She sat with her friend under the budding apple tree, cradled by satin pink blossoms and smooth apple flesh. The two girls were perched on a looming branch, their backs leaning against the rough bark. Their pale hands each held a bitten piece of fruit from the tree, their soft fingers hugging the sticky crimson globes.
Tracee leaned towards Cara and whispered softly in her ear, her breath tangibly perfumed with the smell of pink flowers and light sunshine.
“Let’s go.” Her sweet apple breath kissed the other girls white cheek and smoothed away her corn yellow hair. “Let’s walk around.”
The blonde girl giggled; a pretty sound that danced its way through the whistling silence. “Okay.” She let her elegant hand drown in her silky hair and reappear again at the middle, where she rippled it boastingly. Her icy blue eyes stared into her friend’s chocolate ones. “Where?”
Tracee curled her hair around a caramel finger. Her eyes flew down to stare at the swimming grass below them. “Don’t know.”
She lifted up a thin hand covered by long black sleeve and smoothed away a fallen strand of hair. Her friend frowned suddenly, and took hold of the hand mid- swipe. She stared at the fingers, thinking. “You’re sad again.”
Tracee looked ashamed. “I’ve been having that feeling again. Like... I’m forgetting something. What can I forget if I have nothing to remember?”
She looked out from the pink and purple dots of dancing flowers. Cara lifted her face. “Come. Let me show you something.”
She nimbly hopped down from their hidden perch and smiled up at Tracee. Then she briskly walked off across the meadow, her bare feet stepping lightly on the shimmering green stained with the pink and red corpses of drying apple blossoms. The other girl skidded clumsily off the branch and landed quietly on her naked feet. Her hair enveloped her face in a cloud of dark brown waves for a mere second. She looked around, her brown eyes reflecting the trees littered on the prairie, colored branches swinging in the light air.
She got up. “Cara!” Her voice rang out in the heavy silence. She caught a glimpse of flying blond hair and a shimmering blouse, almost invisible amid the swirls of floral rain. She ran. Her feet glided in abstract circles as she jogged around tall trees and shielded her eyes from the falling flowers. The wind tickled her neck, kissed the clumsy scars where the whispering weeds snagged at her thinly veined ankles and shins.
“Cara! Wait for me!” Her friend stopped. Her face spread wide in a smile as she turned around to look at the running girl.
“Almost there, Trace.” She offered a white hand to the panting girl. Tracee took it and breathed in a breath filled with sweet apples and flying flowers. Her heart felt free.
They continued walking in a synchronized path, their silent feet padding on the grass together like a series of connected chords in a quiet symphony. Cara led her to the end of the prairie, where the green cut off into orange and red damp leaves and rotten moss under the shadowed canopies of a dark forest. A bare, dying tree stood right before the forest; its long grey branches spreading eerie shadows on the suddenly dull grass. Tracee lined her eyes over the piles of rubbish spread round the gnarled roots of the old tree and then inquisitively looked at Cara. Her friend pointed.
“It isn’t just rubbish.” She seemed to read Tracee’s mind. “Look closely.” Tracee looked.
Seeds upon seeds lay littered like tiny black ants next to the curled skins of rotting apples. Dried flowers; brown and fragile, like a butterfly’s wing, fluttered helplessly like tired moths. Broken pieces of a tree once beautiful, like Tracee’s heart. Cara bent down and picked up the glittering corpse of an orange butterfly. And then she pointed at the branches.
Bottle upon bottle was tied by slender throat to every branch; each bottle only an inch apart from the other. They swung slowly like clothing out to dry, the glass glittering with every peeking ray of light, making soft ticking sounds as they hit each other.
Each bottle was filled with something. One was filled with the shimmering bodies of delicate butterflies, another with surgical scissors and a headless doll. A photograph with smiling women was folded in a dancing bottle. As the bottle swung near, she saw that every woman’s face was neatly crossed out in different colored sharpies, except for one. The sharpies leaned against the glass side in a neat rubber banded bundle by the yellowed photograph. They were all memories. Forgotten pasts. Someone had come to share their pain and memories with the old dying tree by giving it something.
The bottles clinked together as Tracee stared at the tree long and hard; until her eyes grew numb and the tears started to slowly fall. Cara silently blew on the butterfly in her hands, and they both watched as it fluttered like a leaf down to the darkened ground.
***
The next day, Cara wasn’t at the meadow.
And the day after that.
And the day after that.
Tracee came every day to the shimmering meadow, blinked against the everlasting rainfall of soft blossoms, and sat in their perch. She left every day when Cara didn’t arrive after many hours.
She didn’t have anywhere to go, though. She wandered aimlessly by the weaving trees as they folded their long arms to rest with the night and strolled past each one of them. But her feet turned sharply round every time she came to the dead tree at the end of the meadow, as if the force of it drew her away. It was during these moments that she had those weird feelings, like she was missing something, something that she just couldn’t remember.
***
It was only on the forty seventh day of Cara’s disappearance that she realized that the bottles were filled with memories. She remembered the photograph with the smiling women; her mother’s old friends. She remembered how her mother lost each one after her illnesses, and she had crossed each one out with her markers to help her mother. The scissors and doll was for a girl who was mean to her. After she cut the dolls head off, the girl broke her leg and moved away.
She filled the last bottle with a piece of her hair that she cut off with the surgical scissors. It was wrapped around a soft flower that had blown into her hand as she opened a new bottle that had been empty on the tree.
She smiled at the trees. Maybe she should be getting home. They had nursed her for far too long. She smoothed a hand down the bark of the tree she always sat on with Cara, and then without her pale friend.
“Tracee.” She looked around as she searched for the voice. It came from nobody. The trees were beckoning to her with their shimmering branches but she closed her eyes.
She lay down on the grass, the soft dancing stalks that pillowed her head and blanketed her slender fingers and bare feet.
“Tracee.” The voice sounded from far away and she couldn’t catch it.
“Tracee, wake up.”
She shook her head and just kept her eyes closed, sighing under the flowers that were quickly falling on her body. In a moment, she was covered in pink and purple dots, like an abstract painting. Her breathing started to slow, and her head was filled with foggy memories.
***
She opened her eyes. Surrounding her were the whitewashed walls of a silent hospital room.
She shifted. The crisp white covers spread over her tired body moved with her. She eyed the silent paintings of mountains and rivers and the thin designs on the top of the walls. There was a button beside her, connected to wires by the IV stuck to her hand. For the sake of company, she pressed it.
She was suddenly enveloped in warm bodies and different colors, tangy perfumes that were so much different from the sweet smell of apples and lonely peace. Different hands held her emotionless face; old and wrinkled like a satin dress, young and firm like the trees she slept in. A pale face that resembled her mother’s drifted in and out of focus as she gushed tears on the bed and Tracee’s wrinkled gown. Her father’s dark face smiled at her as he held her hand. A boy leaned down and kissed her forehead. She eyed him cautiously.
“Tristan.” They stopped their fluttering and touching as her thin voice echoed round the room. The boy smiled at her.
“Tracee.”
She let her family hug her again and cry over her face and hair and chest. She held Tristan’s firm hand. She tried to remember her land of peace and loneliness, where Cara had come to her one day and left another.
But all she remembered, was a broken butterfly, fluttering softly to the dancing earth.
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