Total pages in book: 30
Estimated words: 28386 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 142(@200wpm)___ 114(@250wpm)___ 95(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 28386 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 142(@200wpm)___ 114(@250wpm)___ 95(@300wpm)
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
Chapter
One
Shiloh
I stare down at the chipped blue nail polish on my toes as I walk out into the pasture, nothing but the sound of crickets chirping all around me, a stray bullfrog croaking in the distance. The sun is clawing at the horizon, trying to hang on for a few precious moments, but three steps later, it’s gone and dusk spreads like a shroud over the green, rolling pasture in the distance. As always, my destination is the Wanting Tree.
It's out of place in the center of the pasture, a mighty oak reaching up to the sky, slightly gnarled and a little spooky. There is a hollow in the center of it that was its own universe when I was a child. Dark and mysterious. Now, at eighteen, I still hide inside sometimes and write stories in my notebook. Stories no one will ever see that take me out of this place. They take me far, far away. And I’ve never needed to get further away than I do right now.
I drop down onto the grass in my black funeral dress, leaning against the trunk of the oak and sliding my bare toes through the grass. Settling the notebook in my lap, I tilt my head back and sigh at the purple sky, thinking of my grandmother, who we laid to rest today.
Her final words still echo in my head.
Believe in the Wanting Tree, Shi.
Brow puckering, I doodle those words on a fresh page. My grandmother has been telling me about the same legend since my mother and I came to live with her ten years ago, freshly abandoned by my father. This is how the story goes: Once upon a time, a ranch hand was searching for his soul mate, convinced she was out there, just out of reach. He went to a fortune teller who revealed some bad news; the ranch hand’s lover didn’t exist in this time and place. They were star-crossed, living in different layers of existence. Heartbroken by the news, the ranch hand fit himself inside the hollow of the Wanting Tree and cried out for his unreachable love, only to vanish into the thin air.
My grandmother was convinced that the ranch hand time traveled to his soul mate, whichever plane she was existing on. And she knew the legend to be true, because she’d been standing in the pasture when the distraught man disappeared. Or so she said.
Believe in the Wanting Tree, Shi.
“I wish I could, Grandma,” I murmur, wondering if she can hear me. Hoping she can. Since she passed away a week ago, I’ve been talking to her often, the loneliness turning heavier and heavier in my breast. My mother works all hours as an emergency room nurse and even when she’s home, she’s haunted. Quiet. Sad. We barely speak. I had two friends, but their families have money and they’ve gone on graduation trips to Europe before college starts in the fall. I’m well and truly alone now.
I’ve always managed to keep the lid sealed on my deepest wants, but the solitude is twisting that lid around, slowly, slowly, and now I’m breathing faster into the cooling night air, tightening my fingers around the pen in my hand until the barrel digs into my palm painfully. The Wanting Tree tends to make me feel this way, like I’m missing something important just beyond my consciousness.
“I want my person,” I whisper, even though I feel silly. There is no such thing as a magic tree, even if the person I loved most in the world believed the lore. “Where is my person?”
Everyone else seems to have one. A best friend. A soulmate.
The world is made up of pairs, but I seem destined to remain solo. The daydreamer in the back of class with knockoff shoes and a slight overbite. I feel like an alien most of the time. Like I crash-landed here and I’m still trying to learn ways to fit in, so no one finds out I’m an alternate life form. Sometimes, before I graduated, I would sit in the middle of the cafeteria and this scream would build and build in my throat until I was positive it would shatter the windows if I let it out. There is something heavy and pressurized and urgent inside of me that has no name—and it hums the loudest at the Wanting Tree.
“I want my person,” I say again, louder, the crickets chirping like backup singers.
My eyes are half closed when a golden shimmer swoops in the air, but when I sit up straighter and search left and right for the source, there is nothing. However, the ground is growing warm beneath me, the tree feeling larger than usual against my spine…and suddenly that urgency that has always existed inside of me…it grows stronger. Louder.