Where the rain stops

Water came in through the hole at the toe of my right shoe. It felt like a coin pressed on my skin at first. Then water came into the other.

I hated the feeling, but I kept walking, because if I went far enough I would slowly fade into nothing. If you were invisible, nothing could hurt you. That was the whole point of going.

They would say I was stupid for this, my shoes making duck-quack noises as I stepped, but I tried to push that idea out. There’s no way I was going back.

The path got smaller and smaller until it stopped being a path, and I stepped into crunchy bits beneath the trees. At least the rain mostly hit the trees now before reaching me.

My breath was making clouds even though it was only September. My arm hurt where my dad grabbed me, and I held it against my side.

The trees here were tall, and the leaves had gone yellow-brown like a used teabag. At the bottom of one tree, two mushrooms had pushed up out of the soil, and I crouched to look at them. They were white and soft, with little blue marks like freckles. Baba would have known their name. I sat down here because the rain was less, but a drop hit my cheek.

The air smelled like Christmas, and I heard it through the fuzzy sound of rain falling. It sounded like a low voice, the kind you hear from the front room when you’re trying to fall asleep.

My first thought was to make myself small, the way I did at home when he came up the stairs. I breathed in and held it so I could hear better. The words were not Bulgarian, and they were not any language I had learned at school, but I knew what they meant the way you sometimes know what music means.

Come and sit. You are tired. We have been waiting.

That’s what it seemed to say anyway. It knew I was there, and someone had known the whole time. I should have run, but instead my feet moved toward the voice, and I let them continue.

The bracken was up to my chest in some places, and I had to push through it with the hand that didn’t hurt. It smelled like the bitter brown drink I sipped from my uncle Georgi’s glass that time. There was a tree with strips of bright red cloth tied to a low branch, and I knew the cloths were from people, but I did not know what for. The voice came again, but I couldn’t understand it over the crunching of twigs. I moved closer.

I saw something white pass quickly between the trees ahead. It might have been a rabbit in winter colours. I knew it wasn’t.

Further on, the bracken thinned, and a small bird flew alongside me from branch to branch, blue and white, and it did not make a sound. It was strange because birds do not usually move that way.

The voice returned up ahead, and it felt closer. It didn’t make sense to my ear, but I understood what it meant.

The forest opened into a small circle of moss pressed flat, no bigger than the kitchen at home, with a patchy old beech tree in the middle. There were small blue flowers sprouting that I had never seen before. The rain was not falling inside the circle, and the air was warmer there, like the air from an open doorway in winter.

I stood at the edge for a moment, breathing, holding my arm out. I understood, without anyone telling me, that if I stepped over I would not be allowed to come back the same. I couldn’t explain why.

Then I walked to the middle of the moss and sat down with my back against the tree. I felt watched, but it felt like drinking water after running in the fields all day. My arm did not hurt as much, and the voice was close now, very close. The words made me feel like this was where I needed to be.

I closed my eyes for a little while. The wind in the trees sounded like people speaking far off. Something brushed my hair to the side, lightly, the way Baba used to do when I was small.

When I opened my eyes again, it was nearly dark, and the rain had started up everywhere in the forest, except in the circle, and my shoes were dry. I could feel my heart expand with every bend of the tree in the wind. My arm was a brown that was not a bruise anymore. Through the branches of the old beech I could see one star right above, very small and yellow. It was the only one shining.

I stood up, and the voice was inside my chest now, and I knew what to do. I stepped out of the circle, and the blue-white bird was waiting for me on a low branch, and when I walked, it flew ahead a little way and waited again.

When I glanced back, the circle was smaller than it should have been, or further away, and the star was still shining over it as it had before. I walked with the bird, and I did not look for a place to hide.

The bracken closed behind me.

. . .

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Alex