Girl in the garden

She stepped through the pocket doors into the cool dusk, her minks wrapped delicately around her graceful frame, so that the evening’s chill struck only the top bits of her exposed shoulders, and she felt that whether or not she was watched by a mysterious stranger, her allure would still be fantastic and her wealth observable, but, having this thought, quickly dismissed the make-believe man and stepped out into the pale light; the tiny heeled shoes she wore sank quickly in the grass, and she found that she must quickly pat the earth with only the pads of her feet in order to cross the lawn and make it to the wooded area past the side garden, yes, that’s the place where she’d been needing to go, and as she hopped and skipped, clutching her mink, she encountered a familiar rush––one whose specific nature she hadn’t encountered for ten, twelve years––and allowed the feeling to carry her as if floating toward the darkly hidden wooden place; a musky scent, some thing to be foraged, she thought, and vine structure since destroyed that wrapped and reigned through and around the thin trees: an extension of the garden into the wood, a singular finger wrapping curiously out of the bounded space; it was barren now there under the ash trees, smoky spirals formed not from the bed of leaves, casting strange enchantments or lucky curses––she laughed lightly, in her throat, and tried to believe that it was, in fact, the past, that nothing had changed outside of this walled garden, that her feet were bare and soft, her mind still brined in a dark broth but an unconsummated one, virgin to its reflection which would make it double and more––she tried to believe this and could not, and tried to see in her hands the hands of a child and could not, and she tried to look toward the ash and see the snaked vines of an unenclosed wilderness, but all she could identify was the browning of layers of bark, a deep stain in a crevice––evidence of a former home––the utterance of decay, and the belated whisper of lost time.