What Lies in the Woods

by Kate Alice Marshall

There is a wilderness in little girls. We could not contain it. It made magic of the rain and a temple of the forest. We raced down narrow trails, hair flying wind-wild behind us, and pretended that the slender spruce and hemlock were still the ancient woods that industry had chewed down to splinters. We made ourselves into warriors, into queens, into goddesses. Fern leaves and dandelions became poultices and potions, and we sang incantations to the trees.

We knew the world was cruel and dirty and dull, and it was all so brutally unfair that we refused to accept it. There was magic in the world. We only had to find it.

The flesh does not acknowledge linear time, a therapist had once told me. The past is written alongside the present on our skins.

Sometimes it seemed like the only thing I’d ever been good at was surviving being broken. I didn’t know how to be whole. So any time I felt like I was healing, I found a way to break myself again.