Lost Creek Hollow some people long for a life that is simple and planned

The night was quiet when she finally emerged from the haze of herbalism. She thought she’d inhaled enough herbs to be quite sick of them by now, so she took several steps out of the garden of herbs stacked in her den and sighed shortly.

The moon hung overhead, wrapping the world in delicate threads of silver and chasing out the color. She felt monotone there, between the trees as she walked to the edge of one of the creeks, as though the shadows and darkness remade her from flesh into a drawing upon a page. Made of sketched lines, being slowly flipped through to show the motion. She didn’t feel real. The hazy curve of her black and white body in the shadows and dappled moonlight didn’t feel real. She felt both alive and dead, awake and asleep.

Perhaps that was her problem. Perhaps she needed to sleep. To stop her work and look around her. She didn’t remember the last time she’d spoken to anyone beyond the herbs she doled out and took to those who requested them. She felt like she hadn’t had a meaningful conversation in some time.

Faun stopped there, by the water, staring at her blurred face in the creek’s running water, and wondered where the droplets that kept disturbing the water were dropping from. It wasn’t raining, she thought, and yet the drips didn’t stop. The tears carving down her cheeks went unnoticed entirely.