When I was eight my teacher awarded me a gold star for my collage of a silver birch tree. It was part of our art creation project and she showed it to the whole class. At the bottom of the paintings she wrote: Well doneBrigid Grace! You have captured the wonder of nature through art!
I called the picture ‘My Favorite Place.’ The actual tree grew in the woods that our family would visit each year on my birthday. We could see the woods from our house, our spiritual home, Ma called it. I’d peeled layers of paper-thin bark and placed each piece carefully in the cotton drawstring bag that Ma had embroidered with my name. When I got home, I glued them into a trunk shape, then added twisted pipe cleaners for the snaking roots reaching deep down into the earth. I drew stick figures of my parents lying on the ground beneath the tree, holding hands. They both had smiley faces and closed eyes.
Ma framed my picture and put it next to her collection of shiny moonstones and little figurines. She had a special area at the back of the house where the light glistened through stained glass and wind chimes tinkled with the whispering air. My sanctuary, she called it, myshrine to the spirits.
They’re very New Age, my Ma and Pa. Or perhaps very Old Age. Every year on my birthday we’d visit the tree and sit beneath it as my parents told our story. Pa would gather some kindling and light a small fire to warm us in the February air. Always respect the wood, he told us, just take what you need and leave no trace.
Ma would light incense sticks; their musky perfume always made me feel sleepy. I called it my special birthday smell. I would lay my head on her lap, and she would stroke my red hair, so like hers, everyone said. She would cover me with my blanket; she’d made it herself when I was born and had weaved my name into the fabric.
Then she would begin in a singsong voice, with half-closed eyes, her long plaits swaying hypnotically, gently caressing my face.
One Mayday we visited this tree, your Pa and I.The catkins were in blossom, we smeared their yellow pollen on our faces, we drank drops of the sap extracted from the bark, absorbed its life-giving propertiesthen lay together on the ground, underneath its branches cooled by the deep shadeplacing our hands over the damp earth sensing the life pulsating below us, and…
then she would open her eyes wide and smile…here you are!
Pa would take up the story. I liked this bit best, how I got my name.
We named you Brigid, after the Celtic Goddess of fertility and Grace which means blessing. For we were blessed with you that day.
Now it is my birthday eleven years later and we’re not visiting the wood. Our parents were doubly blessed that Mayday. My twin is called Marcus, after Mars, the Roman God of fertility, the fiery planet. He has red hair, like mine. We were sixteen when Marcus started hearing the voices. He tried to describe them to me: sometimes whispering, sometimes shouting, but always coming from within the trees, from our wood, a rustling invasion of his consciousness.
“But what are they saying?”I asked him. “And what about our twintuition? Why can’t I hear them?”
He ran his hands through his hair. I saw that its color was fading, he was becoming paper thin, like our tree.
“I can’t explain it, why they’ve chosen me and not you....”
“....but who’s they, and what have you been chosen for?”
“I don’t know yet.” He would just look through me, his eyes focused only on the wood. He didn’t see me anymore.
I’d lie awake fretting, worrying. My Marcus was leaving me, this Marcus was a stranger.
He barely left his room, kept his window closed so the voices couldn’t get in. An odor of mustiness and raw dirt began to surround him, the air around him seemed sucked dry of oxygen. My parents wanted him to go to talking therapies but he refused. There is too much talk, he said. I need silence.
On our seventeenth birthday he refused to come to the wood with us, said it was a bad place.
On the morning of our eighteenth birthday, I knocked on his bedroom door. He wasn’t there. The front door was open, the wind blowing into the hallway.
It was the black smoke we saw first, swirling upwards, darkening the sky, hovering menacingly over the wood. Then the brightness of flames as the fire took hold. The crackling of burnt leaves, the crashing of trees, the irreversible smell of destruction.
Today is our nineteenth birthday and we’re going to visit Marcus. He calls himself Mark now. I call myself Bryony. The judge accepted his plea of diminished responsibility and the doctors say that the treatment is helping, he doesn’t hear the voices anymore. His hair has regained its red, his body has regained its substance, but his mind is forever changed. Sometimes he doesn’t know me and I am rendered twinless.
On good days we take him into the hospital grounds. But we always sit facing the building with our backs to the trees.
Lorraine Collins lives in London, England with her husband and campervan. She belongs to a lively writing group who meet for fun, food, feedback and inspiration. Her work has been published or placed by The Anansi Archive, Bath Flash Fiction, Flash 500, WestWord, Wildfire Words, WriteTime, and in various literary festival competitions. She is delighted that one of her pieces has been nominated by Does It Have Pockets for Best Microfiction 2025.
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