AnnouncementThe first six chapters are micro-chapters to get through some backstory and quickly onto the cozy stuff! Starting chapter 7, all chapters are longer, 2,500 words and up. ~Non (PS- the spice starts up in chapter 10.) Now

  The smile that came to my face came on easy. The sort of smile you’d have as a kid, and some of us as teenagers.

  The weather: gorgeous. Cotton candy clouds, more literally than figuratively, drifting along through the sky in powder blue, soft yellow, pink, vender. Sun cheerfully shining. Grass soaking up the rays and just seeming to sing.

  The butterflies: everywhere. Some of them nded on my arms, shoulders and head. They didn’t seem to mind the taste of me. All colors, all sizes, some zipping around fast and others zily fpping their way to wherever they needed to go.

  And the flowers…

  Like I said, easy smile.

  In the distance, a canopy of trees stretched out, but these were trees tall and… I don’t know how to expin it. Free? The trees seemed to be dancing, the way they grew up.

  I couldn’t put my finger on it at first, until I realized that every other tree I’d seen was desperate. Locked in a struggle for sunlight. Pushing against their neighbors. In conflict with the vines who wanted to climb up and strangle them.

  I’d gone canoeing a couple of times before my mom got sick, and a whole bunch of trees on the side of the river were leaning out over the river, trying to bance between grabbing up more sunlight and the chance that they’d pull free of the dirt and fall over. They all grew in a bow shape, a smooth arc upward. Trees were kind of uniform: they grew toward the sun.

  Not these trees. These trees seemed to boogie. Hip thrust out. Boughs off to one side, or like they were dabbing. I’d never seen anything like this, and it was both strange and amazing.

  Then there were the mushrooms.

  “Christopher?”

  “Hm? Oh, sorry.” I turned back to Regina, who was grinning like she knew exactly was happening in my mind.

  Regina stood next to me and took a great sniff of clear alien air. Her hands tightened around the big straps of her hiking backpack. She was carrying a load and a half, essentially, on account of my particur shortcoming. Still, it didn’t seem to bother her, having an extra twenty pounds of gear in her bag. She twirled in the meadow, surrounded by the butterflies and the cotton candy clouds and the boogie forest, grinning.

  “You don’t need to be sorry, Christopher,” she said. “Not one little bit. This pce… it’s infectious. It’s really something, isn’t it?”

  Her question seemed to give me permission to look around me yet again, let my gaze wander. The sky wasn’t blue. The leaves on the trees weren’t exactly green. Some of those trees had what looked like golden leaves. Others had teal-like leaves. And… did that tree not have leaves at all, but rge spheres made of summer green sprouting directly from the boughs?

  “It’s… amazing.”

  Remember this moment, because things get a little dark. Not dark in the here and now. If nothing else, the slight shimmer to the sky, the leaves glittering as they fluttered in the breeze, the sweet tang of the air, and the butterflies seeming to appraise me as they drifted by made all the suffering worth it.

  Super worth it.

  This is Christopher remembering his sense of wonder.