I didn’t notice any of it.

The woods were as they always were in late October. My feet crunched the dried orange, red, and yellow leaves that littered the ground. Cold air whispered against my cheek, reminiscent of the days when I would spend hours wandering this place. Every once in a while, a squirrel scurried up a tree, alarmed by my careless footfalls that landed a little too close to home. Jays called out to each other from the high branches of douglas firs and big leaf maples, seeming to echo throughout the empty forest. I know, logically, that all of this must have been going on around me, like it always was. In the moment, though, it barely crossed my mind.

Had the woods always been this dark?

My body took me on the regular paths that I knew, past the mossy stones in the creek bed and the hill covered in sword ferns. Past the places I usually would sit for hours and just watch the way the forest around me moved. If I sat still long enough, occasionally a deer would walk past me without noticing, or a squirrel would come sit only a few feet away from me. That day, sitting still was not an option for me.

I came upon something new.

That’s not entirely true. I’d been here a thousand times before without issue. But now, before me, stood a tree, burned and blackened and broken at the top. A tree I’d seen a thousand times before, waving and green and altogether alive. My fingers instinctively reached out to touch the bark and came away dark with ash.

Is this what it took to gain my attention? A dead thing, staring me down in a place where I did not expect it to? A place where I had been safe?

I stood there for a long time before my knees finally crumpled into the forest floor, the moisture from the earth seeping into my jeans and chilling my bones. My mouth was dry. Maybe a deer or squirrel crossed my path and took a moment to contemplate the statue-like image of a person who was kneeling, out of place in the middle of the forest. I have no idea if they did. I wouldn’t have noticed it.

I don’t think I’ll ever go back through that section of the woods.

Things were quiet in the moonlight.

She’d always appreciated it, to the best of her memory. Once the city had gone to sleep for the evening and the flickering street lights set the buildings in a hazy glow, everything seemed different. The deafening hum of industrialization that made its way into every crevice of the city’s being became subdued and almost peaceful.

Not that things were quite as loud here amongst the cool gray stones and well-kept lawn of her new home, anyways. Here, the most noise came from the unfortunate souls who had recently come upon a loss. She tried not to be annoyed by them so much. It wasn’t their faults, she chided herself. Let them be. But every time this happened, she found herself annoyed and decided to take sanctuary back under the damp earth, near where she had lived so long ago.

This night, she sat as always in the branches of the great oak tree that marked the center of her new home. From there she could see the moonlight reflected off of the smooth surfaces of the curved and polished stones, the gentle waving of the grass in the breeze. The man had already come by to take away the flowers and other offerings that people had brought during the day. Other pale blue, shimmering shapes floated amongst the wind. They could not go beyond the iron fence that enclosed the stones and lawn. Some felt trapped by this, as if in a cage wrought by death. She simply found her peace in the branches of the oak tree.