Beyond the Trees

Trigger Warning: This story includes themes of violence and mental health.

The car ribboned down the road. Trees and streams blurred by out the window. Pleasant sounds filled her ears. Forest noise. Natural static. Squirrels scurried overhead, scrounging for food to take back to their hoards. Insects chirped and buzzed, not yet scared away by the late autumn chill, singing their last songs before hiding away for the winter.

The leaves had started to change. Some stayed green. Others transformed into oranges, yellows, and reds. They were at a strange point in their life. Bright and bold. Showing the world their true colors before they shriveled up and floated to the earth. Dead. Maybe that's why they did it. They knew the end was coming so they showed the world what they could do before they were gone for good. Dying wouldn't be so bad if it could happen that way. Floating on the breeze. Quiet. Showing the world how beautiful you could be.

She didn’t know how long she’d been driving. Miles and minutes seemed to disappear out here, insignificant when viewed against the massive scale of the forest. Casper Springs had always been that way. No matter which way you looked, trees blocked the horizon. The town was trapped. An imperceptible speck among endless acres of pine, maple, and oak.

Across town, hidden among the trees was the old lumber mill, silhouetted against the melted sherbet sunset. A sad structure. Eerie streaks of rust-red smeared down corrugated metal. Triple smokestacks shot above the tree line. ‘Casper Springs Lumber’ ran down the length of the tallest tower in faded white paint. You could read the tower from anywhere in town, a constant reminder to everyone of what they no longer had.

The mill went belly up in April of ‘97. Open one day, closed the next. The state passed a bill to regulate heavy timber cutting. Smaller mills like the one in Casper Springs turned defunct. Three thousand people out of a job. Between 1997 and 1999, the town’s population shrunk from nine thousand to just shy of five. Still the mill sat up on its ridge. A long dead God watching over his domain.

The mill wasn’t the only God in this forest. Everyone knew about them. Heard them in the rippling of a stream, the wind through leaves. Watching. Observing. Allowing the town to build itself up before tearing it down. God giveth, God taketh away.

The people left in town fell into two categories. The mansion dwellers down on main street, old money and powerful connections, and normal people, too old or too afraid to move away. Retirees and veterans, living off social security checks. Parents and families, too poor to do anything but pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get over it. 

She supposed she fell into the second category, though she wasn’t particularly old or poor. Thirty-five. An age that seemed to put you on the threshold of death’s door when she was a teenager. She had some money- a couple thousand. The scraps of what her father left when he passed. He died alongside the mill. He’d given forty years before being dropped in the gutter, no severance, no thank you for your time, no nothing.

Twenty years he’d been gone. Twenty years she’d lived without him. Without anyone. She remembered when he got sick. The ache that filled her when she saw him in the hospital. Dread. Emptiness. They sent him home after a few days. There was nothing they could do. The doctors had come to the consensus that it was time for him to die. Nothing to be done about it.

He spent his last weeks in bed. Refusing to eat. Crying out in his sleep. The sadness in her shifted. Dread became frustration. Emptiness, indignation. No sadness left. Only anger. Anger that she was forced to watch him decay. Watch him die, knowing she couldn’t do anything. Anger at needing him to live. One more day. One more hour. Needing him to suffer because when he was gone loneliness would devour her. Burrow beneath skin, gnaw at bone, nest in the hollow behind her ribs.

She was lost then, still lost now. Lost for years. Trapped in a cage of trees, unsure if there was anything beyond them.

Fear swelled in her chest, squeezed, pins and needles spreading to her fingertips. She drove. Turn after turn, taking her farther from what was familiar- the remains of a town she had never left. Decades old regrets. Feeling sorry for her own thoughts. A girl’s thoughts, so far removed from the woman she was now.

She focused on the road, headlights cutting through the heavy grey shroud that set in somewhere between sunset and night. Fog swirled from the pavement, phantoms of mist drifting through the trees, haunting the town. She would drive into the night, keep driving.  Adrift in the trees until she stumbled upon what she needed. She’d know when she found it.

Her eyes flicked to the rearview, overcome with the sensation of being watched. She was familiar with the feeling. The rumble in her gut. The flutter in her chest. The itch on the back of her neck where unwanted eyes bore into her flesh. The only thing in the mirror was the churning tempest of fog left in her wake, her own eyes staring back, bloodshot, damp with tears. There was no one behind her. How could there be? There was no one out here. That’s why she’d come.

She’d heard them calling her. For years now their voices had wormed into her mind, wriggled through her skull, squirmed in the soft pulsing grey matter beneath. She heard them in birdsong, the patter of rain- beauty embedded in the chaos.

They told her to join them. Take to the trees. Be one with the forest. Be free.

The night lost its grey, transitioned to black. Pure dark. The dark before starlight and torches. Before man discovered the warmth of fire. True dark. Cold. Ancient.

She peered into the darkness. Boundless. Infinite. Stretched in all directions until the darkness was so complete you became one with the universe. Floating in nothingness. Weightless. Burdenless.

She felt those eyes on her again. Saw the trees. Drooping branches like long gnarled fingers swayed in the breeze, beckoned. Her mind drifted, transposed between then and now. Here and there. Past. Present. Future. All the same. We never change. Never grow. We sit idle as life passes by. Waiting to be saved. No one comes.

Her eyes returned to the road. She slammed on the brakes as her headlights illuminated the deer. The car began to skid, brakes screaming, heart pounding. She took in all the details the moment before the car began to spin. A huge buck, at least seven feet from the ground to the tips of his massive antlers. Blood matted the fur of its broad neck. Strips of gore stretched across the razor points of its forked antlers. He stared at her with small, wet eyes, soulless and black. God’s eyes.

The wheels screeched as she turned into the skid. Too late. The car slid off the road, collided with a tree. Shattered glass. Blood.

Her eyes lost focus, black pressed in from the edges of her consciousness. Before she faded, she saw the light. Brilliant and bright as it sliced through the darkness of the forest. The buck approached, silhouetted against the light, ready to bring her back. Back to the forest where she would lie forever among the moss. Entangled in ancient roots until she was one with the earth. Back home, to the place she was meant to be. Lost. Finally found.