Future For You

A girl frolics through the forest in a white dress, reminding herself that she is small and mortal.

Mother Nature has a sweet, strange way of doing exactly so.

Tip-toeing through a field of three leaf clovers, catching herself on a damp log dusted in chlorophyll-green moss to catch her balance, roaming quiet places whilst imagining she was born with fairy blood. Tall, dark woodlands loomed over her, honeysuckles and lavender caressing her shins with an ethereal force, trees as ancient as the universe itself whispering sacred secrets in her pointed elf-like ears as she hummed the song her father sang to her in her dreams the night before. She played in the fallen leaves for what felt like an eternity before returning home. Time tends to evaporate in the wild. There was nothing more magically comforting than the thought of Mother Nature herself swallowing her whole. 

A cloaked figure casting a shadow darker than night steps into the very same forest and outstretches a skeletal fingertip for a butterfly to rest upon. What would she have to fear from flesh? How is she to know that everything man touches will die? With a gentle flutter of her mystical wings, she sits unknowingly and with trust. And in her very last act of grace, she falls to the floor, her tiny body to become one with the earth, moss already inching towards her to reclaim balance. 

The figure continues onwards with his eyes closed, leaves turning to ash beneath his bare feet, his outstretched finger claiming the spirit of the woods, soul by soul, until there are no more. 

The girl returns to the woods and sees such destruction, such sadness, such loss. She mourns for her mother and swears an oath of blood to avenge. She runs home, the heels of her feet coated in a melancholy ash of what once was, to her cottage of stone where her father awaits. She finds her father in the washroom removing a cloak as she pleads for help, but when he turns towards her, she finds his face is dusted with the same ash beneath her feet. He outstretches a calloused hand and extends his skeletal fingertips, which are too decorated with the bones of the spirit of the forest. 

“Father, where have you been?”

“At work, my dear, creating a future for you.”