by Jennifer Marie Donahue
They searched with men. They searched with dogs. They searched with a helicopter hovering over the swampy forgotten region called Mine Brook. They found a left shoe. They found a hoodie. They found empty beer bottles. They found a barred owl at dawn, surveying the hilly edge of their grid as if also part of the rescue effort. They asked, “How could an eighteen-year-old boy disappear?”
They failed to investigate how a cluster of trees, willowing up, could so closely resemble a group of women. This place, bordered by the highway and behind the cul-de-sacs of identical new houses, is our home. We are mystical queens who sleep here in the shape of trees. We dream here and spend days counting the children lost on shortcuts home. The children evaporate on cold nights after wandering too long in the thicket of dense shrubs. They stumble into our arms that obscure the way back to an old life.
They searched until rescue transformed to recovery. They wondered aloud their worst fears: Perhaps the earth itself swallowed him. Perhaps his body transformed into water and then dissolved into vapor. Perhaps his skin sloughed off like a snake shedding itself and changing into a new creation. But then, what happened to his fingernails? His hair? His teeth?
We, the willow women, want to call out. We want to assure them his body is here, safe, inert at our feet, always warm, always loved, flowers will bloom where eyes once resided. When you sleep for hundreds of years your body hardens with the seasons. He will become immortal with us.
The boy’s family arrived at the end of every failed search day. His mother called his name, his father wept, his brother stumbled along the edges, seeking out what he imagined had been overlooked. He believed that he could be pulled to his brother by an invisible cord of connection. He followed the owl’s calls to the edge of our roots. He touched our hair and felt a prickling sensation of brushing up against a new love.
We never forget the lost children’s whispers for home, for their mother. Shush, we told him our voices trailing like a cold wind, the rain of our tears sprinkling his muddy face clean, washing away the fear to prepare him to greet a new world. Never alone. Never again. You are our child now.
Jennifer Marie Donahue's work has appeared in Dappled Things, Grist Journal, JMWW, Catapult, The Rumpus and other fine places. Her writing earned an honorable mention in the J.F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction and was named a finalist in the Barry Hannah Fiction Prize and the So to Speak! Nonfiction Prize. She lives in Massachusetts. You can find her online at www.jmdonahue.com.