...

There is a house in the woods that has a deep belly filled with fire. There is a fox treading through the snow silently. There are things hanging patiently from the branches of tress. All shall be well. There shall never be a fire in this forest for this forest is eternal.

Though you might not believe it, there is still a forest that you can’t see the outside of. These days you go through forests, not into them, and thus they are less forests than they were and the things within them feel exposed and less shrouded in their dark terribleness and more self-conscious and less opaque and less alive. Once, though, there were true forests and true things that lived within them. Mary was one of those things.

Mary was not a creature, nor was she a god. She was something that lived in the shadows between trees in such a way that she almost was the shadows but not quite. She stretched out in a patch of sun that had escaped the canopy to find the forest floor and imagined she was the sea, absorbing sunlight and evaporating, knowing what the sea was because the sun remembered it and there were bits of it in the air.

'If I evaporated', thought Mary, 'the sun would remember me. The sea might get to meet me'

Above her, leaves glowed golden with halos around their edges. She watched a caterpillar's outline shrinking and stretching, shrinking and stretching, as it crawled on the upper surface of a large chestnut leaf. A pigeon took off with a clap and flashed its pale underbelly and Mary did not flinch.

'All shall be well', thought Mary. 'There shall never be a fire in this forest for this forest is eternal'.

The forest lurks at the edge of your vision. It is the greenish shadow that is just over your shoulder and just darker than the dark that would otherwise have been there.

Mary wanted to be remembered by more things than just the sea.

Mary found a child on the edge of her forest and decided to teach it how to dream the way she dreamed.