"The trees can tell you stories.” An old woman told me this when I was younger. She would lean back in her rocking chair, take one long pull of the air that was whistling through the greenery, and close her eyes. When I asked, she said she was learning. I sit here now in the old rocking chair with my feet up on the railing of a wrap-around porch. The phrase echoes in my ears. The trees surrounding the house seem to dance in the wind, branches filled with green leaves stopping in their dance just short of touching the tips of my toes. The leaves rustle and turn over, the trees’ supple trunks undulating back and forth slowly in the wind, ancient dancers still graceful. As I watch the night my thoughts turn back to her.

She had been an old, withered woman with soft creases in her face and a wisdom of which I was almost scared. She would sit and rock on the chair with me on the step before her. Some people in town thought she was crazy because she had secluded herself in a big house in the middle of the forest. She never went into town and I was the volunteer to bring her groceries. No civilization, people said, how can she live without people around? But she always seemed content. She would laugh ironically and say, “What did civilization ever have anything to do with people?”

I didn’t think she was crazy. I still don’t. She seemed to me like an old witch in the woods whom the world had treated rudely. I was mesmerized by her, and felt with all my heart that all the knowledge of the world rested in the mind of this mysterious woman. When it was time to bring her groceries, I would make my way through the woods to her big, empty house and sit with her on the porch, the groceries half-forgotten beside me. She was out there rocking every time I came. She was listening to the leaves and when she caught some story from the whispering boughs she would speak. Sometimes, if she remained silent for too long, I would wiggle around, restless. “Still,” she told me, “you’re not ready for this story.”

“These stories, they’ll tell you… they’ll tell you something about yourself.” I never really knew what she meant by that, but her words haunt me now on my first night back in these deep woods. With her gone, the house and land had been left to me. It was strange to observers. I was only her former errand girl. I hadn’t even seen her the last few years. I suppose that I had been her last and only tie to the mortal realm. An odd word choice, I think, but I cannot imagine her fully dead. I feel her as a living entity, deep within the ground, growing wild with the earth and with this house. Now my feet catch a chill from the wind but I keep rocking as the leafy world embraces me. Soft air kisses my skin and sounds grow quiet around me as I drift into a semi-conscious state.

There is a young woman in the forest, not far off from the lonely house. Her bare feet pad softly on the ground as she walks on the moss. Small animals, night owls and sleepy deer stop to look at the lone figure making her way through moon-spangled darkness. She is sleepwalking, or if she is not sleepwalking she is not fully awake. The only garment on her body is a small chain with a stone to reflect the moon’s light. She seems in this setting of the goddess Diana, not yet occupied by the earthier things in life, but a light spirit of the air and the moon. She picks her way sleepily through the forest, a small feminine form artless beneath the night sky. Sounds and senses come to her. The wind drifts and a twig crackles under her step. An owl hoots. In her vision is a pool of water, and its seductive reflections of moon and starlight tempt her. She starts to walk swiftly, breath quickening, her pace swift. Soon she is running, almost too fast for her consciousness to keep up. She races towards this vision.

At the bank of the pool she falls to her knees and, gathering the dark liquid, she splashes it to her face and feels it run down like silk down her cheeks and throat. She brings the water to her mouth, drinking deeply. Suddenly she stops, looks into the pool, and sees beneath the glassy surface a pair of dark hooded eyes, punctuated by two strong brows, one cocked boldly. Something about them make her step forward. The cool, slick water on her feet arouse more sensation and her skin asks for more. As her feet pull her forward and the water gathers around her legs, a sigh hitches in her throat, gets lost among the turning leaves. Some abstract cognizance stumbles its way into her mind, and her eyes widen. She is fully awake now. A flush spreads from her cheeks, down to her throat and chest. Her heartbeat quickens and her lips part as her eyes fall on a soft mouth under the suface.

The pool is deeper than she had thought but she keeps going, keeps taking, and each movement brings more heat, more feeling. With her arms outstretched, her hands tremble and she reaches harder and harder for the figure in the water, that strange presence which brings new sensation as she ventures deeper, further. The water reaches up to her neck and just as her fingers reach another set of fingers, just as her thighs brush another’s, shaky fingers clutch the pendant suddenly too tight at her neck. She rips the chain, flinging the cold stone away from her overheated form. The necklace catches in the branch of a small sapling and hangs, straining against its captor as the wind pulls it.

Water clasps the bare spot where the necklace had been and, captivated, the woman takes one more step. Her entire body, foot to crown, is submerged, water surrounding a flushed form. The water moves and laps at the banks, mimicking the swelling brush and leaves in the forest. She takes her last breath, an ecstasy of motion and water and wind. And, with that glorious water, its silk filling her, body and soul and lungs, she drowns beneath it. Soon the water calms and the night dims into those pre-dawn hours. An owl hoots nearby and flies to rest on the branch where the pendant swings. The first hints of sunlight dapple through the trees and onto the stone.

I wake, the crisp air turned biting. My chair is still. My hand clasps the jewel at my neck, a moonstone glowing softly from the inside out. The trees were still whispering a calm, soft aftermath of rushing movement. My bare feet land heavily on the cold wooden floor and I walk to the front door. A humming goes through my body, an energy I hadn’t had before and my steps get lighter. I take one last look at the trees, but they are done with our conversation. I still hear the woman’s voice, telling me, “Listen to the wild. They will teach you a thing or two. If you listen.”

Marina Wright is a sophomore English major and a Literary writer for Generation.