Apples for Alessandra
an excerpt

Chapter Eighteen
Finder of Lost Souls

The girl wandered through the trees, pulling her dress out to her sides, making it wide like wings. Beatrice expected her to take flight at any second, her long black hair streaming behind her. But the girl did not, so rooted they were in earthly things. She – Beatrice sat still on her thinking bench in the thinking spot, in the presence of the brain wave. This is too much, she thought of the convenient symbolism of such titles and gestures.

The girl hummed as she twirled.

Am I dreaming? Beatrice pulled her jacket tight around her, crossed her arms protectively over her chest, her heart. So protective she was of all the secret workings beneath her rib cage. This is where she kept her own texture trunk of that which could not be hung out to dry.

Does this girl have secrets? She wondered. Surely not, she said out loud. No one has secrets when they are five. When you are five, you belong to the cosmos and the cosmos belongs to you. You fling all that you know across the sea-colored sky like stars and moons and Jupiter rings.

When you grow beyond five, beyond ten, when you reach twelve and you grow up and out and the chemistry within you begins to call on foreign urges, that is when you disconnect, like a balloon released, you are left to a dangling ascent.

And so she was.

Dangling from dangerous heights, as she toyed with seductively smudging boundaries.

“Law and morality. Since when are they synonymous?” Milton had said once more.

He was highly quotable, and were Beatrice an ingenuous type, she might venture to market him in the form of t-shirts. Milton Ts for thoughtfully odd boys like Nate to wear.

It was a strange world here among the trees, she thought, her eyelids dropping under the spell of it. The girl was no longer seen, had flitted to the next realm over, perhaps – morphed or shape shifted, now a crow or a southbound goose. The girl was gone.

Who would find her here?