Full Moon - Wendy BooydeGraaff
She sat beneath the trees because she needed the darkness first. The five-hundred-year-old beech and maples stretched their canopies above her. Some of the oldest elders provided crevices in their trunks, crevices that she could squeeze into to find darker dark, at least until her time had come. Inside the oldest tree, she pressed her face into the heartwood, listening to the phloem transport leaf sugar to the roots and listening to the xylem transport water and nutrients to the leaves. Waiting. Hours of waiting. Then she heard the hitch in the steady rhythm of xylem and phloem, the way a heart might momentarily stop its steady pumping when confronted with something sudden. She pulled her face away. Clumps of dried sap stuck to her chin, her jawline, her forehead. She extracted herself from the crevice. Now silver tinged the darkness, and above her the congregation of leaves was outlined in luminescence. Her stomach growled. She began climbing up the mottled bark, stopping once to press her ear against the tree. She heard the inner transportation network of the tree as clearly as if she were still inside. She shivered. Each dark branch gleamed with backlight. Silver speckled through the canopy, freckling her arms, her face. She sprinted up the last length of the tree until she sat atop the leaves. Here the round disc of silver illuminated everything. She tipped her face up and opened her mouth as if to howl. The silver dripped down her throat. She swallowed, then the rushing welled inside of her, a vitality drumming into the farthest bits of her body—under her toenails, behind the last knot in her spine. She wondered if the trees could hear it too, this pulsing inside of her, this transformation underway.
Originally published in Rune Bear, The Weekly, October 17, 2019
Wendy BooydeGraaff's fiction has been included in Stanchion, Slag Glass City, CutLeaf, Necessary Fiction, X-R-A-Y, Phoebe, Ninth Letter online, Iron Horse Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her short fiction was honored by Looking Glass Writers Conference 2024 with a full scholarship, longlisted for Wigleaf’s Top 50 2024, longlisted for the 2024 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, shortlisted for The Redbud Writing Project’s 2023 Coppice Prize, and a finalist in the 2023 Iron Horse Literary Review Long Story Competition. Her middle grade horror story is anthologized in The Haunted States of America (Godwin Books, 2024). Born and raised in Ontario, Canada, she now lives in Michigan, United States. wendybooydegraaff.com
