Debut Fiction: 'The Dream' by Claire Marsden

Where are your words that once fell like leaves? There is nothing but bare earth at my feet. I'll stand. I'll pause. Until the stars themselves are dead. Lichen will grow in the hollows of my bones so ancient it will learn to speak.

How do I reconcile your absence from the groves? Your heat from my hand? Birds still call where we laid. I bowed like a reed at your touch; you disrobed me with your words and left. Time passes. Sweet woodruff nests in my hair. Fieldfares sleep in my ears. Blankets of moss veil my eyes. Foxgloves grow out of my fingers. Time passes.

I fall deeper into darkness, soaking in to the holy dirt and dream of night. A black cassocked man moving upon the mills and hushed sloping hills, ready to give last rites to the day. I dream of rippled ribbons of light falling on ponds clothed with life, of wild stoats playing on the soft folds of creation. I dream of the sweet meadow grass quietly bedded between sleeping lovers' legs. I dream of the places and spaces you inhabited under my skin. I dream of songlines. Of the soles of your feet and how they tread upon my being; with each step you could sing me back into existence...

I dream of silence.

Of twisting and turning in my sadness, of falling and finally finding the ground of my being. I dream of hearing - the deep hum of grief birthing deathless wooded tendrils. Limbs climbing out and up and through; touched by sky and bathed in light.

I dream of my again-making. Of cradling life as it nestles itself into the curve of my boughs. I dream of being loved. I dream.