CLOAK/3.7

Trishna

On the shores of Lake Kenoma, her parents keep tourist bungalows, a dozen tucked among the broken scrub pine screens. The last one on the right, her childhood homestead, over the course of years enlarged, adapted for a family, heated—at every year's first frost another forest of deserted dwellings would descend between their front door and the road where the school bus stopped.
Her family, the father who tried to write, the mother who nursed to earn the health insurance, the stoner older brother, Trishna in the middle and the late child ticket to the lottery of loss.
Her springs and summers, the smells of chemical cedar and fresh water fishing, the slap and heft of damp canvas, the adhesiveness of piney woods and ham and pickle spreads, the brevity of other people's mattering.
Her childhood friend, the spirit of a local witch who travelled through the bloodlines of the oak trees that remained along the lake—who following the history of a single acorn's lineage could enter a tree trunk here and emerge from another tree trunk many miles away, or go home to where she lived, near Indians, in the sunshine of an oak-hemmed glade that no longer existed.