Pond rocks shake under careful girlish hops, beneath a bag stuffed full of an artist’s supply. She almost walks on water, barely tiptoeing the surface. A young girl huffs and jumps the watery divide, landing right in the forest off the shoulder of her village. She says goodbye before exploring the dark. The river swishes water from behind her dress-tail, under the bare skin of her heels, and the trees that roof the heavens sing with tweeting songbirds and harmonies of cicadas. As she trades river-mud toes for dry grass and leaves, she looks once back across the gentle spring toward her home, where several decrepit villas surround a church with a golden-peak statue.

There, she watches dots of people milling about their usually rigid lives. One such worker, the girl’s mother, is likely to be found in the center of town, washing clothes on a rubbing-board for hours at a time. Her husband died years prior to this moment- so the story once was told to a youthful sprout. Her mother says the birth was too much for the man to witness, knocking him dead where he stood. Since then, in the little villa the town shares, it has been the mother’s duty to raise the family’s wage, a hard task in such a fruitless town with a young girl all too eager to help. The little girl and her golden-brown hair run through the woods.

As she leaves for unknown in the thickets, an elated tingle of energy grows through her skin, and a snarky grin spreads across her face to expel it out. Every step is further proof she can survive yet another one, step by step, gathering her pride. Her mother, and many other elders, they say these woods are stalked by spirits and ghastlies, ghouls frightful enough to leave a man paralyzed, but no such thing has taken the little girl ahold but the spirit of adventure. The flames of her curiosity, bouncing light from the broken ends of her hair, light a lantern glow in her head that won’t let her be stopped by a haze of child-warnings.

The girl, more often than not, finds herself at the center of those warnings more day by day. She is only ten, on their most accurate calendars, but the scope of her eye is more than most men could learn in a lifetime. She sits on rooftops for hours to paint morning horizons, regardless of the slippery dew on shingles, she will make friends with snakes, no matter how venomous, just to draw their vibrant coils; climb trees to sketch hawk-babies in their nests. It seems to be all she enjoys, capturing with color. Adrenaline is her paint, and her life is witnessed after the brush.

“A true painter”, the kid calls herself, “Devoted to crossing what others call a firmly drawn line’.”

That is the saying she repeats in her head, every day at sunup and sundown.

But her greatest overstep is the river that separates the woods from home, where bands of sunlight drop through blanketed foliage above, showering the forest floor and the girl’s golden roots.

The girl swallows wind to steady herself on the head of a tree’s stump. She continues through the forest undertow of leafage and twigs, blazing new trails far from the original, in search of the woodland evil that has plagued her curiosity. Tales of boogins make her squeal in excitement, as do bunnies that hop in a swarm along mossy pebbles. Of course, as her mother would warn, she is careful of poison oak, bad ivies and lurking evil, but her forging onward is never halted, only slowed by angles. A look here or there for just a moment can distract the little girl’s attention, sightful always for the best view to capture on her canvas rolls. Her paints are limited by a family’s needs, but if she can capture this rumored muse of the woods there must be a fortune to come following.

She carries paper and pencils in her satchel; water paints and brushes collected over the years. Sometimes there are additions to the arsenal, more often she is gifted supplies by other children, her schoolteacher, or villagers who takes pity and a painting. Some tell stories about the little girl who can’t stop drawing, but between that and watching her pilfer dyes most people reason it’s the better path she dies over a paint bucket instead of bored crawling tavern spittoons. Her mother might say differently, but she is washing clothes.

As her forest view dims and the roof tightens through branches, the birds chirp and insect orchestras fade into sounds more obscure and harmonious. Their buzzing is the heartbeat of the woods, in the moss on the westside of tree bark. She comes across a peculiar fork in the unpathed road: to the right, a cliffside that drops to a valley of shadowy woods; to the left, calm, placid all the same as before, as the forest has always seemed to her. She doesn’t take hours or minutes to decide sliding down the right cliff. The little girl has been warned thrice in her life about this cliff, and she hears them again only once she’s reached the bottom.

Down she travels, dirt-sodden and decorated by scrapes of rocks. Her little sky-blue dress is cloudy now with the soot of the earth. She thinks she looks like a painting. Her stocking legs are shredded across the ground, and her bag drags too. Suffering for the art, from the art perhaps, she believes, is an intimate part of the journey.

Just below the cliffside, under a heavy shadow she wanders, eyes narrowed for evil magic she has dreamt about. Leaves crackle under her heels. What could it be that haunts her town? What is the skeleton in the people’s collective closet? Rumors of hauntings by sinful creatures, bears or wolves swirl through her thoughts, knowing many scornful things said about the woods. She wanders, letting her dress’ curtain guide the way she hops. Snails inch over logs in the ground. A harpy-fly bothers her face and tickles the girl’s neck. There is nothing so bad in the hidden neck of the forest, the girl soulfully thinks.

Sooner than later, she finds a tinged light in the distance, one that draws her forward like a fly-fishing hook on a spider’s

web. A clearing opens ahead, delicately lit by sunlight captured on the ends of longgrass. Curious and tired, the little girl steps into the field. Her bag snares on a cattail for a moment.

This grove of trampled prairie grass forms a circle, surrounded by trees like a bubble of something pure or opposite of that. A herd of deer graze, then scatter as she approaches the center. Butterflies dance together in the wind, which dies as soon as the girl and her dress finds the grove’s heart. There in the prairie’s eye on top of a cluster of rocks grows a bush. Its stems and branches are made from pure gold. There are no leaves, only roots and golden limbs alight in the sun. It glistens from the air and whistles by little birds inside it.

“Oh how perfect!”, the girl shouts, “Thank you lord!”

The girl is elated giddy by the discovery of something new. She circles the golden sapling, seeking the best angle to paint it from. When found, she lays down her supplies, takes up her notebook of canvas scraps and begins to sketch. She crosses her legs in a bed of yellow grass and mushrooms like deathly pustules. A sparrow lands on a golden branch, watches, flies away. The girl burns her pencil into the page until the lead has made a print, then she trades her tool for a brush and what blue paint she can help to in the bag. She paints the sky, the clouds behind trees that loom in a circlet.

An hour passes. The sun above doesn’t move. The forest stays hushed as to not disturb the young artist. Shadows of the trees, yellow grass is painted in all. Even the sparrow on the brush is included, but then she realizes, she doesn’t have gold paint, she doesn’t have gold at all. Who in the village would? Not many, she thinks.

She sits, wondering if she can leave her masterpiece of art unfinished. What if next time, the golden tree isn’t here?

Brushing dirt from her legs, she stands up to confront the plant. She reaches for a branch, gleaming and hanging low enough for her to climb to. She hesitates, looks at the unfinished painting, then back at the pyrite bush. Her hand, caked in soot and paint, hovers, then touches  the bark feels soft, metal so smooth it becomes skin.

“Stop!”, a frantic voice shouts.

The girl spins and sees her mother, dirt-covered, breathless. She gets close and grabs her by the arm.

“What have I told you about these woods!?” she cries. “There are many reasons you cannot come here!”

The girl is pulled away. Her bag and the sketchbook are left under the rock.

“But why? Have you seen this thing?”, the girl pleads, heels skipping to keep pace, “Mama it’s incredible! Think of what-”

“-No!”, the mother she snaps, “There is no possibility here! Enough of this incredible stupidity!”

“Mama!”

Fire blazes in the mother’s eyes, pretended behind steam that mixes out from her tears. Something angry in her tells the truth, or rather leads to it.

“But my bag!”

“Leave it! I’ll… I’ll send someone generous to fetch it. Right now, you’re coming with me. You must learn why there are never woods to speak of, why our people survive while the others can’t. They can’t know, nobody can know of this tree!”

“What is it? Why can’t I paint it?”

“You were painting it?! That is greed!- the seventh child of the devil! Or maybe it’s the planted-child of greed, grandchild of Satan, and you were nearly taken by it!”

They walk in silence for a long while, broken quiet only by nature. A snail is devoured by a crow in the branches. A rock turns to see if the two are a threat, a spider mother beneath it and a possum hanging on a branch above. Halved-trees grow capes off ivy and moss between ever other living tree, it seems. The mother sniffles and finally speaks again once they’ve gotten far.

“You aren’t the first to find the living gold and neither will you be the last. That is our people’s burden. Others did, many, and my dearest it’s a horrible thing. You must never find it again.”

“It is alive? What happened to the people who found it?”, the girl asks, “Mom, where are we going?”

“It is living like a cancer, feeding on the souls of covetous people. When a branch is plucked, so is that poor soul”, the mother admits, as if breaking a vow, “You need to learn. Enough of these stunts.”

They travel deeper through dense thickets, until they find an oddity among the trees, a man frozen. He is sunken in the ground to the lumps of his knees, unmoving like the hair on his chin. Hair, eyes, skin, clothing and bones, even the dirt on his face, he is all gold. The gold rusts in several skeletal places, fooled to the quality. In his hands are a bundle of twigs. In his coat are a hundred stolen gilded leaflets.

“Who is this?”, the girl asks, held back from touching.

“Your father. He came here for us, and as you know he came from a faraway place. He didn’t know our ways to fear the woods and I did not teach him properly; I should have taught you. I told him not to give to the temptation, but he wouldn’t listen, he- he wanted to give us a prosperous life.”

The mother’s face is more water than steam now, crying as she does touch her lost husband’s face, stroking his cheek like bone. The girl stares, recognizing something in his cheeks, in the determination of the eye.

“Your grandparents showed me the tree when I was not much younger than you. I remember it through clouds but, the glow in the light. It made my skin crawl in ways I can never imagine. We made lunch for a carpet in the woods and they let me wander off. It was a test, to see if my soul could resist it.”

“Did you take from the tree?”

“No. I think about that often- and when I see you doing these dangerous things!… I see him. I see him in your face. And it terrifies me. I thought losing him might teach you caution, but… I see gold in you whenever I look.”

Tears stream, and the mother falls on her forelegs, gripping the legs of the man she lost.

“We’re going home!”, the mother cries, “We’re going home.”

The girl nods. She brushes her arm and taps her foot. Something otherworldly possesses her, in the end of her heel which thinks about her lost art supplies, and she glances at her father, the way her mother can barely stand. She can’t stand it. She runs off back towards the grove basking in the sun.

“Wait- No! Get back here!”, her mother screeches, “Don’t you touch that bush!”

Golden hands wave her forward completely still from behind their ivy capes, all souls lost to the gold, but she doesn’t stop as they, the lost, warn. Or maybe those souls eaten to rust are cheering the little girl on, hoping she can break their curse or too fall victim to the crowd. The clearing emerges; the grass streaks her legs.

She finds her bag and the thick book of paintings beside it. A moment goes where she doesn’t know where to look, what to do about the tree and the shouting faintly in the distance. She sees a glint in the corner of her sight and finds it with applaud. It’s magnificent; it’s unique by nature.

She climbs up, grabs a branch. It’s cold and the smooth golden twig snaps into her palm.

Nothing happens. She stares at the little golden rod and doesn’t understand why she did that, what makes so many pennies about this stick. She climbs down and sits down on the rock’s side. Her mother arrives and she gasps both hands to her lips, then she falls on her knees shaped like the back of washboards.

The girl sighs, for a reason she also doesn’t understand. She takes her notebook and guides it to her lap and finds the page she was missing an end to. The end of the golden branch, she tips it across the paper. By reason the gold is built like wood to the core, it leaves a golden chalk-scar. She paints in the branches, lighting the page with metallic dust. She paints until the tree is complete on the cloth, depicted sitting in the crown of a rocky throne. Her masterpiece, she thinks.

“I’m sorry”, she tells her, “Something in me- I simply had to.”

“Whyhihy?! Why do this to me?! Why do this to yourself!?”

The little girl hands the sketchbook over, page after page of finished and semi-finished cloths, turned to the golden majesty.

“I’m sorry”, she says again, “It was in my head! Mamma I’m so sorry!”

She sits, clutching the golden twig and her first brush lost. Her mother crawls and clutches her child. They wait for something magical to happen. Something magical does happen, and it isn’t death.

From the end to horsetail brusher, the painting tool slowly becomes a golden idol. The mother is in love with the sight, gasping through her cries. The brush will never rust, never break, and neither will the girl’s spirit. Later in the day when she lives to wash it, the gilded bristles will clean off perfectly.

They walk home hand in hand, with a golden brush, a painting gleaming similarly, and a story too heavy to tell. But they carry that story together.