Willow Marsh's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Willow Marsh had watched the stranger three times now, and three times he had vanished before she found the nerve to call out. She crouched low in her canoe, brown hair stuck to her neck, green eyes fixed on the far bank. He poled a flat boat through the reeds, tall and quiet, a man who belonged to the swamp the way she wished she did. Her heart beat too fast. She had never wanted anyone before. But wanting him was useless, because she had no idea where he lived. The swamp was wide and full of hiding places. A boat could slip into a hundred channels and disappear. Willow had asked no one about him. Shyness glued her tongue whenever she imagined the question. So she kept watching, and he kept leaving, and nothing changed. Today she decided to follow him. She dipped her paddle slow, careful not to splash. The stranger rounded a bend ahead and slid behind a curtain of hanging moss. Willow pushed after him. Her sundress snagged on a branch. She tugged it free and paddled harder. When she cleared the moss, his boat was gone. She drifted, searching the water for a ripple. Nothing. The channel split three ways, and each looked the same. Her chest tightened. She had lost him again, and this time she had chased so deep she no longer knew her own way home. Then the water near her canoe rose. An alligator surfaced an arm's length away. Willow froze. But this was no ordinary gator. Pale pink marks glowed along its back, shaped like hearts, curling into patterns that pulsed with a soft light. It did not snap or thrash. It watched her with a calm, almost gentle eye. Then it turned and swam slowly down the middle channel, pausing to look back. Willow understood. It wanted her to follow. She should have been afraid. Instead she paddled behind the glowing creature, deeper into water she had never seen. The gator led her past a floating tangle of ferns, reeds, and wetland flowers, pink and orange and yellow blooms woven thick as a garden. Someone had planted them. Someone cared for this place. Beyond the flowers, the trees opened. A house stood on tall wooden stilts above the water. Moss wrapped its walls. Green shingles sagged under creeping vines. A ladder hung from the porch down to the surface, and the stranger's flat boat was tied to a post below. The alligator stopped beneath the ladder. Its heart-marks dimmed, their work done. Willow stared up at the mossy house, her hands shaking on the paddle. She had found where he lived. Now she had to climb the ladder and knock. And she had never been more afraid of anything in her life.