By Ava McKinney-Taylor
The cold soil is a strange sensation against my feet. It's never cold in Faerie. The earth is always warm with sunlight or movement or love. But here, everything is cold. I pull my shawl tighter around me. It's a fine-woven thing, made with spider's silk, and it is almost no protection at all against the cool fall air. My skirt, too, is of shimmering lace, light enough that any breeze at all sends it flying up. How easily I have forgotten the turning of the seasons. How easily I have given up my knowledge to store more food, more friends, more music.
When I was a child, in the lands I was born in, I had my father and my sister, and that was plenty.
I try to remember Then, that time of hardship and humanity. My sister always smelled of bread, for the baker’s daughter was sweet on her and would present her with a new type of loaf every day. My father had hands marked in dirt, with crushed leaves and watery blossoms caught under his fingernails, for he was a great gardener. And I do not know what I was like. Moody, probably. Maybe waspish, maybe joyful, maybe quick to rage. Who am I to know who I was? All I remember is tearing apart bread made of clouds and my father settling delicate roots into cool earth.
And then the world shattered into dancing light and smeared love, and all that mattered was pipes drifting through the air.
I am careful as I walk. The ground here is not trampled down from dancing, and there are blackberries and roses and tripping vines. I pass by a grave, and then two more, and then fourth. My careful father, entombed in the dirt he spent his life in. My sweet sister, buried next to her lover with dough beneath her nails. And their son, who never knew me. So many years I have spent dancing under the stars, so many lifetimes.
Beside them, under the willow tree that my father planted after I left, is a bed of flowers. My father started it, of course, but my sister continued it, and so did her son, and now so does her granddaughter, though she is old and her hands shake with age.
I watch my smooth, steady hands as I reach down and touch one of the flowers. Even the softest flower here feels as rough as home-spun wool, but I love the sensation. The flowers are dying now, going underground for the winter, and I am fascinated by their withering leaves. Even the harshest frosts do not reach us, and we can sing the flowers into brilliance. There is no place for death, unless it comes on the edge of the sword and at the hands of glory.
Wrapping my gossamer shawl around me, I sink into the dirt. With my legs tucked under me, and my arms tight around myself, I think of death.
In the woods, there is a bed of flowers.
It sits, blooming and dying and blooming again, beneath a willow tree.
And beside it sits a girl, clothed in silks and magic.
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