Girl of Leaves
Alissa DeLaFuente
Her body had become a fortress of leaves. She took to wearing long sleeves and bag-like-things to hide her shape and deter people from seeing her clearly. Her face was hers, and yet it wasn’t anymore. She felt as if the wind could take her.
Some moments she walked unafraid of this anticipated dissolution.
Her father didn’t see her then, and he didn’t see her now. He saw the vague outline of a child he took to a fair once, a child who was becoming and becoming and becoming. “You’re just like your mother,” he said to both his daughters, but he wasn’t so sure.
Her mother saw her in the shining light of her own motherhood – the girl was her prized possession and evidence of long years at work. Her mother wanted to protect her and ensure that everything was just right for her, perfect in all ways. The girl didn’t have the heart to tell her it was already too late for protection and perfect was long gone. She needed the story of survival.
She wasn’t even sure her heart was still in her chest. Was it comprised of green and waxy swiss ivy? Succulent, spotted aloe? Crumbling maple leaves ready for stomping? Her sister sometimes gazed at her in a peculiar way, as if she saw the change but couldn’t give it a name.
The rest of the world noticed in its different ways. On the bus, people backed into her and heard the crunch of her decaying body. At school, they glared at the looseness of her clothes. The boys ignored her. The girls whispered to each other and looked away.
At graduation she felt the bulk of her leaves curling up, withering. She sat herself down and waited for her name to be called. Then she crossed the stage, shook several hands, took her empty diploma cover, and stepped off. Her mother met her at the bottom step and scolded her for not stopping for the picture.
Over summer she was supposed to be preparing for college. Secretly, she had declined her acceptance online. She hadn’t told anyone. She wanted to see how long something like this could be kept a secret. This small sort of betrayal. Instead, she sat in her room and waited. She felt the trembling of her body and its translucence, meditated on the veins in the leaves of her palms, and wondered what would become of her if she never stood back up.
A heavy numbness often seized her extremities. She could feel something like bark closing over the empty space in her chest where her heart might be. Before her transformation could become complete it was always breakfast again, or dinner, and someone came looking.
Eventually, she found herself in the uncomfortable chair of a therapist’s office. The room was obviously for children. The therapist herself held a stuffed bear loosely in her arms and leaned in toward the girl’s face.
“Your parents tell me you’re depressed. You don’t eat. You declined your acceptance letter.” She said these things with a kind expression, but it was still a confrontation.
The girl wiggled her toes and felt the shifting of leaves in her shoes. “I wanted to see how long I could keep a secret.”
Half of the therapist’s face responded in genuine surprise. The other kept still, controlled, calm. Quickly she reined in her expression and made a note on a notepad resting in her lap.
“Your sister said this behavior started in winter. That you changed.”
“Did she?”
The girl felt something flutter inside her. Perhaps a moth had been captured somewhere in the branches of her ribcage. She wanted to expel it. The feeling in her throat was uncomfortable.
She tried to say it, then, because she was tired of holding it in. She opened her mouth and felt the aloe of her tongue work around words, but she didn’t speak. She gazed into the waxy swiss ivy of her palms and waited for their session to end. The silence was a balm and the prickling of pins.
Outside of the office her sister had the car idling. The rain was misting around them, obscuring the hard lines of the world. She approached the driver’s side and gestured for her sister to scoot over, which she did. The girl of leaves knew she would.
They took the long way home and stopped by a forest. Deep within, they both knew, was the edge of a glacier lake. If they hiked in, they would discover its freezing waters.
They did without word. The sister looked back occasionally but otherwise followed in mute understanding behind the fluttering leaves and slow march of her older sister.
When they arrived at the water’s edge, the younger sister reached for the girl’s hand, but it was too late. The girl stepped her toe forward and felt the icy grip of the lake. It welcomed her, filled the cavern in her chest, stopped the fluttering of the moths in her throat. She felt herself dissolving leaf by leaf until there would be nothing left.
Her sister caught a final leaf taking flight in the wind and zipped it safely in her jacket pocket. She sat on the water’s edge and shivered. As the light sunk lower in the sky and the haze of rain lessened, the sister began to gather firewood.
The girl observed in a distant way from her existence in the lake. It was a blurry, dissociated one. She remembered being flesh, then being leaves, and both had form. Now, she was infinite. She was the tears on her sister’s face, and the snot also. She was the splash of water across a blueberry picker’s brown hands and the dark clouds above him. She was the monsoon gathering in some distant desert. She was a faraway pond where a lone blue heron stood, silent, watching fish and also the blood in his gullet.
She felt the edges of herself seeping toward farther shores. The rain lifted her up and joined her. She felt neither cold nor heat.
Watching her sister collect firewood in the rain was like watching the journey of an individual raindrop. It was hard for her to track, but she did so because she knew her sister was doing what she was doing out of love.
The girl felt that she loved the distant shores and the near ones. She thought she loved the various beings she inhabited and sprang out of. She came to love the weeds at the lake’s edge and the silvery fish darting through her waters. She felt these things more than she felt love for the moths that had been fluttering in her chest. She loved these things more than the translucent green that her body had become, more than the veins and her tongue of aloe. Still, she couldn’t sing or speak freely, but she could be unobserved and beautiful. She did not feel the urge to hide or keep secrets. She did not feel shame.
As her sister methodically struggled to find dry wood, the girl began to remember her love for her. When her sister crouched and began to rub wet sticks together, she felt a surge of affection. She negotiated with the rain and soon it had stopped falling. Finally, her sister discovered some rocks that when struck made a spark. Night was falling, and if she was going to make a fire it had better be soon.
The sister worked diligently and tried and tried. Her hands were bleeding by the time the kindling caught fire. She fed it slowly and blew gently when it looked like it might be dying. At some point during the night, a gathering of moths rose from the darkness to circle the light.
As the fire grew and her sister kept breathing life into it, the girl felt herself gathering. She felt the flesh of her body becoming her own and no one else’s. What she loved of the distant shores became the moons of her nailbeds. What she loved of the silvery fishes became the glistening of her eyes. She felt the heat gathering and pulsing in her chest and felt the moths becoming something more – a beast and a storm and a fire. They became her song. What she loved in her sister she began to love in herself – the trying and the fumbling, the breath and the flame.
Within the fire now, she felt her sister’s searching gaze and readied herself to be seen. She reached forward and grasped her sister’s hand. With the help of her sister’s pull, she stepped out of the flames. Her sister wrapped her own jacket around her and handed her the clothes the girl had come in years ago, or hours. She put her hands in her pockets to stay warm and discovered the piece of herself that her sister had kept safe – the shriveled leaf. She held it in her palm and turned it over in the firelight. When she let it fall, it crackled and was subsumed by a lick of flame.
