The Curse Of Never Saying What You Mean

"Oak Lore"

When I got the invitation from my old school friend to come to the woods for a visit, I immediately decided to accept, even before finishing the letter—before noticing something strange about the way it had been signed.

Will you come visit us? it started. Us being Luca and Isabel Rossi, a brother and sister I had met at a small liberal arts college we had all graduated from a year ago. My father had made me attend because he taught philosophy there. I’d been miserable and lonely, even living in the dorm with thirty other girls, until Isabel had started tutoring me in Latin. Latin made me miserable too, but Isabel’s tutoring led to walks along picturesque bluffs, and then drives to her parents’ vineyards near Sebastopol, along with her brother, where we would get very drunk in their childhood bedrooms. I started spending all my time with the them, studying Isabel’s languid charm and Luca’s magnetic moods.

I always had the feeling that their childhood together had been uneasy, even though they told me rosy stories about sun-drenched afternoons and board games after dinner. When I’d met them at school, they seemed to cling to each other as if they’d just been pulled from a life raft and couldn’t quite get used to the shore. And here were hints again, in the invitation to visit them: My dreams are terrible. I wake up mewling like a cat, afraid and confused. And you know how we are—when one of us can’t sleep, the other feels it.

I couldn’t tell what exactly was wrong, what there was to be afraid of. The letter skipped from descriptions of dread to promises of fresh-baked bread from their own bakery. But I knew I would go. I was working as a copy-writer for a startup that kept promising to pay me one day. I couldn’t keep living on ramen. I’d rather live on bread.

I stepped on something in the woods. Do you think there’s anything poisonous in California? Sometimes I’ll find myself crying and I don’t remember why. I couldn’t follow any of it. I read the letter twice before something else struck me: I didn’t know which of the two had written it. The envelope said Rossi on the flap, and the signature was a jagged line that could almost be taken for a crack in the thick, porcelain-white paper.

I found their house tucked into the heart of an oak forest. From the road, the house looked so small I imagined I could wrap my arms around the sides of it and rest my chin on the tilting eaves. I wondered if it had been their parents’ vacation cottage. Even the bakery next door was bigger, with a stout chimney and a rough-hewn front door. The Russian river, or some offshoot of it, was so close that I could hear it shush me when I stood on their front porch. Later I would learn that some of the forest’s beauty was an illusion: the lovely patter of leaves, for example, was really the sound of sap falling from holes insects had chewed in the oaks.

Isabel answered the door. I’d been expecting graveness, self-pity (or pity for Luca?). Instead, she smiled and threw her arms around me gathered me into a living room of yellow wood walls and woven rugs. In one corner of the room, a tattered armchair faced a drawing desk. I thought I’d find Luca in the chair and I swung round to beam at him—but he wasn’t there.

“How is Luca feeling?” I asked Isabel, and then wondered whether that was the wrong question. Who was it who woke in the night, who worried about poison, who cried themselves into confusion?

“He burned himself in the bakery,” Isabel said, clasping my hand as if to strengthen me against the news.

Regret stabbed at my heart. Luca had always seemed to me like someone who had stepped out of an oil painting, with his lamplit gaze and his sharp, fragile jaw. Was it all ruined? But then Luca appeared in the doorway to the bedroom, and I couldn’t find any sign of ruin. He said in his quiet voice, “That was months ago. And I didn’t even have the good fortune to earn myself a mysterious scar.”

The house was so small and we were standing so close that I thought I could feel Luca’s warm breath when he laughed. I didn’t want to ask either of them what was wrong. I wanted to feel like I had when we’d been at school, lying on the floor of Isabel’s dorm room, passing around a bottle of wine from their own winery and listening to them speak Latin and Italian phrases I struggled to repeat.

Isabel was still clasping my hand, and I reached for Luca’s, meaning to say that it didn’t feel like it’d been a year since I’d seen them. But Luca’s expression suddenly changed. At first I thought I’d hurt him, had brushed whatever burn Isabel had alluded to. Then I realized he was staring at something over my shoulder.

I turned just in time to see a small face peering in through the window—pale eyes and a protruding mouth, almost like a snout. At the same moment, Isabel dropped my hand and lunged for the light switch on the wall, even though it was midday and sunlight was filtering through the leaves outside.

“What was that?” I asked. The face had vanished.

“Oh.” Isabel looked at her hand still pressed against the light switch and laughed at her own strange reaction. “A cat.”

We spent the rest of the day sitting on the woven rug in the middle of the living room, looking through a stack of art books. Isabel crooned over paintings of wicked horses and fainting women, but Luca sat silently, sometimes trailing his fingers over the corner of a page, over a painted arm or shoulder.

Their little house had no kitchen. For dinner, they took me down a path to the bakery so that Luca could cook the clams I’d brought for us. Isabel asked me if I liked my copy-writing job and I said that it should be much more fun for a girl to do something her father didn’t approve of.

“Remember when he taught us that we were all spheres?” Isabel said.

“No, that being is a sphere.”

“But what does that mean?”

I shrugged. “A sphere is a perfect shape.”

“But what does it mean?” She looked beautiful in the glow of the lamp dangling over the table, with her hand resting against her jaw. How could a sphere be the perfect shape when there was Isabel?

But her scrutinizing frown embarrassed me. “You’re giving me the same look he always gave me in class.” And the same look he always gave me at home, but I didn’t mention that. How do you explain the reason you never try to explain yourself?

I wondered if I should ask her about the letter. But she suddenly pushed herself up from her chair and said, “I’ll find some wine.”

Luca brought out a huge plate of clams and an empty bowl. He looked confused when he saw me sitting alone. “Where’s Isabel?”

I nodded toward what I thought were the stairs to the cellar. “She knows I only brought clams so we would have to drink white wine for a change.”

He handed me a fork and sat down without saying anything more. I’d always felt that sitting quietly with Luca was like sitting near a fountain that’s just been turned off. All that noise and tumult finally giving way to calm.

“Do you want to talk about what’s wrong?” I asked him.

He gazed back at me. Steam lifted from the plate and veiled his unreadable expression.

“The letter…” My jaw tightened. I realized I was nervous, talking about the strange invitation.

Luca glanced toward the stairs to the cellar. “I want to explain.”

I waited for him to say more. But he only frowned at the stairs. He didn’t want Isabel to hear us talking.

I shrank from his silence, agitated by it now. Hurt, really. I wondered if this was a game for them. They were bored, so they’d created a drama for themselves and they’d roped me into it. And now here I was, but I didn’t know how to escalate anything, how to entertain them. At school, I’d always been observant, analytical. Did they expect me to be any different here?

Luca must have sensed my sour mood because he rested his hand briefly on my shoulder. “I’m better with a pencil and paper.” His fingers trailed down my arm a little. I thought of him touching the pages of the art books, tracing painted arms and shoulders. “I’ll try, tonight. Later.”

Isabel came up the stairs. Luca tucked his hands safely away and beamed at the bottles of wine she held.

“Existence is a sphere again, now that you’re here,” I said as she sat down.

We both laughed at Luca’s bewildered reaction.

“Wait until you try Luca’s bread tomorrow morning,” Isabel said. “Nothing could be more spherical.”

“But who buys bread this far from town?” I asked.

Luca took his time prying open a clam. “The locals call in orders and I have the bread here for pickup in the morning.”

“You don’t deliver it anywhere?” I couldn’t understand how they could make money selling bread to a handful of customers.

“That would require leaving the property,” Luca said. And then he glared across the table at Isabel.

Isabelle only gazed back at him levelly.

The letter, the invitation. One of them, at least, had been desperate for me to come. “How long has it been since you left the property?” I asked lightly, as if I hadn’t noticed the tension between them.

Isabel stabbed a clam. “Well, it would be rude to leave now that you’re here.”

That night, Isabel and I read The Call of the Wild together by the fire while Luca sat at the desk in the alcove and scribbled away. I could barely keep my mind on the story. The rasp of Luca’s pencil spoke more than he had since I’d been here.

Finally, Isabel insisted I was tired and led me up to a loft where I found a mattress under a pile of wool blankets. Luca scribbled away in his armchair somewhere beneath me while I lay awake, smelling musty wool and feeling as if I were an animal in a pen.

Once, a year ago, Isabel had left me alone with Luca in his childhood bedroom. We were sitting on the floor, leaning back against the footboard, and he pinned my shoulder against the wood and kissed me for a long time. But he stopped when he heard Isabel coming up the stairs. I asked him later why he had stopped and he’d said he’d been disappointed. I thought he meant about me, about kissing me, so I never brought it up after that. But now I hoped I’d been wrong, that he’d been disappointed to stop.

When I climbed down from the loft in the morning, Luca had already gone to the bakery. Isabel and I followed the smell of baking bread. Luca came to the counter with a loaf balanced on a big wooden paddle, and Isabel gasped with delight, as if he didn’t deliver the same loaf to her every morning.

The loaf slid onto the counter with a soft, hollow noise. I could only stare at it.

It was completely burnt. A charcoal globe.

I waited for Isabel to make a joke, or for Luca to laugh. But they stood gazing at it as if it were a newly hatched bird—delighted and relieved. Luca sawed into it with a bread knife. It crackled, shedding black flakes onto the counter. I watched with growing horror. Was this why they never delivered their bread to town? Could Isabel have humored Luca for an entire year, eating burnt bread and pretending it was a treat?

Isabel held out a withered hunk. “Go ahead.”

I nibbled at the web-like crumb. Isabel crunched delicately through her own piece of bread.

“That was the last of the flour,” Luca said, “until the next delivery.”

I watched him dig out the crumb from the burnt shell of the loaf as if he were gutting a pumpkin. When we walked back to the house, he made no secret about tossing the blackened crust alongside the path.

“Is that for the order the squirrels placed?” I asked, trying to make it all into a joke so he wouldn’t be embarrassed about ruining breakfast.

“No, it’s for the greti.”

“The what? The yeti?”

“The greti. It’s a local legend. It lives in oak forests.”

Isabel gave him a tight smile, but he went on.

“If you burn the bread, you have to offer some to the greti.”

“And if you don’t, you’re cursed to burn it again,” I joked.

Luca fell quiet, which I was used to, but the quiet felt expectant now. Even Isabel didn’t speak. They waited for me to say something. I couldn’t guess what it was they wanted to hear, so we arrived at the house to only the rustle of leaves shifting underfoot.

“Let’s stay in the garden instead of going inside,” Isabel said.

I briefly wondered if she was trying to keep Luca from finishing what he had been writing out for me. But actually, the garden was better than the house—tangles of wildflowers and earthen pots full of old birds’ nests. Luca switched on a garden lantern, as if the shade could possibly overwhelm us. We sat on a bench together and watched while Isabel tapped at a battered birdhouse with a rusty hammer. Luca’s hand rested first on the back of the bench and then on the back of my head, as if I were something to protect, a rabbit or a cat.

“The way you two can sit and never talk… ” Isabel said. “Just like when we were at school.”

Luca touched my shoulder, as if he wanted me to speak. What could I tell him? About the coin-leafed oaks, their silver-gray branches. It made me feel rich to sit under them—but he must be used to it all.

Isabel seemed to sense my agitation. “You always worry about finding the right thing to say.”

“If I say it wrong, you’ll be bored of me,” I said with a laugh. “If I say nothing, we could sit here for a whole hour.”

Isabel stopped tapping at the birdhouse.

“Which do you want?” I asked her, half-teasing. “Words or an hour?”

“Words or hours?” Isabel echoed.

Luca repeated the phrase to her, but in Italian, as if that would help her understand. She said something back to him, maybe answering the question. He nodded like he agreed. But I didn’t know what she had said.

She eyed Luca’s arm around my shoulders. “Aren’t you hot? Sitting so close in the sun?”

Luca said he was, and I wondered why he always let her separate us. We all went to the stream behind the house and swam, and I forgot my annoyance with them. The cold water shocked us into joyful screeches. I said I’d gone numb, and Luca brushed his fingers across my bare stomach to prove me wrong. He did it under the water where Isabel couldn’t see.

Later, when Isabel climbed onto the bank, I noticed a purple-red mark on the bottom of her foot and wondered whether it had been the fault of the river rocks.

Luca went back to writing that evening while Isabel told stories from school about the other girls in our dorm. She laughed brightly, rosy in the firelight; I listened with alarm to the sound of Luca’s pencil moving faster and faster, as if he were trying to black out the whole page. Finally he burst from his chair and said, “I forgot to close the back door of the bakery. I opened it to air out the smoke.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Isabel said quickly. “Just leave it.”

“An animal will get in.”

I studied Luca, trying to figure out if this was his way of getting me alone. Was this how he’d deliver his long letter to me?

I was about to offer to go with him, but Isabel said, “Wait. A flashlight.”

“They’re out of batteries.”

“All of them?” Isabel’s voice was small. She and Luca seemed like two children, afraid of the dark. The bakery wasn’t far from the house. Even I could probably stumble my way along the path.

“What about the candles?” I said, nodding toward the mantle where a dozen of them lay on their sides, their wicks still milky white.

“Candlelight doesn’t work.” Isabel went to the window and peered out into the darkness. It struck me for the first time that they had no curtains.

“You can use the light on my cell phone.” I dug it out of the drawer of the side table, where I’d put it the day before. There was no reception out here, only a landline in the bakery.

Luca reached for my phone, but Isabel took it instead. “I’ll go,” she said. “It’ll just take a minute.”

She left. Luca and I were finally alone.

Luca strode back to his desk. He turned to me, holding a paper against his chest. “This explains everything,” he said. “All of it.”

My stomach tightened. I looked to the door Isabel had left ajar. What would happen if she came back while I was reading Luca’s long explanation? I still couldn’t guess why he didn’t want to show it to her. Unless it had to do with his hand on the back of my head, his fingertips against my stomach in the cold, electrifying water.

I reached for the paper still clamped against his chest. He didn’t seem to want to release it. I held my hand there against his chest instead, feeling his wild heartbeat, until he finally let go.

I turned the paper over. It wasn’t a letter. It wasn’t words at all. It was a drawing.

I stepped closer to the desk lamp. He’d drawn the oaks outside. Their jagged branches formed a puzzle-like canopy, and in their negative spaces I made out familiar shapes: attic windows, a stout chimney. Strangest of all were the small, repeating circles—moon phases shaded at wrong angles. Or miserable faces. I couldn’t tell which.

“Luca…”

I looked up to find him watching me expectantly. He had spent the last two nights drawing this so that he could make me understand why he’d brought me here, why he couldn’t leave, why he made strange noises at night and moved as cautiously as an animal being tracked.

“It’s all there.” He pointed at a shaded orb, a face with a twisted mouth.

“Luca,” I said slowly. “This doesn’t explain anything.”

He looked from the drawing to me, confused, almost offended. At last his expression slowly turned to something very near disgust. A coldness trickled through my heart.

The door creaked open. Isabel stood there with the phone light still switched on.

Luca shrank away from me, but not before he gently pulled the paper out of my hands. He laid it face down on his desk. “I’m going to bed.”

He had to pass close by me to leave the room. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

He paused there next to me. “Oh. No,” he said softly. “Don’t be. It’s just how these things work.” And he vanished through the doorway into his room.

I don’t know how much later it was that I heard the ladder creak while I lay in bed. In my mind played visions of Luca trailing his fingers over the page of the book we had looked at together, the painted arms and shoulders.

The ladder creaked again. Then: a rustle, a faint scrape.

I crept out of bed and crawled toward the ladder. “Hello?” I whispered.

My hand found something on the floorboards: a scrap of paper. I pulled the chain dangling overhead, and the bare bulb near the low ceiling began to glow.

The scrap was a corner torn from the edge of Luca’s drawing. The pencil lines shone silver. And almost hidden in the cross-hatching, a word: L ore.

Strangely, there was a space between the L and the o, taken up by the heavier lines of crosshatching.

Lore. What did it mean? Why would someone write it and slip it into my room while they thought I slept?

I looked again and now I saw, in the crosshatching, a tiny letter e. Did
Le ore mean something in Italian? Yes—hadn’t Luca said it earlier today? I had asked which meant more, words or hours, and he had said it to Isabel in Italian. Le ore. The hours?

My heart drummed. I crept down the ladder he had climbed just moments before, my bare feet pressing the same slats his had pressed. All those hours we’d sat in silence together. At school. And here, the hour in the garden. The hour in the stream, when he had crept toward me in the water, close enough to reach for me.

A light glowed in the doorway to his bedroom. I stepped through—

Isabel sat there at the edge of his bed, cradling Luca’s head to her shoulder. She looked up at me as I stepped in, a smile playing at the corners of her lips.

“We couldn’t sleep,” she said, her plaintive voice at odds with her gloating gaze. “I heard Luca moving in here and I knew it was another nightmare.”

The blankets had been thrown aside. Had she heard Luca coming back from my attic room, or had she found him thrashing through a nightmare?

“Luca?” I said softly, my heart pounding.

“Don’t try to talk to him,” Isabel said. “He hardly knows where he is after he wakes from a nightmare.”

But his gaze lifted to mine, even as Isabel kept his head against her shoulder. She’s keeping him from me. I tasted something sour.

I closed the note inside my hand and turned from the room.

Le ore. The hours. Luca’s way of inviting me to his room—but Isabel had gotten there first. She wouldn’t let me come between them. She was so afraid he’d leave her that she never even let him go into town.

In the living room, I wandered to Luca’s chair and touched it, hoping to feel closer to him. His drawing still lay on the desk, but now it was face up and missing one corner. It made me cold to look at it—those frantic marks, that moon-like face, shaded so oddly.

I opened my hand and studied the scrap of paper in the light of the desk lamp. To my dismay, I couldn’t find the tiny e I’d seen before. The note Luca had left for me, calling me to share the night with him, vanished in an instant. The word now seemed so clearly to be Lore.

The cat-like face, the bread thrown alongside the path. It’s for the greti. It’s a local legend. The wound on Isabel’s foot.

I turned from the desk, from the haunting shapes in Luca’s drawing. I was letting Isabel get to me. I was walking into a nightmare she had made up in order to taunt me.

I wandered like a sleepwalker through the cold house to the colder loft.

I lay in my bed, heavy with resentment.

I woke to an acrid smell. Burnt bread? But Luca had said yesterday that he’d run out of flour.

I climbed down from the loft to find Isabel sitting on a chair near the living room window, clutching a flashlight even as she looked out into the sunlit garden. She wore the same rumpled clothes from the day before, and her dark hair hung wild around her face. “I found this,” she said, holding up the flashlight. “There’s a little battery left.”

Luca came into the room at the sound of her voice. He saw me standing there in just a long shirt, and desire flashed in his gaze before quickly snuffing out. “The power lines are shut off. There’s a fire somewhere, so they have to keep the lines from sparking.”

“Do we need to evacuate?” I asked.

“The fire’s not close.”

“The power could be out for days,” Isabel said. “The food in the bakery freezer will spoil.”

“We have plenty of canned food,” Luca said. “I’ll go get some beans. We can heat them over the fire like we’re camping.”

Isabel shot up from her chair, holding out the flashlight to Luca. “Take this with you.” She made a frantic movement, reaching desperately toward him. Her foot caught on the edge of the rug. She tumbled forward.

Her head glanced off the mantle. My stomach dropped at the sound. Luca lurched toward her and had her in his arms before she could drop to the floor.

I held my breath while he turned and laid her on the couch. “Isabel?” he said, and she winced against whatever pain his voice added to. He turned to look at me, his gaze bright and sharp with worry. I realized then that Isabel was foolish to fear that he might ever leave her.

“Ice,” I said weakly.

“There’s some in the bakery freezer.”

“I’ll get it.”

Luca was already halfway to the door. “No, stay with her.” Sunlight spilled into the room and then the door shuttered it again.

Isabel mumbled something about the flashlight. I knelt and brushed my hand over her arm, trying to comfort her. “It’s okay, he doesn’t need it.”

“It’s just a bump. You won’t have to be a nurse.”

I glanced at the swelling corner of her forehead. A spot of blood welled from a cut there.

“Is it terrible, being here with us?” she asked.

“I like it here.”

Isabel looked toward the door, her hands twitching around the flashlight. “We keep you up at night.”

My mouth went dry. I remembered the cool wood of the ladder slats under my bare feet, the heat of astonishment rising from my chest. “I found a note in my room last night.”

Isabel kept her gaze trained on the door.

The house seemed to creak under the weight of her worry. “I keep thinking through all the if-then’s,” I said.

“The what?”

The house shifted, settling on its haunches. “If Luca wrote that note and left it in my room, then…” I felt suddenly warm and restless. “But if you wrote the note…”

“Then…?” Isabel prompted.

She didn’t admit to writing it. But neither did she ask what the note had said, as if she already knew. “Then you want me to think that something strange is happening here in your woods.”

Her gaze finally shifted to meet mine. Pain blazed behind her eyes. Or fear?

I remembered her gloating smile from the night before. “And if Luca wrote the letter I got in the mail, the invitation to come here, then he was lonely and he wanted me to be with him.”

“Lonely?”

“And if you weren’t here, then Luca would be free to…”

“To be with you?” She frowned. “You think I’m keeping him from you? I’m only trying to keep you safe.”

“Safe from what?”

She gazed back at me without answering.

My skin went cold. “Why won’t you just tell me what’s wrong here?”

“I’ve told you everything I can.”

I searched her face, but I couldn’t understand. The cryptic letter, the strange note. The half-stories about a creature in the woods. They hadn’t told me anything.

“You’re the one who won’t say what you mean,” she went on. “You talk about spheres. You ate that burnt bread—why did you do it?”

I sank away from her. “What do you mean? I thought…”

“Luca and I are only doing what we have to. You’re free to do whatever you want, but you won’t. You don’t say how you feel. You never say what you mean.”

I frowned.

“You sit with Luca while he waits for you to ask him the right questions,” she went on, “but you never say anything at all.”

“The right questions?” I echoed. My head was swimming.

“We can’t get away but you came here by your own choice.”

“You want me to think that you’re trapped here?” I looked down at the flashlight still gripped in her trembling hands. “You want me to think there’s a monster that haunts you in full daylight? If that were true, you could just tell me.”

Her shoulders tightened. She suddenly seemed small and brittle on the tattered couch, a frightened child. Her gaze went to the window behind me.

I looked too, half expecting to see a face peer back at me through the glass, a round face with a pointed snout. “You could just tell me.”

“If I could tell you, then I would.”

I looked from the empty window to her pleading gaze. My heart made jagged movements in my chest. What was I supposed to believe? That she was trapped under a curse? That she had uncovered the secret lore about how to break it? My mind filled with the scratch of Luca’s pencil over paper. He’d tried to tell me—something. But that was how curses worked. They kept you from revealing them. All those things you needed to explain, all the things that would help anyone understand—you could never find the words to make them known.

A sudden heat rose from my chest. “There’s no creature. There’s nothing out there.”

For a moment, we listened to the quiet sighs and creaks of the house. Isabel said, “Then go and look.”

I stiffened, surprised by the dread her words summoned in me. But all of this was just a story Isabel was telling herself. Luca had written that letter, and he had written that note. Not because of a curse brought on by a monster, one that could be broken only with the right knowledge. He wrote it because he wanted to be with me, even if he didn’t know how to say it.

I rose from the floor. I would go outside if she wanted me to. I’d look, and I’d find nothing strange at all.

I went up to the loft and put on shorts and then came back down into the living room.

“I’ll go help Luca bring back ice,” I said, and it surprised me to hear my voice so strained.

I hesitated. For some reason, I leaned down and took the flashlight from Isabel.

I left the door open behind me. I wanted Isabel to see. The tangled garden, the gravel path to the bakery, the sunlight falling in harmless patterns from between shifting leaves.

From where the path veered around a tree, Luca suddenly appeared, carrying a bag of ice. My heart lifted. I felt as if I were sloughing a skin that had become too tight, and my dread and uncertainty fell away with it. Luca saw me there, and for a moment, a smile broke through his anxiety.

And then we both saw it: a strange shape, darting from the brush.

I knew in an instant why Luca and Isabel had never used the candles on the mantle. Why they switched on their garden lights during the day, why they seemed as frightened in the morning as in the dark. If I had a book of lore for the creature now craning between me and Luca, I wouldn’t have known any more about how to defeat it than I knew in that moment—

In one movement, I lifted the flashlight and flicked it on. The beam didn’t show in the sunlight except where it touched the creature’s matted fur. No natural light could reveal it the way an electric one did in that moment. No sunbeam or moonbeam, no firelight or candlelight, could stop it in its tracks the way I had just done.

And in that moment, the creature became fully known to me.

It stood on its back haunches, lifting thin arms to claw at the beam of light that seemed to spear it. I saw only a flash of the creature—one frozen moment in which it was trapped in misery, its face pale, sharp, narrowing into a snarl of pain. Its pelt the gray-brown of the oaks, dirty and matted, but no more so than a deer’s. Its claws sharp and dripping with clear venom, a last attempt to save itself from obliteration. It seemed a vile thing, but for all the power it held to issue curses, it was still an animal of the forest, a mere four feet tall, skinny, half-starved, dangerous in the way that animals are, in the way a feral dog might be, but still destined to decompose into the forest floor, like a hundred rabbits and squirrels might be doing at this very moment.

And then it dropped into the dirt, dead.

For one short moment, I felt sorry for it. Not because it was dead, but because it had been so utterly exposed, fur and claw and snout.

Luca stared at it for a long moment. He had dropped the ice. He crept toward the creature, and then past it, his expression changing from fear to loathing to something worse: weary disappointment that his nightmares had found such an earthly, animal shape.

He lifted his gaze to me and I looked away, afraid his expression wouldn’t change. I was afraid that he had not written the note, nor the letter. And I couldn’t bear to know whether the care he felt for me was only for a creature best seen in stolen glimpses and half-light. A creature made too ordinary by the full light of morning.

He came toward me and put his arms around me. I felt the weight of his relief as he sank into me, while I stood rigid and fragile as a rain-starved tree. Please, I thought. Please say you wrote a note to me in the middle of the night, a note that only I would understand, a note that said every quiet moment between us was nothing like estrangement, that you understood my silence, and that it enchanted you.

I realized I was holding the note in my hand even now. I had gotten it from the loft when I had gone up a few minutes ago, and I didn’t know until this moment that I was clutching it still.

Luca drew back at last. He looked down at the crumpled note in my hand. He frowned. “What is that?”

“Nothing,” I said. I let it fall into the ordinary dirt. •

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Thank you for reading my story, “Oak Lore.” I wrote it after falling in love with the dark academia sub-genre. I wanted to challenge myself to capture the isolation, exclusivity, and secrecy that work so well in dark academia, even while setting the story in the sun-drenched oak forests of California. I call this new take “California academia.”

I tapped into my own anxiety and sadness over California’s destructive wildfires to create the fear at the heart of this story. The monster in the story can only be defeated with electric light, something nearly impossible to access during the power outages caused by wildfires.

I hope you enjoyed the story. Special thanks to Emily Henry for reading an early version of the story and providing notes.

—Parker Peevyhouse