It was surreal, how quickly the gloss and glass of the Cul-de-Sac disappeared under the primeval green of the regional park. The trees and ferns on either side of the road hung there in sullen silence, their branches forever attempting to arch across. Should humanity stop tomorrow, the dark green would begin its takeover the very next day.
We were inconsequential to the bush, as locals so casually called it. Thick and tangled, it would eat you alive and not even notice. As it had my mother. Ten years, it had kept her in its arms. Ten years while her blood turned to dust and her flesh melted off her bones, and her murderer thought they’d gotten away with it.
The wind was solid today, but the bush stood firm. It had survived far worse than a big wind. I could easily imagine dinosaurs striding through the trees, looking completely at home. Once, as a young teen, I’d gone into the park with nothing but a small daypack, my aim to walk off my anger after a fight with my father.
The weather had turned in five deadly minutes, black clouds covering the sky and chips of ice pelting down like rain. Disorientation had hit so hard that I’d had to physically fight the urge to run, do something. It was instinct to think motion was better than stillness.
But in the bush, unintentional motion could get you dead.
As it turned out, the weather cleared as fast as it had turned, and I soon spotted the trail marker I’d lost in my panic. But I could as easily have ended up another set of bones in the green.
“Ari, beta, don’t go into those trees.” My mother’s fingers brushing my arm as I, still small, sat beside her on the back lawn, my gaze on the forest that loomed in front of us. We hadn’t had a fence against the trees then, the seduction of the forest only steps away.
“That’s not a friendly forest like in your books,” she’d said, her dark eyes hypnotized by the whisper of the trees. “It’s a forest that’ll steal you and keep you. And you know I’d die with missing you.”
Kilometer after kilometer of green and wood, huge ferns with their dark trunks, and the twisting branches of trees I couldn’t name. Sudden flutters in the canopies, birds taking flight. Then the first sighting of a gull.
I didn’t feel like I’d taken a full breath until I pulled up to park behind a black sand dune held together by tough coastal grass that waved in the wind. At my back rose a mountain covered in bushland, the lone house up there appearing a toy structure in among all the green.
Taking off my single sneaker and sock, I left them in the car, then picked up my cane.
The sand on the path to the beach was firm, but it still wasn’t made for a cane and my foot didn’t thank me for my uneven balance. I didn’t go far—just beyond the nearest dune, so I could see the ocean. After a long, deep inhale, I sat down with my back to the dune’s gentle slope. The soft ebony of the sand glittered with minerals even in the weak sunlight, but I had to take a moment before I could appreciate it.
Even the short exertion had me huffing, my foot hot with a dull agony.
But it didn’t matter. Not after another breath. Not in this place of wild magic.
Tiny spiral shells bleached white lay beside me, on sand that had been brushed into perfect ripples by the wind. Picking up one, I looked at its curves, entranced by the delicacy of its form.
“Look, Ari. This shell here.” Wild hair whipping around her head, my mother’s body clad in that yellow swimsuit as she crouched on the beach, her smile huge, and her eyes squinting against the sun.
Putting the shell down on the sand with care, I dug out my phone. The data connection glitched and I wondered if I’d have to leave the beach despite my need to be near its primal pulse. The waves crashed to shore, foaming white breakers against the glittering iron, rolling unwary surfers who’d come out to battle the waves.
“Come, Ari! Let’s play in the waves! Hold my hand!”
Putting away my phone, I folded up the leg of my jeans on my good leg, and began to struggle to the breakers. I left the cane where