Breadcrumbs - Anne Ursu [48]
And why wouldn’t Jack have a string, anyway? He wasn’t dead, they said it didn’t mean he was dead. But Hazel knew that anyway—you know when a piece of yourself leaves the world, never to return.
Hazel had a string. This was a strange idea to get used to. She was a puffy, unformed mass of wool leaving something definite and fixed in her wake. Every step she took in the woods was one more bit of string left to time.
And time was passing. Tick tock. Tick tock. The sun was lower in the sky than it should be—she hadn’t been in the clearing that long, but it looked like late afternoon now. It didn’t make sense.
That wasn’t the only thing. She reached the crest of the hill and heard the bubbling of the stream. She had met up with the ravine again—but it was on the wrong side.
Hazel looked around. Was she going in the wrong direction? That wasn’t possible, was it? If she knew anything about anything, she would be able to look at the shadows the trees cast and know if she was going backward. But she hadn’t been paying attention before. She never paid attention to the things she was supposed to. She never had to, before—there had always been Jack.
Somewhere, hours from here, a cracked Junior Explorer compass lay on the floor of the woods.
Her heart twinged. Her legs whined. Hey body protested.
There was nothing to do. Hazel stepped off the path and plopped down behind a nearby tree. She rummaged through her bag, and her hand touched on the Joe Mauer baseball. A pang of missing Jack went through her. Then she pulled an energy bar and her canteen out of her backpack for some approximation of lunch. The energy bar tasted as good as she felt.
But Hazel still ate the whole thing, washing it down with water from the canteen. Then she sighed and looked around for some sign of anything. Something squeezed in her chest. She had no idea where she was or where she was going. And she was alone. No one ever has to do these things alone.
Usually, they at least have a friend with them.
Hazel wrapped her small arms around her small chest and looked around at the great trees. She kept her eyes level—she felt all of a sudden if she looked up and saw how far they reached into the sky she would disappear altogether.
And then her eye caught on a flash of something out of place. She squinted. About ten yards away, near the ravine, something white was tucked into the hollow of a tree.
Maybe it was something. Hazel needed something.
She grabbed her backpack and crept toward the tree, looking around carefully as she went.
It looked like a garment at first, a cast-off cloak made of small white feathers. It was tucked away in the hollow, as if someone had hidden it there. Hazel put her backpack down, grabbed a thick stick, and poked the mass. Nothing happened, so she bent down carefully and placed her hand on it.
It was the softest thing she had felt in her life, and everything that was twisting inside of her stopped. As if there was no need for fear or loneliness when there was such softness in the world.
She picked up the feathery garment—it was surprisingly thick and heavy—and then yelped and dropped it. For attached was a long slender neck that supported a beautiful white head with a black mask and a bright orange beak.
It was a swan, but with no swan inside.
Hazel stared at the thing at her feet. A dead eye stared up at her. It had been alive once. It had been a swan and someone had taken it and killed it for this skin.
Hazel knew about this from fairy tales. There were people who could turn themselves into an animal by wrapping themselves in its skin. It had always seemed to Hazel like the most wonderful power—to be able to transform yourself into something else entirely.
Hazel looked around again and then picked up the skin and let it unfurl. The swan had been no ordinary bird—the skin belonged to a creature bigger than Hazel. It must have been magnificent.
Maybe she could do it. In the real world Hazel was an ordinary thing, a misshapen piece with no purpose. Maybe here she could be a swan. Maybe it had been left here,