I thought I wanted to be alone, that I was brave and strong and didn’t need a single thing from anyone. But now I’m not so sure. Now my heart crumbles inside the cave of my chest, and I wish I was the size of a gnat, so small I could fold myself into a crack in the floor and disappear. Tiny and forgettable.

I let the candle burn down to nothing, wax dripping onto the wood floor beside my feet until the flame fizzes and blinks out. I let the glass jar roll away from my fingertips and thud against the bedpost. I draw my knees to my chest and curl my toes under the rug. But I leave the window open—I want to feel the cold—and I listen to the wind bite against the eaves of the house.

A soft pain forms inside my ribs, a hurt that won’t go away. Empty and hollow, like my gooey insides have been carved out with a blade. Jack-o’-lantern slop.

Eventually my eyelids sink closed and I drift into an awful sort of sleep.

My dreams are strange and green, and I feel myself being pulled under by moss and golden leaves. Rich, dark soil blots out my vision, it clots my ears and mouth, it suffocates, it buries me alive. I can taste the earth, the cold frozen ground caving in on top of me.

But then there is music, metallic and thin and far away, vibrating through the soil of my dreams. I wake, choking and grabbing at my face as if to pull the roots away, to claw my way back aboveground. But I’m still on the floor of the loft. Not buried—not dead.

The night sky fills my room, the sun long set. How long have I been asleep?

Snow blows in through the open window, along with something else.

A noise from somewhere outside, in the trees, in the snowy dark.

The music was not in my dreams.

It was real.

Spellbook of Moonlight & Forest Medicine

EMELINE WALKER was born a month late under a ghost moon—instead of the dwarf clover moon, as was intended. Her eyes were alabaster white, and when she opened her mouth to cry, only air slipped out.

She was a quiet child, who spoke to herself and played cat’s cradle alone in her room and dug her toes into the mud to feel the worms wriggling beneath.

But at seventeen, during an unusually windy autumn when wild dandelion fluff blew over the lake like tiny parasols, Emeline went into the Wicker Woods and lost her mind.

Yet, it was not her fault.