by Keely O’Shaughnessy
I sense the knight before we reach the sycamore. His bulk embedded in the tree’s trunk. He towers over us and yet remains anchored to the forest floor.
Helmet and gauntlets polished smooth, he whispers to me of something ancient, of blood and metal, of rows of chainmail punctured with a broadsword. Of the bodies that became meat, that became the nutrient-rich soil, that became the food that sustains all of nature.
“Here,” I say, stepping over the stones that encircle the sycamore’s roots.
James thinks we’ve come to carve our initials and that afterward I’ll open my legs to him, again as I did at the edge of the forest, pine needles pressed into bare flesh.
He flicks his penknife open.
I almost laugh thinking how James believes I would allow him to deface something so precious. “We will teach him,” I whisper to the clamouring leaves.
Plucking away strings of firmly wound ivy, I’m able to hold my palm flat to the tree’s grain. The knight’s features are crudely cut, but his intensity pulses just beneath the surface; he spurs me on.
Instinctively, I drum my fingers against his bark. The knight answers with the trill of a woodpecker, the shriek of barn owl. The wood tremors. And the mesh of branches above us knits tighter. The glow of a waxing moon becomes shadow, and the forest grows dark.
James looks at me, eyes wide and paper-white, and I wonder if I’ll say anything this time, whether I’ll explain the good he’s doing by surrendering to the will of the forest or that the ooze of him that seeps into the earth now will fortify the verdant woodland of our future. Or if, as the knight’s searching, binding hands double about the boy’s throat, like always, I’ll simply stay quiet and take my place beside him, bound to the sycamore tree, for I belong to the knight and he to the forest.
KEELY O’SHAUGHNESSY is a writer with cerebral palsy, who lives in Gloucestershire, UK. Her micro-chapbook, The Swell of Seafoam, will be published as part of Ghost City Press’ Summer Series 2022 and her debut collection, Baby is a Thing Best Whispered is forthcoming with Alien Buddha Press, August 2022. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions as well as the Wigleaf Top 50. She is Managing Editor at Flash Fiction Magazine. Find her at linktr.ee/keelyo.shaughnessy.
