Anyo’s eyes aren’t like anyone else’s. He doesn’t know what it’s like to see through the eyes of the more human villagers, of course. But he knows that he can see things they can’t, because he’ll sometimes point something out that every one of them miss. It makes him afraid for the villagers, because he can see the dangers of the forest. Can they? For a given danger, would his eyes make the difference between life and death?
Even those eyes aren’t perfect. He’ll see shapes and interpret them as something else at first. A human-like silhouette turns out to be a log. A lurking shadow is nothing more than a few branches, waving in the wind.
Some of the things he sees in the forest don’t have such clean explanations. Sometimes the glimpse of something is gone before the truth emerges. Anyo thinks of these as ghosts.
Despite his friends’ teasing, Noi isn’t the only person on Anyo’s mind. Far from it. His daydreams about her flit teasingly through his thoughts, to be sure. But she’s only one of many of the ghosts his mind projects onto the half-seen shadows. There’s a whole crowd of them. His exaggerated versions of the villagers. The people whose stories he’s been told, but whom he’s never met. Nobles, kings, and sages of legend. The strangers who must have done things - the founders of the village, the inventor of the bow, the first hunter - linger on the outer edges of this army of phantoms.
Chief among the ghosts are his parents.
Even when someone dies, their ghosts stay in our minds. Anyo knows this. He can still hear the voice of Old Zed, and he knows where Old Zed is buried. Every so often, when he walks the eastern dirt road, his feet naturally want to take him down the side path to Old Zed’s shack. The shack is long gone. The rusty sword hanging over Old Zed’s fireplace is no longer there, whispering stories to a young Anyo. The ridiculously sweet berries that grew around the side of the shack are gone too. But nobody told the ghost of Old Zed that he should be gone. He insists on accompanying Anyo on his walks.
Anyo’s parents aren’t so close to home. They wait for him at the liminal zone, where village ends and wood begins. The boxy shapes and sharp right angles of mortal construction give way to the organic growth and the browns and greens of life. Beyond that boundary is the realm of the Green Lords, or the Forest Queen, or whatever mythological figure you think is plausible. Anyo prefers to think that the forest itself is the ruler of that forest. His parents set foot in that royal domain and never returned. How did they earn the displeasure of its monarch?
What do their ghosts say to him, when he patrols the outer edges of the wood? He has memories of them from his youngest years. He has his imagination to fill in after that. He has their journal, the chronicles of the wonders they found in the forest.
“Follow us,” the ghosts say. “Find us.”
“Stay out,” they warn. “It’s dangerous.”
If only they could be here, to tell him truly. If only they weren’t just the half-glimpsed shadows of light and leaf that the forest creates.
If only he wasn’t alone with the ghosts.