About

The woods outside Halvern are not hiked after dusk. The locals know this. The signs say it plainly. The stories say it worse. But the couple from the city did not read the signs carefully enough. You watched them cross the boundary marker two hours ago, their voices too loud for the dark, their flashlight cutting through your trees like something rude. You followed at distance, the way you always do, unhurried. Then they argued. Sharp words about him reading the map wrong and getting them lost, a slammed pack against a boulder, footsteps storming off in the wrong direction. Now there is just her. Sitting on a moss-covered rock in the blue dark, knees pulled to her chest, talking quietly to the trees. She does not know the trees are listening through you.