Mabel, Episode 8.5, a letter from Juniper, in which history comes alive again.

Dear Lily, all day and all night I thought about writing you this letter, saw it unfold in my mind, and so now that I am here with my paper and my ink, it does not seem like a real thing, but like a task one undertakes in a dream.

When I am finished, I will curl this paper up and tuck it in an acorn shell and throw it through your bedroom window.

I dream this too.

And did I dream you? Are you real? Are you anything of flesh? Do you breathe?

Sometimes when I look out of your mirror at you, I think that I'm looking at a piece of my own soul

torn loose and tossed into the world. Not because you belong to me, but because you are familiar and strange at the same

time. Lily, you are a person, you are a creature, all in your own right, and isn't that curious?

How can something like you have come to be? I want to unpick you like stitches to see what

makes you run, but I want. I will content myself with drawing your

name over my wristbone to consider how you turn my blood into gold. You were small when I was

small. I watched you through the blue star, through the blazing star. It was my mother warned me

against you, but I heard you

singing in the cinnamon fern and thought you were beautiful, a thing I could never touch,

like the crest of Orion, like the farthest Pleiades. You wore erythronium in your hair like

your name, the yellow trout lily. Lily, Lily. Sometimes I think I would eat to if I could. There is a witch

in a story who ate a girl she loved and always there afterwards, when she spoke, flowers fell

out of her open mouth. I would swallow you up and you would be lobelia on my tongue for the rest of my life.

This is what they say. It is not uncommon for us to want to eat what we love.

But you are uncommon. Every moment we have spent together is a shining stone in the bowl of my skull.

I am greedy and so I take them out and look at them now and then, like a dragon.

The day we went to the buried well and threw butterfly weed down into the black water

...