I
woke to the sound of wind-chimes. My first thought was to be thankful for the
breeze; my second thought was that we didn’t have any wind-chimes any more
because my brother tore them down to fight off his recurring migraines.
I opened my eyes and
instantly regretted it. My room had become a pinball machine for sunlight, and
it bounced off everything, searing my vision and leaving crazy patterns on the
backs of my eyelids. I shaded my eyes before opening them again. Grandma always
says being prepared is half the battle.
My closet door hung open.
Metallic vines had pushed their way out, then snaked up the walls and
intertwined on the ceiling while I slept. Copper and silver petals dangled
against each other with the breeze from my window in a song that I would’ve
found gorgeous if it weren’t so terrifying.
I jumped out of bed,
racing downstairs with the childish hope that if I found an adult and told her
then everything would be better. “Gran!” I yelled, busting through the
downstairs rooms. “Gran!” The last place I looked was the sunroom, where
Grandma started her seeds in the spring.
The ceiling was a mass of
metal roots that had punched through the floor of my closet. They inched their
way down the wall as I watched, so stunned that I seemed to have grown roots of
my own. When they reached a vase and curled around it, smashing the crystal
into a thousand shards, that broke my paralysis.
“Gran!” I screamed as I
blew out the back door and down to the stream. “Gran, where are you?” There was
no answer, and I sprinted down the path, away from the house, back to where I
had found the flowers, as if there might be some answer there for me.
I don’t know if I was
hoping for some kind of corrosive metal version of Roundup, but my discovery
took what little breath I had left in my lungs right out of them.
The massive oak those
flowers had been going under was almost impossible to look at. The vein I’d
noticed sneaking up the trunk the night before had taken over the entire living
system. Where the sun broke through the canopy and dappled the trunk, tiny
explosions of light shimmered.
The ground around the
base was littered with branches and leaves, too heavy to hold their own weight
now that the flowers had infected them.
I dropped to my knees
beside one branch and plucked a leaf. It came away with a metallic snick that
reminded me of clipping wires with Jamie, when he showed me how to steal the
nearest neighbour’s cable. But the leaf in my hand was much heavier than any
cord I’d ever held; my hand bowed under the leaf’s weight and it fell, hitting
my sandaled feet and making my toes curl up in response.
It was gold. Solid gold.
The entire oak that I’d spent so much of my childhood under, spinning dreams
and fairy tales, had just turned into a fairy tale of its own. I gathered up as
many leaves as I could carry and shuffled back home under their weight.
Once grandma got home,
I’d have a lot of explaining to do; the fact that I was now carrying more money than her house was worth
might make the explanation go down a little easier.
“Gran,” I called as I
pushed through the back door. “Are you home?”
“In here, child,” came
her voice, sounding much weaker than usual. I went into the sunroom to find her
in a rocker, deflated and half the size I usually thought her to be, staring at
the ceiling.
“Gran?” I said softly. “I
need to tell you something.”
She sighed. “No, no you
don’t. What I see in front of me tells me all there is to know.” She finally
looked at me, the resignation in her eyes so dead that not even the glittering
spots from my gold leaves were reflected there.
She reached for my hand.
“But what is this?”
“Gold, Gran. The old oak
in the woods, it’s-”
“No, girl,” she said,
turning my hand over and snaking her finger along the molten line that trailed
from the leaf cut. “What is this?”
