the woods are lovely, dark and deep
Black on white, if you must ask such personal questions.
How funny he is! And funny only because he doesn’t know he’s being funny. He doesn’t know (at least, I think he doesn’t) that I can see how unused he is to humor—how carefully he speaks, contorting his words as he wanders his way into making a joke. He even glances at me like he’s gauging my seriousness. The way his expression almost flickers as he thinks it out, weighing options: do I answer truthfully? Or play along?
I watch all this out of the corner of my eye, and despite myself I feel my mouth twisting into a little helpless smile, my chest warm and filled with real affection.
“Forgive me, Mister Pravda.” I let out a dramatic Victorian sigh; my head falls back, and my hair tumbles out of its loose knot and down my shoulders in a pearl-white sheet. A rose petal finds its way out, too. I watch it drift out on the faint breeze, turning circles over itself, before it coasts down to rest on the deer-track in front of us. I am careful to step over it in my next stride so it will not be crushed.
The field starts to narrow ahead of us. The grasses become sparser and sparser, turning from long ribbons of wheat into scrubby bluegrass and camellia bushes, and then the forest rises up again. One cedar appears, surrounded by flowers; then a second one pops up, then a third; and within a few heartbeats we are absorbed in the Viride once more, the stars blotted out by its thick canopy, moonlight streaming only through the finest spaces in the leaves.
“Hm,” I say. My voice is earnest and thoughtful, a little musing hum as I turn the question over in my mind. “Perhaps neither. It might be that the Earth is chasing them both. Ah, and that would be why we only see one at a time—the moon rests while the sun is pursued, and vice versa.”
I shrug then, and tease him in a voice that rings with suppressed laughter: “I wonder if you think I am more well-read than I am. Do you believe I might decide the universe, Mister Pravda?”
