We are sixteen and it’s past midnight and we’re swinging in a park. We go higher than I was ever able to as a kid on my school’s playground. I hated New York for many reasons, but the feeling of a cool summer night and the pines cupping us as if we were something worth something was something I could rarely find.

    

You have bright red hair and light brown freckles. One on your lip always distracts me. I’m not sure if I like you, but I know I like being around you.

    

For most of my life, I lived in books. I read Perks of Being a Wallflower and dreamed of friends who would have my back through any emotional episode. I read Sarah Dessen and I dreamed of making dramatic mistakes and screaming out of cars with the windows down and kissing beneath mottled yellow streetlights. In the large city I came from, folks lived too far apart. Children looked at you weird if you invited them to ride bikes together. I’d developed a hatred of my frizzy brown hair and almond eyes. They weren’t popular in the books I read, so they must have been wrong.

    

You were the one who told me how close you lived to that park by the library. You saw me balancing on railroad ties. You raised your hand in recognition and I fell, skinning my knee, and you ran over with bandages from the library and your fingers were cold when you smoothed the bandage over my skin. I remember thinking that was odd, as it was a warm summer day with an unusual amount of sun. It was so bright that your normally brown eyes melted into honey.

 

Tonight, you are a shadow, a blur of laughter and flashy smiles. It’s weird to me that there are no street lamps to light you up. The brightness of the city never really left my bones, nor the backs of my eyelids when I laid down to sleep. Despite the loneliness I’d always felt there, there was a pull as well. I never felt like I was supposed to leave.

 

“Bet I can jump further than you,” you say, breathless. I snort.

 

“I bet you’re right. I never liked jumping from swings.”

 

“Wuss.” With this, you lean forward and reach the top of the arc of the swing. When I squint, I can see your ghostly pale hands let go of the chains and you fall into a graceful roll across the ground. You stand up and face me with your arms outstretched, as if asking me to trust you, or asking me to fall.

 

I stop the swing, my heels in the gravel and lock eyes with my chin tilted up. You ignore my defiance and pull me into a bear hug. 

 

“I’m not sure what we are,” I mumble.

 

“Friends,” you say.

 

*    

​

The world of natural gods is a cold one. One might expect the opposite given our proximity to the Sun, but funnily enough, the Sun is one of the rudest. Don’t forget that he can peek on any of our doings.

    

One would also think that, being gods, we are nearly limitless. This is not the case, and we are reminded of the fact within our first moments as gods.

    

There is no way for us to remember our past lives. I remember that I knew love once, and that is all.

    

These inconveniences are worth being able to skate across rivers on the white spray, or speak to the oak trees and see the sphagnum moss grow beneath a touch. I don’t remember what it felt like to be human, but I know what it is to be a part of the Earth, and isn’t that much better? Humans these days have no connections, no communication with the land or the animals they coexist with. How pitiful.

    

There are other beings that are much more suited for our attentions. Sprites dance along beaver backs, guiding them to the strongest trees to make their homes out of. I find more kinship in beetles that munch on the decay than the humans who create it.

    

That is, until the day I came across a very unusual type of hunter.

    

At least, I presumed he was a hunter based on the bright stripes of color across camouflaged clothing. Strange that he carried no visible weapons, but I have been wrong about a creature’s danger before. I had to smile at the neon stripes matching well with his hair, a fiery orange red grown long and gathered into a bun at the base of his neck.

    

I followed him for a while, and at first everything he did seemed to prove my initial presumption correct. He set noise traps, so that he’d know when a large animal was in the area. He walked with footsteps that barely seemed to touch the leafy ground, considering how little sound they made. The tightness in my chest warned me of something, and I decided that it meant not to trust him.

    

I only hesitated in my supposition when he kneeled down and poured some dried leaves into a pouch. He tied the pouch and smoothly hung it over the branches of a tree before whispering mvto. The word tugged at me uncomfortably, and I felt he was more familiar than my brain was willing to admit. I snuck to the pouch when he picked up and moved on. It smelled of tobacco. Another feeling niggled at the edges of my memories, but I shook it off and continued stalking after the man.

    

He hung three more pouches before stopping about a mile away from the first. He sat, legs crossed, and poured the rest of the dried tobacco from its bag onto the ground. With a blue Bic lighter, he got it to spark. With his hands gently cupped around the pile, he coaxed the spark into a flame. He whispered prayers over the offering, and I crept closer to listen.

  

 “Let her be safe, Creator. Let her be dancing with you.”

    

I tilted my head at him. His skin was white and freckled, and that combined with red hair added up to a kind of person not commonly given to this type of prayer. It is much more common to see folks with brown skin and dark hair and eyes alight with purpose. The utter oddity of this man enticed me to stick around him for longer. He had not noticed me yet. Humans rarely do. Especially not humans of his complexion.

    

I was of half a mind to reveal myself to him, if only to shock and terrorize him for a few moments. I giggled to myself at the idea, already savoring the mental image. It was terribly disappointing when I looked back at him only to find him already looking at me.

    

“Damn,” I said. He looked shocked for the first time.

    

“I didn’t know you could say that,” he breathed. I considered messing with him, staring with eyes mostly concealed by the forest or screeching with the voices of the cicadas. I settled for leaning against a skinny tree trunk and gazing at him curiously.

    

“Will you speak with me again? I’m searching for a friend. She’s been lost in the woods for a long time, years now. I just want to find her.”

    

I didn’t respond. I tucked myself into the shadows of the trees, looking more like an unsettling pair of eyes than I’d intended.

    

“Her name was Hazel. Have you ever heard the forest or its animals speaking of her?”

    

At the sound of the name, I froze. It was uncomfortably familiar, and I resented the feeling it gave me. Without warning, the forest filled with the smell of salt and iron. The ground bled red. The praying man gave no sign that he saw any of these changes, but they suffocated me. I remember stumbling back from him, from the name. I remember tripping on my way deeper into the forest.

    

I’m not sure I remember much else.