Free Black Feathers by Joseph D'Lacey Page B

the course of seven days. She even saw Apa cry once. But each night she dreamed of a small boy with moon-silver skin, tar-black hair and eyes of polished granite. A boy who held out his hand to her. A boy who always smiled.
    New Wood is dense with trees, and despite her attempts to shrink, the branches of the pines snag and catch at her along the narrow path. The chill here is different. It breathes all around her and the silence is muffled by a frosty mist and a hundred thousand green needles absorbing all sound. The ground is soft and peaty beneath her brown leather boots and her way is defined more by touch than by sight in the darkness. And then, quite unexpectedly, the trees end and the path opens out. Above is a circle of lightening sky in which the stars still observe her. She can smell smoke on the air and up ahead, near the opposite edge of the clearing, she can see a large, squat shadow from which a flicker of light escapes. This is the source of the smoke and possibly the source of the stillness in New Wood.
    She has reached Mr Keeper’s roundhouse.
     
    August 10th ’13
    My eyes only
     
    I’m such a saddo.
    Even though I know I’m welcome in the world and even though I know my family loves me, I feel like a stranger.
    At school I’ve never done well in any subjects except art, which doesn’t count. Never made any really good mates. Never had a proper girlfriend. Never been in the football team. Never really been in trouble either. I’m just like this big… nothing. A loser. Even at home I feel like it’s me who doesn’t belong.
    Why?
    If I knew the answer to that I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this stupid diary. I’d be out there doing something. Doing anything other than thinking. Thinking is all I do. And nothing ever comes of it.
     
    There is still time to change her mind, even as she stands here on the threshold of the clearing where Mr Keeper lives. She could turn and walk back the way she came, back to the safety of her family and their small comfortable cottage. She knows there will be nothing comfortable about the work which lies ahead with Mr Keeper. It would be better, surely, to allow knowledge and adulthood to arrive in their own natural time. Even in her ignorance of the future and of where Mr Keeper may lead her, she understands that she will look back on these times and wonder, no matter what she does, whether she made the right decision. She already regrets the loss of a carefree mind. How much more of herself will she lose by walking forwards into this moment when she could so easily step back into the past? She thinks about this for several chilly moments, each out-breath unravelling in the still air. Her thoughts seem no more permanent than those same spent breaths.
    But there’s no undoing her visions from the night country, is there? No sending away the gentle boy with the black hair and grey eyes. And there’s no unseeing of the thing in Covey Wood. If she turns away now these new presences in her life will never be fully addressed and she feels their import so very strongly. They are like parts of her already. Parts she neither wants to, nor is even sure she is able to, live without.
    Before she realises what is happening she is walking towards the roundhouse, confidently despite the darkness, and her thoughts and fears only catch up with her just at the moment she rings the tiny bell beside Mr Keeper’s squat doorway. Cracks of flickering yellow and orange are visible through the sticks and mud which form the walls, and between the doorway and its ill-fitting wooden frame, but she cannot see Mr Keeper. She is about to ring a second time when she hears a rumble from inside. She almost steps away until she realises the rumble has a voice – Mr Keeper clearing his early-morning throat. The noise goes on for some time and Megan finds herself willing the phlegm upwards so that the poor man can finally speak to her. The noisy proceedings end with a throaty hoik followed by a