You wake up under a shady willow with a vague semblance of what you had dreamt.
You have dozed off again. And no wonder, there is a good book in your lap and your favorite songs are still crackling through your earbuds. You ought to replace them, they are going bad. You pull them out and decide to listen to nature’s music instead. The soft gurgle of the pond coupled with catkins rustling against each other has always been your favorite blend of sounds. Every now and again your ear is filled with the nearly undetectable buzz of a cicada humming past. You aren’t quite sure, but you think that the last bug to flitter by may have been a bumblebee in search of a flower to land upon. The springtime has brought a host of such flowers—lilac, daisy, honeysuckle, a sprinkle of nannyberry, and a dash of virginia rose add pops of color to the lawn. Beneath the tree clover and dandelion grow in dense clusters, growing more sparse as they span away from the tree. Further off in the rolling field is a host of meadowsweet and steeplebush just getting ready to sprout. You pluck a clover and twirl it between your fingers.

A squirrel scrambles down the tree and flicks his tail at you. And when you go to snap a photo, he has the audacity to toss an acorn at you with a chitter before frantically scuttling off. For that reason, you preferred the rabbits.

You lean back against the tree and look at the sky, soon the sound of children laughing overpowers the bird calls and pond babble. Two boys fly kites shaped like dragonflies as a younger girl with blonde pigtails and a sundress blows a cloud of bubbles. She calls for the boys to come try to catch them before they pop. The boy with the red hair and dinosaur t-shirt tells her that they are too busy. The older boy with the blonde hair tells her to ask Katie. Sooner or later she’d invite a friend over to help her catch butterflies as she does every Saturday afternoon. But until then she could use some company, so you offer to join her. She smiles cheerfully and tells you that her name is Louisiana-Piper. You tell her yours and say that you’ve never met a girl named Louisiana before. She giggles and hands you a bubble wand, instructing you on how to use it. You keep her entertained until Katie arrives. Just as you start to leave, they ask you to help them catch butterfly that has flown out of reach. You lose track of time. Eventually the blonde boy, who you have come to know is her brother, Parker, calls her to follow him home. Faintly, you miss being that young.

You pick up your book and watch a sneeze of dandelion seeds take to the air. They coast lazily about, seeking good places to land. You mark your page and tuck it safely away in your bag. It is nearly eight thirty but it still not quite dark yet, the days are growing longer and you know now that spring is fading away. You will miss it of course, but the summer solstice has its own glories that you enjoy almost as strongly as vernal ones.

You stretch your arms and decide that your time at the park is done for the day. You walk home with the twilight in its second stage. There is a deep blue in the sky, pushing the colors of the sunset down. A few clouds cluster near the drooping sun as a few stars pop into view. You feel bad because your parents are probably worried, you always seem to spend too much time at the park and arrive home when there’s more navy in the sky than oranges and golds.

When you get home you see your mother and her friend just beginning to fold up a picnic blanket. Fleetingly, you wonder why they didn’t accompany you to the park, the scenery over there was much more suitable for an outdoor lunch. Your neighbor is also packing away his lemonade stand, he offers you a cup. Deciding that it would be a nice way to end a fine May evening, you flip him a quarter and take a cup. You watch the sun dip completely below the horizon as sugary citrus explodes on your tongue. As the neighbor kid retreats into his house—no doubt rushed by his father calling him a fourth time—you wander into your back yard. A week or so from now, fireflies will dance in between butterfly bushes and garden gnomes. You think that you might catch a few if you find the time, but you have promised your father that you would help put up some summer décor. Your grandmother has been particularly adamant about trying something she’d seen on Pinterest. She has been asking your father to save small jars and bottles so that you can make strings of lights of them. She tells him that your grandfather has a knack for such things and can help put it together. Though you don’t fancy actually putting the lights up, you think that they will add a nice, almost rural, touch to the yard. You finish your lemonade. Though the night is early, you can hear the yip of a coyote.

You look towards the forest just beyond your backyard. Windchimes tinkle behind you, somehow coaxing you to recall the days when you would chase fae and sing with elves. The days when you would swim with nixies in the pond and catch glimpses of unicorns in the sunrays that filtered between the leaves. The days when faeries awakened when flowers opened their petals. Just like that you remember your dream in full.
Suddenly it doesn’t feel like a dream at all.
You look at your hand expecting to see a rope bracelet.

***

You leave your bedroom window open with the curtains billowing and casting shadows, the night time has never bothered you. Some people are jarred by the concept of a forest looming in the background, they think that an open window is an invitation for the shadows to crawl in and wreak havoc. You can understand how that would be daunting for some, the forest is a host of odd noises and weird night creatures—uncanny foils to their morning counterparts. But you are used to them all.
In fact you couldn’t imagine a night without such sounds.
They have lulled you to sleep since your coloring book days.

You listen to the distant night calls until you are almost asleep and just on the brink of a dream. You hear a tapping at the window, it doesn’t set in right away that the tapping is not the beginning of a new dream. The tapping persists, but your visitor doesn’t invite itself in just yet. Though pale green fingers curl around the frame, and when you come to full wakefulness you catch, on the tip of each finger, the teeniest emeralds glistening under the moonlight. The fingers drum against the pane again. Perhaps this is what many fear. But you don’t, you go to the window as if answering the call of an old companion. The half-imp, half-dryad looks at you with eyes of gold, his mossy hair flutters like the curtains. His wings twitter frantically, during their upstrokes they show a gossamer olive color and beating down they display yellower hues. He looks like a day rising faery and you wonder what he is doing up so late. He drifts away from your window and you decide that such is your cue to follow.

You consider that you are in fact in a dream, that you must not have realized that you fell asleep. That makes it easier to grab your iPod and slip through the window. The moon is in a late waxing phase, the month will end with a full moon. Under its light you can see the sparkle of dew drops, they wet the soles of your bare feet. The cricket chirps are a lot clearer now, there is a choir of them but you can’t decipher the lyrics. Every now and again a tree frog or two will chime in. You breathe in the night air; it is fresh, mostly. Mixed in with the damp smell of old leaves is something more acidic. Just at the border of your yard, where the grass begins to grow taller and intermingles with clusters of rye, you spot small twinkles of light. At first you think that they might be fireflies, but it is still too early in the year for that. Even if it wasn’t, these tiny orbs glow teal. A long time ago when you still sat on grandmother’s lap, listening to her sing lullabies you heard a story. It was a fairy tale that had been passed down for generations, from here is where you know what those softly luminescent orbs are.
Despite the stories you trek up to the tiny wisps. Once upon a time, in a story far away, these creatures were malevolent, leading the unsuspecting into traitorous parts of the forest. But like most of the faefolk, they have mellowed. There are no more forlorn creatures and no more enchanted beings, no light nor dark; Ogre and elf, troll and pixie, vampire and stayer, they just want to stay alive and vibrant. You hear the windchimes jingle on your patio again. The will-o-wisps buzz around, zipping towards the tree line. The imp-dryad seats himself upon one of the wisps and eyes you just as curiously as you eye him. It must have been centuries since a human older than twelve has acknowledged him or a being like him. Curious indeed.
But the things you acknowledge in dreams are different than the ones you acknowledge in waking.
As languid as can be, the wisp carries the imp-dryad towards its companions.

So you, after one last peek at your slumbering house, head in the same direction. You love the forest after all. It isn’t frightening in the slightest, it is a comfort.
It is home.

You pass under a natural arch of old oak. Cedar and pine intertwine with the oaks making the forest diverse and inviting. Their scents mix together and you cannot tell which odor belongs to which tree. You see a beetle scuttle over the bark and decide not to touch any of the trees. The wisps light your way as you traipse about. You have been in this very forest for many years—your mother is fond of reminding you that she used to take you for walks here when you were just a babe, she of course, did all of the walking. But this is the first time you can think of that you have ventured here during the night hours. Under the moon it is familiar in a surreal sense. The trail is accented by the same sizable rocks that have been there for ages. They didn’t have as much moss when you were a child, as they do now. The collection of fungi poking out from under them is new too. From somewhere within the branches of a cedar, an owl hoots. It is mysterious enough and darkly alluring but it is not eerie nor mournful. It is followed by a higher hoot and then a deeper one that sounds much closer. You think that, that third call might have come from the oak next to you. You squint up at the tree but can make out nothing. You wish that you had brought your flashlight, your iPod’s light will do just well, but it feels somehow less appropriate.

You would like to gawk some more but the swarm of wisps are waiting, you don’t know where they are going to lead you but you don’t want to leave them waiting for too long. For a moment you long to dash into the swarm and let those beads of light dance around you, but you guess that doing so might be seen as invasive so you keep your distance as they lead you deeper into the forest. The trees pack themselves more tightly as you trail further in. One might think it would be oppressive, but you feel as though the trees in their density offer you better protection. By the time the wisps stop moving you find yourself in a clearing. What you see throws you right back into your childhood and for the first time in ages your imagination has fuel. Dream or not, you find yourself in the midst of something you know is very special. You don’t know the occasion, but celebration is all around you. There is decoration all around. Most of it consists of yew and floral garland. You see it dangling from branches and wrapped around tree trunks, pink roses and daisy climbs all the way up. In other places wisteria clings to the trees; this spectacle can’t possibly be real as you have never seen wisteria in these parts before. But then, you’ve never seen an imp-dryad either. Golden glitter seems to hang in the air, leaving a fine dust on your clothes and in your hair. Everywhere you look there are hovering paper lanterns mostly in greens, purples, blues. Upon giving one a gentle tap you realize that they are not part of the décor. The delicate being nips at you and bobs away, taking its light with it.

You find yourself dazzled by fairy music. A fairy with a harp, a satyr with a pan pipe, and an elf with a hurdy gurdy. There is also a centaur playing an instrument you’ve never seen before that moment. It is silver in make and has a tube-like body. You may have taken it for a flute if not for the spindly spines that rise and fall with each note. Many of the pixies, elves, and faeries spin and twirl gracefully to the beat of the song. Bells tied around their ankles tinkle as their dresses of lace and flora swish fluidly about.

You can see so many different creatures gathered about. There are a few gnomes intermingling with dwarves and goblins. Further into the forest a few witch covens make conversation with vampires. The werewolves huddle near the faun. A cluster of talking mice with iridescent fur skitter at the feet of a winged dog. You even glimpse a few miniature dragons. Though lacking in size their scales are magnificent, splayed over their bodies like shiny tie-dye. Most of them boast the colors of the most breathtaking sunset, some of them ripple in blues, greens, and teals like that of untainted pond water and others have scales of pure silver dipped at the edges in gold dust. Oh, but there is such a variety you can’t possibly keep track of it all.

As you marvel at the dragons, the elven kin offer you berries and diced mushrooms on platters bordered with pinecone scales. Others offer you a chance to dance with them. You take them up on their offers and dance until you are ready to return to your bed.

***

You want to go back to the park, but daily tasks call you away from it. You have a list of mundane things to do from the laundry to some vacuuming, each task is as dull as the next. Between loads of said laundry, you find yourself picking up some of the clutter you let accumulate in your room—better to do it yourself than to wait for your mother to cause a stir over it. As you do so, you cast longing glances at your book shelf. A few of your favorite titles are calling you. The voices of the ones you’ve been meaning to read cry louder. But you are forced to ignore them for now. You promise that you will come back for them when you get the chance, even if it’s only a page or two before bed.

Your relief today comes in the form of your father reminding you that you still have to help him string the lights out around the patio and the in the trees so that your grandma will have something to smile upon. At least with this chore you can go out and get some fresh summer air instead of remaining cooped up in your house. So you tell him that you will be downstairs in just a moment. You change from your pajamas into your shorts and your favorite summer tee. You’re dad is already outside, getting a head start on the task, by the time you have finished dressing.

As you work to put up the first strand, you peer into the forest. Your dream from about a week ago comes back to the surface.
A swarm of gnats play in the tall grass near where the forest opens up. And a family of butterflies flutter around its natural oak entrance, where vines and something that looks like wisteria dangle down. A generous amount of sunlight casts itself upon the spot. It looks simply enchanting and as majestic as a forest ought to. Ivy curls around trumpet vine and creeps up the bark of the oak. Those little orange flowers are exactly the kind that would house a teeny fairy baby.
And for a moment you believe again.

For no other reason than to humor yourself, you stray from the strand of lights and motion to peel a petal back. But before you get the chance to peep into the flower your father beckons you to stay on task as your grandparents would arrive any minute now. You sigh, the flower and the fantasies it brings will have to wait. A lady bug with a shell like a dotted red pearl springs from the trumpet flower. As a child you used to chase them around the yard, letting them crawl along your fingers. You climb back atop your ladder and finish weaving the strand of homemade lights through the branches. You step down to admire your work. Between yourself and your father, the new decorations are looking pretty spiffy. The two of you keep up until all of the trees in your yard get their share. In the daylight they look like ordinary jars but once you plug them in, they will look as mystical as everything else in the garden. You are eager for night just so that you can see the full glory of your work. Briefly you consider that it would have been more suiting to set candles in each jar instead of a bulb, you vocalize this to your father. He disagrees, stating that doing so would be too tedious and time consuming anyhow. As you are about to leave, he asks you if you will help him clean the gutters. It is a task he has been neglecting for months now and your mother has been arguing with him to get it done. Deciding that you don’t want to hear it again, you agree. You might as well seeing as most of today has been eaten up by housework anyhow.

The next morning is even less thrilling. It starts with the bleating of your alarm clock, stealing you away from a pretty dream and thrusting you harshly back into real life. It would be less irritating if a long day of work wasn’t in store for you. You tug your uniform on and have a quick breakfast of two pancakes and some apple juice. You grab your car keys and head out. Your car is nice enough, you suppose, it treats you well and gets you where you need to go. That’s all you can ask of it. You arrive at work, a quaint little local coffee shop. Mostly it isn’t bad but there are some days when you would rather curl up under one of those gaudy pink and olive green striped tables and never come out. On those days you yearn for the simplicity of childhood. The time when you didn’t have to worry about Matilda and her ridiculously complicated orders and the hissy fits she throws when her latte isn’t done exactly right. You have never come across someone so picky. Today is one of those days where she is screeching at you because your coworker ‘didn’t heat it properly’. Your boss intervenes offering her a new one on the house, if for no other reason than to calm her tantrum. You wish that she wouldn’t cave like that, but you don’t say anything lest you precure Matilda’s wrath again.

It is late when you get home, so you go upstairs and try to write. But no stories come to your head, so you opt to surf the web instead, that comes naturally. Such is how it has been for a while now, all of your soul wants to put the pencil to the paper but no words seem to come and when they do they just don’t sound right. They don’t flow how they used to. You click around for a bit and try to recall past ideas that you never got around to writing but you can’t think of any. You check your emails and watch a few videos. You have another idea, you begin flipping through your journal for stories that you have never finished. No inspiration comes from there either, though you have some pretty solid stories started you have no idea where to take them. You also fear that your writing has become lackluster and will ruin something that looks so good. Finally frustrated out of your mind, you put the journal away wondering where your muse had fled to as you frantically give one last attempt to collect the visages of your past creativity. When that fails too, you retreat to your bed with a faint hope that perhaps your dreams will offer you some new material, but lately you have been struggling to recollect their content.

Work keeps you busy for the days to come and you don’t get a chance to go to the park until the second week of June. It has been too long, watching fireflies blink in your yard just doesn’t cut it. So at the first chance you get, you grab a book, your journal, and your bike and you set off. Despite the summer crowd, your favorite spot under the willow, the spot where you’d first put your journal to use, is unoccupied. Maybe sitting in your favorite spot again and enjoying nature’s energy will kindle your creative vibes. The field before you now shows off delicate pink azalea, white tri-petaled trillium, and the sunny yellow of daffodil. Near the swing set, before grass turns to woodchip, a viburnum shrub has finally exploded with teeny white blossoms. The air is pleasantly hot as you tap you pencil onto the paper of your journal.

***

You are lost, terribly so. It might not have been so bad except for the rain. The world around you has a grey tinge to it and you wonder if your family has noticed your absence. Really, all you intended was to have a quick walk. The family reunion has been pleasant enough so far, but it is crowded and you wanted to get a break from aunts with no sense of personal space and overly loud uncles made louder by a few cans of beer. The nature reserve the reunion was being held at is a charming place; the ground is lined with toadstools and clover. To the left a field of rye bobs up and down under the spell of the summer breeze. Your family had made good work of the small trees, tying white lace to their branches and sprinkling faux diamond scatter at their feet. You had watched dark clouds gather at the corner of the sky, all the while, the forest path was calling you. It had been calling you since you arrived. After an offhanded joke by uncle Marvin, you decided that it was time to make your get away. You probably should have told your parents you were stepping out for a bit or at the very least you should have invited your cousin to tag along, she knows the area well. But you didn’t think to do so and now you are lost in some forest of red maple and black birch in Connecticut, states away from your home in Maine. It was wonderful at first, the sprinkle hadn’t yet turned into an all-out rainfall and you remembered to take your camera along so you had managed to snap a few photos of the sweepy leaves of a hemlock tree spotted with raindrops. The fluff of cottonwood fell upon you with the raindrops giving the forest a rather fantastical allure. And because of the drizzle, many of the more annoying insects had fled. That should have been your first clue that you were walking into a storm, instead you felt relieved that you didn’t have to swat at gnats the whole time. You caught some of the fluff and put it in your pocket, you don’t yet know what you will use it for, but it seems like a nice thing to have. Something else caught your eye, a glistening in the bushes. When you stooped down to see what it was, you were disappointed to find a shard of a broken bottle. The rest of the thing like shattered a few feet away, marring an otherwise pristine view.
All of these things are what have distracted you to the point of not being able to find your way back to the reserve.

Instead you came out at the edge of an old steel mill. This is where you stand now, at the edge of the forest, gazing at the ugly thing that nature is trying its best to reclaim. Its abandoned and in shambles but it has already done its damage. The structure is a tangle of rusting metal tubes and pipes, the kind that had inevitably, during their running days, hacked out enough smog to anger even the smokiest dragon. As of late these tubes and pipes have been conquered by creeping ivy, you are pleased to see that the green tangle seems to be strangling the gaudy things. Rising from the top are smoke stakes of various sizes in various states of corrosion and decay. You can see cracks in the fixtures. It isn’t your usual material, but you take a quick picture regardless. As you wander closer the ground becomes progressively trashier. The mill had vomited up screws, cogs, and scraps of unused metal. Broken steel beams hang precariously in the entryway. Curiosity gets the best of you though and you are inside before your brain sounds the warning bells. The space is wide and ugly, the roof is a kaleidoscope of long dead pipes, crossbeams, and steel pillars with nuts and bolts bigger than your face. A few of the pipes that waterfall down the wall sport pressure gauges and wheels used to open and shut the ventilation system. There is a power panel on the opposite wall in which the ivy made its way in. Grass burst through cracks in the decomposing floor and curled around levers and metal spokes. The windows too are cracked, some to the point where they have holes. You are most appalled though, by the miniature generator in the corner and its cluster of uranium fuel rods. You remove yourself from the industrial jungle as quickly as you had entered it.

You continue down the road, trying to put some distance between yourself and the daunting mill. The rain is coming down in sheets now, coaxing the mist to thicken. In no longer eddies around your ankles, but blots out a good portion of your vision. You hope that the rest of your family has made it inside safely. You see figures poking through the mist—wooden skeletons that range in height from waist level to towering above your head. They are trees, you realize, or what’s left of them. They jut out of the ground like jagged fingers. The ground beneath them is a mess of twigs, crunchy leaves, flakes of bark, and sawdust. The remains of something that was once so breathtakingly powerful. The mist flows from their husks mournfully. You take your camera out and hastily capture the somber display before the rain can damage it. You can see a saw blade burrowed into one of the trees, you walk closer intent on pulling the blade out.

As you edge nearer, the air seems to glimmer and distorted as if someone has draped seran wrap over the landscape.