The Book of Elijah Knight 

Escape To The Forest

Asher is strapped in the back carrier. He drifts over my shoulders, his head, drunk with sleep, falls forward, resting and then jerking suddenly within the curved arch between the back of my head and the end of my neck. “It’s too early sweetie. It’s not time yet.”

Leaves skid across the thick layer of ice on the creaking lake, the stems lightly sifting the snow.

The flakes stir and crinkle, drifting and settling like onion peels on thatched rooftops. In the distance, squirrels scratch away at the trunks of silence.

At the foot of a birch, almost as if a mummy wriggled free and escaped, lay its white, unravelled and discarded coil. My heel crunches into the snow. Our steps grow faster and faster. Come, Asher. Run. Run. Let’s escape. Free, we run as if we were the invisible, fully unravelled mummy.

Dry, yellowed leaves, somehow eluding fall, shake as we rush past. I hold my hands up, protecting Asher from the swinging branches. From his bulky snowsuit, his dangling forearms bounce and swish when they rub against my shoulder. Hidden animals scurry beneath the snow’s surface.

I come to a halt, my hands at my hips, my torso half hunched over gulping for air. The flakes drift down, zigzagging before the evergreen backdrop, floating down like a giant Baby owl’s seminal shake, its nubile, downy feathers released.

Asher is already asleep. He, seemingly like only a baby breathes, sips three quick, precious breaths, and then sighs, as if it were all too much. His mouth is slightly open and completely carefree, yet his lips curve - like at the edge of sadness.

I remove the carrier from my back and support Asher’s flopping head. I succumb to the caressing snow, and down I lay looking through the tips of overhead branches that encircle my face and shroud the sky. I look through the circular clearing as if I lay in a deep, empty, topless silo. Asher’s breath puffs out, his warm breath sculpts the cold into the shape of an invisible little hand that unravelled from its mortal coil.

I place the carrier holding a sleeping Asher on my chest. His weight presses the back of the carrier against my chest. Still strapped into his harness, as one person, Asher and I seeming share a set of eyes, and watch the snow fall. We let the flakes flutter to our eye lashes and blanket us in its layers of silence - as if the entire world had closed her eyes.