The Weeping Wood

My grandmother, Marta, had a farmhouse on the edge of a forest called the Weeping Wood. The locals said the trees wept sap like tears, but really it was just the pines bleeding resin in the heat. She was a woman of logic, who believed that every creak in the old house had a cause, every shadow a shape. So when my mother and I moved in with her, she expected nothing but the mundane.

I was four, all knobby knees and wild hair, and I spent my days in the yard, chattering to the air. My mother and grandmother smiled, calling it imagination. But that summer, the air grew thick and still, and the swings hung limp as hanged men. One afternoon, I sat on the left swing, talking to my ‘friend’, and Marta watched from the porch. The right swing began to move, gentle at first, then rising higher, as if a ghost were pumping its legs. Marta felt a cold knot in her stomach, but she shook it off, blaming a draft. She came out, and the swing stopped.

As the weeks passed, the incidents grew. I would point to the edge of the wood and say, ‘The lady is waving.’ Marta saw nothing, but the hairs on her neck stood up. One evening, I refused to eat, staring at the corner of the kitchen. ‘She’s crying,’ I said. Marta turned, and for a split second, she saw a shimmer, like heat off a road, and then nothing. She began to doubt her own mind.

The breaking point came on a night of full moon. I woke screaming, and Marta rushed in. I was pointing at the window. ‘She wants in,’ I wept. Marta looked, and the glass was fogged, and on it, a handprint—small, like a child’s—slowly appeared. She ran to the window, but there was no one. The handprint faded, leaving only a smear.

Marta did what she never thought she would: she asked the old woman in the village, who knew things. The woman listened, her face grave. She said, ‘There was a girl, Lila, who drowned in the creek behind your farm, sixty years ago. She was about your daughter’s age. She’s lonely, and she wants a playmate.’ Marta’s blood ran cold. She remembered the creek, now a trickle, but still there, dark under the trees.

That night, Marta took me to the woods, and she spoke to the air. ‘Lila,’ she said, ‘you have to let my granddaughter go. She’s not yours to take.’ For a moment, the silence was absolute. Then, a whisper, like wind through leaves, but with a child’s voice: ‘I’m so alone.’ Marta’s heart ached, but she knew what she had to do. She cut a lock of her own hair, and tied it to a branch, a deal: a piece of her, instead of me. She turned and carried me back, and never looked back.

We left the farmhouse the next day. Marta never spoke of it again, but she kept the window in my room boarded, and she never told my mother the truth. To this day, I don’t remember any of it, but I have a fear of swings, and when I’m alone in the woods, I sometimes see a girl in a white dress, standing at the edge of the trees, watching me with eyes like dark pools. And I wonder if she’s still waiting, patient as the years, for a playmate who never comes.