Entry #33

Wizard in the Wood
by Stace Dumoski


The sunshine tasted like a kiss, and the wizard – so long trapped in shadow – fell into it, lulled to gentle delirium by its warm caress.

“Hello, my love,” he murmured to the sky, but the voice that answered came from the trees nearby.

“You shouldn’t have come.”

“You shouldn’t have called me.”

She came into the glen, clad in dappled white and leaves for jewelry in her hair. “He’ll kill you this time.”

The wizard, delighting in the pinprick tingling of his toes, the breath stirring in and out of his lungs, and the sharp pain of a rock jabbing him in the rump, could not make himself care. “It won’t be the first time.”

“What if it’s the last?” She sat beside him. Their hands found one another, fingers laced together in a familiar pattern.

“Look!” He pointed at a flower. The tiny blossom pushed its way up from beneath a fallen tree. “Yellow,” he said, because he had forgotten.

She was inclined to nonsense at times like these. “You don’t have to go.”

“Would you stay here with me?”

“Yes,” she lied.

“Then I’ll stay.” Another lie, but generously offered. On a branch overhead, a blackbird chirped a love song.

A tear ran down her cheek. “There’s never enough time!”

“There’s enough for this.” He touched his lips to hers, and her kiss tasted like the sunshine.