?You?ve been away for far too long, Inaiah.?

?I know.?

?It?s good to see you.?

?You too.?

Inaiah stood at the base of a tree made of sprawling white branches that reached up to the sky like the hands of a great skeleton. Its trunk seemed a marrying of multiple trees twisting around one another. He smiled and put a hand on the pale bark and closed his dark eyes when he felt the thrumming of life beneath his palm. It was warm to the touch.

?It?s almost time, you know.?

?I know,? Inaiah said.

The Girl walked up to the tree and mirrored Inaiah?s stance. She too smiled and closed her eyes, which were pale gray.

?We?ve been waiting for a long time for this,? she said.

A breeze stirred the air and Inaiah opened his eyes to watch her. She was beautiful in an ethereal sort of way. Her skin was pale, her hair long and dark and caught up in the wind. It was tossed and tangled but even then, she retained a sense of elegance that he never could have mustered himself. She wore a simple, white dress that stopped at her ankles and left her arms, which held a multitude of scars ranging in length and width, bare. It seemed too thin for the cold, but she seemed un-bothered by it. Maybe the warmth from the tree kept her comfortable, Inaiah didn?t know.

?I know,? he said. ?You?ll only have to wait a short while longer.?

His hand was still on the tree and he studied it thoughtfully. There were scars on his knuckles from a time long past, when he was just a man who enjoyed the occasional drunken brawl and got into a little too much trouble once or twice. The back of his hands, beneath his knuckles, had burns on them. He imagined the similar burns on his palm and thought hard about the cause of those marks. Then he took his hand away from the tree and stepped back, looking up through the canopy of tangled limbs and leaves at the starry sky above. And he smiled again.

?He was here not long back, wasn?t he?? Inaiah asked.

?How can you tell??

?I can see his star from here. It wasn?t there last time I came.?

The Girl looked up and stepped back as well.

?I never noticed that.?

?You never look up at the stars?? Inaiah looked at her, his face expressionless. ?You?re too busy tending to the tree. Always with your nose in the dirt.?

The Girl smiled.

?I have to go. I?ll come back to visit you again, soon. I?ve missed you.?

She approached the tree and turned around, leaning back against it with her arms spread out to either side and she looked at him without saying a word. He could read the action as easily as any book, and he nodded and took another step back.

?Just a little while longer.?