Where The Light Waits

The gravel drive exhales dust as I kill the engine. Twilight slumps across the mountains, color wrung out like a rag. The farmhouse sags worse than I remember—like my absence pulled another nail loose.

I sit a minute. No music. No crickets. Just a hush thick as wool. The air smells like rain that changed its mind.

Nan used to call this the breath-held hour. “Everything’s waiting,” she’d whisper, lighting her solstice lantern. “Even the sun.”

This year, the sun didn’t rise. Not really. Grey skies. Crops failing. A local reporter called it a “seasonal disruption.”

But Nan would’ve known better. She’d say it was a warning. A world out of rhythm. A heart refusing to beat.

The pocketknight in my jacket presses into my ribs. Beside it: her old almanac, stuffed with spells and pressed leaves. A photo slips loose—her hand on my shoulder, the day I told her I was her grandson.

She’d smiled like I’d finally caught up. “I knew before you did, love.”

Everyone else left. She stayed. Then she died, and even the birds seemed to forget how to return.

Last winter, I tried to leave, too. The ER lights were cold. The questions colder. I didn’t have an answer for why I stayed.

Tonight, I’ve come back to ask the land itself.

I open the door. Grass rasps against my boots, leaving prints behind. The field hums underfoot. Somewhere ahead, the grove waits.

Nan never taught me spells like movies show. No circles of salt, no cauldrons. She taught listening.

“Some things,” she’d say, “only grow if they hear their name.”

On my seventeenth midsummer, I brought her firewood in a binder and baggy flannel. She looked me over, handed me the matchstick, and said, “Go ahead, then, my boy.”

It was the first time anyone had really called me that. I almost dropped the match.

She didn’t just accept me—she wove me into the land. Every name I gave myself, she planted in the soil like a seed.

After my overdose, it was her voice that barged into the dark. You are exactly where you belong.

So I came home to the only place that believed it.

The gate is rusted, half swallowed by vines. I unlatch it, then unlace my boots. Nan always said, To walk in the grove, you meet it skin to soil.

Beyond the fence, five oaks form a broken ring. Their crowns claw the fading sky. The space between them glows faintly green—moss plush as velvet, lit from below by something that doens’t feel electric.

The ground breathes beneath me. Roots pulse slow and deep, like lungs stitched under the earth.

Nan’s rules return like muscle memory.

Walk sunwise.

Speak a truth at every oak.

If the grove accepts it, the light returns.

If not, the sun stays gone. Or maybe I do.

I step forward, barefoot. The moss cools my pulse. The first tree waits.

The bark’s split like a sternum. Sap darkens the grain.

“My fear,” I whisper, “is that weakness is permanent. That I’ll always need more help than anyone can bear.”

The moss blanches beneath me. A root lifts slightly, tension coiled in silence. Shame tightens my throat.

Then: breath. The root settles. Cedar drifts in the air. One firefly sparks, hovering at eye level before drifting toward the next tree.

The moss greens again. The truth is accepted. I move on.

Leaves tremble without wind.

“I’m angry,” I say, “that they gave me a script that never fit. Be silent. Be strong. Be useful.” I tried. I swallowed until it soured my ribs.

Sap pops like a split knuckle. The moss glows—brief and sharp—then dims.

The fireflies multiply, circling me in slow orbits. In their light, I see my hands trembling. Tears I didn’t plan to drip to the moss.

The orbit widens. The path clears.

This oak leans low, its limbs woven with honeysuckle. The scent blindsides me.

“I loved Eli,” I murmur. “He sat by my hospital bed. I laughed it off. Said I was fine. I was terrified he saw the cracked parts.”

The moss flushes warm. Fireflies spiral, then twine together—two strands, one light.

I see his hands on the plastic chair, clenched so tight the knuckles went white. He didn’t look away. I did.

The spirals untangle, and the next path opens.

The tree towers above me, bark scored deep with old lightning.

“I’m sorry,” I say, “For carrying Nan’s faith like cargo I meant to jettison. For letting her die before I learned the language of roots. For almost taking her voice out of the world along with me.”

A lark sings once. The moss pulses gently—like a palm pressing back.

The hush settles around me again, but this time it doesn’t choke. It cradles.

The last tree guards a shallow hollow. Roots arc over the ground, forming a low archway.

Beyond it: heartwood. The center of the grove. Where Nan said, “Truth lives without apology.”

I crouch. My knee bumps the knife in my jacket. I draw it out, thumb the worn handle. It could’ve ended me.

I could leave it here. But not without saying what I’ve never dared.

“Waiting is dangerous,” I whisper. “Waiting means I might stay. Might hurt again.”

The fireflies gather above the arch, spelling a rune I remember from Nan’s notes. Open. But only if I pass through.

“I want,” I say, breath shaking, “the right to need. I want to wake up tomorrow and not apologize for it. I want a dawn that’s not ashamed to find me breathing.”

The air shudders. Moss glows so bright I see my own scars lit like constellations.

I dig a shallow trench with the blade. Press it in. Cover it.

Soil dampens my hands. The breath in my lungs comes easier.

Then—birds. One voice, then two. Then a chorus.

Above the grove, the sky is starting to bleed.

Light eases over the hills, a faint pulse on the lip of the horizon.

It finds my face without warning. Warms my skin like something remembering how to return.

I open Nan’s almanac. The page where her photo used to be is moss-stained, blank. I write:

Reason One: dawn remembered my name.

The fireflies don’t vanish. They orbit. Witnesses. The sun spills through the branches—no fanfare, no music. Just the soft weight of being allowed to stay.

The knife remains buried. I walk out with nothing but breath.

At the fence, I lace my boots.

Over my shoulder, the fireflies rise again, drifting into two slow letters. A.R. Amaranth Rowan.

The name Nan gave me before I was ready to carry it.

I nod once, they scatter.

The engine hums beneath my palms. The road is not the same. I’m not.

In the mirror, the grove breathes behind me.

So do I.