Page 11 of Hellebore

“I don’t know…” I whined, reluctant.

“Heather,” she snapped, sparking a prickle of tears in the corner of my eyes. She rarely spoke unkindly to me, but when she did, it felt like the world ruptured beneath me, ready to swallow me whole. “Just grow up. You need to stop being such a child, scared of everything. Of the world. Of change. Meet me there, I’ll have a surprise for you.”

She sighed then, exhaling the tension threaded through the tips of her shoulders. Relaxing back against the rocky hillside, picking petals from wildflower stems absentmindedly.

“A surprise?”

“A secret,” she said quietly, her voice near a whisper beneath the wind.

“You have a secret? Tell me!”

I shimmied closer to her, readying myself to carry the weight of her burden.

“No. I can’t. Not yet, anyway.”

My heart smarted then, a sudden ache gripping my rib cage.

“Why can’t you tell me yet?” I asked, trying to hide my disappointment.

“Because, I said,” she smirked, her eyes glistening in the narrow moonlight.

“Why not now? I want to know,” I urged, displeased with her taunting.

We had never kept secrets from one another. That was our pact since infancy. We had made a blood oath for it in our adolescence, swearing to the earth that no matter what, we would always trust in the other. Pricked fingertips pressed together with earnest, assuring our loyalty.

“I can’t tell you, because it isn’t my secret alone,” she confessed, her lip curling into a satisfied smirk. She was enjoying it – hiding something from me.

“It must be a rather serious confession, if you can’t tell me right now,” I admitted.

And while the bitterness of anger sat atop my tongue, I understood. For I had my own secret I couldn’t share. Something wicked that festered and swelled behind my ribs.

Are any of us truly alive, or merely borrowing breath from the universe until it’s time to return it to the trees. Are we designed to be more than a cycle of food for the earth, destined to return as ash or meat for the bugs, or are we sincerely here for a purpose?

Are my parents’ teachings sincere in their assurances of an afterlife, that there’s somewhere better for our souls to spend eternity? Is my father there right now? Is Francesca?

Part of me wishes it so, hopes for more, for gilded gates and sins bathed clean. But there’s a part of me that lingers on the idea that whatever happens as our heart beats, is forgotten by generations passed. That the choices I make, here in this small community, can’t be anything more than anecdotes for the children to use as warning.

That each of my mistakes weaves a tapestry of warning for those preceding me, a story of everything that can go wrong if you don’t abide by their teachings. If you don’t obey.

The forest is filled with ghosts, according to my mother. The spirits of women who tarried too far from the rocky path, and found their demise among the thicket. She told us that the branches would reach out and claw us, grip us, drag us to a horribly slow death if we so much as touched a toe off the walkway.

For a time, we believed it so. We would watch for the streak of white between the trunks, the billowing gossamer of the spirits dresses as they would stalk us from the shadows. Sometimes, the sun would break through the treetops just right, and we would gasp at the white light, believing it to be one of the lost women. Yet, they never showed, truly.

The spirits in the forest are fables passed from mother to child in warning. Their ghosts bound to the earth rather than heaven for having made sinful choices in the trees. Even though it was a story designed to keep Isa and I from straying beyond our confines, now having claimed my closest friend, something has knotted inside me and their whispers have begun to scrape through my bones. It’s as though they call for me, their siren song beckoning me from the roots of the eucalypts, calling me home to them. Francesca, calling me to her.

Sometimes, I wonder whether our parents were too much like us, already knowing what possibilities lay beneath the branches having experienced it for themselves. Why else would their warnings heed so heavy?

The wind carries whispers that I can almost catch if I tilted my head just so. A rustling of leaves, the lullaby of magnetic voices? I can’t quite tell. The stories mother told as I walk the earthen path replays like a siren in my mind, each branch a skeletal finger, each shadow a lurking ghost. And yet, even as the chill of fear crawls over my skin, I want to follow them, to see if the lost women of the forest had anything to tell me; anything about what had happened to Francesca.

The woods whisper to me now, as I stand beneath its swaying leaves.

You belong here. It says, kissing my cheek with a gentle breeze.

Half a year has passed since I last stood among these trunks, since the last time I dared to face the place that swallowed Francesca whole. For weeks I avoided even looking toward the tree line, as if the forest itself might reach out and drag me in.

The quiet between the trunks is spine-chilling. The wind stirs the high branches, leaves whispering softly above, yet down here nothing moves. No insects. No birds. Only a heavy silence that settles across the ground like ominous fog.

I step through the leaf litter, waiting for the familiar crunch beneath my boots, but the forest floor seems to swallow the sound. Each footstep disappears before it can exist. I move slowly, cautiously, my breath loud in my ears as I approach what used to be our hideout.