Chapter 1 Rae of Sunshine

Rae

The morning light burns into my eyeballs. Okay. Good morning, world. I shove the patchwork comforter down and let my fluffy socks hit the wooden floor of the cabin. My cabin. That still feels weird. As of last week, it is mine. Before that, it was Nanna’s, and I just thought of it as home—the little cabin in the woods where I grew up. Where herbs hung drying in the kitchen, and chipped jars full of wildflowers sat on every windowsill, and I was never allowed to whistle after dark because apparently that was how you invited trouble. Now it is mine.

Dust drifts through the beam of sunlight stretching across the bed and straight into my face. It tickles my nose, and I sneeze hard enough to wake myself properly.

“Right,” I mutter. “Today, we stop being haunted and start being productive.” Step one: Open all the windows. Step two: Fleetwood Mac. Loud. Step three: Tea. That feels like a solid plan for reclaiming my life.

The floor creaks under my feet as I wander through the cabin and push open the first window above the sink. Cool morning air rolls inside, carrying the smell of damp earth and sun-warmed leaves. I open the next window, then the next, until the whole place feels like it is breathing again. Nanna always said houses need air, just like people. My throat tightens, but I swallow it down. Nope. Not today. Today is not for sitting in my grief. Today is for cleaning.

Fleetwood Mac crackles to life from the old speaker on the shelf, and I turn it up until the music wraps around the wooden walls and pushes the stale quiet into the corners. Then the kettle goes on, I make my tea, and I get to work. I start by pulling down the little dried bundles tied with string, then gather up the jars of things that might once have been useful. I take the tiny bowls of salt from the corners, pull out the iron nails pushed into the door frames, and untie all the rowan tied above the doors with faded red thread. Cloth sachets hang in odd places all over the cabin, and I collect those too, piling them on the kitchen table one by one.

Every time I remove one of Nanna’s strange little protections, I feel lighter, like I’m clearing the old heaviness out with them. I know that sounds terrible. I loved her. I still love her. I miss her so much it can hit me in the chest over something as stupid as seeing her mug by the sink or one of her cardigans still hanging on the hook by the door. But I cannot live inside her rituals forever.

As a kid, I used to think Nanna made half of it up to stop me from running wild through the woods. She had so many rules, and none of them made sense. Never step outside barefoot after sunset. Never bleed in old places. Never follow a path if the birds go quiet. And whatever you do, never, ever enter a fairy ring. I assumed all of this came from being very old and very committed to a bit. 

I sweep some berries off the floor with my foot and move to the kitchen window, untie the tiny sachet hanging there, and toss it onto the growing pile on the table. 

“There,” I say. “Much less witchy already.”

Tea in hand, I stand in the middle of the cabin and look around. It’s still full of her, but honestly, if I have to keep cleaning right now, I might actually cry into the mop bucket. The woods sound far more appealing. I finish my tea, rinse the mug, and head for my room. I dig through my dresser until I find my favourite flared pants, soft with age and patterned with faded flowers. Nanna called them my moon child trousers. I pull them on, then tug a pale yellow shirt over my head. Across the front in peeling white letters, it says WORLD PEACE. Then I peel off my socks and toss them onto the bed. Today I need to feel the earth.

I grab my basket from the hook beside the door, step outside and smile. Warmth settles over me as the sun hits my skin. The boards are cool under my feet, and the rosemary and mint growing wild in the old herb bed smell so beautiful. I stand on the porch for a second and breathe it in. “Okay,” I murmur to the trees. “Let’s try this again.”

I follow the path that curves around the side of the cabin and slips into the woods. Straight away, the air cools under the shade, and the ground goes soft beneath my feet. I crouch beside the first bramble patch I find and start picking blackberries, dropping the ripest ones into the basket one by one. A few go straight into my mouth too, because Nanna always said berry bushes took a tax. “One for the basket, one for me,” I murmur. “Keeps things fair.” 

I keep walking once the basket has a layer of berries at the bottom. I pass the fallen log I used to balance on. The crooked birch with peeling bark. The little patch of blue flowers near the flat stone Nanna always told me not to sit on because some places belonged to things we never see.

The path slopes down toward the creek, and I follow it for a while, picking fruits from the trees as I go. A little rise ahead marks the edge of a clearing I know well. Mushrooms and wildflowers grow there if the season is right. Nanna hated that clearing. “Some places are doorways, Rae-girl. Don’t go stepping where the world feels too still.” I climb the rise anyway, because I am not eight anymore, and doorways, in this case, probably mean snakes or boggy ground.

The clearing is small, round, and drenched in sunlight, and there, tucked into the grass like something placed by careful hands, is a perfect ring of pale mushrooms. My eyebrows lift. “Well.” Little white flowers speckle the green inside the circle, and the grass there looks softer somehow. Brighter. I take a few steps closer, more amused than anything else. “Don’t enter the fairy ring.” Nanna’s voice plays in my mind. I smile and laugh under my breath. “You dramatic old woman.”

Then a breeze moves across my skin, cool enough to lift the tiny hairs on my arms, and my smile falters. The clearing feels… strange. I glance up into the trees. The birds have gone silent. Everywhere else in these woods, they never shut up. They chirp and argue and rustle and sing like tiny feathered lunatics. But here there is only the whisper of leaves and the sound of my own breathing. I look back at the ring of pale mushrooms. There’s a strip of sunlight between me and the nearest white cap. A soft laugh slips out of me. “Okay, if I step in there and nothing happens, I’m haunting you back.”