What Follows

Whatever they were, daydream or figment or nightmare, there were at least two of them and they followed her everywhere. One was a cloud drifting at her right shoulder. She could feel it, the gray draft it made in the air. Sometimes she poked at its edges, no further. The depths of it were fearsome, inevitable and endless. But the other one? Oh, that was a rare and lovely thing. Only visible when she turned her head and looked for it. Green on green, also inevitable, also endless, but this one a happy shadow, growing itself into a forest, tree by tree by leaf.