lay my body down
How long has she stood here?
Long enough for snowflakes to become leaves, that fall and roll past her in dry murmurs that sound like death rattles. The kind of death rattles that only leaves and wind can make together. It is a kind of noise that fails to wake her up enough to realize that she could almost put down roots her, like Hickory’s tree that she refuses to go visit even though she knows the exact location of it. To see that tree is to feel her heart squeeze like a vise inside her black breast, tight and hard, a constriction of emotion that Loam just cannot quite give in to.
Loam hasn’t looked at herself lately.
Who would want to see what a witchy mare of the woods has come to look like after all the years have gone by and she’s been forgotten? Not that she was ever someone to be remembered. It is quite possible that her own muzzle is peppered with the pale hairs of age that have come to visit her at last, but it is an age that she doesn’t feel - her joints are still nimble enough to bend to her incontestable will and she’ll give them no thought until the moment they start to fail her, locking up and sending waves of pain straight to her animalian brain. Until then, there are only the leaves and Loam, blazes of bright color and her own small sable self caught in the middle.
The scent comes to her first.
Not of a mare, but of flowers when there should not be flowers spreading their gay scent into the air. It makes her heart go sick with want and thump faster in her breast, because no one can make flowers bloom out of season except for… Hickory. She shuts the emerald of her eyes against the vision that comes drifting to her out of the woods. It must be a conjuration of her mind. No - not her mind, this is her heart’s doing because her brain knew better. But now there is the raw earthy smell of the bay mare herself that clogs Loam’s nostrils to the point that she is forced to snort out the scent, even though it had crawled down deep into her lungs and stayed there.
Hickory has taken root inside her as much as her tree has in the dirt.
Then she hears her name said from those lips (lips she has dreamt of beside a green pond in a dark corner of the forest) and her dark green eyes crack open to the sight of Hickory standing there before her, like a damned dream come true. Her mouth cracks open in the same fashion, and a croak comes out because she hasn’t spoken in so long - “Hickory” is all she manages for the moment, the rest chokes up her throat.
Loam