Beneath the trees, breathing

The Sernox

The year advanced its course, and with it came the night, sly in its approach. The harried dusks gave way, the moon mocked the land it once knew. The days and weeks blurred, acceptable only in the knowledge that with each evening, as the wind found its way through the village by the lake, I would be returned to Emmi’s side. We would walk and talk and sit and laugh, time’s illusory mitigation dispelled as she slipped back through her door, leaving me alone. My feet, weeping for the direction in which they travelled, crunched fallen pines and solemn soil, aware of the aftermath of solace. I would find myself at my cabin. There I would collapse, staring at the ceiling, waiting for sleep to claim my soul. But in that sleep, dreams found their way. As months crumbled and daylight fled, the terrors—swollen and bleak and always with the scent of blood—whispered their uncaring hurt, forcing me to the forest at dawn, to seek a clearing where I could sear the dread from my eyes.

These actions became my routine, my stasis, the duality in which I lived. The carapace of daytime lies crumbled in the presence of a singular name.

*

One Friday evening, another useless string of weekdays complete, I approached her house. She was there, waiting. Her rucksack—the one I had carried from the station—was on the ground, an oblong bag beside it. She picked them up. She smiled, the thin crescent of her lips displacing the air before it reached my eyes.

I glanced to the bag, deciphering its contents. “A tent?” I asked, hoping, my thoughts a thousand minutes into the future.

She nodded. “I would like it if you followed.”

And she moved, not waiting for my assent, her body turning to carry her away.

Into the night we went. Into the forest we moved, along tracks and crooked paths, between the trees and moss, past branches and trembling streams, beside rocks and fallen trunks whose blackened bark housed fruiting spores. The pines watched, guarding fate’s many threads. They saw us move. They noticed where Emmi stopped, the incapable chambers of my heart threatening to end it all.

I would speak of what happened, would write the intricacy of her movement, would linger on each molecule revealed and the manner in which our hands, clammy and delicate, sought every crease and line. I would tell the structure of her flesh, how we remained under the scrutiny of stars, how the universe watched and winked with each breath that fled our lips, as the forest, silent in observance of our exchange, waited for it to end. I would speak it all in minute detail. I would do so were such recollection incapable of crushing my being more than my actions crushed hers.

Afterwards, we lay there, naked and coiled as one, forgotten to all but the night. Her finger traced the ridge of my collarbone. My eyes moved across her porcelain form. The light of jealous stars fell upon us. She said she could feel it, that it tingled, that the energy of other worlds disembarked along each hair, each pore, each buried vein and ash of bone, how a trillion photons extinguished their untold journey upon her skin. And even though it was cold, I could see moisture caught in the nape of her neck, collecting at the small of her back, the places where, had there been enough light, I would have seen refracted in each translucent sphere the tracery of ink beneath.

“This is where we return,” she said. “It is here. Watching.”

I didn’t need to ask. I didn’t look. I felt the prick on my neck, for I knew of what she spoke. My hand—the one that had, at long last, moved across the artwork of her life—found the patch of bare skin stretched across her ribs. I touched it with my finger, let my palm rest flat upon it.

“Yes.” She giggled. She buried herself into me. Then her body unravelled, uncoiling like a serpent with skin forever shed anew, ready once more.

There was no reality, then. Nothing was real that night. It was incomparable, a moment unrealised in all the lifetimes of this world, untouched even by the gods. It was a moment never to occur again.

*

The next day, long after our return—an amount of time measured only with my heart, the red and beating pulp soaking blood into Astraea’s pristine scales—I saw Emmi.

She was by the lake.

She was talking to someone else.

Substack image generator.

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This was part 5 of The Sernox. The previous parts are:

Part 2 > Part 3 > Part 4 > Part 6 > Part 7.

I do not think there are many of these left now. There are other worlds to tread, but here an ending dangles proximal. Does that word even make sense? I don’t know. It’s late. I must sleep. I expect to dream, but I have no forest come dawn. Thank you for reading, whatever it is these words are about. I’m sorry for what will come.