Arrival
A poem from the Appalachian Moon Witch universe
Sibyl Springs, Virginia looks, at first glance, like a place that simply decided to stop time—a mountain resort town of hot springs and colonnaded hotels, old money and older trees, the kind of place where families have been summering for generations and everyone seems to know everyone else’s name. What it doesn’t advertise is everything underneath that. The secret societies. The bloodlines that go back further than the town’s own recorded history. The things that have been carefully, deliberately hidden in plain sight for longer than anyone living can account for.
Twila Stith drove into all of that on a July afternoon, knowing none of it. Only that something in the hollow recognized her before she recognized it.
This poem is her arrival. In her own words.
Arrival
By Twila Stith
I did not come here to be healed.
I came because the only school that wanted me
sat in a mountain hollow I had been warned against
by the woman who raised me and the ghost of the one who didn’t.
Still, I wound down the road with the windows open,
summer pressing its whole green weight against my face,
the rhododendrons crowding the shoulder of the road
as if they had been waiting there a long time
and had grown impatient.
Something in the hemlock and the wet stone said you.
Not a welcome, exactly.
More the way a name sounds
in the mouth of someone who knows it too well,
but has been holding it back
for reasons they won’t explain.
The mineral breath of the hot springs
came to me first—sulfur and iron,
warm as an open hand,
rising into air so laden with July
it had no room for one more thing
and made room anyway.
Then the particular dark that lives at the foot of mountains—
not the honest dark of a city at four a.m.
but a dark with dominion and appetite,
a dark that reads you the way an animal does—
scent first, then stillness, then decision.
A thing I never knew I wanted.
The hotel rose from its hollow, red-bricked and colonnaded,
broad-shouldered against the mountain,
certain as the dead—
past the point of argument,
not surprised to see me.
The Appalachian Moon Witch Chronicles — Night of the Moon Witch, Night of the Mother, and the forthcoming Night of the Others — is a gothic folk horror series set in the Virginia mountains. The books are available on Amazon and your favorite retailers.
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