Storm Season by Kathryn Reese

Fiction

Photo by Guenifi Ouassim on Unsplash

The girl with a forest in her chest has been without a love so long she has forgotten what it is to hold hands, so tonight she runs a finger round the outline of her own palm: thumbpad, lifeline, wrist.

In her forest there is soft rain, the sort that beads on the tops of epiphytic roots and glosses the leaves of wild ginger.

Gloss. An old word for tongue, or speech. The girl thinks she should go back to making glosses, little pencil notes in the margin of ancient texts. If you can’t find love, there is always parchment.

The forest shakes. The rain pours, dousing the strangler vine and sweeping fermented berries into the stream.

The girl sighs. It is too quiet in a wet forest, the sodden cicadas silent, the frogs without warmth for song. It is quiet and lonely and bored. No one has come stamping through the lantana, machete in hand, seeking out the ancient temple. No-one has called “coo-ee!” into mute darkness, listening back for the voice of a saviour. No-one has tasted the stinging gimpie-gimpie or milked the freshwater lily root. The forest weeps and weeps and weeps.

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Author's Note:

My self care practice is walking. I love finding my body’s rhythm and the way a long walk connects me to place and a whole ecology of earth, plants, animals, microbes. Often while I’m walking my thoughts will loosen and start to make poetry or stories. This piece was written on a walk near my parents’ place on Jinibara country, the Blackall Ranges on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland Australia, on a path that took me past wild ginger and lantana on the edge of the forest. 

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Kathryn Reese lives on Peramangk land in South Australia. She works in medical science & enjoys road trips, hiking & chasing frogs to record their calls for science. Kathryn’s work can be found in The Engine Idling, Epistemic Lit & Red Room Poetry.

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