Hello wonderful readers! I hope your November was lovely. I need to thank the wonderful scholar and poet Seamus Heaney for the excerpt from the beginning of Beowulf that you find at the end of this chapter. He is the translator of the bilingual edition that I quoted. Alice's own translation that she would be reading from is an older one that came out in 1922 for accuracy purposes, but I really like Heaney's translation so I'm using that as the text for her to read aloud. I own nothing. The English words are all Heaney's.

Alice felt thunder rumble throughout the hotel, the reverberations of the clap tumbling through the bottoms of her feet. She stepped each of her stocking toes into brown kitten heels, and stared into the full-length stand alone mirror. She hadn't worn this morning dress since Charlotte, but she relished the opportunity to dress like a lady in front of the Bondurant boys, instead of running around the station in riding pants and field boots, looking like she was off to vote for the bizarre, zealous Adolf Hitler as Chancellor. She didn't like that man. Something made her very uneasy about him. Just like Special Deputy Rakes. She smoothed her peach crepe dress, it's double collar folding down four different angular directions as it dipped down in a V-shape from her neck. She shook out the pooled fabric ending just above her ankles, making sure the layers of crepe were falling right. She checked her winged cuffs for crispness and suddenly wished she had dressed for a ride. With a sigh, she stuck her cloche hat on her head, carefully navigating around the curls she'd pinned in a roll to the back of her neck in the style. Then she slipped on a pair of cream colored netted wrist length gloves, picked up her small wicker clutch bag, her pencil, notebook, and Frederick Klaeber translation of Beowulf, and left for her short walk to the hospital.

When Forrest awoke the morning after surgery, he immediately felt a dull, throbbing pain at his throat. He'd spent a miserable few hours since his normal rising time of six o'clock watching a pair of nurses and his doctor fuss over him, walking around the bed, gingerly peeling the gauze away from his wound to apply salve and check the stitching, reminding him every time he started to grumble that he wasn't allowed to talk yet. They had allowed Howard and Jack in to see him that morning, and Jack had been his usual, overly chatty self. Howard, quieter than usual, hadn't apologized to Forrest, but he could tell his older brother had sincere regrets about allowing himself to be otherwise engaged when he was supposed to be back in time to have prevented the carnage the aftermath of which he found himself surrounded by. By near nine they had gone, off on a mission to run the station even half as well as Forrest could when he was home. Howard had to tend all five stills, not to mention see to the rest of the station's business, while Jack would do his best to assess where he was needed, and try to help without getting underfoot. A nurse came to see Forrest, and gave him some medication for his pain, setting up a small glass bottle to drip into his IV, and soon he'd drifted back to sleep. Forrest so infrequently had time for extra hours of sleep, he nearly felt a stab of guilt at returning to rest halfway through what could have been a productive morning, but the seductive lure of rest and the gentle lull in pain offered by the medication caused him little pause.

Queue Composer Jeff Beale - "The Silent Film"

Then he dreamt. He was in the woods near Blackwater Station, searching for a still he knew he'd placed there. Though he knew nearly every inch of those woods, and knew himself to be near home, he did not recognize the path he walked on. He would not have recognized it in waking, for it was only in the dream that it existed. It was warm there, a soft breeze blowing through the trees and whistling above in the hills past rock outcroppings, as the sun moved slowly to set in the west and pull the light lazily past with it, until it disappeared entirely. He was lumbering along the path he knew lead to the still he searched for, but as he got closer to where he imagined it would be, the objective started to feel less and less like a still, though in the dream he knew he was searching for something, and couldn't imagine he'd be looking for anything else. It was then that he heard the soft crackle of a branch breaking underfoot.

There was Alice, ahead of him on the path, in an emerald evening dress he thought he recognized, and he did, as the one she'd worn to Carrie's party, though neither in waking nor sleeping would he have remembered ever having seen it before. Her hair, just as in life, a mess of different colors somewhere between gold, light brown, and red, dependent upon the light, shone as the colors of the fading sun shimmered over it, and Forrest's breath hitched as he realized she'd done nothing to it, only let it spill down her shoulders in soft, unruly waves. She was barefoot, walking in the woods as though it were the most normal of things. And when she saw him, she smiled. In his dreams, Forrest was uninhibited, and, it seemed neither was she. He stalked to her, covering a great deal of ground in only three strides, encircling her waist in his big, sturdy arms.

"My wild girl." He grumbled. He realized then that she seemed an extension of the woods around them. Perfectly at home.

"I've been waiting for you." She said. She placed her hands gently on his shoulders.

"Yeah?" He mumbled.

"Mmmm-hmmm" she assented, wriggling blissfully against him. He even thought she might be teasing him a little, mimicking his mono syllables. Everything in Forrest caught fire.

"You should be careful out here," she purred into his neck.

"I aint scared o'them." He said, his deep voice a defensive protest.

She laughed, a seductive form of one he'd heard before.

"I wasn't talking about them." Somehow, though he knew he'd been holding her tight as can be against him, she managed to wriggle away, and, teasing, scamper off down the path, her flirtatious glance over her shoulder a clear invitation for him to follow. He pushed off his foot in an attempt to go after her, but never let his foot fall.

Queue Paramore - "Hate to See Your Heart Break"

He was awake before it found purchase on the ground, and when he blinked and adjusted his eyes to the surroundings of his hospital room, there she was, sitting there in the wooden chair by his bed, in a pretty little dress, her hands covered in gloves, unlike so many of the women he knew, as she stared down at a hardcover book in her lap. Her ankles, he noticed, were crossed around one another, off to the side, demurely. He wasn't about to move his head or his neck to look down, or his hands, lest she detect his movement in her periphery, but he hoped that their pleasurable, if fictional contact in his dreams hadn't elicited the type of response it usually did when he allowed his mind to stray concerning her. Particularly after dreams of her. And, sometimes, to his embarrassment, he'd awoken in so cumbersome a condition he'd be forced to remain in bed until he had remedied the situation. But she didn't seem to notice he was awake. Perhaps if he had…responded he could lay here until any evidence had gone away. But it was unlikely. He had free license to stare at her straight on without her noticing. She sat, enthralled, her eyes pouring over the pages between her hands, and he thought, not for the first time, that her pretty, round face was the most beautiful thing he'd ever laid eyes on. Then she looked up, as she seemed to feel his eyes on her. She grinned, just for him, and his heart ached.

"You're awake!" she said.

"Whatchu got there?" He grumbled.

"Hey! They said no talking." She gave him a feigned disappointed look, and smiled.

"I will tell you, just don't aggravate that wound." She pointed at him with her finger, making a silly face so he could see she was only partially serious. She located the ribbon she was using for a bookmark and placed it in the page she'd been reading, then she folded the book over and smoothed her gloves over the cover.

"This was my father's. It's called Beowulf. It's a story from England, so old nobody knows who wrote it, but it's set in Scandinavia, where Far was from. Beowulf is a war hero….his whole family is revered, actually…. from what is now Sweden who comes to the aid of the Jutes…Jutland is part of Denmark where my father was from…."

She paused as she thought about her father and the obsession he had with Scandinavian folklore. She hadn't even noticed she'd spoken aloud the Danish word 'Far' that she used for father. Thinking of him was difficult enough without sentimental ruminations over the stories he'd told her as a child. She took a breath.

"Anyway… he comes to the great hall of Heorot in Denmark to kill a monster everyone else has died trying to kill, and there is a dragon, and treasure" she realized how silly the story must be sounding to a sensible, grown man like Forrest.

"…. it's a legend. I thought it was fitting, given the circumstances." She smiled at him. He looked straight ahead, concentrating on remaining expressionless so she wouldn't notice just how moved he was that she thought of him in relation to something she obviously held so dear.

"I haven't read it in five years." She continued. "But I've only been reading the history bit whilst you were asleep, I haven't started the story yet." She stopped and, in her agitation, ran her fingertips gingerly around the edges of the hardcover.

"I was waiting for you to wake up. Maybe I could read aloud? There's plenty of fighting?" She looked at him helplessly, as though she knew how silly the idea was but was hoping he'd take it the way she'd intended, as something she loved that she could share with someone she admired and felt similarly about.

"Well go on'en." Forrest mumbled.

Alice smiled and settled into her seat, opening the book and leafing through until she found where to begin. Her soft voice filled the hospital room, her Virginia accent all the more pronounced since she'd come back, her eyes meeting Forrest's when she happened to look up during an important part of the story.

"So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by

and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.

We have heard of those princes' heroic campaigns.

There was Sheild Sheafson, scourge of many tribes,

A wrecker of mead-benches,"

Forrest listened and watched her, grateful for an opportunity just to stare at her and listen to her voice, feeling not so guilty as he was certainly paying attention.

"rampaging among foes.

This terror of the hall-troops had come far…."

...and so the morning in Rocky Mount passed, melting into legend.