Dead Willow by Joe Sharp Read Free Book Online

that was just like life, wasn’t it? The thing you wanted most was just out of your reach. Well, not today, she decided.
    Her foot went into the fork of the tree and she climbed. She couldn’t remember having climbed a tree before, her childhood having faded from her memory long ago. But apparently, she had, for in no time she was snaking out along the branch that held her obsession.
    She reached down and wrapped her slender brown fingers around the object of her desire and yanked it from the tree. As she held it in her hand in anticipation of how sweet it was going to taste, she glanced down through the brightly colored leaves below and saw … nothing.
    Her eyes raced, scanning the ground around the tree, as she began inching her way back down the branches.
    “Juni?” she shouted, panic starting to sprout in her gut. “Juni, you come back here now!”
    When she came down out of the canopy and stood looking between the other trees, her panic took root. The apple fell from her hand as she took off down the rows, searching, one after the other, but there was no little white girl in the grove.
    “Juni! Goddamn it!”
    Wherever Juni was, she was hiding and didn’t want to be found.
    Or, she wasn’t hiding.
    An awful notion crept into Annabel’s mind. What if they had come for her? What if a decision had been made, and Annabel hadn’t been told? Or worse, they had used Annabel as a lure to get Juni into the orchard?
    Suddenly, she wasn’t quite sure she felt afraid anymore. She thought that maybe she was feeling angry instead, and that if she didn’t find Juni in the next few minutes, then she was going to find someone else, and give them a piece of her fucking mind!
    “Juni!” she called out again.
    “Mmmmm … ”
    The moan rippled through the orchard, and it didn’t exactly sound human. She had sometimes heard sounds like this in the cemetery, but never here. If she didn’t know better, she would’ve sworn …
    “Mmmmm … ” The moan drifted on the warm breeze, and it was coming from behind her, from the center of the grove, from the tree where her perfect apple had hung waiting. Was this another part of the snare? The part meant to trap her, and then Juni?
    She started back down the long row to her magic tree. The poison apple still lay there where she had dropped it, under the shade, near the root, … and the root moved. Annabel froze, not sure what she was seeing. The root coming from the bottom of the trunk had shifted, and then again.
    “Mmmmm … ” She forced herself to put one foot in front of the other, fighting the creeping shock that threatened to shut her down, until she got close enough to see that the root had a shoe at the end … and the shoe was Juni’s. She broke into a sprint.
    “Juni! Juni, baby!”
    Annabel got close enough, close enough to see it … and then she dropped to her hands and knees and pushed herself away. She stared down at the ground, her eyes clamped shut, refusing to look again. She couldn’t see this, not this! This was worse than the council, worse than reclamation! This was …
    Annabel took a shuddering breath and fought the urge to look away. She forced her head to turn toward her friend, toward the spectacle she had glimpsed, her wide eyes trembling, as she came face to face with the unthinkable.
    Juni had made herself part of the tree. Or the tree had swallowed her up until nothing remained but parts of Juni; Annabel couldn’t be sure. Somewhere in the rough bark, one ended and the other began, and it was seamless. What could have been a knot looked at her with Juni’s eyes. What could have been a gnarled root took on the shape of a young girl’s leg. Part of her foot and shoe remained.
    The root moved again.
    Annabel jerked back, her eyes riveted to the shoe. It looked like it had been carved out of wood.
    “ Juni? ” she whispered softly.
    Her gazed traced the leg back to the trunk, until she caught sight of something that could have been a wayward