This is the conclusion of Liminal, a short story in serial form. If you haven’t already, read Part 1 here.
I am not so great with this knife and the bark is really hard but I figured out that I can chip it. Not cut it. If I chip it I can make lines where the white wood shows through the brown bark. It’s pretty good. The heart looks like a heart mostly and you can see the F+M in the middle.
I think Florent will like it.
It is agony.
Why does gentle Mathilde savage me so?
Am I not what she has been pining for, so heartsick, so stricken, for all these days?
Is it days?
Or is it centuries? They all flow in the same rushing river, do they not, the days, the months, the years, the centuries, so the water of one stream is indiscernible, indivisible, from that of another. They are one, they are unceasing, they rush on, over me and through me.
As does this pain.
As does this loneliness.
I hear him coming now through the bosquet because he is singing a stupid song. I don’t care. I’m just so happy he’s here. Finally.
I call out to him. “Florent!”
He smiles and waves when he sees me under the oak tree. I try to stand so he will see the heart I carved. When he gets close I say “You got my note.”
“Yes,” he says, and he pulls it from his pocket to show me. “So, you like me,” he says. Then I see him see the heart. His eyes get real wide and he makes a smirk I guess. A weird smile. “Did you do that?” he asks.
I hold up the knife. Then I point it at him.
“Oh,” he says. “You’re SO dangerous.”
I decide I like to seem dangerous. “What’s the answer?” I ask. I lean back against the oak and I bend my leg to put my foot up against the tree trunk. I think I look like a model.
“The answer to what?”
“The answer to my note.” Boys really can be so dense. I am totally ready for him to kiss me.
He unfolds the note and reads it. “There’s no question,” he says.
I groan. I hope he is not a dope. Because he is so cute. “Do you like me?” I say, as dangerous as I can sound. I want to sound alluring or something but I only sound mad.
He nods and smiles. Maybe he’s shy. I didn’t think of that.
“You like me?”
He looks at his shoes. “Yes.”
“Then I would like you to kiss me.”
“Okay.” He pushes the note into his back pocket and he walks toward me real slowly. It’s so exciting. I reach out my hand and he touches it. His hand is so soft. Then he presses against me, squishing me against the oak tree, with his arms around me, and then I feel his lips touch mine.
I take a breath and I whisper his name, right into his mouth.
“Florent.”
I shudder. My entire being quakes to hear her call him by my name.
If he is Florent, then who am I? I, who has answered eagerly to that name since first she in her lithesome form glided beneath my branches.
I am Florent. I know it to my core. Yet the evidence before me shakes my confidence.
She rests against me lovingly, I feel the warmth of her body pressed to mine. Her glorious flaxen hair cascades along the corrugations of my bark.
My bark. My branches. I hear it now, and all at once I know what I am.
The sorceress has entombed me in this ghastly form, immobile, forever longing. I am love embodied, sensate, yet without a mouth to speak, without arms to enfold, no tears, no racing heart, no shuddering breath.
The waters of all these days, this terrible truth, flow within me, through me, onward for eternity.
And Mathidle and Florent walk off, hand in hand, through the dappled sunlight.