Strange the way she sleeps, her spine so straight it's as if she forgot it could bend; arms spread wide at her sides, fingers splayed like the twigs they were and will be again. I caress them for a moment, and wonder if perhaps her slumbering mind knows no form beyond her true one.

The room is quiet now, but her lies have a way of lingering. Nostalgic whispers of a past like mine, a chronicle of imaginary yesterdays. If only she knew that I'd followed her, that I'd watched her take root in the wood. How effortlessly her feet broke the soil, how quickly appeared the branches I climbed so often in the summers of my boyhood.

Was she watching me even then, contriving her fanciful stories while bearing me skyward on the strength of her limbs? Was it this union that empowered her to change, perhaps the trickle of blood from that long ago day when my careless hand came away with a sliver?

So many times I've tried to ask her, to wring the truth from her lips, but like autumn's last leaves, the words are reluctant to fall. I despair at the thought of desertion, at the chance of her leaving if it became known that I saw her true. Or perhaps in sharing the magic would be lost, born away by the Gods of impossibility.

For now she lays sleeping beside me, but soon she'll leave once more, abandoning me for the trees, for a familial bond that grows only in my absence. She'll speak then of her human hours, her brush with mortal sins and mortal dreams, her glimpse at the fragility of man. They'll rustle their applause for her courage, pass whispers from leaf to leaf, branch to branch, but in silence they'll rebuke her, filled with envy at her gift.

And in the morning she'll return; I'll rouse to find her smiling, still draped in scents from my youth, an olfactory collage of pinecones and soil and moss, the freshness of the wood given life. In her eyes I'll see the subtle rings of her many years, the wisdom of a place I can't touch, but oh how I wish I could. I can't bear to think of how she'll depart yet again, how she'll sweep from the porch and across the back lawn, her skin birthing leaves even as the gate swings slowly shut behind her.

I'll follow as softly as I'm able, my clumsy human feet leaving imprints in the grass.

Or perhaps this time I'll wake before her, and pay a visit to those who so often call her away, who deny me this need for her constant presence at my side, and fill my heart with worry that on the next they'll insist she stay.

I'll carry with me a book of matches, and feel the phantom weight of tomorrow's regrets. I'll burn them one and all, from the smallest flower to the tallest tree, and then we'll be together forever.

Kurt currently lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan with his lovely wife and their not-so-lovely cat. Kurt's fiction has appeared in a variety of print and on-line magazines including Flashquake, Raven Electrick,and Reflection's Edge.