When I see him again, it’s by accident.

We’re halfway through the set, my sister is shouting something in my ear that I can’t hear, and my plastic cup is sweating in my hand. The band is chewing through a song everyone else seems to know the words to. The room smells like beer, detergent, and fifty borrowed nights out.

I’m scanning the crowd for the toilets when my eye catches on a profile I know.

It takes a second to place him. The hair is shorter, the shoulders slightly rounded, but the angle of his jaw is the same. It’s him. I haven’t thought of him in years.

I touch my sister’s arm — “Back in a sec” — and start to thread my way through the bodies, my drink held up high out of danger.

He turns as if he’s felt me coming.

For a heartbeat we just look at each other. I’m smiling but the smile I was expecting in return never arrives.

Something else crosses his face instead.

When I was seventeen, my weekends started under a sagging white canvas in a car park, selling clothes at a market stall.

We’d haul rails out of a van at some unkind hour, fingers numbed by metal in winter, sun already pricking the back of your neck by spring. The stall belonged to a woman who paid us in cash and folded loyalty into extra shifts. Most of the time she paired me with other girls my age. But sometimes, when she was short or knew it was going to be busy, she brought in a friend of hers to help her out.

He was twenty-one, at university and reading big books. Quoting Monty Python without having to think about it. He knew how to charm customers just enough to make them buy and leave smiling.

We slipped into a rhythm quickly. Long days will do that. We invented small rituals: the way we folded and stacked T-shirts, the lines from sketch shows we threw back and forth whenever it went quiet. He listened when I talked, remembered details about school and friends, didn’t treat me like a child even though I was.

He also liked to needle me, the way boys do when they’ve learned that irritation is safer than sincerity. One afternoon, after he’d pushed one joke too far, I snapped, “God, you’re so frustrating I could jump on you right now.”

Because where I came from, raised by a single father on WWE and sisterly play fights, jump on you meant a full body tackle to the floor, pinning someone until they surrendered. I meant it scrappy, half a threat and half a dare.

He froze. Went very still and very careful. Then I froze as I realised there was a maybe living under my words.

I had no real experience, no stable list of signs to tick off. I only knew that sometimes his gaze stayed on my face a fraction longer than it needed to, or that his shoulder brushed mine when there was plenty of space. It could have been nothing. It could have been everything. At seventeen, those feel like the same thing.

One afternoon, at packing-up time, he offered me a ride home.

It was practical. I lived vaguely in his direction, the buses were slow… but in my head this was where the story might finally do something. The first time it would be just the two of us, in a car, no customers, no boss in the background.

We drove mostly in silence, some local radio station filling the gaps. I watched the familiar streets slide by, waiting for the air to thicken into something else. A question about boyfriends. A comment about us. Anything.

At my front gate he pulled up, cut the engine and turned to me.

“Have you got any money for fuel?” he said.

I blinked at him. Then at the dashboard. Then at my own hands, already rummaging in my bag before I’d quite found the feeling that went with it.

Of course I had money. That was why I was there every weekend. I fished out a few notes and handed them over. He took them with a quick “Cheers,” smiled the general purpose smile he used on strangers, and said, “See you next week.”

On the walk down the driveway, I rewrote the story I’d been telling myself. If he’d been interested, he would have waved it off, made a joke of it. He would have dragged out the moment at the gate instead of squaring the ledger and driving away.

After that, I tried to stop reading meaning into every small thing. He was older, clever, kind. I let myself enjoy that.

But it didn’t stay put.

In the weeks before New Year’s we did the usual vague talk about plans. I said I wasn’t sure yet. He made a noncommittal noise. On the night itself, between me and my sisters the house already full of the getting ready mess of hair spray and borrowed clothes, the phone rang. It was him.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

I told him over the noise, about the party I was going to. He said he was heading out with some of his friends, that I should come. His voice sounded different over the phone, closer.

“I can’t,” I said, apologetic. “Maybe another time?”

“Sure,” he said slightly disappointed.

I put the receiver down and stood looking at it for a moment. Then I finished my eyeliner and went where I was already expected.

At the stall, a little while later, I told him about some boy my own age who’d gone suddenly cold. He listened, stacking folded tops with more force than they required.

“I can beat him up for you,” he said, light on the surface but with just enough weight under it.

He held my eye for a second too long after he said it.

I laughed, cheeks hot, and changed the subject.

There were no more comments like that, nothing you could pin to the wall, until several weekends later. The afternoon had thinned out; the market was in that lull between busy and done, and there was nothing to do but fill the empty time with chatter.

We were talking about everything and nothing when he told me about a girl who liked him. Someone at uni. He said it casually, but he watched me from the corner of his eye.

“She’s interested,” he said, fiddling with a stack of tags. “But I’m not ready.”

“Why not?”

He went quiet in the particular way that makes everything around you feel suddenly too loud. His shoulders folded inwards, like he was protecting something from my question. He stared past the hanging rail, refusing to meet my eye.

“Because I’m still in love with someone else,” he said, barely above a whisper.

I knew, in that instant, who he meant. Or thought I did.

“Who?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. His gaze slid away towards the row of blouses. His mouth opened and closed on nothing.

Before either of us could decide what to do next, a customer ducked under the canvas and asked for another size. We moved apart automatically, back into the roles we knew: smile, fetch, fold, take money. By the time she’d gone, the moment had retreated to somewhere it would be heavier to touch than to leave it alone.

We both let it stay there.

Then school ended. University brochures, big open questions about the rest of our lives. I decided to leave, to go and work as an au pair in America for a year.

At the stall I told him, the way I told everyone, that I was going abroad.

“Wow,” he said. “That’s… big.” A couple more questions. Where. When. Did I know anyone there?

He did not say don’t go.

If there was a last day, I don’t remember it clearly. I remember packing rails into the van, canvas coming down, my boss counting the float. I remember him saying, “Let me know how it goes,” and me saying, “I will,” in the automatic way you say it to people you like and might never see again. We probably awkwardly hugged.

And then I went.

I stand frozen as his shoulders tighten. His gaze is still cold and his face unsmiling. Then his hand shoots sideways, finds the woman next to him and yanks her a step forward so she’s standing directly between us.

“I’d like you to meet my wife,” he says.

His voice is steady enough but his knuckles are white around her fingers, his eyes unflinching, and he has yet to smile at me.

She blinks, smiles at me, and offers her name. I offer mine. The band hits the chorus of something loud and for a moment our mouths are moving and nobody can hear anyone. We all laugh too hard in that way that belongs more to the noise than to the joke.

When the volume dips, we fall into the only script available: what are you doing now, where are you living, how long have you been together. His wife fills in soft details about their flat, their routines. Every now and then she glances from his face to mine, as if trying to place me.

He watches me while she speaks, like he’s waiting to see something register.

“Are you here just for the weekend?” he asks.

“Yeah. Seeing family.”

He nods. He doesn’t ask anything that would produce a future. No we should catch up, no you should see so-and-so again. He keeps us pinned in this tiny, overlit scene.

Someone at my back jostles my arm; beer slops up the side of the cup and onto my fingers. I wipe them against my jeans.

Eventually, the conversation runs out of surface.

“Well,” I say, because there’s nothing else, “it was really good to see you.”

“Yeah. You too.”

I step backwards first, then turn and let the crowd fold between us. My sister leans in: “Who was that guy?” I say, “Just someone I used to work with,” and hear how thin it sounds even as it leaves my mouth.

We stay for a couple more songs. I stare into my drink looking to name how I feel but nothing comes. I tell my sister I’d like to leave. On the way home she says, “He was weird,” and I shrug.

Later, in bed, the scene replays itself with the volume turned down. The market stall. The car. The fuel money. I can beat him up for you. I’m still in love with someone else. The way I said who? and enjoyed, for a second, the idea that he meant me.

The way he looked at me over a rail of blouses; the way he looked at me over his wife’s shoulder. The white knuckles. The wife who kept glancing at my face…

It all feels, unreasonably and completely, like being punished for a test that I was never told I was taking.

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“Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. 
Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.”
— James Baldwin

We have an embarrassingly low bar for the phrase “making love.”

Two people who’ve been on three dates, slept together twice, and can barely remember each other’s birthdays will say they’re making love. Couples who haven’t looked each other in the eye properly in months will still call it that because they share an address and a bed, and they’re afraid of what it will mean if they don’t.

Making love has become a kind of linguistic fraud that has rendered the term sleazy from misuse.

We use it too often to varnish over situations where one partner is exhausted and invisible, but still expected to perform intimacy on command. Because love isn’t just a feeling in the moment; it’s the sum of days where you actually showed up for the person you want intimate access to.

There’s a reason traditional vows don’t stop at “love.” They add those two awkwardly old fashioned verbs: honour and cherish.

Love can be wildly subjective. People love their partners, their dogs, their phones, even their favourite coffee mug. Love alone is a really low bar. Honour and cherish require a lot more active work to transform love into making love.

Honour means treating another person like their inner world matters as much as yours does, and cherish sends a daily message saying: You are safe and seen here. Rest. Let me look after you. I have your back completely; not just when it suits me.

When these three conditions are missing, calling sex “making love” feels dishonest. At best, it’s wishful thinking. At its worst, it’s spin.

Years ago, I still remember looking meaningfully at an ex-boyfriend during sex. Tenderly, even. I was trying to be present with him, to meet him eye to eye. He responded by yanking my hair back so that my eyes were no longer level with his. Afterwards, he referred to that moment, including the shock of having my head wrenched back without warning, as “making love.”

I guess the words were supposed to sanctify something that didn’t feel loving at all. He got to name the moment, and I just had to live it.

We all hear the same script on repeat: men say they don’t get enough sex. Women say they feel like single parents with an extra adult child.

But when men complain about “not getting enough sex,” that’s what they’re asking for: sex. Not repair, not reconnection. And yet when they’re trying to secure it, the phrase that gets rolled out is “making love,” as if changing the label changes the reality. And there’s a kind of violence in that too… the way language gets used as pressure rather than invitation.

I’ve noticed couples in restaurants where one person talks and the other performs eye contact for thirty seconds before their hand drifts magnetically back to their phone. I know the feeling a little too well of realising mid sentence that I’m effectively speaking to empty air.

Add to this the grinding, invisible load of remembering bin days, organising birthdays, running the social calendar, knowing when the kids need their PE kits, when the vet appointment is, what’s low in the fridge. Add to that the laundry, grocery shopping, cooking, the dishes, the after school logistics, and sacrificing your own sleep because you know if you don’t do it, it won’t get done.

Over time, that doesn’t feel like being cherished. It feels like being upper management without the pay, title, or acknowledgement. That’s where resentment begins to form like black mould, rotting a relationship from the inside out.

And it cuts both ways, because I hear just as many men say they feel like their wife’s father or bank account, not her partner. No one wants to feel like the parent in their own relationship. It’s hard to feel erotic toward someone who treats you like mummy or daddy, rather than someone who is also struggling equally under the weight of trying to figure it all out.

How is meaningful connection supposed to flourish amid that kind of neglect?

I think about nights where I’ve crawled into bed bone tired, my body still humming with the day’s demands, finally starting to exhale; only to feel a hand rubbing my back, initiating the familiar hopeful dance that triggers analysis in my mind rather than instant lust. Thoughts like: How long has it been? Can I make myself be in the mood? How many “not tonight” notes have I banked in the last month?

There’s no conversation about the day or curiosity about how I am. Just a wordless expectation that I will somehow switch from project manager into lover on cue.

That also might get labelled “making love” but I’ve never been able to use that phrase myself; it’s always given me the ick. What I have done instead was nod along while other people used it, as if agreeing with the label might eventually make the reality feel less hollow.

Too often, we talk about sex as if it lives in a separate box from everything else. As if you can ignore someone’s needs all week and then expect them to feel worshipped because you lit a candle, put on a playlist, or reached for them in the dark.

But our bodies remember what the mind tries to rationalise away.

If you spend most of your week feeling unseen, unheard, or taken for granted, your nervous system does not magically forget that when the lights go out. You cannot neglect someone all day and then be offended that they don’t burst into flames in your arms at night.

“Making love” isn’t simply a style of sex either: slow… tender… dimly lit. It’s an outcome. It’s what happens when two people who feel seen, supported, and respected meet each other in bodies they already trust.

If the relationship is a hostile work environment, it doesn’t matter how gentle the sex is. You’re not making love… you’re engaging in damage control with pelvic thrusts.

We treat the idea of “making love” like a bedroom skill. Something you can switch on with the right mood lighting and a better attitude.

But what happens in bed is just a summary of everything that came before it: the bins taken out without argument. The birthday remembered, the phone put down, and the fight revisited and actually resolved. The “I’ve got this” on a night when you’re on your knees with pain or exhaustion.

“Making love” is when the person in your bed knows you have their back outside of it.

If they don’t feel held in the daylight, they’re not making love with you at midnight. They’re just negotiating, managing, and surviving.

It’s time we stop confusing that with romance.

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I can never forget the unsteady look in their eyes.

Slightly panicked, uncertain, and how quick they would lower their gaze to study the ground. And then as we got closer to each other, how they would step off the kerb into the street to allow me to have the pavement.

It breaks my heart even now to remember those moments when the cleaners walking home from work would move aside to make way for me. How they’d see a uniformed schoolgirl coming the other way and angle their bodies smaller: shopping bags pulled in tight, elbows tucked, a quick apologetic smile.

I didn’t ask them to move, I just walked through the space they made. That’s how early we learn who must give way. I’d pass other cleaners waiting for buses and taxis: uniforms folded in handbags, bleach on their knuckles, waiting to be carried across town to the places where the real floors needed scrubbing.

I didn’t have the words then. I just absorbed the lesson… some women make room so the rest of us don’t have to.

Those women were often single mothers. They spent days raising other people’s children and nights raising their own; in sectors that remain among the UK’s lowest paid. Their labour crossed a border: comfort was delivered elsewhere first and brought home in the form of rent money, groceries, and school supplies on lay-by.

Their sons grew up on furniture paid for with aching backs and swollen feet.

And I watched some of those boys, once grown, laugh with friends about “maids” and “cleaning ladies” as if they were a different species. They’d never marry a woman who did that kind of work. They’d transcended it.

To them, their mothers’ jobs were something to escape, not something that carried them, or something to be admired for their sacrifice.

Andrea Dworkin wrote about how under patriarchy, every woman’s son is her potential betrayer. It’s most often quoted about violence, but betrayal often comes earlier and softer. Betrayal often starts as etiquette. First you learn who steps aside, the you learn who is stepped around.

It’s a two-for-one taking: their labour is cheap, and their dignity is meant to be quiet. Just as the day is lifted out of their bodies; the story is lifted out of their mouths.

Years later, after the mortgage crisis, I met that same logic in my own kitchen.

I’d lost my job and was doing everything you’re meant to do to be a “good” unemployed person: updating my CV, sending applications, turning up in my one proper interview outfit. I was shortlisted again and again, and still the offers went to to the men, the “providers.”

But money was tightening in our own home.

One night I said, half joking, half serious, “Maybe I’ll go back to waiting tables for a bit. I did it when I was younger. I could do it again.”

He didn’t pause. “No wife of mine is going to do work like that.”

We still needed the money, but it had to arrive with a business card in order for it to be considered proper.

I know he meant it as protective, but it landed as a rule.

Fix this, but not like that. Earn, but only in a way that doesn’t make me flinch. I washed the dishes with my coat still on and felt ridiculous tears come — less from the numbers, more from the sense that even my desperation had to be respectable.

That moment felt like the pavement politics all over again: who gets to keep their footing, who gets to step down into the gutter. How he loved me enough to keep me from “work like that”, so that someone else’s wife would have to do it instead.

Patriarchy sells itself as chivalry; the kind that says a man should keep his woman away from low work. But it only works because another woman is already there, doing the undignified work. A gentleman’s pride is a budget line, underwritten by someone else’s mother or wife.

Class sits on top of this like another heavy hand. “I don’t want you to end up like me,” a cleaner tells her son, meaning: I hope your life is easier than mine. The culture translates it into: don’t end up with someone like me. Don’t bring home a girl who smells of bleach. So he doesn’t. He may hire her instead, and speak warmly about his mum’s sacrifices while repeating the story from the other side.

But loving his mother in private doesn’t stop him aligning himself with men in public. That contradiction is stark: they’re men raised by single women who give them everything they need to rise, and yet they remain loyal to other men.

It makes me think about those pavements. The cleaners that made themselves narrow for a schoolgirl they didn’t know, and years later, me making myself small inside my own kitchen.

On paper our lives are different, but the rule is the same: women shrink so men don’t have to. Some mothers break their bodies so their sons can climb, and then watch them step around women like them on the way up.

Dworkin called every woman’s son a potential betrayer. But before the big betrayals, there are the little ones: the jokes, the wincing, the polite refusals, the “no wife of mine” lines. But if a man’s sense of honour depends on a woman shrinking beside him, it isn’t honour… it’s entitlement dressed as protection.

I keep thinking of those days walking home from school, and I wonder when two people meet on a narrow pavement: who steps down? And who taught them to? What would it take for a son to climb and not be ashamed of the woman who made his ascent possible?

Start perhaps by saying your mother’s job out loud, proud, and without flinching. Pay the women who hold your life together at the true cost of theirs. Bring the tenderness you keep for your mum into public, where it counts. Refuse the no wife of mine sentiment, and the outsourcing that follows.

Because dignity that needs another woman to step off the kerb isn’t dignity at all. It’s borrowed height. It’s time we stop paying for it with boot marks on their backs.

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We went to dinner as we always did.

I don’t remember where. Probably Legendary, one of our favourite spots. It was the place to be seen and to watch others. A wide open patio threaded with trees so your table felt private, but no one was ever really unseen.

By then we’d been there so often the staff knew us. We were greeted by name, like regulars in a show we’d been quietly starring in for years. My heels clicked against the stone as we followed the host. Bottle of red, as always.

We talked about our week even though we’d only seen each other a few nights ago for drinks. There was always something. Him the crab; me the fish. Sentences flowed back and forth, overlapping, interrupting, tidal as the sea.

We ordered. We ate. We drank. The soft breeze slipped between the tables as the wine slipped between us. By the time we were done, we were ready for the club… loose, lit, and tuned to the possibility of doing something we could laugh about in the morning.

We moved through the night like we’d rehearsed it: his hand at the small of my back as we crossed the room, my fingers hooked in his belt loop when I leaned up to speak, his palm on my knee whenever he bent double to laugh with his whole body. If you’d seen us from a distance you’d have assumed: yes, that’s them.

We bumped into friends and fell into orbit: outside to drink and smoke, inside to dance. I loved the way he moved when he’d had a few: hips loose, shirt riding up, throat bare. He was so vain in daylight, terrified of being ridiculous. But in the dark he forgot. That forgetting made me feel more brave too.

The music was so loud, when he leaned in to suggest shots he had to put his mouth right against my ear. His lips brushed once, light and accidental, but my skin didn’t get the memo. It sang and my breath caught in my throat as we went to the bar.

We were so high on the night that shots made sense. He gave me a sly, private half smile over the glasses. I matched it, feeling heat crawl up my chest.

Outside again. More cigarettes. His real laugh came out; that unrestrained cackle that scrunched his whole face and turned his hazel eyes to slits. When he lost it completely his eyes streamed, and he’d grab my arm like I’d done it to him on purpose. Every time it happened I felt chosen.

Eventually people peeled away into taxis and borrowed beds. Our ritual remained: drive to the all night petrol station, split a pasty and debrief over grease, crumbs, and gossip.

It was around 1am when I pulled up outside his flat. We stayed in the car, windows cracked, the engine ticking cool as we lit more cigarettes.

Neither of us moved to end it, so we laughed. We needled each other. I threw out lines just to watch his mouth kick up. Then something in him went quiet. His eyes settled on me in a way that made my own mouth go dry.

“Pass me your lighter?” he asked.

I did. When he took it, his fingers closed around my hand and didn’t let go. Half a second, maybe a full second. Long enough that it wasn’t nothing.

My stomach dropped. I told myself I was imagining it, and pulled back. Lit my own cigarette and kept talking.

Eventually there was nothing left to say, nowhere left to hide. We leaned across the console to hug goodbye. This time he caught my wrist and held it.

The air in the car thickened. His hazel eyes were fixed on mine. The night pressed in at the windows. I could hear him breathing. I could hear my own.

His thumb traced one slow, deliberate circle on the inside of my wrist. Heat shot up my arm. My heart hammered so hard I felt it pulse in my tongue.

Outside, the streetlights haloed the trees. I’d parked us in the dark. No one could see the way his face was inching closer. No one could see the way I glanced at the empty back seat and pictured how fast this could tip: my back against the door, his hands on my thighs, all that charge from the evening almost finally, stupidly, recklessly spent.

He was waiting. That’s the part that still makes my chest tight. Waiting for me to nod, to close the distance, to decide what this would be so he didn’t have to.

“Goodnight,” I heard, and realised it was my voice.

I pulled my wrist free. I kissed his cheek and then I put the car in gear.

Because as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t step into something I knew I’d have to feel in the morning and he wouldn’t. Not when the risk would live in my body and slide clean off of his.

I drove home and we never spoke about it.

Two decades later, I don’t replay that almost; I replay the before. How precisely we fit around each other. How people assumed what we were and how we let them. How safe I felt with his arm slung over my shoulders, his head bent to mine, his laughter catching on my words.

He was already out by then.

With straight men, I’d learnt the pattern: boredom, ego, blurred lines, my body as a question they wanted answered. I never expected it from the friend who’d dissect their behaviour with me over red wine and petrol station pasties.

That night in the car, he didn’t touch my wrist because he didn’t know who he wanted. He touched it because he knew I wanted him. And he knew he could.

Slowly over the years, he stopped taking my calls. Stopped replying. The world that felt like ours turned out to be his; he walked out and left me standing in it alone.

Last Christmas he messaged me three words: “Merry Christmas,” followed by my name.

No apology for not being there for me when I was in hospital. No “I’ve missed you.” Just enough to hand me the old role… the girl who takes his three words and turns them into sentences, who phones back, who patches, who makes him feel like the kind of man who didn’t leave. A man who still has options.

I didn’t answer.

It took me a long time to see that he wasn’t risking our friendship that night.
That the only thing he was risking was me.

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Welcome back to The You Tree.

If you’re new here, you may want to catch up with Act I, Act II, Act III, and Act IV.

When we were last with Elinor, the snow was rising, the dog was on her blood, and Smith and Tanner were calling for a witch to burn. She ran for the dark between the carts, crock tight under her cloak, and a work scarred hand had just closed around her wrist…

“Got you,” he said.

She twisted once before she stilled. The lantern cut a harsh circle in the snow. “Giles,” she gasped.

He didn’t let go. “If Smith sees you, you’ll hang by morning.” His jaw worked. “Why did you come back here Elinor?”

“For the crock under the yew,” she whispered. “Resin and rags to keep our fire lit.”

The dog bayed, nearer now. Giles’s jaw worked. “You cooled my lad’s cheek when it burned raw,” he said. “I owe you for that.” He hauled her into the narrow shadow between shed and smithy. “When I let go, drop, count to three, and take the well side.”

Before she could answer he shoved her down behind a barrow and strode back into the light. “This way!” he shouted, pointing down the far lane. Men and dog both swung toward his lie. As they passed, his fingers brushed her wrist once — go — and then he was gone with them, calling the hunt away.

Elinor ran for the dark between the carts, the crock thudding under her cloak, and did not look back. She reached the woods by counting heartbeats. In the lee of the pines, the storm sounded smaller, like someone closing a door on anger.

Kit threw back the sacking. “Elinor—”

“I’m here,” she said, stumbling inside. Alys launched at her. Elinor caught her one armed, keeping the crock tight with the other.

“Did they see you?” asked Kit.

“A hand did,” she answered. “But the right one.” She set the crock down on the packed earth. “Help me.”

They worked without wasting words. Kit scraped a hollow in the ash, and Elinor laid one resin soaked rag over the faint ember they had nursed all evening. The flame took at once, bright and eager, then settled to a steady, sensible burn.

Alys held her palms out. “It’s back,” she whispered.

“It is,” Elinor said. “We’ve little to spare so best we keep it small.”

They ate what was left of Agnes’s bread and lay close. For a while the only sound was the fire’s low breathing and Alys’s softer one against her collarbone.

Dawn came thin and grey. The storm had gone uphill to gather itself. Kit was outside checking the snares when a voice called from the trees.

“Elinor?”

She pushed the sacking aside. The priest stood there with snow on his shoulders and a sack over one arm. “I go to the poorhouse,” he said. “They’ll need more than prayers.” His gaze took in the lean-to, Alys, and the bruise on Elinor’s wrist. “I thought to see if you still drew breath.”

“We do,” Elinor said. “Thanks to an old debt remembered.”

He stepped nearer to the coals, warming his hands. “Smith and Tanner were up late,” he said quietly. “They talk of proof and penance. Their tempers have not cooled.”

Elinor’s eyes flicked toward the dark beyond the trees, where the village lay. “The yew’s split is widening,” she murmured. “If the wind turns hard, they’ll call it judgment and finish what they began.”

“What would you have me do?” he asked.

She hesitated only a moment, then lifted the crock’s lid and scooped resin into a small clay pot from her herb basket. The same salve she had carried for bark and skin. She pressed it into his hand. “If the night turns and I can’t reach the green,” she said, “dress the bark for me. Do what my hands would do.”

He closed his fingers around it. “I will and if they look for blame,” he said, “I will stand where it falls.”

Their eyes met and a silent agreement passed between them as plain as any oath. “Go on, then,” Elinor said. “Don’t let the poorhouse freeze for our sake.”

He gave Alys and Kit a slight nod, then disappeared back into the white tipped trees.

Inside the lean-to, the fire ticked softly. Elinor set her palm over its heat, thinking of another heart she might yet keep alive.

The day held, thin but steady. They mended what they could: Kit checked the snares and came back with nothing but rabbit tracks and a frost stiff twig for Alys to whittle. Elinor sorted her remaining herbs into little paper twists; most were smoke sour now, but some still kept a clean bite. Alys made a game of counting them, blanket round her shoulders, toes to the fire.

“We have enough,” Elinor said. “If we mind them, they’ll mind us.”

By afternoon the sky lowered again. Wind worried the tops of the pines; snow went from drifting to driven.

At dusk, shapes came out of that weather. Agnes first, shawl white with snowflakes, Giles behind her with a sack over one shoulder, and their boy holding tight to a goat’s rope. The animal walked as if it had chosen them, not the other way round.

Elinor ducked out to meet them, holding the sacking aside. “In,” she said. “Quick.”

They crowded under the lean-to. Agnes thumped down the sack. It contained oats, a heel of cheese, a dented kettle hammered round again. Her mouth was set, but her eyes were not. “We’re done,” she said. “Smith says our Ned’s bewitched. Says the goats follow him because you touched his cheek.”

Ned flushed and tightened his grip on the rope. The goat nosed his elbow like a friend.

“He only feeds them gentle,” Agnes went on. “But they’ve near convinced themselves it’s devil’s work. Tanner’s started saying what you put in him will out.” She looked toward the dark where the village lay buried in snow. “We’re done hoping for mercy.”

Giles’s jaw worked. “If there’s room by your fire,” he said, “we’ll work for it. If not… say so plain and we’ll move on.”

Elinor shifted so Alys could see, and they all could hear. “We plant before we take,” she said. “We return what we borrow. We speak plain or keep silent. If you’ll keep to that, there’s room plenty.”

Agnes let out a breath that sounded like she’d been holding it for months. “Agreed.”

They set to work as the light failed: braced the lean-to, ran a better ridgeline, laid fresh boughs and shared tallow for cheeks and fingers. When the fire was settled and Alys had shown Ned where to sleep by the warmest pole, the storm thickened around them, but inside the little shelter the air held steady and sure.

As night thickened, the wind found its teeth in the village square.

It came knifing along the lanes, worrying the old wound in the tree where Tanner’s nail had gone in, and rattled the empty trough stone that kept straying back to the roots. Snow began to slant instead of fall.

The yew stood where it had always stood, taking the first blows.

It remembered Elinor’s hands, the cool paste and warm skin, the way her voice had said hold as if the word itself could bind it. It reached for that warmth now and met only iron cold air.

If it could speak loud, it might have called her name. Instead, it listened to the storm gather itself like men drawing breath for hurt, and felt the split in its heartwood begin, slow and sure, like ice working into stone.

Inside the lean-to, breath and firelight made a small, golden cave.

Ned slept with his hand tangled in the goat’s rough coat while Alys lay curled against Elinor’s chest. Agnes and Giles lay on their backs, eyes open, counting some private litany in the rafters. Kit dozed sitting up, knife sheathed, boots still on.

Elinor lay awake a while longer, palm resting lightly on the earth where the crock had sat, feeling for something that wasn’t there. “The yew will be standing in this too,” she said quietly.

Agnes turned her head. “It’s only a tree,” she said, but not unkindly.

Elinor almost smiled. “That’s what they said when they nailed their proofs to it.”

The wind worried at the sacking, then seemed to think the better of it. For a little while longer the world held: ember, wool, and the slow tide of sleeping bodies.

Sometime in the black hinge of morning, the storm came back with its mind made up. Wind slammed the lean-to so hard the poles grumbled. Snow drove sideways, pouring through any seam that would have it. The fire shrank to a sullen red eye.

Alys woke with a start. “Mama—”

“I’m here.” Elinor pulled her close, felt the cold in her feet, and the knock of her teeth. Across the way Ned coughed and Agnes hushed him. Giles shifted his bulk to take some of the draught.

Kit crawled to the fire, shielding it with his body.

Elinor listened past the canvas of noise. In it, or under it, there was something else: a hollow crack, far off. Her hand went cold around her own ribs. “It’s in the square,” she said. “They’ll let the tree die and call that judgment.”

“No,” Agnes said. “You’ve done enough, Elinor.”

She sat up. “If I don’t go, they will take the last good thing that stood for them.”

Kit looked up at her. “You can’t reach the tree in this.”

“I must,” she said. “I won’t ask it to die alone.”

Alys clutched her sleeve. “Don’t go Mama” she urged.

Elinor smoothed her hair back, gentle but firm. “You remember what we said? We thank what keeps us, and sometimes we keep it back.”

“I’ll go with you,” Kit said.

Agnes started to protest, but Giles caught her arm. “He’s quick,” was all he said.

Elinor nodded once. “You stay with Alys,” she told Agnes. “Ned, mind the goat. Giles, keep the fire alive. If we’re not back—”

“You’ll be back,” Alys said fiercely, willing it so.

Elinor kissed her brow. Kit took up the axe, tucking it against his shoulder. Elinor pulled her cloak close and together they stepped out into the blizzard.

The world beyond the pines was a white roar.

They walked bent into it, heads down, letting the hedgerows and old paths do the remembering for them. Twice Elinor stumbled; and twice Kit caught her. By the time they reached the village, empty lanterns swung wild on their hooks, creaking against stone. Doors were barred. No one with sense stood in the open.

But the yew did.

It loomed out of the white out all at once; a black shape under a heaving sky. One great limb had already torn away. A long, dark split had opened down the trunk, deep enough that Elinor could see the raw wet gleam of living wood inside.

Kit swore under his breath. “Another gust like this and—”

“They’ll say God did what they wanted to be done,” Elinor said. Her voice shook with cold, not fear. “Help me.”

They circled to the lee side, where the wind’s hand was briefly lighter. Snow stung her cheeks; her cloak snapped like a sail. Elinor pressed both palms to the wound “You’ve stood through all their years friend,” she whispered. “You owe them nothing more.”

The yew knew the touch. Heat, even now. Beneath her hands, a slow rhythm answered her pulse: You came.

Elinor bowed her head. “I did,” she whispered. “I will not leave you to the frost. If they had only cared for you, I’d have left you in their keeping.”

“Is the heart sound?” she called to Kit.

He leaned in, squinting through the driven snow. “Here,” he said. “If we take this, what’s left will fall, with or without us.”

“It will fall anyway,” Elinor said. “Better it falls giving something back.” She took the axe from his hand; the handle felt slick and wrong with cold.

“On three,” she told the tree, because it felt truer than telling herself. “One. Two.”

She swung on three. The first strike jarred her to the shoulder. The second bit cleaner. Kit braced the split with his hands so the heartwood wouldn’t tumble into the snow. Two more blows and the piece came free: a solid wedge of living wood, dark-ringed, green at the core, with the weight of a newborn babe held close.

The yew felt the tearing, and the answer inside it. Two mouths, it thought dimly. If one is carried, one still speaks.

Elinor wrapped the heart at once in resin cloth, binding it tight so no wet could find the green. “Hold,” she whispered into the bundle, the same word she had given the tree. “Hold with us now.”

The wind chose that moment to come down like a hammer. The trunk gave a long, breaking groan. Kit seized her cloak and dragged her back; something tearing hot in his shoulder as the yew bowed. It was slow as a man taking a final kneel, then went over in a roar of snow and splintering.

For a breath, the whole square was flying bark, white air, and blind noise. Then it was only wreckage and the storm.

“Let’s go,” Kit said, close to her ear. “Before they look out.”

Elinor clutched the bundled heart against her chest and ran. The heart was warm and heavier than she’d thought, as if it still drew breath.

The storm covered them better than any ally.

No one came to the windows; no one saw two shadow shapes slip from the fallen dark to the white. Elinor ran bent double, the heart clutched tight. Snow dragged at her skirts, grabbed her boots, and bit into her shins.

By the time they reached the fields her lungs were raw. The village vanished behind a curtain of its own making. Ahead, the pines were only a darker kind of night.

“Nearly,” Kit said, though his voice was torn thin and threaded with pain. “Keep hold.”

“I am,” she said, and didn’t know if she meant the bundle or herself. They found the hedge by touch, not sight. Elinor grabbed the sacking with her free hand. “It’s us.”

Agnes dragged it aside. Warmth and firelight spilled out and so did Alys. “Mama!”

“Careful,” Elinor gasped. “Careful—” She stumbled in to her knees and set the bundle down on their one good blanket as if laying down a child.

Alys dropped beside it, wide eyed. “Is that…?”

“It’s the heart,” Elinor said. Only then did her hands begin to shake, slow and numb from the cold. “What was left that still wanted to live.”

Kit kicked the sacking back into place, with a small groan of pain. Agnes pushed a cup of something warm into Elinor’s hands while Giles tended to Kit’s shoulder.

For a few breaths they all just looked at the wrapped shape between them, listening to the storm claw at the world outside.

“Will it…?” Alys started.

“Yes,” Elinor said. “If we give back what it gave us.”

She laid her palm on the cloth. Under resin and sap and shock, there was the faint insistence of life.

“Rest now,” she whispered. “We’ll do the next part in the light.”

Morning broke hard and white and the square was unrecognisable.

Drifted to the eaves, the air sharp enough to cut through thoughts. Where the yew had stood there was only a hollow, a smooth absence scoured clean by the wind. The trough was gone. The stones had shifted. Even the soot ring that once marked the roots had been taken.

Men dug through the drift, muttering. Boys fetched water that froze before it poured.

Smith stood at the lip of the hollow, eyes small and red. “She felled it,” he said. “The witch. Look; footprints. Proof enough.”

Tanner crouched beside him, tapping the ground with the haft of his mallet. “And where is she now? Hiding in the woods, most like, waiting for spring so she can finish what she began in winter.”

“Or gone to hell,” Baker said, and crossed himself twice.

A voice behind them answered, quiet as a cut. “You’d know the road, then.” The priest walked into the hush with his cloak hem stiff with frost.

“She was not here,” he said. He did not need to raise his voice; it carried by the cold. “I passed her camp at the brook before dawn with bread for the poorhouse. She had no axe. Only this.” He held up the small clay pot of salve Elinor had given him.

“She asked me to tend the bark if I could not keep her from exile,” he went on. “I came when the storm eased.” He looked at the empty place, then back at them. “There was nothing left to dress. Only what the wind, and your neglect, had already taken.”

A murmur went through the men. Someone spat, but it landed on his own boot.

“You’d blame a woman gathering herbs,” the priest said, “rather than the hands that nailed hides to living wood, the soot that choked it or the lye you let run to its roots.”

Smith bristled. “Mind yourself, Father.”

“I do,” he said. “I mind whose name you put to your own ruin.”

No one stepped forward to contradict him; they only watched his back as he turned away. The square felt suddenly smaller without the tree to look past.

“Bury what’s gone,” the priest said. “And pray the ground forgives you.”

When they looked up, he had gone.

After that day, each time someone crossed the square, they tried not to notice they were stepping through absence, or how the wind had once hurried a set of tracks out toward the trees.

In the woods, they waited for the storm to spend itself.

When the wind dropped to a ragged breath, they took the bundle out into the quiet. Elinor chose a place where the pines broke for sky and the brook bent close, creating a fold of earth held on three sides, sheltered from the worst of any weather. She knelt and brushed away the crust of snow with her bare hands. Underneath, the soil was dark and cold, but not dead.

“Here,” she said. “This ground listens.”

Kit cut a neat square of turf, then Giles lifted it clear. Agnes lined the hollow with moss and scraps of sacking, making a small, warm cradle. Alys set her hands on the earth’s rim, solemn as if she were at prayer. Ned stood with the goat’s rope looped round his wrist; the animal watched, chewing slow.

Elinor unwrapped the resin cloth. The heart of the yew lay in her palms — a solid wedge of wood dark at the edges, bright green veining its core. “You,” she murmured, as she had at the very beginning. “You live as one of us now. You are no longer theirs to waste.”

She laid it into the moss cradle. The fit was right; it settled like something remembering where it was meant to be. She drew earth in around it with her fingers, firm but gentle. “Root,” Elinor whispered. “Drink, and live.”

She bound the last strip of resin cloth over the mound; not as a shroud, but as a promise against the next hard frost. Alys pressed her small hand beside her mother’s. Kit, Agnes, Giles, and Ned followed, one after another, their hands all overlapping in the cold atop the yew’s new home.

For a moment none of them spoke. The silence felt full, not empty.

“There,” Elinor said at last. “We’ve given You your name back.”

The days that followed were lean, but no longer lonely.

They learned each other’s weights and ways. Agnes could stretch oats and dried hips into a meal that left no one aching. Giles built a better shelter from fallen pine and the tools his old trade had left in his hands. Kit kept snares honest and axes sharp. Ned had a knack for finding the driest kindling; the goat trailing him contentedly.

Elinor walked to the little mound every morning and checked the cloth, pressed her fingers to the soil for damp, spoke a word or two under her breath. Alys went with her, learning without being told that care is a doing thing.

“Will it grow?” Alys asked once.

“Yes,” Elinor said. “It knows how.”

At night, when the fire warmed their faces and the woods leaned close, stories came easier. Not of witches in the trees, but of plants that healed, of storms survived, and of small mercies not forgotten. No one called it a village, not yet. But paths began to wear themselves between hearth and water, shelter and sapling, as if the place agreed.

When the thaw came, it announced itself quietly: a different note in the dripping, the brook shouldering off its rind of ice. One morning Alys knelt by the mound and sucked in a breath.

“Mama. Look!”

The cloth had shifted. From the seam of earth a single green point pushed through; no bigger than a grain of barley, but stubborn as a fist.

Elinor crouched beside her. For a long time she didn’t speak. Then she reached out, not to touch, just to be near.

“Welcome back friend,” she said, smiling.

The others came and stood in a loose ring: Kit with dust on his hands, Agnes holding dough, Giles with his cap crushed in his fist, Ned with the goat pressed to his side.

The small shoot felt their nearness as warmth. It may not always catch the shape of their words, but knew the gentle hands around it meant shelter and not harm.

~ Epilogue ~

Years turned the way they do when no one is counting but the trees.

The sapling thickened, shouldering its way upward. Children grew under it; Alys first and then others. They learned to read weather in its needles, and to take only the branches it chose to lay down. Kit set his bow staves to season under its shade, working round his shoulder that had never quite healed. Agnes dried rosehips for the winter there. Ned’s goats grazed the edges and never once were tethered to the bark.

When Elinor’s time came, it came in her sleep on a mild autumn evening, resin scent soft in the air. They laid her beneath the yew she had raised from the rescued heart, close enough that its roots would one day find her. From a fallen bough, Alys carved a small wooden heart and set it at the base of the tree. Then she leaned her brow to the bark and felt, deep in the grain, something warm and steady answer back.

Seasons passed. Snow came and the yew leaned over the roofs to keep them from caving. In summer it threw its shade wide. Red berries came in time, bright as drops of sealed delight. The people who lived there took what was offered and tended what they took.

The yew watched over them as it had once watched over the village. It remembered the burning, the frost, and the silence. It forgave none of it; but it gave anyway.

It knew these voices, the careful use of its shade and needles and fallen wood, and it knew the small, sure hands that checked its bark. When they spoke to it — “You,” they said, as Elinor had; it knew they meant itself, and not just its use.

You, it thought in return, in the slow bright language of rings and root and leaf. I will keep you, just as you have kept me.

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Welcome back to The You Tree. If you’re new here, welcome, and please follow these links to catch up with Act I, Act II, and Act III.

When we were last with Alys and Elinor, the fire had taken their home. By dawn the square was ash and silence, and the yew stood alone, its roots tasting what some men called justice.

Now the snow was coming early, and the woods the only place left for them to hide…

They slept that first night under a hedge whose twigs had learned the shape of wind. By morning the grass was glassed over with frost and Alys’s breath came thin and fast.

Elinor broke ice from the ditch with a stone, held it in her palms till it dulled to water, and tipped it between her daughter’s lips. “We’ll move to the pines,” she said. “They keep what warmth there is.”

They cut fronds with Elinor’s small knife and wove them into a lean-to against a fallen trunk. The work was clumsy at first; their fingers forgot, then remembered again. Alys gathered bitter berries with the solemnity of a clerk counting coins.

Near dusk the sky turned to tin and began to spit. Not snow, but rain that thought better of itself halfway down. The sleet found every seam. The low wall of fronds bowed, then sagged, then let go in a hush that felt like an apology.

Cold water ran down Alys’s neck.

“Mama—”

“I’ve got you.” Elinor stripped the child out of her wet things and pulled her under the cloak. “Breathe with me. In. Out.” She rubbed Alys’s feet hard between her palms until the colour crawled back. “Hush now. Fear is a fire,” she murmured into Alys’s hair. “We’ll bank it and make it work.”

They waited through the hiss and the drip. By the time the sleet passed, the trees had cloaked themselves in darkness. Elinor rebuilt what she could by feel… lower this time, tighter, with moss in the gaps. She set a loop of twine by a rabbit run and prayed it would hold till morning.

By dawn the snare was sprung and the snow around it scored with a fox’s drag. The linen she’d left for wrapping lay shredded in the bracken. Alys’s mouth trembled.

“It was hungry too,” Elinor said, steadying her. “We’ll get the next one.” Her own hands were split across the knuckles, weeping clear in the cold.

At noon the air softened, and their footprints stitched a crooked path from the hedgerow to the pines. Near dusk a third set joined them: broad and deliberate. Elinor stood waiting with her knife in her hand. A figure stopped at the tree line, hood up, an axe and billhook held up like apologies.

“Priest says two is thin shelter,” he managed. “I can cut and keep, and I don’t talk much.”

Alys drew a breath to speak, then gave a nod, small and fierce. Elinor studied the set of his shoulders, the way his eyes did not ask to be thanked. “Then cut, we’ll speak after the tea boils,” she said.

She and Alys gathered pine needles and fetched their pot.

He worked like someone who had taught himself: efficient, left-handed, careful with the blade. He unwrapped flint and steel from a scrap of cloth and struck once, twice; the spark caught in birch bark and grew. Fire rose, small and obedient, the first since the burning of their home that drove them from the village.

Alys clapped her hands to her mouth in delight. Elinor closed her eyes in thanks. In the light from the fire, the man looked younger still. When he passed Alys a bundle of sticks he said, almost to the ground, “I’ll carry the heavy. Mind your hands.”

Elinor studied him a moment. “What do they call you?”

“Kit,” he said, after a pause. “The priest’s word, not mine.”

“Then we’ll keep it,” she answered, turning the pot toward the flames. He nodded once, awkward but certain, and crouched to feed the fire.

They mended the lean-to with the small length of sacking cloth Kit had brought with him. He showed Alys how to notch branches so the snow would slide and not settle. “Like this?” she asked, knife trembling a little in her linen covered hands.

“Not so deep,” he said, taking the stick gently from her. “If you cut too far, it weakens. Let it bend, don’t force it.” She watched, intent, as he scored the wood cleanly.

“Did you learn that from your father?” Elinor asked.

Kit hesitated, then shook his head. “From breaking things that mattered.” He passed the branch back to Alys and watched her try again with the anxious pride of someone who had never been trusted with a lesson.

Just then, a horn sounded far off, the kind that turns birds to silence. Kit’s head whipped up. He set a finger to his lips and drew Alys behind the windbreak.

Voices came with the crunch of crusted snow. “Tracks here. Two small, one bigger.”

“Fox and cubs?”

“No. Human. Cloak hem, see?”

Elinor pressed Alys’s hands between her own to keep them from knocking together. The men stopped so close Elinor could smell old ale and tallow.

“Reeve says to keep to the ridge,” one muttered, “but Tanner pays for word.”

“Word of what?”

“The witch.” A laugh, like spit on cold iron. “Or the boy she’s taken up with.”

Kit stepped out from the shadow before Elinor could stop him. “Sirs,” he said, voice level. “The foxes went through at dawn. There’s a drag line to the ditch.”

“That so?” The taller man eyed the axe in Kit’s right hand. He’d swapped it without thinking. “You from the village?”

“Priest, sometimes,” Kit said. “Cutting storm fall. He’ll want the path clear to the poorhouse.”

The shorter one sniffed. “Show me your other hand.”

Kit held both out. “I set only for the pot.”

“Mind you do,” the man said. “If we find snares not tithed, we’ll hang them with their owner still in ’em.”

They moved on, horn low and sour.

Kit waited until the sound bled away. Only then did he let the axe fall back to his left. “They’d have taken you if they’d seen you,” he said without turning.

“But they didn’t,” Elinor answered. “This time.”

That night the wind sagged and the cold turned thin.

The rabbit Kit had brought with him crackled over the coals. Elinor bowed her head. “We thank what feeds us,” she said. Alys copied her, shy and exact. When the bones were clean, Elinor scraped the little pelt by the fire and rubbed tallow into the skin. “For shoes,” she murmured to Alys. “To keep your feet from splitting.”

Kit looked away as if he’d intruded on a prayer.

In the morning he returned with a crust of bread wrapped in cloth and a silence that held. When Elinor thanked him, he shrugged one shoulder, awkward.

“Smith says the tree’s bewitched,” he said at last, almost as if the words itched. “Tanner agrees. Baker nods when they pass. They’ve a mind to leave it to winter.” He hesitated. “They look at the sky, not at the roots.”

Elinor’s mouth tightened. “Then I’ll look at the roots.” She wrapped salve, a strip of cloth, and a small spade in her shawl. “Keep her busy,” she told him, tilting her head toward Alys. “Berries if you find them. Stories if you don’t.”

“Stories?” he said, startled.

“Of when you were small.”

“I wasn’t,” he said, and then, softly so that Alys missed it, “Not for long. They beat the small out of me when they saw which hand I favoured.”

“Then you kept the better hand,” Elinor said. “The one that remembers mercy.”

Elinor left at dusk.

The path to the village remembered her feet and then forgot them again where the frost had glossed the stones. From the edge of the green the yew sat black against the paling sky, embodying a patience that had learned to wait. It dreamed of her in the frost… the only warmth it trusted.

Elinor kept to the shadows of sheds and eaves, crossing the square where the soot made a ring that never washed out. She knelt by the root flare, spread the cloth, and worked the salve into the scraped bark. “Hold,” she told it, the way you tell a child to hold still for a needle. “Hold and I’ll come again.”

The tree did not understand the words, only the press of her palms, the clean scent of the paste, the way the heat wandered from her skin into its grain. A small remembering of summer slipped beneath the bark, finding the tree’s heart where life still pulsed green and slow.

“Why this tree?” a voice asked.

Agnes stood a few paces off with her shawl crossed tight, a basket hooked in her elbow. She looked thinner, but her gaze held steady.

“Because it hears,” Elinor said, not looking away. “Because it keeps what you tell it and returns it, given time.”

Agnes came nearer and set the basket down. Inside lay a wool blanket with more darn than cloth, old sacking from the mill, and a crock of tallow stoppered with a rag.

“For the wind,” she said. “And for feet that have a long way to go.”

Elinor’s throat caught. “You’ve done much.”

“I’m paying a debt slowly,” Agnes said. “And another besides. They’ve begun to say our boy charms the goats, that he whistles and they follow him from the pens.” Her jaw went hard. “Smith calls it devil’s work. Tanner says you put it in him when you touched his cheek.” She looked away, the anger cooling into something smaller. “I’m tired of men who name what they fear and then call it God.”

“Then come away,” Elinor said. “When you’re ready. We won’t go back.”

Agnes’s eyes flicked to the square. “Not yet,” she said. “But soon.” She hesitated. “Will the tree live?”

Elinor laid her ear to the bark as if to a sleeping chest. “Yew runs deep,” she said. “Cut it and it grows two new mouths. If they starve it, it will remember how to live on less.” Her fingers rested a moment longer. “But it will take hurt that did not need taking.”

Agnes nodded once, took a breath as if to say more, then gathered her empty basket and was gone.

By the time Elinor reached the woods, her breath smoked like a dying wick. Kit was waiting near the lean-to, his face pale in the firelight.

“You shouldn’t have gone alone.”

“I had to.”

He glanced at the bundle she carried, then at her hands. “The frost’ll come hard tonight. Best keep the fire fed.”

In the days that followed they learned the work of staying.

Elinor banked the coals under ash; Alys blew the ember back to life each morning until her lips hurt then they spent the morning gathering and preparing wood for the fire.

Alys stumbled once with an armful of kindling. Kit reached out before Elinor could, steadying her with a hand at the elbow with the easy, absentminded care of an older brother. “Mind the brambles,” he muttered, pulling his hand back as if burned.

That night the cold came down like a lid. The wind backed and blew wrong. In the small hours the coals gave a last orange blink and went to ash.

Alys woke with a sound that wasn’t quite a cry. Elinor pulled her against her belly and felt the child’s toes — wooden, no heat, no hurt. She pricked and rubbed them until colour rose like shame.

Kit knelt in the dark, striking flint to nothing. “Birch bark is spent,” he said, low. “Everything’s damp as soup.”

Elinor looked to the bundle Agnes had given. The blanket, sacking, and the tallow already thin. “We’ll not last a second night like this.”

“We will,” Kit said, but his breath smoked and his hands shook.

Elinor listened to the woods thinking, to Alys’s small teeth knocking. Then she remembered the crock she’d squirrelled under the yew, the spare rags sealed with resin for mending bark. They were dry, hidden from weather and would burn clean, if she could reach them.

“They’ll strip the tree by now,” she said. “Goats, maybe worse.”

Kit looked up sharply. “If you go now, there are men on watch.”

“If I don’t,” she said, “we’ll have no fire and no friend left standing. Keep her warm. If I’m not back by the time the moon sets—”

“You will be,” Kit said, too quickly. “You will.”

As the sky went the colour of pewter and the air thinned to a rattle in the lungs, Elinor slipped away again.

She rubbed ash across her cheekbones, bound her skirt up from her boots, and tucked her knife flat along her forearm. As she walked toward the village, she caught sight of the moon. A ring, pale and wide, was slung around it, warning of heavy snow to come. Elinor knew it was a sign and that she could not fail. She moved the way a thought moves when it doesn’t want to be noticed: under eaves, behind the well, counting where the cobbles lifted.

Voices by the forge. She knew them before she saw the shapes.

“…priest won’t bar us twice,” Smith said. “At first light I’ll set a wedge in its heart.”

“And if she comes?” Tanner’s laugh was soft and sour. “We’ll nail her palm to its roots and see if her god pulls her free.”

A lantern drifted, then steadied. A dog whined, catching a scent.

Elinor waited until the bellows sighed and the men’s shoulders turned. She flicked a pebble at a loose shutter so that it rattled. The dog pulled toward the noise and was hauled short with a curse. She crossed that space quickly, her breath held tight between two beats.

The yew felt her before it saw her; the ground told it so. It gathered what warmth it could to meet her hands.

She knelt fast: straw wrenched back from the root, the trough levered an inch at a time, paste pressed into the ring cut wound a boy had left. “Hold,” she whispered. “Hold and I’ll come again.” Heat wandered from her skin into the bark. The yew felt it… a thrum beneath the frost, old sap answering warmth. It longed to follow that heat, to go where she went.

Take me with you, it thought without words, the wish rising through its rings like sap through spring wood. But she only pressed harder, unaware, and the thought sank back into silence.

At last she reached under the root flare where she’d hidden the crock. Her fingers closed on the rim, ice rough against her skin. She worked it free, prised the lid loose with her knife. The smell of resin rose, sharp and clean, carrying the promise of fire and the healing of wounds that needed to be sealed.

Behind her, bootsteps shifted. The dog’s low whine snapped and became a bark. Elinor flinched and her knuckles struck a bucket. The iron sang a thin, wrong note that didn’t belong to the night.

“Fox again?” Smith called.

“Too neat for a fox,” came Tanner’s answer. “Free the dog.”

A whistle cut the cold. Chain hissed over a hook and leather creaked as the animal surged. Elinor pressed herself flat to the trunk, felt her own heart go hard and quick against the bark. Too loud, too loud, she and the yew tree both thought.

The light swung wide. Snow glittered like salt. Elinor slid along the shadow of the yew and ran to the narrow alley between the smithy and the shed. The snow there squeaked the way frost does when it won’t forgive. Her breath tore at her throat; her braid snagged on a nail and ripped free a strand.

“Take the well side,” Smith’s voice, close now.

“Catch!” Tanner commanded the dog, eager.

The lanterns were tracking her. She hugged the crock tight under her cloak; the lid knocked her ribs with each step. She took the corner and almost fell, catching herself on the split stone that marked the lane. It took skin; a dark bead bloomed on white.

“A trail,” Smith said behind her. “There.”

Tanner’s laugh came soft and sour. “Let’s find out which burns faster: truth or flesh.”

The dog found the blood and bayed. The sound filled the alley, full throated and sure. Elinor went for the gap between stacked carts — two strides, three — but her skirt caught on a splinter and tore.

A hand closed tight around her wrist.

It was strong and work scarred, but clean even in winter. The lamplight caught the frost on the shed wall and and made it glitter like ground glass.

“Got you,” he said.

To be continued…

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Welcome back to The You Tree.
If you missed the first two parts, you can catch up on Act I here, and Act II here.
Last time, mercy was mistaken for witchcraft, and the village forgot what kindness cost…

The forge spat and hissed but Smith’s count never reached three.

Smoke thickened and the bellows sighed of its own accord. The priest’s voice cut through it, loud and clear. “Enough! You will not scorch God’s image.”

For a moment no one moved. Sparks kept as Smith dropped the coal and tongs. Elinor fell to her knees, pulling Alys into her arms.

The priest planted himself between her and the fire, eyes hard as flint. “Go home,” he told them all. “Let your tempers cool before judgment finds you wanting.”

The crowd broke apart slowly, shame sliding over their faces like mud after rain. Smith backed toward the forge, Tanner turned his grin into a grimace, and Baker crossed himself twice for good measure.

Elinor rose unsteadily. The yew’s shadow reached toward her as if it meant to help her stand. The square returned to stillness. Men put down their tools, and dogs crept under carts. By dawn, no one spoke of what had almost happened.

As they walked home, hands clasped tight, Alys was first to break the silence. “Why did they do it, Mama?”

Elinor brushed ash from her sleeve. “Because fear burns faster than truth.”

“Will they stop now?”

“For a while,” Elinor said. “Till the next spark finds dry ground.”

The priest’s sermon that Sunday was brief and brittle. “The tongue is a fire,” he said, “and no man can tame it.” When the congregation spilled into the square, he called to a young man loitering by the door. “Kit. See them home.”

Elinor began to protest, but Alys’s hand tightened in hers. The boy walked a few paces ahead, head down, the way those born outside the parish records learn to walk.

At her gate he paused. “Best keep your shutters drawn,” he said quietly. “Some fires take longer to die.”

Elinor inclined her head. “And some roots hold longer than they should.”

He looked as if he meant to answer but didn’t, then turned to leave.

In the days that followed, Elinor kept to the edges of the green, tending her herbs and watching the yew from afar. The villagers pretended not to look, and in their pretending they found new ways to talk.

By midweek, the forge was busy again, the tannery stinking of smoke and hide. Only the yew seemed to remember. It felt the air change. There was a tautness, like cloth stretched too far on a frame.

That afternoon Elinor paused by Baker’s window. Flies had gathered there again, slow from the chill, black beads shifting on the sill. She carried a handful of tansy and bay leaves wrapped in linen.

“Still plagued?” she asked gently.

Baker turned, wiping sweat and flour from his brow. “They’ll have their share, same as the rest of us.”

She smiled, setting down the bundle. “Tie this by the window. It will turn them away.”

His mouth tightened. “Smith says it’s prayers that keep the worms off, not scent.” He gave a slight cough as he shifted from foot to foot. “Tanner agrees.”

Elinor’s smile thinned but held. “If words alone kept harm away, you’d have none left to speak.”

He flushed, glancing at the watching men in the street. “Take your witchweed home,” he said, loud enough for them to hear.

Alys lifted the linen to the latch as if to tie it there but Baker banged the shutter, catching her fingers. She snatched her hand back, eyes bright with pain. Elinor drew her close, picked up the herbs, and walked on.

The yew watched her pass and felt the small cut of it; the way kindness leaves a mark when it’s refused. It thought of all the times she had tended its roots and bark, her hands gentle where others were rough. It wished it could do more for her and for Alys.

Someday, it promised itself.

Two days later the cry came up.

“Maggots! The flour’s gone to worms!” Baker stumbled into the square, a torn sack spilling white dust that clung to his boots.

Villagers gathered like birds around spilt grain. Tanner wiped his hands on his apron. “Strange rot for cold weather,” he said.

Smith leaned in his doorway, arms folded. “Not strange at all when a woman meddles with what’s meant for men’s work.”

The crowd shifted, hungry for a reason.

Elinor was at the well. Alys ran to her side, clutching her skirt as Baker shouted again,“She brought her weeds here last week — offered them for my window! I said no, and now look what she’s done in spite!”

Elinor set down her bucket and faced him. “I offered you the same herbs I’ve brought every year to keep the flies from your flour,” she said. “It was you who refused them.”

A few heads turned; a few smirked.

Baker’s face darkened. “She mocks me now,” he said, his voice catching. “She curses a man and then calls it kindness.”

The murmurs thickened.
“First the hides, now the bread.”
“She’s ruined the season.”
“Next it’ll be the well.”

Alys clutched her mother’s hand. “Let’s go home,” she urged. Elinor kept her head high and walked through the circle of eyes without answering.

By dusk, a ring of blackened dough hung from her door, nailed through the middle. The crust was split and sour, the smell of yeast turned rancid in the chill. A single fingerprint was pressed into the dough near the nail, deep and familiar.

Alys reached for it. “What does it mean, Mama?”

“That we’ve been remembered,” Elinor said, prying it free. She placed it on the hearth until it hardened to stone.

By morning, smoke still clung to the square though no one had lit a fire. It hid in cloth and thatch like the ghost of the forge’s breath. Elinor rose early and went about her work, though the air felt wrong in her lungs. The women who once asked after herbs now crossed the street.

At the well, one muttered, “Best draw quick before she speaks.”

She carried on as though she hadn’t heard. The yew felt her stillness and wanted to shelter her, but its roots could only reach where the ground allowed.

Toward evening, Baker came to the forge. He spoke in low tones to Smith and Tanner, hands cutting wildly through the air, the words spilling like grain from a split sack. From the forge’s light their faces glowed red — three mouths, one murmur.

The yew caught only fragments: flour… rot… woman… pay. It shivered. Some hurts travel faster underground than above, it thought to itself, wishing it could warn Elinor.

Later that night, Alys woke to the sound of footsteps. Men’s voices, muffled but near.

Elinor lifted a finger to her lips. “Stay.”

The first thud came soft; a hand on the door. The second harder. Then the crash of the latch. The smell of pitch found them before the light did.

There was a spill, a hiss, and the crackle of straw.

Elinor ran for the back window, dragging a blanket, a pot, and her herb basket. She threw both through the opening, then lifted Alys after.

The child’s hair caught on a nail; Elinor freed it with one hand and climbed out behind her as the thatch above them bloomed orange. They stumbled toward the edge of the green, breath loud in their throats.

The yew saw them pass and strained against the dark. Run, it thought. Go before the embers learn your names.

Behind them, a voice shouted, “Fetch water!”
Another, “Too late!”

The bucket line formed, but the flame had already taken what it wanted.

Alys turned once. “Our house,” she gasped.

Elinor caught her face between both hands. “What’s gone to fire will not have us too.”

They ran beyond the hedge to the safety of the woods where few dared to enter once frost began to bite at night. When they reached the brook, they fell to their knees, shaking. Elinor wrapped them both in the blanket, her heart hammering against Alys’s crown.

In the distance, the village bells began to ring, not for worship but for warning. The sound wove through the night like a stitch closing a wound.

The yew stood in silence, needles trembling, roots tasting ash. It did not know whether to mourn what burned or what remained.

By dawn the square smelled of smoke and soap, of work begun too late.

Children whispered about witches. Men spoke about rebuilding, but no one spoke of guilt or the missing.

In the woods, Elinor woke to the sound of Alys’s teeth chattering beside her.Frost had crept over the grass overnight, silvering the plants that lined the fog covered water.

She pulled the child close, wrapping her cloak tighter. “Hush now,” she whispered, “we’re safe.” But the words felt brittle in her mouth.

The wind changed, carrying a scent of snow. It was early for it, far too early. Elinor looked toward the line of dense forest trees. “We’ll find shelter there,” she said, as if the woods were listening.

Alys stirred, her breath a thin mist. “Mama, I’m cold.”

“I know,” Elinor said softly. “I know.”

Snow began to fall — slow, uncertain flakes that melted as they touched the earth. Elinor watched them vanish one by one and pressed her lips to Alys’s hair.

She thought of all she had left behind in the fire… the herbs hanging from the rafters, the blanket by the hearth. She had her pot, but no axe to chop wood, and what wood she could find would be damp and no good for burning.

“We’ll find a way,” she said, trying to convince herself as much as Alys.

To be continued…

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Big thanks to Moll Moonlight for tagging me in this challenge to write a poem about yourself and your birth month. I’m a little late with my answer after a few days away in Oxford seeing another specialist, but I couldn’t resist the invitation to reflect on my birth month, and how it in turn, reflects on me.

I’ve always felt like March is an in-between place. Like a hush between what was and what will be. Perhaps that’s why I’ve always felt at home there…

I am the woodland that breathes beneath its own silence,
roots dreaming under thaw,
air that tastes of old leaves and dampened earth.

The brook loosens its tongue at last 
soft, uncertain — 
and I remember what it feels like to be moving.

Catkins tremble like quiet thoughts,
grey green lanterns in the wind,
lighting nothing but themselves.

Daffodils shoulder through the dark,
not brave, just sure,
that light will come back 
if they ask without speaking.

I came here once to disappear.
There’d been a season of too many voices,
each one calling me something different
until I could no longer answer.

The trees kept my name until I could say it again.
Like lichen, I learned to bloom where no one looks,
where kindness never came back the same way twice.

But the quiet work continues 
the slow repair of everything that froze.
Sap rising like forgiveness.
Moss filling the small wounds the frost left behind.

Sometimes the wind calls and I do not answer.
Sometimes I listen until I forget I’m listening.
It’s enough, most days, simply to go on being.

Call me equinox: neither lost nor found,
just held between the tides.
I am what the world does
when no one is watching…
still breathing, still green beneath the ash,
still waiting for the light to notice.

To fathom the woods in March,
is to know that the world remembers 
as soon as it stops pretending.

There’s something special about seeing each month come to life through us. I’ve very much enjoyed reading the poems already posted, and pass the challenge on to anyone else who would like to join in 🤍

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Welcome back to The You Tree.
If you missed Act I, can you read it here. 
Last time, the rain broke and a hammer rose…

Act II

The hammer hung in the air.

Just then a horn sounded, three short notes from the lane beyond the mill. The dogs came first, a shiver of bodies and noise. The village’s huntsmen followed with a stag strung between two poles, voices high from the work of it.

“Make way there” they shouted.

The square broke apart to let them pass. Smith let the hammer fall to his side as if that had been the plan all along. “Work to do,” he said, almost amiable, and stepped back beneath the eaves.

Tanner wiped his hands on his apron and moved with the others, the crowd unbraiding itself into busyness.

One hunter swung the stag too close and its hoof caught a low bough of the tree. Elinor said, “Mind,” without raising her voice.

“What, the king’s wood?” the man laughed.

Alys’s fingers held fast to Elinor’s sleeve until the moment folded itself away like a fox crawling into its den.

The villagers said the rain would sweeten tempers, and reassured one another the hammer had never truly been meant. That a woman who talked to trees should be grateful to be left alone.

Work soon went on as work does.

Soot drifted where it pleased. The trough found its old place by the easiest reach of arms. A boy hung his hoop on a low limb of the yew. Goats were tethered near to it where the grass stayed green longest. None of it was much, and each thing had a reason. Every reason sounded sensible said the villagers as they nodded.

Elinor came at dusk with a small pot of salve and a strip of soft cloth. “Hold still,” she told the tree. Alys stood guard with her arms folded, stern as a hawk. Elinor laid the salve along the scrape where Tanner’s leather had rasped the bark. “There,” she said, as if to a child with a grazed knee. “That will do.”

“Still at it?” Smith said, passing. He didn’t stop.

“Still at it,” Elinor responded, without looking up.

The next morning a woman came to Elinor’s door with a boy crying on her hip, his cheek red and weeping from the lye.

“Agnes,” Elinor said, making room. “Sit.”

“It came up angry overnight,” Agnes said. “He scratches till he bleeds. I thought you might have something?”

Elinor rinsed her hands, took down a twist of dried needles from the yew, ground them fine, and mixed them with honey and mint.

“A touch will draw the fire out,” she said, pressing the paste with her thumb.

“From the yew?” the woman asked, uneasy.

“From what burns and endures,” Elinor said. “It knows the difference,” she said, spreading the poultice with two fingers.

Agnes watched Elinor as if watching might teach her steadiness. The boy’s crying soon settled to hiccups. “God bless you,” she said. She set a small bronze coin on the table.

“Keep it,” Elinor said. “Bring me a mug of well water round to the yew when you pass. That will pay the debt.”

Agnes smiled the way a tired woman smiles when someone has met her halfway. “I will,” she said, and meant it.

Tanner and Smith watched Agnus leave and said Elinor liked to make a show of kindness. “Honey is for bread, not poultices,” said Tanner.

“Indeed. A woman who thanks a tree will charge God for rain next,” Smith responded as he spat on the ground. A look passed between the men as if something unspoken had been decided.

By noon two boys walked past Elinor’s cottage and sang under their breath the way boys do when they don’t understand their song. “Witch, witch, witch,” they chanted. They scattered when Elinor looked up, then circled back to see if she’d follow. She didn’t.

Agnes came by in the afternoon and set a mug of water near the root flare. “As promised,” she said softly. Elinor nodded once, grateful as if it were a great thing. Alys poured the water slow so the soil would take it.

Tanner brought a hide that had gone wrong in the damp, pale and spotted with mildew. He held it up with both hands for anyone to see. “Rotted from the inside,” he said. “A waste.”

“Bad cure,” Smith offered from his doorway.

“Bad luck,” someone else said.

Tanner didn’t move his head, only his eyes. They rested on Elinor a beat too long. “Some luck walks on two legs,” he said, folding the hide over his arm without uttering a name.

That evening Alys found the Sunday ribbon tangled in the roots.

“Shall we hang it back, Mama?”

“If the girl does it, it’s a promise,” Elinor said. “If we do it, it’s only pretending.” She turned the ribbon in Alys’s palm. “Best leave the truth to its owner.”

Smith stood in his doorway with a bucket of slack water and threw it over the cinders. The steam drifted toward the tree as if it had been asked to. He watched the drift and measured nothing at all.

“No good. No good,” Smith muttered to himself in the way a man does when he’s making up his mind.

Agnes visited Elinor again two days later. Her boy’s cheek had settled to pale pink. “He sleeps,” she said, wonder in her words. She tried to press the coin into Elinor’s hand once more.

“Keep it,” Elinor said. “You’ll need salt before week’s end.”

Agnes looked over her shoulder at the square, then back. “They don’t like you,” she said as if it were a weather report.

“They don’t like needing what they can’t name,” Elinor said. She lifted the salve pot to the light. “Take what you need and leave the rest.”

Agnes took a breath as if to say more, then didn’t. “Thank you,” she said, and went.

That night someone tied the ribbon from the yew tree to Elinor’s latch. A neat bow, with no note.

Alys untied it and stood with it in the dark. “Is it a nice thing?”

“It is a thing that says we know where you live,” Elinor said. She kept her voice even. “Put it away.”

Tanner watched Elinor and Alys from a darkened doorway and thought to himself that a woman who sees signs in ribbon would see them anywhere.

On market day Smith sold a new hinge to a man from the far side of the ridge. “Smooth as butter,” he said, and let the plate shine in his palm. The man asked if the seething forge smoke always drifted toward the square. “Wind’s wind,” Smith said. He smiled like a man who hasn’t been thinking of anything at all.

At the well Agnes lifted her bucket and met Elinor’s eye. She gave a small smile, then looked away when another woman came up behind her and asked, loud enough for others to hear, “Is your boy bewitched or cured?” Agnes said, “He’s well,” and kept her eyes on the rope.

“From what?” the woman pressed.

“From a rash,” Agnes said. “From the lye.” Her voice wavered on the last word. The villagers all heard it and filed it away.

Toward evening Tanner lingered by the yew, thumb tracing the scar his hides had left. “Feels, does it?” He sneered.

“It does,” Elinor said.

Tanner turned, voice low enough for only a few to hear. “Then it’ll know who to blame when the next hide rots.” The words settled softly, almost kindly, and someone laughed to make them harmless. Tanner’s mouth made a shape that could have been a smile. He didn’t press. He simply let the moment sit between them like a coin no one wished to claim.

Dusk found the square tidied back to itself.

Elinor and Alys walked home with the empty salve pot between them. At the threshold, Elinor stopped. Three nails lay in a neat cross on the step. It was smith’s iron, clean and new.

She lifted them, turned them once in her palm, and slid them into her pocket. Then she fetched water and scrubbed the step until the grain rose.

“What are they for?” Alys asked.

“For saying what men don’t wish to say out loud,” Elinor said.

They barred the door. The night moved around the cottage as nights do.

In the morning, when she opened the door for air, six nails were on the step again, bright with dew as if they had multiplied like toadstools in the night.

Elinor decided to take Alys into the woods that day to gather herbs and berries, so the village may cool. The yew would have to mind itself for a while.

Under the trees the air was different… sweet, resinous, and steady. They filled their baskets with mushrooms, hawthorn, apples, and the last of the wild mint.

Alys pressed her cheek to the moss on a fallen trunk. “Smells like home,” she said.

Elinor touched her hair. “Then remember it, so that the woods will remember us too.”

By the time they returned, dusk had thinned the square to smoke and silence. The forge light flickered like an eye half shut.

Tanner came from his shed with a new hide slung over his arm, its flesh side pale as milk.

“Let’s see if your tree’s blessings hold,” he said, loud enough for all to hear. He pressed the hide to the yew’s trunk and drew a nail from his pocket.

“Don’t,” Elinor said, stepping forward.

“It’s work, same as yours,” Tanner said. The hammer rose. The nail bit once, twice. Metal sliced through bark, through the yew’s flesh.

Smith leaned in his doorway, cloth in hand. “Told you, Tanner. She whispers to it. See how it shivers when she speaks?”

Tanner grinned. “Rot follows her voice. Hides, harvest… men’s luck.”

“Call it what it is then,” Smith said, his eyes dancing.

Tanner turned toward the doorways. “Witch,” he said, drawing out the word. “And she keeps her familiar in plain sight.”

He stepped closer to Alys and prodded her shoulder with two fingers. “Don’t you, little one?”

Alys flinched, pressing back against her mother’s skirts.

“Leave her be!” Elinor’s voice pierced the air sharper than she meant it to. “If she’s cursed, then so am I, and the curse is you.”

A hush spread through the crowd and bodies stiffened.

Smith strode forward and seized Elinor’s arm. “A curse, she says! See here—” He wrenched her sleeve up to the elbow. “Look! The witch’s mark!”

Gasps. Someone drew a cross in the air, another muttered prayer, and a bucket dropped, ringing deep across the square.

Elinor pulled free, breath shaking. “That’s a scar from work, you fool.”

Smith sneered. “Then perhaps that work was the devil’s work.”

He turned to Tanner. “There’s a way to know for certain.”

Tanner’s grin returned, ugly this time. “Aye. The fire never lies.”

Before Elinor could move, they were on her. Smith catching her right arm, Tanner the other. The baskets spilled, herbs and apples dancing across the cobbles, crushed beneath their boots.

Elinor caught Agnes’s eye. Agnes looked to the forge, then away and said nothing.

Alys screamed, clutching at her mother’s skirts as Smith dragged Elinor toward the forge where the coals still breathed. The heat rose in waves; sparks leapt as if eager for proof.

“Hold her hand to it,” someone said.

“See if the skin burns clean,” said another.

Elinor struggled, wild now. “Let me go! You’ll damn yourselves!”

Smith’s grip tightened. “If the flame shuns you, witch, you’ll walk free.”

Elinor twisted hard. “You’d burn truth itself to keep your lies warm!”

The struggle jolted the iron stand; sparks flared, bright as a curse. Tanner stumbled back, startled.

Smith jerked his chin at the forge. “Bellows.”

In the square, the yew’s roots pressed against stone but found no hold.

Tanner pumped; the leather wheezed as the fire woke.

Smith took a coal in the tongs until it went white at the edge.He prised Elinor’s fingers open and held her wrist flat above the grate. “On three,” he said, hovering the ember a finger’s breadth from her palm.

Tanner pinned Elinor’s elbow. Alys wailed while one of the crowd held her back.

Smith began to count. “One. Two—”

To be continued…

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Marooned in my bed from chronic illness, I kept thinking about that old question, “if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it still fall?”

What struck me wasn’t the sound, but the silence that might follow. What happens to the things, and the people, who give everything quietly until one day they simply aren’t there anymore? Would anyone notice? Would they care?

That thought became The You Tree.

Act I

The village square had no centre until the yew decided to take it.

It grew where the ground made a modest hump between the well and the smithy, roots easing down where the rainwater used to sit. In spring it kept its counsel, and then all at once, the needles showed a sober green as if the tree had decided, privately, that the work could begin.

They called it the yew, but it heard you and straightened. They mean me, it thought, when children tapped its bark in passing, when ropes were looped to its lower boughs on windy days, when an old woman leaned her basket to it and borrowed the yew tree’s steadiness.

You, you, you, the villagers said, and the tree believed it.

Elinor set her basket down and spread her palm on the rise where the root flared. “Hello, you,” she said, as if greeting an old friend. “We’ve a little to do today and then you may breathe easier.”

Her daughter Alys copied her, earnest as a bluebell. Her small hand landed too high. Elinor guided it down slowly. “Here,” she murmured. “Feel the smoothness under the bark. See that ring? That’s where the food moves. Smooth means well. Ridges here—” she turned Alys’s fingertips a thumb’s breadth “—mean hunger.”

Alys frowned the way children do when they want to be useful. “Is it hungry?”

“Not if we mind the water,” Elinor said. “We never take without putting something back.”

“Why do we call the tree you Mama?” Alys asked.

“Because names are agreements,” Elinor said. “And we mean to keep ours.”

In summer the benches drifted to the shade of the tree. Men took off their caps and let the dust settle where it liked, and a dog chose the curve of a root for its nap. A young girl tied a ribbon round the same low twig every Sunday and untied it on Mondays, as if keeping a promise only she understood. One Monday the ribbon snagged. Elinor eased it free so the twig would not snap.

“There we are,” she said to the twig instead of the girl. “No harm done.”

Smith worked with the forge door wide. The ring and fall of iron travelled across the square, a blunt heartbeat. Soot drifted like fine flour and settled where it pleased… on the well ledge, on shoulders, on hardy needles that did not complain. Smith wiped his brow with the back of his hand and peered at a hinge. “Good enough,” he said because he liked a job done more than a job admired.

Passing, he glanced at Elinor with her hand to the bark. “Does it answer back then?”

“When you listen properly,” Elinor said, and kept listening.

Tanner liked the sun. He carried wet hide to the line behind his shed and watched it weep. When the line was full, he made do by borrowing boughs from the yew tree. “Just an hour,” he said, and hooked a pale weight over a low branch where the light was best. Elinor winced as the leather rasped the bark.

“That opens the skin of the yew,” she said quietly.

“Hides must dry,” Tanner said. “Orders don’t wait.”

Elinor’s voice dropped to the tree. “Hold over. We’ll salve it at dusk.”

Washing day filled the trough between the well and the yew. Lye made the suds bright and the knuckles of the village women red. The rinse ran off in white ribbons, seeking out low places, and went to ground.

“See the milk in the water?” Elinor said to Alys.

“It looks like soup,” Alys said.

“Don’t drink the water friend,” Elinor said to the yew as she shifted the trough stone with a careful hip. “Lye burns. We’ll bank the run here.” She tucked straw into a shallow channel so the water would slow and sink where the soil could bear it. Alys brought straw in two hands, holding it like something that might break.

A neighbour looked up. “Leave that be, Elinor.”

“If the lye runs there again, we’ll scald the roots,” Elinor said, not unkindly. “You wouldn’t salt your own bread.”

The neighbour sniffed. “It will be fine,” she said, to no one in particular as she went back to thumping a rug.

The summer wore on for too long.

Morning promised rain, but the clouds forgot by noon. Dust settled in lungs, the road shone like bare bones, fields wore their pale tiredness in full view. Men counted sacks not yet grown and nodded as if numbers could be coaxed into being.

The water well rope grew a squeak and kept it.

The yew held its colour as best it could. Soot made a film the breeze did not always lift. A hairline split appeared along a high limb, a winter wound previously mended and forgotten, now widening a fraction from the drought.

It’s only a little, the tree told itself, and braced the hurt in the way trees do: by adding quiet work where no one looks.

“Mama,” Alys whispered one hot afternoon, “is it poorly?”

“Not if we mind it,” Elinor answered warmly. She showed Alys how goat hooves tamped the ground hard as crockery. “Roots need air,” she said. “We’ll loosen the crust.” They worked with their fingers until the soil gave a little. Alys blew a curl from her eyes and looked pleased with herself.

Smith came by with a strap over his shoulder. “You’ll have that child thinking trees are people,” he said.

“Are they not?” Alys asked him, her eyes wide and serious.

Smith cleared his throat, and finding no easy answer he settled for a shrug. “Keep her out from underfoot,” he said instead, and went back to work.

The day finally arrived when the sky remembered itself. It came over the ridge in a flat grey sheet and stayed. The wind changed, bringing the earthen smell that belongs to rain. Children ran to the square without being called. A woman lifted both hands to her breast as if catching a word.

The first drops were fat enough to drink. Alys tipped her face up and opened her mouth like a fledgling. “It’s here,” she said, as if announcing a guest.

“Then say thank you,” Elinor said, taking both her hands. They stepped in a circle as their skirts began to darken and hair stuck to their temples. Their shared laughter came up the way spring water bubbles up when the spade finds it.

Alys pressed her palm to the trunk. “Thank you,” she told the bark.

Elinor laid her cheek to the tree and said it too, low and plain: “Thank you.”

The rain grew to a proper storm. Dust lifted and became air again. The yew shook itself like a great beast and let the water run twig to twig. Thank you, it thought. Not to the sky, which doesn’t listen, but to the Elinor and Alys who felt with their whole bodies when the weather turned.

From his eaves, Smith watched tools glitter and then go dull with water. “Foolish,” he said, voice not carrying. “You’ll catch your death.”

Tanner came to his shed door and judged the hides with a practised thumb. “Well then,” he said, which could mean anything. Someone put a bucket out; someone pulled one back in. Habit is a like a kind of weather system, too.

The square remembered its old sound: the soft hammer of rain on leaves, the quiet thud of water falling from one place to the next, the little clap of puddles against boot leather. The well rope dropped its squeak and sang a low patient note with each draw of the bucket instead. Children were sent inside and came out again on urgent errands they forgot halfway.

Elinor and Alys did not stop celebrating. When the circle made them dizzy they swayed and held on. When they steadied, they whispered to the tree as if to a friend who had come a long way. Alys’s ribbon came loose from her hair and stuck to her wrist; she tied it there and clapped.

By evening the sky had emptied itself. The square wore the gloss that follows rain. The stones glistened bright as if newly placed, and the wood showed its grain like old scars. People came out to look at what the weather had done to their things. Benches were wiped. A line was restrung. Smith rested his hammer on the sill like a man whose day had not obeyed him but had ended anyway. Tanner pressed a fat place in a hide and left a print he judged acceptable. The women tipped the trough to drain and left it upturned, pale and clean.

Elinor knelt, hand to root flare. “There now,” she said. “There you are.”

Alys closed her eyes to listen. Whether she heard water sinking to the under soil or only her own blood in her ears, she nodded as if a secret had been confirmed.

Night came with the clean smell that belongs to the first hour after rain. Someone said, “About time.” Someone else said, “We’ll be right as ninepence.” In the forge, banked coals held their orange quietly. Smith went to bed with his hands smelling of iron. Tanner slept with his mouth open and dreamed of a ledger that filled itself.

The yew tended to its work. It sent the water where it was needed, tightened where the split had widened, let fall two small twigs that insisted on dying no matter the weather.

At dawn, smoke rose straight, then wavered. A boy came early to throw stones at a mark in the square and was sent home. A woman shook a rug and the dust obliged, inventing itself from nothing. Skirts dried stiff from the previous days rain dancing, Elinor and Alys passed with baskets. They walked the way people do after a day in rain, as if remembering how to take a first step and then another.

As they made their way over to the tree, Elinor was dismayed to find the women had begun to wash with lye near the tree once again.

“The rain will hold the lye and hurt the yew,” she said to the group.

“It will be fine,” one replied without looking up.

“You’ll break your back over a weed,” Smith called from the forge.

“The tree listens when you strike, just the same as iron,” Elinor said.

He snorted. “Trees don’t scream.”

“They do!” Alys blurted.

“You just stopped hearing them,” Elinor told her, softening her voice for the sake of her daughter and not for Smith.

The clatter at the trough slowed. Hands stilled. Tanner wandered over, wiping his palms on his apron. A few neighbours drifted in behind him and the women put down their washing.

Smith stepped out into the open with the hammer still in his hand.

“Say that again,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard.

“That it hears,” Elinor said. “That it feels what you do to it.”

Tanner looked at the branch scarred from his hides. “Feels, you say? Then it won’t forget this.” He moved as if to touch it, and the square seemed to hold its breath.

Elinor moved first, setting her palm to the wound. “Enough.”

Alys slipped closer, fingers catching at her mother’s sleeve.

No one spoke. The fresh rain smell had gone from the day; what remained was iron and old soap.

“We’re working,” a woman said, but she said it quietly.

Smith rolled the hammer in his palm as if testing its weight. “If it screams,” he said, almost cheerful now, “we’ll all hear.”

He took one slow measured step forward and then another.

Elinor did not move her hand from the bark.

The square fell dealthy still, the space between the hammer and the branch larger than it should have been, wide enough to hold a breath and a choice as Smith lifted his hammer high above his head.

To be continued…

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My husband and I have never raised any actual children, but we have raised fictional ones… an ever growing cast of misfits we’ve named, report carded, and disciplined via a Family Rulebook. What follows is an account of their latest gathering. A family dinner where the three: Rumpelstiltskin, Anathema, and Pathymetry, bring their school report cards to the dinner table, with predictably unpredictable results.

We do report cards at dinnertime, because nothing seasons a casserole like feedback.

“Right,” I say, laying out the stack. “Who wants to go first?”
Rumpelstiltskin folds his arms. “Guess.”
“Not this again,” says their father.
“Three guesses,” Rumpie says, generous as a bouncer.
“Fine,” I say. “First guess… Rumpelstiltskin.”
“Colder.”
“Second guess… Bartholomew.”
He brightens. “Warmer.”
“Third guess… Rumpelstiltskin Bartholomew Hooks.”
He nods, magnanimous. “Correct. You may read.”

I unfold his report and read it aloud:

Rumpelstiltskin is a bright boy with a strong sense of play. He refuses to disclose facts unless staff have ‘had a fair guess’. This is becoming quite disruptive and the staff would appreciate if you could have a word with him about this habit.

“Define ‘disruptive’,” Rumpie says.
“Refusing to say your name at the register,” I say.
“That’s not disruptive. That’s pedagogical. I’m promoting inference.”
Their father taps the table. “You’re promoting silence, mate.”
Rumpie considers this. “Silence is also an inference Dad.”

From the far side of the table, Pathymetry nudges the salt cellar so it sits exactly centred on a placemat. The air steadies around her like a maths problem that has decided to cooperate and be reasonable.

Anathema drapes a napkin over her head like a veil. “There will be no centre when the stars fall.”

“Brilliant,” I say. “We’re only two paragraphs in.”

“All right you lot, new rules,” their father announces to a chorus of groans as I pass him the burgeoning long list of rules we’ve had to implement over the years.

“Clause 9.1, amended. Guessing games are to be restricted to weekends and car journeys of less than fifteen minutes henceforth.”

Rumpie scoffs but silences as his father shoots him a look.

“Clause 9.2, new. Registers are not riddles,” he reads aloud as he prints the words neatly into the book.

“Second paragraph,” I announce and read:

Rumpelstiltskin shows early promise in philosophy. However, we feel his ‘warmer / colder’ approach to truth would benefit from some boundaries.

Rumpie beams. “You head that? Early promise.”
“Boundaries,” I say.
He sighs, as though I have outlawed oxygen. “All right. From now on I’ll answer at school if they get to have one guess first.”
“Two,” says their father.
“One.”
“Two.”
He thinks. “One and a half.”
“New rule,” his father announces. “Clause 12.4, new. A minimum of two straight answers are to be provided to all teachers per lesson. Half guesses are not allowed,” he says underlining the word “not,” as Rumpie sulks into his peas.

Pathymetry, with the solemn authority of a coroner, counts them. “Thirty-six.”
“Don’t weigh the peas,” I tell her.
“I’m not weighing them,” she says, wounded. “I’m counting to six-by-six to check them for symmetry.”
“Of course you are. Now your turn” I say.

She pushes her report forward like it’s a binding contract for me to read:

Pathymetry demonstrates advanced numeracy and an unhelpful urge to weigh and measure her classmates. Today she attempted to estimate the mass of Justine’s plait.

“It was an estimate,” she says. “No contact.”
“Did Justine consent to be a dataset?” I ask.
She tilts her head. “She did not object.”
“Because she didn’t notice?”
She tilts her head with a far off stare. “I will request consent in writing next time.”
“No one is filing consent forms for hair.”
“I can introduce an opt out clause,” she offers hopefully.

“Rulebook!” her father interjects, handing it over to me so he can take a bite of food.

“Clause 3.7, amended. Household scales are for ingredients only. Humans are not to be quantified without explicit, enthusiastic consent from said human, even if they fail to notice. Clause 3.8, new. Hair is not data.” I read out loud as I ink in the words.

Pathymetry looks like she’s readying herself to object but decides to centre the salt shaker once again instead.

Just then Anathema’s napkin veil slips off her head. She leaves it where it lands, and stares at like a fate that has chosen her. “We cannot measure what will be taken in the night” she half whispers in the general direction of her father.

“Right kiddo, your turn!” he says.

She slides the report across the table to him in slow motion. Her report card is slim, and the paper trembles slightly in his hands as he begins to read, as if the paper itself fears her:

Anathema is a highly imaginative child. She continues to announce ‘the end of days’ during tidy up time, which motivated excellent tray organisation but unsettled two pupils and our new Higher Level Teaching Assistant.

“Outcome focused,” their father says. “That’s leadership.”
“I also blessed the glue sticks,” Anathema says. “That’s pastoral care.”
“Darling,” I say, “maybe call it a… forecast? Or a vibe? Not an apocalypse.”
“Words are spells,” she says. “We must name things correctly, or else.”
“Or else what?” Rumpie says, interested.
She looks at him kindly. “Or else you will be guessed.”
He sits up straighter, as if he’s being flirted with.

I skim the next line and continue to read out loud:

We would appreciate your support in encouraging Anathema to share her strong feelings using ‘I’ statements rather than hexes.

“I feel the abyss,” she says, both obedient and terrifying.
“Rulebook!” I announce.
“Clause 5.1, amended. Prophecies will only be permitted between 4–6 p.m., provided they contain at least one actionable step. For example: the end is nigh; tidy your shoes. And Clause 5.2, new. No cursing of dinner ladies, teaching assistants, or prospective pets.”

“Speaking of,” Pathymetry says, “when will our cat arrive?”
“We don’t have a cat,” I respond.
“Yet,” she says. “I’ve prepared a feeding schedule for Pythagoras, and also a mass log.”
“No logs for cats.”
Rumpie perks up. “If we get a cat can we guess his name every morning?”
“Absolutely not,” I say, and then, because I can feel Anathema readying herself to invoke a blood moon, “Unless the cat explicitly requests a guessing protocol.”

There is a beat in which they all imagine a cat with opinions. It’s not a terrible picture.

We eat, and the casserole does its best.

“Right,” their father says. “General comments.”

Rumpie swivels his report and reads out loud in an exaggerated staff voice. “Rumpelstiltskin contributes richly when he remembers he is not a sphinx.”

Pathymetry reads hers. “Pathymetry’s instinct to sort the world could be better channelled into estimation rather than confiscation.” She nods as if that was always her plan. “I will start an Estimations Corner in class. I will stand in it.”

Anathema doesn’t read hers. She stares at the steam rising from her plate as if it is a message from the beyond. Then softly, “Miss Haines says I am good at naming fears.”

We are quiet for a moment in the exhilaration of a sentence that costs nothing for a change, and allows us a moment to eat.

Rumpie eventually breaks it. “So? The plait experiment. What were the results?”
Pathymetry looks stricken. “Unclear. We were interrupted.”
“By whom?” he asks.
“By me,” says Anathema, who smiles like a storm system. “I told them the bunsen burners were omens.”
“They are,” Rumpie says. “One is named Guess.”
“Oh, do shut up,” I say fondly, ruffling his hair.

“One last Rulebook adjustment,” their father announces.

“Clause 2.2, new. Science equipment is not an omen, but at home it may be metaphor by prior arrangement.”

Pathymetry has finished her peas and balances her fork across the plate so the tines align with a tile grout line. “May I weigh the compliments?” she asks. “For fairness.”
“No,” I say.
Rumpie leans back, content. “You could guess them.”
“Do not weaponise my needs,” Pathymetry says, which is something she’s heard somewhere and adopted as a tool.
Anathema taps the table twice. “We are missing dessert.”
“We are not having dessert,” I say. “We are having closure.”
Their father raises his glass. “To closure.”
“To evidence,” says Pathymetry.
“To riddles,” says Rumpie.
“To the end,” says Anathema, and then softly adds, “of term.”

I drink my water like it’s something else and feel grateful that Anethema has not insisted on trying to bless it this evening.

I collect the reports. The stack is warm from their hands and gravy. I slip them into the folder we keep by the cooker filled with immunisations, emergency contacts including the Met Office, the Ombudsman, the National Grid, and a certificate for “Most Improved Listening” that is much disputed.

“Okay everyone. This has been a mostly successful report reading but I want to reaffirm clause 1.1,” I say.

Without looking up from her napkin that she is once again trying to fold into a Möbius strip, Pathymetry begins to recite, “Clause 1.1, reaffirmed. In this house we say things clearly when we can, forgive ourselves when we can’t, and tidy our shoes because it helps” with much emphasis on the tidying of shoes.

“That’s right,” I say smiling as she continues to attempt to fold and refold her napkin.

“And clause 1.2, new. On days when measuring fails and guessing exhausts and prophecy frightens, we eat together,” I add warmly.

Anathema reaches for my hand beneath the table, fierce and cold. Pathymetry glances briefly at the angles of our elbows and lets it pass. Rumpie, after a beat asks, “Is now the right time to guess whether there’s sticky toffee pudding?”

“Colder,” I say, and for once he accepts the answer.

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Daylight thins; autumn tilts toward shadow; the old myths wake and beckon.

Within that hush, and with a nod to storytellers like The Wandering Fool who keep turning old tales to new light, I’ve joined Liliane Briarwyn to write a duet: Persephone’s call from the fields, and Hades’ reply from stone and ember below.

Tenderly, we wove two poems and two voices together: a call and an answer. Two lovers star crossed by season; bound by the turning of the year — long misunderstood as darkness, now revealed as balance.

Act I — Persephone: The Call

by Liliane Briarwyn

The apple trees blush against the fading sky,
skins splitting with sweetness,
juice slipping down their sides like a promise too ripe to keep.
Vines clutch the fences with trembling fingers,
already brittle with goodbye.

The wind finds the hollow of my throat,
slides beneath my hair,
and I shiver though the sun still lingers.
Warm soil presses constellations into my bare feet,
its grit a quiet insistence: remember where you belong.

Mother’s voice hums across the hills,
frayed with worry,
and I ache to stay,
to gather the last sheaves,
to keep her song from breaking.

Yet beneath the honeyed fields,
a velvet tremor stirs.
A heartbeat in the roots answers mine:
steady, unyielding, known.

It recalls the weight of stone against my back,
and, there, a phantom warmth at my nape,
a breath I can almost feel,
patient and unhurried,
as though the underworld itself leans close, waiting.

The vines wither, but their dying tendrils beckon.
A leaf skims my arm,
its whisper as intimate as a hand sliding over skin.
Shadows scatter, then gather again, circling.
Am I a captive in their wings,
or a chosen wanderer?

Both… neither…

I taste bruised apples on my tongue.
Harvest’s sweetness, fading fast.
The sky pleads for me to linger,
but the dark below speaks my name.

My palms ache for cool stone,
even as my shoulders lean toward the last heat of harvest.
I reach.
I drift.
I fall.

Do you hear me, unseen one?

Even as my mother’s fields cry for me to remain,
I call through the roots:
Do you hear me?

Act II — Hades: The Answer

by Unwell Hooks

I hear you.

Your voice descends —
a scarlet thread through stone.
I do not let it scatter.
I hunger for it, draw it into my hall,
into the silence that waits for only you.

Zeus names me shadow,
Olympus calls me thief.
Yet you know me otherwise:
the keeper of embers,
the steady arms that guard your sleep.
Above, your mother crowns you in harvest.
Here, I crown you in repose.

You are not a prisoner here.

In this darkened realm
you reign as my queen.
Without your step these corridors are hollow,
my throne a monument to order,
but barren without you.
You are the flame against my granite,
the pulse that allows my stillness to endure.

You tasted the pomegranate.
I gather and keep each precious seed,
not as tally of debt
but covenant of return.
Each season counted,
each descent prepared,
your lips reddened,
my hands faithful to the reckoning.

You are the flame that ripens orchards,
I am the stone that steadies their roots.
Alone, we are fragments.
Together, we become the cycle.
In my arms your brightness does not fade,
it banks —
and burns the steadier for the dark.

Rise, vanish, scatter,
yet know this:
I am hollow without you.
And when you return,
my halls bloom with shadows,
roots quicken,
the fire steadies its breath.

I do not bind you.
I shelter you.

I am the night that steadies your day,
the silence that lets your song endure.
When the fields reclaim you,
I will release you —
but the ember of your fire
remains banked in mine,
waiting, unforgotten.

Persephone.

My love,
my shelter,
… my other half.

Thus turns the year: descent and return; shadow and flame; two rulers under one vow. Here endeth the prologue; the rest is written in root and stone.

Images © 2025 Unwell Hooks. All rights reserved.

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Three winters ago I started counting my life in little brown envelopes.

Reminders from HMRC, and bills I could no longer shoulder on my own since I stopped being able to work. Forms that asked for proof of an able body I no longer had while I lay bedbound, shut up in one room. If I didn’t have a partner who could hold the roof up when I couldn’t work, if one more brown envelope had tipped the pile, I know exactly where I might have ended up… not on a road trip with fairy lights, but in my car on a road trip without an end date. Fine dining and takeaways replaced by food banks. Radiators replaced by endless layers of thermal clothing during winter.

Not an aesthetic, just survival.

Like many insomniacs and doom scrollers, I used to watch van life builds on YouTube at 2 a.m. I found the time lapses soothing: plywood measured and cut just so, a kettle hung on a hook, a bed that folded away smooth as origami. The videos advertised freedom as a sort of flat packed catharsis. But what those videos don’t show is what I began to see in my own life: how quickly a long period of illness can collapse your world to the size of four wheels or a tent, and how unglamorous life becomes when you don’t have the energy to commodify it.

To me that’s the quiet hinge in all of this: choice. If you can step back easily into comfort, the van is a backdrop. If you can’t, it becomes a sentence.

Burning Man has the same undertow. On paper it is radical self reliance: dust, desert, barter, effigies, and art. But in practice it costs thousands to perform scarcity, and then fly home comfortably after the event. I vividly recall how when the scaffolding of capitalism buckled at Fyre Festival, how quick the internet rushed to mock the duped rich. Yet when the scaffolding holds at Burning Man, the same choreography is canonised as visionary.

Either way, what’s on offer isn’t transcendence but a consumable spectacle — curated, packaged, and sold.

We other each another relentlessly inside these same systems… the rich sneer at the poor for failing at self reliance. The poor in turn sneer at the rich for failing at conspicuous consumption. But the sneering is just another way to maintain distance, to uphold a sense of moral hierarchy between the haves and the have nots.

And I know the seduction of mobility because I lived its cleaner cousin. I used to run my business from “anywhere with Wi-Fi.” Borderless, as long as my passport agreed, and as mobile as my health allowed me to be. Digital nomadism sells its own version of a picture perfect postcard lifestyle: a laptop, a beach, the price of rent miraculously halved by palm trees.

But my own life showed the other side of the picture. Chronic illness doesn’t come with hashtags or sponsors… it comes with corridors, waiting rooms, and forms. Long term illness is an aesthetic, but one without praise.

And perhaps that’s why the market knows how to bottle longing so well.

We buy aesthetic poverty in graded tiers: distressed jeans on the high street, enamel mugs or furnishing that have been deliberately aged or scuffed. The wealthy buy the same story, just at a different price point. Handmade rustic ceramics shipped from a Greek island, carved stools from Bali that arrive swaddled in FedEx foam. Same script, just different seats.

Influencer culture completes the loop.

I recently watched an influencer sit in her £3 million mansion, plugging £2.99 ribbed glass mugs from Homesense as if that made her just like the rest of us. And I’ve watched as wealthy influencers post sponsored content of themselves frolicked in affordable H&M bikinis on £5,000 holidays to Greece in private villas. Influencers sell what we can afford back to us, neatly repackaged in aspiration.

I’m not saying that these people don’t work hard to maintain their tenuous grip on this lifestyle. On the contrary, I think most have to work harder to maintain that life that millions of others covet for themselves.

But I am saying they’re engaging in Chanel’s old trick with new lighting: most people will never own the handbag, but most of us can buy the perfume like a temporary licence to the club. Aspiration is monetised at every rung on the ladder. Belonging to the world of the haves can be rented by the bottle, the mug, or the hashtag.

This is not a sermon against joy, or travel, or making art in a hostile world. I’m just asking that we tell the truth about the props. That when we curate scarcity, we should admit where the off ramps are, if they’re there at all. When we aestheticise lack, we should at least name and recognise who is stuck truly living it.

Because I can track the route from my sickbed to the kerb in half a dozen bureaucratic steps: the GP who wrote me off, the clinic that never called, the savings that thinned, the bins that still needed to go out on Tuesdays while I shook from exhaustion.

If my partner hadn’t been there to shoulder both our weights, I would not be writing this essay. I would be living the unphotogenic version of #vanlife. The one without fairy lights, that no brand would ever sponsor.

So here is my new self imposed rule for reading the dream: is there an exit door and a home to return to, and who holds the key?

Van life, Burning Man, digital nomadism, distressed chic… each can only function as a liberation when the key sits in your pocket. Without it, the same images flatten into recoil and stigma. We romanticise what we can walk away from, and yet we punish and scorn what other people are trapped in.

If we want the freedom these images promise, we could start not by buying the mug, but by building better exits for the people who do not have one.

And by people, I mean me.

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“Regrets, I’ve had a few, But then again, too few to mention.” I used to love the audacity of that Sinatra line, but today it lands heavy like a stone. I often write about how others failed me. Yet if that’s the ledger, then the other column belongs here.

The times I failed other people.

Some I’m certain I missed as they happened, but these are the ones that stick in my memory with barbed teeth.

Before my career in marketing, there were the hospitality years: long weekends and even longer resentments, a ladder you climb as you move from clearing plates to running the floor. I moved from waiter to head waiter to manager. No one mentors you for leadership in organ grinding places like that; you’re simply left to reverse engineer it on the fly. I did learn quickly, worked enough cash in hand shifts to pay off my first car in three months, and kept the floor running smooth and steady.

Restaurants shed staff like snakes shed skin. The owners hired a new waitress with no experience, Tammy, and told me to train her.

People think waiting tables is simple. But the really good ones carry a sixth sense. They thrive under pressure, see everything three steps ahead, they move fast, without ever spilling their friendliness. Unfortunately, Tammy didn’t have that sense.

One afternoon I crossed the room with a tray crowded with boiling tea and coffees. She pivoted without looking and full body slammed into me. The usual gasps of shock rippled throughout the restaurant as the tray bucked, teacups and mugs fell to the floor while teapots filled with boiling water slid down my front.

I didn’t have the luxury of being upset, I needed to get back to service. So I towelled off in the kitchen, my skin still stinging, and went back to work.

But I didn’t forget it.

On busy days Tammy could barely manage one table. I picked up her slack because as head waiter it kept the wheels from coming off. One day came a large party of businessmen: she seated them and rang the order but I did everything else. I brought them their food, drinks, cleared their table, and brought them their bill. When it came time for payment she suddenly appeared to collect the money. The payer looked at me as if to ask, why am I paying her instead of you? I simply smiled and wished the party a good day further, because that’s service.

But there is an unspoken code: if I run your table, you offer the tip. She didn’t.

Resentment was building to the point it became like a second apron. I became shorter with her, cooler, tighter with my patience. I assumed she was oblivious to her own performance. Almost a year later, after yet another confrontation over one of her missteps, she began to wipe at her eyes saying I was hard on her. It startled me: the proof she had been feeling the weather just as much as I had.

I realise now I had mistaken her quiet for absence. I wish I’d lent her my calm as freely as I lent her my competence. I hurt her, that much is clear.

Then came Stacy.

She was timid, a friend of a staffer, with all her edges tucked in. Word reached me she found me intimidating. The girls and I laughed. We’d built an easy little clique where everything was understood without being said. Except by Stacy, who kept to the walls and shrank from even simple asks. Her reluctance began to irk me, and what came next was pure vanity dressed up as authority.

One slow afternoon, I stood beside a waiter who’d become a close friend. Stacy asked her, not me, for permission to use the toilet. I pulled rank like a sword from a belt.

“Stacy, I’m the head waiter. You don’t ask anyone else — you ask me,” I grandstanded.

Her apology hit the tiles at my feet as she fled. At the time I enjoyed the quick, cheap rise being obeyed gives. But now that memory tastes metallic. It wasn’t leadership; it was domination. Now I wear the shame of it like a tarnished name badge.

The last story I fear, is the worst.

I was now managing an under performing restaurant where morale was something we remembered rather than had. Lola worked the coffee bar. Weekends meant closing at one or two in the morning. Because many of the staff were cheap hires, they had a pre-booked taxi service to ferry them home to the outskirts of town.

One night the restaurant was so busy that I asked Lola to stay late and offered her a ride because her home was along my route. By then I was regularly driving one of the waitresses home who paid me gas money and we’d smoke cigarettes and listen to music as we decompressed the busy night away. Lola agreed. It helped her, it helped the shift, and — as these things often do — the favour hardened into custom without ever being spoken.

At some point I started to feel used. The feeling wasn’t fair; I’d set the terms and let them calcify. By then I was so overworked, I often drove home late and several times felt the tug of sleep while behind the wheel. I’m not sure that helped my state of mind. So instead of changing the rota, to my shame, I chose something far more cold.

One night as usual she asked if she could ride with me, but I’d already decided to be immovable.

“Please,” she implored.

“I’m meeting friends after work,” I lied.

“I’ll pay you like the others do,” her voice grew desperate.

“Can’t,” I said, and shut the door in my tone.

I don’t know how she got home. But I do know I’d asked her to stay past the taxi window and then withdrew the only bridge I’d left her. She began to avoid me after that and she was right to.

There is a little context. I was young, exhausted from frequently being expected to do double shifts so my own manager could go home to visit family. Some nights that left me with only 3 hours of sleep before having to get up and do it all over again. I was achingly overwhelmed by the way bad management grinds down everyone beneath it.

And yet, context isn’t absolution.

All that is left for me now is to carry the weight properly, change the shape of my reach, and most importantly to learn from the lessons.

From Tammy: don’t mistake quiet for numbness; correct without contempt; lend your calm as generously as you do with your competence.

From Stacy: never confuse leadership with the thrill of being obeyed.

From Lola: don’t build a bridge by habit, then pull it down by mood.

I can’t return those nights or rebuild the safety I pulled away. But what I can do is hold the ledger open and step forward with more care. And learn that if people are standing on a bridge you built, you don’t get to kick out the planks.

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Content note: suicidal ideation, medical trauma.

I keep returning to that line. Everything affects everything. And how, even at my lowest point, when I told everyone I was drowning, they told me I wasn’t even wet.

“Walk with one foot in front of the other,” the A&E doctor said. But I couldn’t. My legs were shaking too severely from thyrotoxic tremors that I stumbled. So he altered the assessment to ensure I would pass.

“I think these inverted T-waves are just an old condition. You can go home now but make sure you visit your GP,” he declared as he tapped my ECG.

I’d never had chest pains or an abnormal ECG in my life. But I was raised to understand the language of dismissal, and so I went home. My GP offered me nothing. I kept taking the death pills I’d been assured were necessary for my health by a private doctor, and began to waste away in plain sight.

When your body is burning and your brain feels like it’s boiling, words go missing. I crawled to the bathroom and needed help with the stairs. Weight loss wasn’t top of my mind. Yet in a month I shed close to ten kilos without noticing it.

Then the daily chest pains arrived like a metronome of dread.

Under enough pressure, psychology says, every mind seeks an exit. Mine did. I began to consider my options. I told a friend that if my quality of life deteriorated any further, I would consider Dignitas.

“You’re really upsetting me right now,” she bawled over the phone.

I gently explained that it wasn’t just about me. I wouldn’t, couldn’t, make my husband live with an albatross of a life, watching me fail to live it with him. Shut up in a room like a relic of a past life.

She launched into a story about an old man who did everything for his wife with dementia because love. I think old was the word she failed to account for. Perhaps in my eighties, dependence would feel expected. But I was in my early forties, the youngest by decades in the cardiac ward when my condition worsened enough to admit me. Where every night without fail, a chorus of patients pleading ‘kill me’ rang out to the ceiling tiles, and nurses that never came to answer their desperate pleas.

Nothing about this was natural.

I had every right to mourn the life I was losing. But the people in my life began to drift quickly. Calls stopped and then eventually, even texts. I would watch friends having group WhatsApp chats, talking like I no longer existed. As if I were already dead.

Even my husband, out of ideas, suggested I talk about politics more. The suggestion felt as absurd to me as someone saying I should just think myself healthy. What I needed was medical intervention and when I didn’t get it, my bed became a deserted island from which there was no escape.

Doctors decided I’d made it all up. Attention seeking, they said to my face and then began to talk about me in the third person as if I were no longer in the room.

Apparently somehow I’d managed to forge my abnormal ECG, too.

On my last morning in hospital where I was still holding onto hope that I would be helped, I learned I hadn’t been referred to rheumatology, as agreed, but to mental health. I’d heard the stories: complex patients sectioned because no one could be bothered to do the time consuming work. So I asked to be discharged.

Thyrotoxicity had taken my ability to walk by then so my husband had to wheel me out. I suppose they chalked that up to theatrics too.

Back at my GP surgery, chilblains soon bloomed across every one of my toes. Angry, red, purple and painful. Yet the lecture I received wasn’t about investigations into circulation or autoimmunity; it was about “accepting” that I was just mentally ill.

Arguing was pointless. From there, the message calcified: I was exiled from NHS care.

Meanwhile, hair fell out everywhere, even the parts of my body no one talks about. Water scalded my skin; baths were replaced with wet wipes because it was all I could withstand. I was housebound and still needed help to navigate a life reduced to a staircase and two and half rooms.

Those months in the pit of despair were coal black. The cruelty and indifference around me humbled me in ways I’d only ever understood abstractly before.

I thought about The Beach, and the scene where Christo is moved out of the camp to soften the mood for everyone else while he lies dying. I felt like I had became him: pushed to the quiet edge of the map for the comfort of the healthy and able bodied.

My estranged family said nothing. Friends, except the one who made my life about her feelings, disappeared into absence and silence.

I told so many people, in so many ways, that I was lost. They answered with denial, platitudes, or worse — nothing at all.

While I felt like I was slowly dying and trying to decide at what point I might take my end into my own hands, I thought about how much society likes to moralise suicide as being a selfish act. As if people owe the world their presence, but the world owes them nothing in return.

So here is my counter: how many times has someone told you they were in pain, and how many times did you deny it, paint a silver lining over it, or change the subject to save yourself the labour of showing up?

Because I told many, but truly hearing me would have required action. It would have meant phone calls, visits, advocacy, presence. Real effort. And effort, I learned, was the line most people were unwilling to cross.

Everything affects everything. The altered A&E assessment. The lack of investigations. The referral switched behind my back. The unverified mental health note that shadowed me into every room. A friend who cried for herself. A GP who diagnosed from ego. A husband who ran out of language. Each click of that ratchet tightened the whole machine until there was no air left for me to breathe freely.

I’ve resolved that my funeral, when it comes, will be invite only. I won’t have people arriving to spotlight themselves in grief who vanished when I was alive. Because absence in the dark forfeits the right to gather in the light.

If you recognise yourself anywhere in this, let it sting. Let it move you. And please believe people the first time instead of calling them selfish after they’re gone.

Sit with them when it’s graceless and inconvenient. Walk or drive them to appointments. Challenge lazy assumptions. Bring bread, and also bring your spine. Keep checking in even after the third ignored text. Hold the line. Especially when the system drops it.

The next time someone tells you they are drowning, maybe don’t argue about the weather, but reach for them. The difference between harm and help often only hangs between a handful of decisions.

Everything affects everything. And so can you.

For anyone who has ever dimmed themselves polite.
And for the light that remains.

They come soft spoken,
palms upturned like pilgrims,
coated in compliments
and dust from your path.

They do not knock.
They lean in, smile tight,
fangs dripping with envy
as they whisper they’re so proud.

They mimic your glow
but cannot hold the fire,
so they circle…
hungry, harmless looking, 
tugging at your edges
with sugar laced teeth.

You gave once.
Dimmed yourself polite.
Offered your warmth in hope
it would teach them to glow.

But no one can teach
a mouth not to bite.

You learn to keep the door half closed.
Let them knock,
let them flatter,
let them rot in their praise.

You know what they are.
You see the feast in their eyes;
my soul remembers
the ache of being drained,
how they fed on my light.

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A few nights ago I was brushing my long haired pug and as I gathered the usual flurry of loose hairs, I sighed to my husband: “If only these were golden hairs.” We laughed, but the thought lingered in my mind. I wondered what would happen if there really were such a creature, one that shed something that precious each day and how people would decide who the hairs, or in this case, the feathers would belong to.

As a fan of short story writers like Shirley Jackson, D.H. Lawrence, and Charles Dickens, this idle moment inspired this fairytale: the story of a golden chicken, and the many ages that rose and fell around its feathers.

The Golden Chicken

A long time ago there was a golden chicken that lived far longer than most. Each morning it dropped one feather, golden and shiny as a newly minted coin. Its keeper swept the yard at dawn and set the feather aside in a biscuit tin lined with felt so that it would not ring against the metal. By noon, someone always came to count it.

People would later call this part of the story the age of kings.

A herald announced a royal degree beneath the clock: by ancient right, the bird and all its issue now belonged to the Crown. Soldiers stormed the village and took the chicken from its pen.

The keeper’s broom was requisitioned; he signed a chit and was given a ribbon for Loyal Service that soon broke in his pocket. The chicken went to the Royal Aviary behind iron railings with gilded spikes. Children with coal dusted fingers pressed their faces to the bars trying to catch a glimpse at the wonder and were lifted away.

The peasants supplied seed and were thanked. Rumours said the King had commissioned a cloak made entirely of golden feathers, though few had seen it worn.

“Will the village see any share?” the keeper asked a guardsman.

“The Crown shares in the village,” the guard said, as he tightened his grip on his axe. Levies soon rose and carts trundled towards the Aviary. When a second bird was rumoured to have been seen in a distant valley, soldiers were dispatched with maps, cavalry bearing steel, and orders from the king.

In the tavern a farmer held a feather from his pillow to the candle and watched it curl black. “Not the same,” he declared, and the room laughed softly because in that time it was unwise to laugh too loudly.

After a long while the peasants revolted and the banners changed. Drums, speeches, and a van with loudspeakers whose antenna was tied with red ribbon rolled through the villages. The Committee took the chicken, and demanded the keeper tend to it again on behalf of the people without pay.

Parades circled the square twice so the cameras could catch them from both sides. The canned voice from the van crackled: “Comrades, we all share in its glory!”

Posters went up that night, WORK TODAY FOR A GOLDEN TOMORROW.

The keeper walked home with a red paper flag stamped with the likeness of the chicken to gift to his daughter. In the morning there was another feather, but a Committee member was assigned to collect them while the keeper swept the yard.

Inside the Ministry of Feathers the corridors smelled of floor polish and fresh paint. A woman showed the keeper a form already stamped. “This confirms the bird is now in the People’s care,” she said.

“Will we see a feather?” he asked.

“Of course,” she said, and looked past him to the next in line. But by that winter the keeper found himself breaking bread into three pieces thinner than feathers, and some nights he went without, so that their daughter could eat.

The parades eventually softened into offices, and people spoke of the age of allocation. A banner over the hall read FAIRNESS FOR ALL. The Office for Plumage Allocation set up trestle tables. Clerks clipped feathers in half with rough shears and slid the halves across the wooden table to waiting hands. A chalkboard listed names and allotments.

“Name?” said a clerk, not looking up.

The keeper received a brown envelope with a half feather wrapped in tissue and a printed warning not to hoard. Winter soon came and the same woman from the Ministry, now wearing a different badge, announced “necessary adjustments,” and halves became quarters. A larger notice bearing the Minister’s handwriting appeared on the door: IF YOU CAN HOARD THEM, YOU CAN SPARE THEM.

“Spare them for what?” the keeper asked.

“For need,” the clerk said, and tapped the ledger where someone had underlined the word twice.

That winter the chicken coughed, if a bird can be said to cough.

“We need a vet to care for the chicken,” the keeper said, and filled out a request form in triplicate. The reply came stamped COLLECTIVE RESILIENCE PRECLUDES PRIVATE INTERVENTION. He fed the bird warm mash and hoped for spring.

The scale began to list lighter and lighter, though no one dare to admit it out loud.

Soon the chalk dust settled, and the age of exchange began.

The old mill reopened as the Feather Exchange. A painted cock crowed over the door; and beneath it a crisp slogan declared ENTERPRISE MAKES PLENTY. A bell rang on each hour. Men and women in smart coats held folios and spoke in numbers. A boy sold Feather Backed Notes in blue paper with watermarked roosters. “Trade them in at any window,” he said, and the queue split into two doors: one fast, and one slow.

The keeper watched a trader with ribbons of feathers looped like sashes around his chest. “How much is a sliver?” he asked.

“It depends on the hour,” the trader said. “And who you are.”

“Who I am?” the keeper asked.

“Are you a buyer with feathers already,” the trader smiled. “Or a buyer without any.”

On market day the price board changed so quickly the chalk never had a chance to dry. The keeper tried to buy a sliver for his daughter’s dowry and was told to come earlier next time, and with more to offer. At home he spread the blue notes on the table. They smelled of ink and starch.

“Is this a feather?” his wife asked.

“They say it is what a feather can be,” he said, and folded the notes away. In the second winter a private door to the Feather Exchange opened with a small brass plate that quietly announced ‘Members Only.’

The townspeople soon began to watch that door rather than the board.

The chicken fell ill again. “We need a vet,” said the keeper to the Exchange.

“On credit,” said the clerk. “Care Line packages come in Bronze, Silver, Gold depending on what you can afford,” as he slid a brochure across the counter. The Gold plan came with queue priority and a soft spoken helpline.

The keeper paid for the Bronze Package and waited solemnly by the coop.

The years turned and crowns soon returned. This time not in gold, but in code.

People would later call it the age of lords without castles. The chicken was kept behind thick glass that you could not touch, but you could subscribe to a livestream to watch it. Feathers became tokens, and access came with many terms.

A notice blinked on a little screen: By continuing you agree to the updated Terms of Feather Use. The men who ran the platforms spoke of stewardship and scale. SCALE IS CARE, announced a billboard by the lane.

Prices were set by algorithms that smiled favourably at those who already held many feathers, and suggested tiered packages to those who held none. The two doors of the Exchange came back, this time with smart cards and digital keys.

In this new age, disputes became customer tickets, and wars were waged through lawsuits and embargoes.

One day in a glass office far away from the village, a technician made a quiet change to the system. A setting was flipped so that anyone on the basic plan suddenly found their feathers locked away. The notice on the screen read: precautionary hold applied — for your protection. At the same time, those who paid for the premium tier found that their feathers moved freely, and faster than before.

“For stability,” was the official message. “For those who can pay,” whispered the townspeople to each other.

When the keeper tried to gift a sliver to his granddaughter, a messaged popped up informing him that he lacked the correct tier. “Upgrade,” it said, and showed him a crown you could click.

“Who owns the chicken now?” the little girl asked.

“People who say they don’t,” he said, and scrolled to the end of a document that never quite finished loading.

Then came the week the bird suddenly stopped.

Morning after morning the biscuit tin lay empty. Old reflexes returned wearing new clothes but with voices heard once before. The loudspeaker on the Committee’s van, dragged from storage, accused saboteurs of causing the shortage. Some pointed to the newer villagers and said they were the culprits. Fights soon broke out in the street, oil for lamps became scarce, and garbage began to pile up in the streets.

By way of answer The Office for Plumage Allocation drafted an Emergency Adjustment Order, announcing that all saved halves were to be surrendered “temporarily.” At The Exchange the side door opened for a select few. The gentry came out with their ledgers cleared but their feathers untouched. Outside, the villagers queued with their scraps of feathers, surrendering what little they had left.

A herald stood in the middle of the square and read an ancient clause about extraordinary royal custody. And on the platforms, accounts were frozen without warning; the rules were rewritten overnight, and no one was asked for their consent.

“It’s only for a week,” everyone said, and queued in the places they knew from before.

On the eighth morning the bird shook itself and dropped a feather with a soft thud that sounded like a sigh of relief. The keeper lifted it, felt its weight, but this time he decided not put it in the tin, and walked to the village hall instead.

By then the posters had begun to peel and the loudspeakers crackled with a hollow echo. The keeper spoke with the people at length. After several days of discussion and debate, together they wrote on a single sheet of paper and nailed it up:

The chicken must not belong to rulers, classes, or markets alone. 
It must be guarded for all.

They pulled down the mill and built a square room from its bricks. They called it the Commons House. Three rules were painted on a board in letters plain enough for anyone to read:

1. A share of each feather is to fund roads, clinics, and schools.
2. A share may be traded in an open market, without special doors.
3. A share is sealed for those not yet born.

Auditors were appointed who answered only to the people and wrote with ink instead of chalk. The chicken returned to a clear roofed pen, and was fed well by the keeper and without hurry.

The biscuit tin went inside a transparent box on a plain table. At dawn the keeper, old and grey grey now, lifted the feather with two fingers. He signed a book when he handled it and signed it again when he set it down.

“Will there be arguments again?” his granddaughter now a young woman with a babe of her own asked, as they leaned on the fence where daisies grew bright at their feet.

“There already are,” the keeper said, and nodded towards the hall where voices rose and fell and rose again.

An inspector tried to salt a ledger and was found out. A trader tried the old side door but found it bricked over. The market now ran on a single bell and a single queue. The auditors wore no finery and spoke in full sentences even when they were tired. A vet came when needed, paid from a line on the board called care and maintenance, and the keeper kept the receipts in a folder that anyone could inspect.

The posters grew smaller and changed less often.

The loudspeakers were now only used for weather warnings and harvest fairs. On market days, a weathered sign hung from the eaves A PRICE IS NOT A PROMISE, as a reminder of the new system of fairness. When someone asked who owned the chicken, the keeper pointed to the sheet of paper, and the rules hung on the board.

“It isn’t a perfect system,” he said to his granddaughter. “But it endures.”

“How do we keep it fair this time?”

“We read the notices, and we teach everyone how to read,” he said. “And when the notices change, we make sure to read them again.”

A week later the granddaughter queued to trade her first sliver. She stood between a baker with flour on his sleeves, a woman who mended clocks, and a trader with a calculator hanging from his belt.

This time bell rang the way fairness should: only once as the Commons House clerk looked up and said, “Name?” in a voice that was not unkind.

The keeper swept the yard and listened to the scrape of the broom on stone, a sound that had not changed over the ages, even when other things did.

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“Why won’t they let them go?”

The boy was eight, maybe nine. A knitted hat was just beginning to slip over his eyes, and his fingers were sticky from the toffee apple clasped in his right hand. His eyes were wide with the question. A bunch of us were standing outside the circus gates, leaflets and posters numbing our hands from the first bite of autumn. His parents stared at the ground, while the kid’s alarmed eyes darted between our posters, me, then back at the poster again as I searched for a response.

“They aren’t allowed go,” I eventually answered, my heart catching in my throat. “The circus makes them stay.”

That same visceral snap swept through me again when Virgin Media’s new “To Better and Beyond” advert crawled across my screen over the weekend. I reported it to the Advertising Standards Authority that same night. My complaint was simple: the ad normalises working elephants, leans on a caricatured Thai setting, toys with gender-mocking stereotypes, and uses an elephant as a prop for mischief.

It doesn’t matter that they used a CGI elephant. What matters that the corporate message launders an industry of captive bodies into a joke.

I think about that while I look at this photograph — the crease of the elephant’s eyelids, the battered skin, its tusks pointing past the leaves as if choosing a path that isn’t there.

People call pictures like this magical, but they cannot be because magic requires consent. To make an image like this, someone had to stand close, close enough to change this animal’s day.

Instagram users love dressing that change in inspirational captions, like “bucket list”, “once in a lifetime opportunity”, or “honeymoon magic”. Reels show cars idling while a matriarch hesitates at the tarmac edge. Roads snaking across a range once sewn by nothing but memory and scent. Lenses that cut into the private ecosystem of a herd, all in the name of claiming the perfect shot. We package the disruption and sell it back to each other with filters and tourism board gloss.

This pattern is becoming increasing familiar in online spaces.

Shari Franke, who grew up inside a family vlogging empire, told lawmakers that what looked like ordinary life was a full-time industry built on other people’s boundaries. That “There is no such thing as a moral or ethical family vlogger.”

Because her parents renamed the exploitation of their children, and monetised it, so the harm became something viewers willingly consumed. Much like the parents who flock with their children to zoos and safari parks to ogle captive animals every year.

The victims might change; but the cost never does.

The documentary An Apology to Elephants pulls back the veil to show how elephants are groomed to perform. With painful chains, and bullhooks. An animal heavy with knowledge denied the one remedy her joints ask for: distance. Because in the wild a herd will walk twenty miles or more in a day. Healing arthritis demands those miles, and yet concrete only offers tiny circles.

And I know something about the circles of confinement myself.

Chronic illness has narrowed my world to the size of a room, some days to the size of a bed. I don’t get to roam where I’d like. It rubs my soul thin that I can’t walk my dogs through the Cotswolds countryside waiting just beyond my front door.

Even so, the comparison stops short because I still have agency. I wasn’t dragged from the only life I’d known and trained to perform for the amusement of others. I wasn’t made to watch my parents hunted for their tusks.

Though I’ve lost every friend I had, I am able to make new ones. Elephants are torn from complex families, their social maps ripped up in one morning. What I live is a kind of captivity with choices still attached, whereas working animals have none.

And yet, there is one likeness that cuts close: how people look.

I have lived through what I’ve come to think of as “virtue tourism.” Illness groupies slide into my messages, wanting all the gory details, then vanish once the spectacle is done. Family members arrive with flowers instead of peanuts, but the exchange is the same… my suffering becomes their stage.

That same act of looking plays out in other ways too. At the circus protests, it was always the children who looked straight at our signs, unflinching, while their parents pulled them back with tidy smiles. The kids hadn’t yet learned to turn cruelty into entertainment, but the adults had.

This is exactly why I believe a playful advert with a truck-stealing elephant matters. Because children will see it, and they will learn to speak in the language of the joke long before they learn the price of it.

Filing a complaint with the Advertising Standards Authority is a small act, but it is mine. My body can’t stand at the gates for hours any more, yet I can still say “not this”.

No to the postcard shorthand. 
No to the stereotyping of Thai people. 
No to depictions of gender-mocking stereotypes. 
And no to the normalisation of labouring animals dressed as whimsy.

The ask in my complaint is simple enough.

Keep the magic where it belongs — in stories, in crafted make believe that harms no one. When you see an elephant in an advert, a reel, a brochure promising transcendence, remember the road you don’t see and the day you changed without asking. If you can, say something and if you can’t, refuse the laugh.

Because the eye in this photograph isn’t asking us for our wonder. I know that look because I’ve worn it myself. The plea for space, not spectacle.

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