Here it is, the second entry in my Flash Fiction Contest.

Thank you, Michelle for your submission, and good luck!

The Heart of the Woods – A Ghost Story

By Michelle M. Manus

The circumstances of Melara and Beloved’s meeting were not unusual, nor were they typical. It was not a romance novel setting of love at first sight, nor was it any of the myriad ways in which people tend to fall in love nowadays. It was, rather, a recognition of two kindred spirits, and one that should never have come to love. Perhaps that is what made the difference.
They met in the park – not the part by the lake with the picnic tables, but the part in the woods, off the beaten paths, where not even the foolish young venture. The very heart of the woods, where only the searching go, and it was not with excitement that they found each other, but rather with an odd annoyance at a mutual invasion of sacred privacy.

The afternoon passed with silence between them, each refusing to leave a place they claimed as their own. The evening too came to pass, filled no longer with silence but with the quiet expression of things that could not be understood in the harsh unreality of the world outside.

It was not love, understand, nor was it friendship, or hatred, or even respect. It simply was.

Time passed. How little or how much is difficult to say, and for the story here told it does not matter. Eventually the things spoken of above did grow between Melara and Beloved: understanding, respect, friendship, and even an odd twinge of hate. Love was the last to come and it came neither quickly nor slowly.

Melara was young – in college, though that doesn’t matter – a lost idealist who did not even believe in the ability of humanity to possess goodness. She needed a link – a reason to remain in a world where nothing mattered, and nothing made sense. She loved Beloved because he became that reason.

As for Beloved, he was dying. A few days, a few months, no one was quite sure. It didn’t matter because he had died long before that. A lifetime of destroyed illusions had all built up like a slow poison inside of him until finally he woke one morning and understood that they had killed him. To live again Beloved needed honesty – bluntness, sincerity, even pain. Melara was each of these; a flower that showed every color as brightly or dully as it chose to, uncaring of what predators might be attracted to its brilliance.

Each resisted the draw to the other for individual reasons. The disillusioned idealist tends to cling to disillusionment because it is safe there, and the dead rarely ever embrace the pain of coming back to life. Melara’s emotions ran more volatile, more prone to expression than Beloved’s, and so it was that when love found them it was Melara who brought it to fruition.

The first touch ever shared in their hidden world was the moment she pressed her lips to his, ignoring his desire to be left alone. She cared not that he spurned connection. She needed him desperately. Needed him to rip down the warped idealism inside of her and mold it into something she could understand.

Beloved fought their first contact. He did not want to live again, and he did not want the responsibility for the pain he knew Melara would feel when his body was dead. But he could not hold out against her. Her fierce determination, her intense desire, destroyed the strength of his resistance, and he could not do what was best for her. He surrendered to his selfishness and to the desire to have what he wanted regardless of the consequences.

To say their love was ill-fated would be to pronounce the death of an over-used cliché, and it wasn’t really so, at any rate. When Beloved died he was more truly alive than he had ever been while his body still worked.

Upon his death Beloved’s ashes were given to Melara in a small obsidian urn. She carried the other half of herself, in her hands in a small black jar, back into the heart of the woods.

She thought of crying, but in this place tears failed her as they had not since Beloved’s death. Being here again, with Beloved in her hands, a sense of stillness enveloped her. The stillness was broken by a harsh wind blowing through the trees, so strong it ripped the jar from her hands. With a cry she flew after it too late. The wind shattered it against a fallen stone and Melara fell after it, her hands sinking deep into the ashes.

The wind stirred and the ashes blended, intermingling with the soft dirt until it was impossible to distinguish one from the other, and she understood then that the world they had made together had reclaimed one of its creators. Looking down she found her body half submerged into mud and she wondered if it had not reclaimed them both. Struck by the moment she lifted her ash covered hands to her face and inhaled, the burnt scent of Beloved moving around her, through her, in her.

Hands covering her face Melara heard his voice whisper in her ear, felt the roughness of Beloved’s hands on her waist, and she realized then that she could never leave. Her love – her selfish desire to keep him – had brought Beloved back here, had tied him to this place, and so she realized that his love would tie her there as well. She leaned back into her lover’s arms and her eyes closed, never again to open.

It is an awkward story: the height of love – the height of selfishness. What actually became of Melara has never been proven. But I’ve heard it told that if one travels far enough – deep enough – into the heart of the woods, that Beloved and Melara are still there, each one’s love too strong ever to let the other leave them.

If you want to submit your own story for the contest there is still time. Send all submissions to Somedamnfool88@gmail.com