A Single Wish

The wind catches my final leaf. He has been trying to catch it for weeks, and now the fight is over. I watch it waft through the air. It lingers in the in-between, a single spot of yellow cascading through the empty air. It falls to join its brothers, the mass of yellow, red, and orange there on the floor of my forest.

A young man comes down over the hill: his jacket pulled up to his chin to fight off the cold, and his hands in his pockets.

I watch him come...

He looks down at the ground, his feet sliding just under the layer of leaves, picking them up and scattering them around him. He comes in the swish swish of falling leaves. The leaves fly up around his feet and fall once more, returning to their home and covering the path of his return.

I know this man. I know his story. The wind brought it to us and we sang it through our branches.

We saw him grow up.

He sat in his window seat and read Bambi. He read the story of the young fawn turning into a buck. He read of the leaves falling from the trees, the hunts of man, the way Bambi watched the leaves scatter as he walked through them.

He remembers the deer now. His eyes reflect the look of Bambi’s. He is looking for his father. He is looking for his father to appear out of the silent forest and speak to him, to tell him the things he wants to know, to tell him how to survive in the woods.

He is looking.

The wind carries my leaf through the air. It lifts my final leaf and carries it to the young man. It deposits it in his hood. A wish.