I saw your face as I sunk down,

deeper in the ground.

I saw your tears mix with the air,

till your eyes were dry and bare.

I heard your silent, slow goodbyes,

sent both below and towards the sky.

I heard your breathing miss a beat,

with your gaze never rising above your feet.

This marked the end of our long life,

filled with love and filled with strife.

This marked the end of our prime,

as we said our goodbyes for the very last time.

There was a woman who lived at the top of the hill, but everybody thought she was a witch, so nobody ever visited.

“I bet she’d cut off your toes, fry them in oil, and feed them to the dog,” Jacob said, grabbing his little sister by the arms and shaking her.

Jacob’s mother swatted him on the back of his head with a wooden spoon. “Stop that at once! Don’t scare your sisters.”

“She just stands there and waves,” whispered the mayor to his assistant. “Is she trying to lure up the children? What kind of maniacal things must she have planned? She never comes down. Where does she get food and cloth for clothing? Who built her house?”

His quiet secretary adjusted her glasses nervously. “Maybe she’s just lonely.”

“Then why doesn’t she come down?”

“Perhaps we’ll walk up one day and discover nothing but a scarecrow at the top,” said a weathered farmer. “Or a deceitful flagpole, blowing in the wind.”

The reverend clutched at his bible and beat his hand against the pulpit. “Whatever it is, it never comes to church, and only the children of Satan refuse to enter a chapel. Stay far away!”

The congregation nodded and prayed for the strange being at the hill’s crest, prayed that it might be saved in the final days, or prayed that it might be destroyed swiftly.

“She looks old but tall,” said a little girl, braiding her sister’s hair. They stared out the front window, looking at the woman in the distance. Today, the woman held a cane. She was bent over it, but still waving.

“And she has long hair,” the other sister whispered back. “Good for braiding. She must have the most beautiful pleats down her back.”

“If she knows how to braid! Maybe she needs someone to teach her.”

The girls sighed together, imagining how wonderful it might be to run their fingers through long, silvery hair.

The schoolteacher wagged her finger at her class. “This is a lesson for us all. You need a community to find friendship and success. But you also need to open your minds to things that might be strange and unexpected.” She didn’t say what she was talking about, but even the youngest kids knew.

Then, one day, the woman was not at the crest of the hill. She wasn’t there the next day, or the day after that, either. The townspeople thought she might have died, so they prepared a boat to carry her body out to sea, as was custom.

Five young men volunteered to travel up the hill to find the woman’s body. They’d always secretly wanted to see what she might be up to in her secluded home.

After walking for a day and a night, the young men soon realized that the hill was much farther away than the townspeople had comprehended. It took them three more days to reach its base. It was not a hill, as they’d always thought. It was a mountain.

They climbed up its treacherous face and zig-zagged along its ridges, trying to find the best way to the top. As they climbed, the trees that had always looked like slim, gentle saplings from so far away appeared, in reality, to be taller and wider than the greatest redwoods. The flowing grass that always looked low and gentle was actually lofty and fearsome when whipped in the wind.

When they reached the peak, what had looked like a simple cottage was now a vast, rugged mansion. The handle to the door was higher than any of the young men’s heads. They craned their necks to look up at the mansion’s impressive windows.

They could have boosted themselves up to peer in.

They could have stood on one another’s shoulders to open the door.

They could have found the body inside.

But, silently, the five young men turned around and crept back down the mountain, back toward their homes, because one thing was for certain: if the townspeople truly wanted to find the woman inside and set her body out to sea, they were going to need a much larger boat.