The fragrance of scotch pine and blue spruce is pungent in the air, amplified by the heat of late June. Or so you think it is June. This place feels oddly void of time. You open your eyes to see a sun hazed over by stratus clouds. From all angles you spy familiar wooden structures.
You are back.

You sit up with your legs tucked under your bottom and bask in the estival air and all of the scents that waft within it. You furrow your brows, thinking that it is not as clean as before. Even so, the place hums with earthy energy. A stronger gust of wind picks up the hem of your shirt and flutters your hair. You notice for the first time, the string of beads and feathers woven through strands of it.

When you check for your rope bracelet you notice a faint fir-green glow on your palm. It is a circle with a shaded dot in the center and another smaller shaded dot that lies out side of the circle and to the right. There is a third hollow dot at the bottom.
The sigil of Mother Earth.

You can feel that earthy energy buzzing in your hand. Behind you, at the edge of the forest is an elf, in her arms she carries a prismic bouquet of flowers with pastel petals strewn of thin diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, and amethysts.
She sets them down beneath a cypress.
You sense a vacancy in her soul.
She has lost someone and the cypress guards their soul.

You take a deep breath, but it is smothered and you find yourself hunched over with coughs. The elf woman moves to catch you.
The grating and groaning in the distance is louder and when you look up again you notice the smoke hangs thicker in the air.
Like the flowers you wilt back over.

***

Your parents find you staring at the forest’s corpse. You are slumped over and alarmingly cold, but somehow you don’t feel the chill. You squint hard, trying to remember how you got here to this bleak place. You’re shivering and your parents have to help you to your feet. You are dazed.
You think that you may have fainted.
You spend the next day in a doctor’s office, where you are diagnosed with the common cold. Leave it to you to get sick in the summer.

You fill your sick days in your room, trying to paint the symbol you saw on your palm. But no matter how hard you try, how many times you blend the colors, you can’t seem to capture the right shade of green. You never were much of an artist anyways. So you tear the sheet out of your notebook and fetch your journal. You try instead to jot down your journey to the Weeping Forest. The name isn’t your best creation, but it will work for the time begin. Like the title you have made for the far off land you keep visiting, your recount of it, isn’t up to par with your past works. You wonder how it is that your younger self seemed to have produced more creative and colorful works than the you in the now. This time instead of tossing your journal to the side in frustration, you fight through it, scrawling words on the paper. In the end you have a very messy story that seems all too forced.
You suppose that such is better than no story at all.
At least you wrote something again.

You are about to give it another shot, but your phone buzzes and you decide that you’re due for a break anyhow. You grab your mug of honey-laced tea and pick up. Juniper asks if you’d like to join she and Alexi for a night of clubbing. Under normal circumstances you might have said yes but tonight you have to explain that you’re still feeling ill and rather drowsy from the medicine you took a few hours ago. You can hear the disappointment in Juniper’s voice as she says, “okay.” She wishes you a quick recovery and hangs up, probably to pretty herself up. Juniper always was crafty with a makeup brush. You sip your tea and try to get some sleep.

The dryad-imp tries coaxing you into the forest again. But this time you don’t go, you don’t have the energy for another nighttime adventure. As a child you might have slipped out runny nose or not, but you are more sensible than that now, you can traipse the forest all you want after you get better.

***

July comes in a steamy breath. There is a hot orange sort of morning haze as the sun continues to creep its way up the horizon. Your window is open as per usual so you can hear a loud chorus of cicadas. The branch of the tree closest to your house rasps on your window. A blue winged teal calls out in the distance to be answered by a chikadee. You go to your windowsill and take in the sounds of the dawn. In a few hours your house will be abuzz with people for your family’s annual fourth of July barbeque.

You fix yourself a cup of coffee and slip outside. Dew still glimmers in the grass like translucent beads. Strands cling to your feet as you walk across the lawn. A few grasshoppers leap over one another, one nearly lands on your knee. The air smells fresh with a tang of rye. Sunlight glints off of handmade, foil pinwheels as they twirl like miniature windmills. You follow a path of flat stones that your father had laid down back when the house was first built. Since then you and your mother took to lining it with gazing globes in colors all over spectrum. Your favorite is the blue one that displays in the purple of a lolite crystal when in certain light. Directly in front of that is the other gazing globe you like to admire. The one of inky indigo with swirls of green, aqua, and pink. The indigo is dotted with sparkles—it reminds you of a Finnish sky graced by the northern lights. The sound of the cicadas grows louder as you get closer to the forest.

Your father and siblings join you outside to set up tables and umbrellas while your mother gets a head start on the hotdogs and burgers. She always has been better on the grill. You decide to do your part and slice up some watermelons and cantaloupes and break the beverages out. Just as you finish arranging the fruits you hear the doorbell ring. You know that it is the neighbors, the Chung family always seems to arrive before everyone else. You offer them cans of sodas and lead them to the patio. Your mother’s cheerful greeting is only outshined by the family dog’s. Wagging her tail, she dashes about the yard with no real purpose.

The party is in full swing by midafternoon, the scent of the grill overpowering all other odors. Ricky from down the block, unloads an artillery of fireworks. The kind of fireworks you aren’t positive are legal, but it’s all in good fun so you don’t mind, though you plan on sticking to sparklers. Sipping on a carton of juice, you recline in your lawn chair and watch the children jump on your trampoline. Katie does a flip to the amazement of Louisiana-Piper while her brother is off trying to convince Ricky to let him light one of the fireworks. He won’t be swayed and offers the child a harmless smoke bomb instead.


A buck trots out of the forest, the sun beams between its majestic antlers. It is the largest buck you have ever seen, and you have seen hundreds of them in your lifetime. You squint, swearing that its fur is gold. Real, genuine gold. No one else seems to notice it.
This is your cue to leave.

Of course, you plan on reuniting with your guests for the firework display, but right now, the forest calls. You follow the deer as he guides you through the forest, his hooves clomping along the trail. You half expect to see faery children riding on the dragonflies that zip about. Instead you spy the white fluffy body of the wooly alder aphid. The blue fuzz on its head makes it look like a blue haired fairy in a feathery gown. No wonder you thought that faeries existed as a child. So much light floods through the trees that the forest seems to be washed in gold. The rays send shimmers over the buck’s fur. You push through thickets, trying to avoid as many burs as you can, but one of them may have gotten caught in your hair. You come to the clearing where the ground is overflowing with the bellflower and lavender. Mixed in with them is a generous sprinkle of summersweet and a few evergreen hued hosta plants with snails tucked into their leaves. Somewhere in the background, over the noise of your family barbecue, you hear the gurgle and churn of a creek. It is strange though, in all your years in these woods, you have yet to come across the source. Your parents have never heard it and after turning ten, your siblings ceased to hear it. You have taken to calling it the spirit pool. The buck strolls into a ring of toadstools, he pauses in the center and stares at you. His gaze is somehow ancient, foreign wise. He sits down before he dips his majestic head and lets you stroke him between the antlers. For a long time you sit with him, thinking that this may be the most magical thing you have experienced. Leaning against his belly, you drink in the woodland sounds of summer. You pull out your journal and you start to write; the flow is steady and poetic.

The sound of a firework startles your companion away, you decide that you better rejoin your family anyhow. Even without following the trail you entered with, you can tell you are close by the smell of barbecue sauce and corn on the cob. You smile, thinking that you ought to snag a cob before Chester can gobble it all down. You exit the forest full of burs and small leaves. Cousin Riley approaches you and asks you to invite her next time you meander through the woods. She hands you a sparkler and introduces you to her boyfriend, Telo. She met him on a trip to California and brought him back as a souvenir. You follow the pair to their picnic blanket and have a seat. The sky is going deep blue and a whirlwind of fireflies dance over your picnic table, around your gazing globes, and fly up from your birdbath. You look at the jars you and your father have worked so hard to put up and decide that it has paid off, their light attracts moths and firefly alike. Very charming, you think to yourself. You see Louisiana-Piper and Katie in an intense competition with her brother and his friend to see who can catch the most of the lightning bugs. So far Parker, being the taller of the two, is winning. It doesn’t help that she is eating a red, white, and blue popsicle at the same time. Your attention is brought to the Chungs’ game of frisbee when the disk lands in your lap. Xiùlán quickly apologizes for her younger sister’s poor aim. You laugh it off and toss the disk back, they invite you to join them. There’s no harm in doing so, so until the first firework pops off, you and Xiùlán make for a pretty decent team.
The display is dazzling, a sparkling rain of golds, greens, and purples, sometimes reds. Your favorite fireworks are the ones that droop like twinkling willow sticks. Bursts and bangs echo above the hills and treetops. Ricky knows exactly how to put on a show, he only misfires once, knocking the birdbath over. Your mother picks it up with a grumble as the crowd whoops and laughs (Parker gasps out an, “oooo, you’re in trouble”) and the show goes on. One of the fireworks explodes in the shape of a rose. Ricky lights up the next.
And in the its red flash, you can see the buck standing at the edge of the forest.

***

Work is extra dull the morning after. In comparison to all of that excitement, how can it be anything but? You would much rather be plucking thistles in the park or collecting berries in the forest. You can’t believe that you forgot to do it last night! Instead, you settle for doodling a picture of them on receipt paper until your supervisor sternly tells you to stop slacking. You tuck the sketch into your pocket and make a mental note to shade them in red when you get home.

As you scrub down a few tables images of the forest and the buck flicker vividly back to you and for the first time in a long time, you daydream. You fill that scenic path with gnomes and griffins, giants, and boggarts. The trees become packed with phoenix, sprites and brownies. You don’t even know if brownies go in trees! But it doesn’t matter, it is your daydream. You decide to get more creative and imagine a few phoenix with brilliant blue fire instead of orange.
It feels amazing to have imagination back on your side, helping you through the mundane things.

Instead of calling your mother to pick you up—your car has been in the shop for a little over a week now—you decide to walk home. The forecast is clear and is supposed to stay that way until next Thursday and soft puffs of wind alleviate the early July heat. You wave to your coworker, Alicia, wishing her luck at volleyball tryouts, and make your way out. You stop at Maree’s and get a vanilla-chocolate swirl with extra sprinkles. You listen to snippets of conversation ranging from small talk of the weather to friendly debates over which anticipated superhero movie is going to be the best. Your quaint little town is alive; the locals are joyful and the tourists are bustling. You point a group of them to your favorite local crab shack. You catch a whiff of the ocean, accented by the cry of a razorbill. You can go home, but instead you elect to visit the oceanside. You send a quick text to let your mother know.

The beach is packed this time of year but you go regardless. You spy the wooden planks that make up the stairs leading down to the beach. Tall marram grass pushes under the rope and tickles your skin as you brush by it. When the stairs come to an end, you step onto soft tan sand that sifts between your feet, it gets uncomfortably between your toes. As you walk further down to where the sun beams brightest, the sand grows hotter and hotter until you break into a sprint to reach the water for relief. The same breeze that tousles the marram grass tugs the waves forward so that they slap against a wall of rocks near the west end of the beach. You stoop down to pick up a seashell but a small child runs past and knocks it away. You feel a twinge of annoyance but hold your tongue. The child comes to sit, giggling, before a large sandcastle that he seems very proud of. This inspires you to saunter towards the rockier west end of the beach, where the crowd thins. It is at this part of the beach where the evergreens tower and most of the beach debris—waterlogged branches, twigs, leaves, empty water bottles, and fishing lines among other things—gather. For this the swimmers avoid it, but the campers and picnickers adore it. More than once you’ve seen groups of teens gathered around bonfires atop the miniature cliff that overlooks this part of the beach. And too many times, you’ve seen them chuck random junk over the ledge to see how far they could get it, which accounts for much of the litter clustering within the natural debris. The fourth has left its own scarring on the beach; remnants of bottle rockets, roman candles, and Saturn missals flake the sand as well as a few beer cans and empty chip bags.

You find yourself a comfy looking log and take a seat. You don’t hold it for long, upon a fairy tern. You squint thinking how it cannot be. Fairy tern aren’t native to these parts.
It twitters about expectedly.
So you follow it.
Follow it through the woods until you see a familiar shimmer in the air. It darts towards the spot and disappears.

You walk towards the portal.