KING OF THE WOOD
He was already laughing when I arrived, and didn’t wait, but charged off the trail and into the wood. I stayed where I was and watched him go. It wasn’t long before he found himself tangled in brambles, caught in the grip of a million toothy twigs. But it wasn’t him they had, it was just his clothes that were snagged, and he slipped out of them as sweet as a pea from its pod. And then there he was in his emperor’s suit, pale and shining, toes in the leaf bed and arms proud as branches, trumpeting the joy that’s born when a bedrock belief steps into the light.