A Short Story Moment

So. Megan already knows this, but after I read/watched Hotarubi no Mori e, I was kind of a little bit inspired. And I really wanted to write a short story at least partially based off the manga/anime. And I was pretty sure that it wasn't going to happen any time soon, given that I am constantly writing, and I didn't want to add anything else to my writer's palette.

Then I had a day where I was just kind of stressed, and I was going to the writer's meeting that I go to, and I decided that I just needed to write something.

At 5:00 pm, I sat down at my computer. At around eight, while sitting in the middle of the meeting, I finished this.

I realize that it's not terribly clear, and it's not terribly well explained, and there are a couple moments that are taken STRAIGHT out of Hotarubi no Mori e, but it's all pretty intentional. I paid no attention to prepositions or gerunds or anything of that sort, because this was seriously just supposed to be me writing, and I haven't edited it very intensely, because I kind of don't want to.

So. While not the best thing I've ever written, and while it's not my favorite thing I've ever written, I do quite like it. And considering that I wrote this in three hours, and finished it in the midst of a five-way conversation (I even took some notes on the conversation), I think it's pretty good. :)

Oh. And it doesn't have a title. Yet. Because I haven't decided on a title that fits, yet. If you have any brilliant suggestions, feel free to let me know. Also, if you see any glaring grammatical errors, feel free to point them out.

I'm going to stop talking, now.  ^_^

The first time Tom met Alice was the summer she was seven and still young enough to believe in fairy tales. She fell out of a tree and he caught her, because that was the sort of thing he did. She screamed at first, because of the pattern of tree bark on his face and arms, and because of the leaves that meld with his skin. Then she was fascinated by the ridges on his cheeks and forehead and small knots on his knuckles. Then she laughed, because when the leaves brushed against her, it tickled. But she didn’t notice me.

            Tom led her out of the forest that day, and I watched from the edges of the trees. When he came back and saw me, he said, “Children are strange.”

            I smiled, because it’s true. But part of me was heartbroken, and Tom saw that.

            “Hey, Emma,” he said, and tapped a finger against the painted mask on my face. “I see you.”

            “I know,” I told him.

            “Promise me that you won’t forget that?” he asked me, and I shook my head.

            “No, I won’t promise. But I won’t forget.”

            I never did forget. Sometimes, though, he did.

            Alice came back to the forest every day that summer. Something about Tom fascinated her, and he welcomed her curiosity. He didn’t mind when she followed him through the forest or asked nosy questions or played with his hands because they were interesting. He stopped her when she tried to comb the leaves out of his hair, but otherwise, she could do anything she wanted.

            Sometimes other forest people would come to watch them with me. The small girl who lives in the pool would play in the water with Alice, and the huge bear-people came to listen to Tom’s stories. The tiny sprites would dance around Alice when Tom brought her to their home, and Alice would laugh in delight.

            She saw all of them. But even though I was there more often than any of the other forest people, Alice never saw me. And when he was busy with Alice, Tom often didn’t see me, either.

            Alice left at the end of summer, and Tom was sad and quiet and stayed in his tree.  He was like that until November, when snow came to blanket the whole world. Even the forest, thick and magical and full of things no one understands was turned white. Tom came back alive then, shedding his leaves and not bothering to return to his tree for days or even weeks. We were always free and crazy in the winter months. We would skate on the water-girl’s frozen pool with her, run with the wolf-people and huddle with the bear-people when we got cold.

            One day when we were building a snow dragon, Tom said, “Hey, Emma?”

            I looked up from the snow I was packing into a claw, and my mask slid down on my face. I pushed it back up and said, “Yes?”

            He pressed snow into the dragon’s side and asked, “Do you think Alice will come back next summer?”

            Part of me wanted to say that I hoped so, for his sake. The rest of me wanted to say that I hoped not, for his sake. So I just said, “I don’t know.”

            Alice did come back. The next summer and the next summer and the summer after that. The summer she turned twelve, the forest people began to worry.

            That summer was the summer Alice noticed me. Or, rather, the lack of me. She found it strange that Tom would carry on conversations with me when I didn’t appear to be there, and she was unnerved when he would pass a book or a flower or a stick to me and it would disappear when I took it.

            “Who else is here?” she finally asked one day when we were all sitting on the grass and I said something that made Tom laugh.

            “My friend,” Tom replied. “Emma.”

            Alice frowned and looked hard at me without seeing me. Tentatively, she asked, “Is Emma real?”

            Tom laughed again. “As real as any of us that are part of the forest. It’s just that she wears a mask that makes it impossible for humans to touch her or see her or hear her.”

            “Why?”

            Tom leaned over and tapped my mask. “Because if a human touches her, she’ll die.”

            Alice’s eyes went wide, and she looked so horrified that I felt bad for her and not myself.

            “Hey,” I said to Tom. “Tell her that I say hello. And that it’s not that bad, because the forest-people can see me.”

            So he told her, and after a conversation where she spoke to the air and I spoke through Tom, I convinced her that she shouldn’t be too sad for me. But when she left, Tom turned to me and hugged me and said, “I’m sorry. I know how much you want to be seen by the humans.”

            “It’s okay,” I said, even though it really wasn’t. “It’s not like I’m the only one who can’t get what they want.”

            His eyes became sad when I said that, and he touched his arms and shivered before he left and went back to his tree near the center of the forest.

            In the winter both of us were somber and sad, and it seemed like our mood infected the whole forest. The girl in the pool would sit on the water and cry, the wind spirits wailed at night, the boys with raven feathers would sit in the branches and stare at nothing, and the lost woman stopped calling to be found.

            All of us were human, once. Normal. Then we got sick, or we died, or we stumbled upon something that should not have been found, and we found ourselves here in this forest, changed and trapped. Those who had been there forever, like the rock child who lives in the mountains, have given up trying to become human again. Some, like me, want to be human desperately, but have no idea how to go about it. And some, like Tom, still try as hard as they can.

            The summer Alice turned fourteen I was walking through the forest by myself. I had my mask hanging around my neck because I was deep in the forest and it would be hard for any humans to find the way there. I had left Tom and Alice sitting by a stream, and I was trying to figure out whether or not I was jealous of Alice. Lost in my thoughts, I didn’t notice the wind spirit who shaped a massive hand out of dust and dew until it grabbed me.

            I was surprised, but I wasn’t frightened until the deep, heavy voice of the wind spirit said, “Tom just asked Alice a question. Tom just asked Alice to promise. Tom just asked Alice to promise to never forget him. And she did.”

            My hands flew to my mouth and I tried to run, but the massive hand held me tight.

            “We all knew,” the wind spirit said. “We all knew that he would ask her. He asks all of them. He asks all of them to promise to never forget him.”

            “I know,” I said, and then I just stood there.

            Sadness from one of the forest people will draw the others, and soon a bear-woman and a fox-girl and an old tree-man, almost like Tom, came to stand around me. The bear-woman carefully pushed my mask back up over my face with her huge paws so that I could hide my tears, and the tree-man and the fox-girl only watched me. They knew that I needed to be seen.

            “Thank you for telling me,” I told the wind spirit, and the hand held me tight in some strange approximation of a hug before dissolving into a breeze.

            That evening, I found Tom at the very edge of the forest, arms folded tight and a thoughtful look on his face.

            “Why do you do that?” I asked him, and looked at his arms with his sleeves pushed up to his elbows.

            He looked at me and smiled a smile that made his face of bark and leaves look sad and not happy. Unconsciously, his fingers traced the scars on his arms.

            “If you had a chance to be seen and become human again,” he asked, “Wouldn’t you try and take it? Wouldn’t you want yourself to be happy?”

            I didn’t say anything, and the two of us stood there until the sun set and the moon rose. Before he left, Tom asked me, “Will you promise me that you won’t try and stop me?”

            “I won’t promise,” I told him. “But I won’t stop you.”

            Alice came back when she was fifteen and sixteen and seventeen and eighteen. And it was hard, because all of us liked her. She would always say hello to me, even though she couldn’t see me, and sometimes she brought me books and pictures and glass jars full of colored sand. She would play with the water-girl who could never leave her pool, and tell stories to the raven boys who could never lose all of their feathers. She would dance with the wind spirits who would never have full bodies, and she would sing to the lost woman who would never be found. Alice was kind and she was pretty and she made Tom happy. And if she only kept her promise, then Tom could be human again.

            She didn’t come back the summer she was nineteen. Tom refused to go back into his tree just in case he missed her when she came, and because of it, he got sick and near the end of the summer, I had to carry him back to his tree. Throughout the autumn and the winter and the spring, he kept on looking at his arms, watching, but nothing changed.

            The summer Alice turned twenty, she came back. But this time, she brought a young man into the forest. Maybe he was too old to believe, or maybe he had never believed, because he couldn’t see any of us. He endured a few days in the forest with her, but when Alice came back a few weeks later by herself, none of us were sad that he hadn’t come.

            I watched Tom carefully that summer, but it seemed like he would be alright.

            Alice came the summer after that, but only for a few weeks, and then not at all the next summer. The summer she turned twenty-three, she came back with a ring on her finger. Still, it seemed like Tom would be fine, because she still remembered him.

            When Alice had her first child, she brought the little boy into the forest and showed him to all of us with delight. All the forest people loved him. But Tom began to look tired, and we all began to worry.

            In the spring before Alice turned twenty-six, I asked Tom the question no one wanted to voice.

            “What happens if she breaks her promise?”

            We were lying on our backs near the pool, and the water girl gasped and ducked under the surface of the pool when she heard my question. Tom just turned his head to look at me and raised and arm. He pulled his sleeve down and said, “This.”

            I looked at his arm, at the names of the girls who had broken their promises that were carved into his skin. But I had seen all that before, and I had never seen such a look of despair on his face.

            “No,” I said. “What happens to you?”

            Tom looked up at the sky and said, “I guess I give up.”

            She didn’t come that summer. Or the next summer. Or the next four summers.

            In the middle of summer the year Alice turned thirty-four, Tom let out a scream that ripped through the forest and the hearts of all of us. When I ran to find him, he was doubled over his right arm, sobbing. He didn’t know that I was there even when I grabbed his arm to look at it.

            He was bleeding, a mix of sap and normal, human blood. And in the center of all the blood, I could clearly read the name “Alice.”

            Tom didn’t come out of his tree for two years. So I walked with the lost woman and talked with the girl in the pool and tried to laugh with the tree-man who, despite being probably hundreds of years older than Tom, seemed far more alive.

            When Tom finally did come out of his tree, he wouldn’t talk. The wind spirits tried to hug him with their awkward hands. The fox-girl tried to get him to play. The wolf-people invited him to sing to the moon with them. And I was too scared to try.

            Years passed as years do in the forest, and without Alice to judge, I don’t know how long it was. But I know that there were many quiet winters and sad summers and lonely autumns and springs without joy. Tom and I no longer seemed to know each other, and I felt as lost as the woman who will never be found.

            A summer came when Tom met another young girl. Her name was Maddy. He didn’t talk to her. When she fell down he didn’t help her up. When she tried to play with him he walked away.

            That summer I realized that something needed to change. But try as I might, I couldn’t figure out what.

            For another summer, and another, I watched at Tom sank deeper and deeper into himself, becoming distressingly like the tree in which he lived. And in that summer and the next, I sank deeper and deeper into myself, no longer even wishing to be seen. All I could do was hope that someone would save him. And it would have been nice if they could save me, too.

            Sometimes I forget that the other forest people care. So when I was walking by myself who knows how many years after Alice, I was surprised when a massive wind spirit hand reached down to grab me.

            The wind spirit said only one thing: “You don’t have to be human to be happy.”

            That night I went to find Tom. I sat down by his tree and waited until he came out. He looked almost confused when he saw me, but I just grabbed his hand and pulled him down to sit by me.

            “Hey, Tom,” I said.

            It took him a moment to respond, but finally he said, “Hey, Emma.”

            For a while, we just sat there. I didn’t let go of his hand, because I didn’t want to, and for the first time, I felt no need to.

            We watched the sunset together, and though Tom still seemed confused, he seemed better than he had. So when the sun had fully disappeared, I squeezed his hand and said, “Tom?”

            He looked at me, a mix of blank and curious. “Yes?”

            “Do you think,” I asked, “That it would be hard for us to just try and be happy together?”

            Tom didn’t say anything. So I didn’t press him.

            “Do you think,” I asked a few minutes later, “That we could be happy even though we aren’t human anymore?”

            Tom didn’t say anything.

            “Do you think,” I asked even later, and I took off my mask and put it on the ground, “That if I didn’t forget you and you always saw me, things would work out?”

            Tom looked up at me and said, “Can you promise that you won’t forget me?”

            In that moment, it felt like the entire forest was holding its breath.

            I thought about his question for a long time. And because I hadn’t pushed him, he didn’t push me, and he waited there with me until sunlight began to creep over the horizon.

            When the birds started singing, I finally gave my answer.

            “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to promise you that,” I told Tom, and he looked at me without expression. “But I won’t forget you.”

            And Tom smiled.

            When we walked away from his tree, I left my mask behind.

            The next day, we started walking in the forest together. Since it had been so long, it seemed like we were discovering the forest people all over again, and it was strange to me how amazing they were. They welcomed both of us back with laughter and hugs and tears and everything I had missed.

            It was the first day in a long, long time that I was happy. And from the way Tom refused to let go of my hand, and the way he smiled, and the way he seemed to shed years, I think he was happy, too.

            Tom has fifty-seven names carved into his skin. They’re all from girls who broke their promise to never forget him. Sometimes those scars still hurt, and sometimes he looks at them and he can’t be happy. But then he’ll look at me, and then he’ll smile, because he knows that I won’t forget him. And then I’ll smile back, because I know he sees me.

            It’s funny how easy it is to be happy, sometimes.