Pencil sketch of a mandala design

Inside, you spread the paper on the kitchen table and set the compass point in the middle. Start small, you tell him. A dot is a promise you keep for the whole drawing. You draw the central flower first, six teardrops leaning into one another like women at a well. He asks why the star needs eight points, and you say the wood will answer that if he waits, because the beeches throw eight long shadows across the lane at noon in October. He doesn't believe you, so you carry on outward, each lotus petal a little larger than the last, until the page is crowded with leaves that look ready to lift off the table.

When the lamp is lit he asks what the ring of dots is for. A fence, you say, to keep the wild out and the good in. He counts them, forty-eight, and says that is far too many for a fence. You agree. Then you show him the thing nobody else bothered to see: the scalloped border, traced slowly with a thumb, bends exactly where the lane curves past the old oak, the place where the village stopped being afraid of the dark and began leaving bread on the stump.

Tobias goes home with the drawing folded into his jacket. The next morning you walk the lane before the mist lifts and find forty-eight pale stones set along the verge, one for each dot, each one beaded with dew. At the oak, eight small boot prints lead off into the beeches, and somewhere past them a boy's voice is counting, reaching eight, then starting again.