This was before she knew about magic. Before she was pissed off because her mother told her she couldn’t attend Jenny Mulvey’s sixteenth birthday party. (To be fair, she’d come home stinking of vodka the last time.) It was before she snuck out of the back door of the basement and crept across the quiet, suburban lawn without saying goodbye to her mother. (She would always regret not saying goodbye to her mother.) Before she took the shortcut through the woods, the one she’d taken a thousand times, the one her mother always warned her against taking.

It was before she became lost and couldn’t find her way out, even after she turned around, abandoned her pursuit of the party, gave up on the idea of ever kissing a boy beneath the fluorescent kitchen lights. Before she imagined her own basement door was a lighthouse leading her through the dark, her mother the keeper. Before the trees shifted around her and she found herself in an older forest. Before the tall pines stole her shadow and she came across the witch who whispered the secret of how to steal it back. It was before she believed refastening her shadow was her key to returning home, to finally seeing her mother again. It was before she followed the witch’s instructions and found the thorn of a particular flower in a particular briar, before she pricked her thumb over a dry patch of dirt and let three drops of blood drip onto the ground. Before the column of gray smoke blossomed in front of her. Before she thought, That isn’t my shadow, before it reared up and plunged straight into her chest, where her heart lay beating its fragile, frantic rhythm. Before she realized that perhaps the witch did not have her best interests at heart and the smoke pulled her, scared and gasping, deeper into the woods, straight to the girl locked at the top of the tower.

It was before she wrestled with the smoke inside of her and rescued the girl from her terrible fate. (“Sarah,” said the girl, as if waking from a dream. “My name was Sarah.”) Before they climbed down from the tower together, before they looked into each other’s eyes and before they braided each other’s hair. Before she felt the gray smoke still nestled in her ribcage, pulling at her, plucking the strings of her fates, but she wanted to stay here with Sarah, she didn’t want to leave again. Before Sarah found a dusty tome that taught her how to exorcize the smoke. Before Sarah fed her the heart of a lizard under the light of the full moon. Before she regurgitated the smoke, a gray cloud pouring from her mouth, and before it lay in front of her like an organ, wet and glistening and pulsing. Before it sank back into the ground, and Sarah kissed her forehead and said, “Now we’ve both saved each other.”

It was before she and Sarah sat side by side at the top of the hill and watched the Pleiades blossom as the sun sank down, before she looked at Sarah and thought of everything that had come to pass, and all she could think to say was, “I wish you could meet my mother.”

This is before: the light filters down like a dream and the house still seems too big for her to ever imagine that the world might feel small. She’s tucked into a bed of red leaves on the front lawn. There’s a leg pressed against her leg, and she knows it’s her mother sitting beside her. Later, there will be a slice of apple pie and she’ll lay under a blanket on the couch with a book, the dog swishing his tail, the wind stirring the willow branches against the bay window, her mother’s knitting needles clicking endlessly. As she sits on the hill with Sarah, she can almost feel the dry leaves shifting against her, her mother’s palm on her back, the tag on the collar of her jacket. She wonders if her mother can see the same stars. She remembers before, when she could not imagine wanting anything else.