, shall you grow,’
With hands raised she spun around, and slowly the green shoots did show.
Over ruin and wreck she danced, caring not a whit,
For flowers grew up where she passed, burying refuse and grit.
White lace bloomed beneath her feet and round her willowy trees snaked,
Turning that which was broken and bleak into a holy beauty, waked.
Soft sunlight fell over verdant green as branches thickened with drooping leaves
With naught but the spring wilds to be seen; a house of summer days and autumn eves.
Suddenly heavy with life and light, it was a paradise of the wilderness crowned
In a wreath of white flowers, delicate and bright, where grief could not be found.
She stopped and sighed, breath bereft; her labor had not come without sorrow,
But her soul she had healed, no wound left, and with joy she would meet the morrow.

Wildness Becomes You

Wildness becomes you.

So devour the stars and eat the darkness,
crack the ground beneath your feet.
It is enough–it is enough
that they will try to break you
for breathing, being, and wishing
for something like happiness.

Burn their battering belittlements
with solar fire bursting from your fingertips–
turn it into ash, bury it in night,
and raise new continents to live on.
You are enough–you are enough
to forge life anew.

They will fear, they will tremble,
and you will conquer,
with a wild and deafening roar.

Run

I’ll be running
in the beautiful places
to see if I can get
beyond the anxiety–

half dark cities
in falling lights,
water over the ridge
and trees under the wave,
falling to tumble
down, to
run
farther, further,
quicker than
the stone weights
of old habits
can fly,

thoughts too full,
heart too lost,
all of it speeding
apart too quick
for the carrions
to sink their claws
into my shoulders
and drag me back
to standing still and
stagnant.

Morning

Every morning I open my eyes,
shift my bones to lift me up,
it’s like walking to the middle of a stone bridge,
wondering if the rock will crumble
and leave you to drown
in the water below.

Let’s Get Coffee Sometime

There is a certain sadness to you, he muses,
tracing his fingertips in delicate circles
around the coffee rings
stained in interlocking patterns
on our rickety table.

Yes, I reply inwardly, with the tilt of my head,
studying the slow movements
and hesitancy of his hands–
yes, there is, and you’re not the one
to understand it.

Hollow Creatures Don’t Feel the Earth Shake

You are not hollow.

There is a vast landscape
opened up in your heart,
with continents so wide
that it might feel
(at times)
utterly empty,

but is, in truth,
howling with life and a love
that will send echoes and tremors
over your geography, your geology,
shaking the stalled tectonics
of your stationary heart,
splitting the coldness of the ground,
and waking you from numb sleep.

Lonely soul, yes, you are,
but remember this—
hollow creatures
don’t feel the earth shake.

Everything looks better in the morning.

It’s not a war of light and dark,
but the idea that if the day
can turn itself over
begin again,
sleep again,
you can too.

It doesn’t matter whether rest comes—
it is the very act
of picking yourself up
from the bitter ground
of your cluttered bed,
scrutinizing your knobby knees
your sleepless skin
and believing
that all of it
will look better
under a new day’s
morning star.

The Heart Remembers

The heart remembers,
I whisper to myself
as I watch her in the hallways
brushing her fingertips against the walls,
smiling complacently,
and telling me the same story
for the third time that day.

The heart remembers,
I half-sing in the middle of the night,
after watching my father
lumber up the stairs,
head hung with weariness,
to follow my mother
in a half-drowned sleep.

The heart remembers,
I say aloud, to no one in particular,
having imaginary conversations
with a frightened old woman
begging her to be at peace–

“it will remember
what your mind can’t,” I tell her
(desperately)
“science gives us confidence,
faith, even, that memories
are imbibed in muscle tissue
inscribed onto the walls
in the empty caverns
of your heart,

so even when this disease
eats your last living memory,
and you forget your own name
the name of your mother
your children
and me,
your heart will remember–

it will recognize your husband’s touch
leap at the sound of the piano,
it will beat regardless
of the names you can’t recall,
and forge on,
even when your mind
forgets to tell your lungs
to breathe.

It holds a library
of untouchable memories–
nothing can change
what is already written within your chest,
no despair can erase it,
no tick of your mind can stop it.

Your faith,
family,
your very character–
none of it is truly forgotten,
not really.”

…

The heart remembers,
I murmur under my breath,
watching a frail woman
ascend a staircase too steep for her,
with a trembling mind
and a burden she can barely recall.