Aparra

At dusk, Aparra glows. The ghost gum's smooth white bark catches the last light and holds it — the whole trunk luminous against the darkening desert, a lantern no one lit. Travelers in the red center navigate by her kind; the lost ones simply walk toward the glow. Last autumn a child wandered from camp at twilight, and Aparra — who cannot move, being a tree — did the only thing she could: she shone a little brighter, or so the rangers swear. The child was found asleep at her roots at dawn. The Painted Bark faction, connoisseurs of surface, considers her their mystic: proof that appearance can be a kind of rescue. "I do not glow to be beautiful," she says, though she is. "I glow because the dark is large, and someone is always lost in it."