1/18/2024 0 Comments Dowsing rod garden story![]() ![]() The tug grows stronger as she passes the football green and begins to flank the cornfield now gone fallow. How to stop her mind from sliding off into imaginary worlds so she’s not at risk of walking into anything unexpected. Which means she knows, for certain, that she isn’t moving the stick. How to keep her focus on what she can see. Elise retrieves it from her bag, rears back her arm, and that is when the wood begins to move.Įlise knows things she didn’t know when she was eleven. ![]() After school, though, the whole thing becomes embarrassing-the thought of herself that morning, her private shrine, this urge to transform the stick at all. She’ll walk to the hardware store this afternoon and buy a strip of rubber, erase the last of its power over her. Annoyed with herself, Elise slips it into her backpack and heads to catch the bus. She runs her fingers over the stick, looking for the twist of horror, but today there’s nothing. On the morning Elise turns fourteen she wakes up sad. Sometimes she dreams the corpse from the well into the humid darkness under her bed and imagines how her leathery cheeks would rot. Somehow the stick stays in her belt loop for the frantic sprint back up to her house.Įlise has circled rocks atop her dresser, a protective ring in which the Y-shaped stick can rest. Elise pushes off the rotting wooden well cover, which is cold and wet and smells like the underside of the porch. When the stick comes up against a curved stone wall, tap-tap, she secures it through a belt loop like a sword. Now is poofy coat weather, and she’s telling herself a story of Ice Age explorers, and she goes where her feet take her. Elise runs past her mother’s garden with its dead rose bones that snarl and thatch together, past the sloping yard heavy with clover, all the way down to the woods that limn their property.Īt the edge of the forest she picks up a bent stick, crooked Y shape appealing for its potential as a slingshot, and swings it back and forth across her path for spiderwebs. It’s early on a Sunday, not the best time of the week but almost: the light is still too soft to allow for thoughts of school. ![]()
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