Not Here, Not There

Zora left the car door open, then forgot it.

The forest closed its mouth around her.

The lot ended at a warped board, a sun-faded map blurred until the trails ran together, colors washed pale as old sky. She stepped past it. Gravel gave way to soil. Soil softened to a mat of pine needles that cushioned her steps.

Two bends in the trail. She picked the one where the trees grew closer together. The trunks leaned in, limbs knotted overhead. Then the branches parted, a slit of light showing.

She paused. Branches stirred above, waiting.

She stayed as if stillness could starve whatever watched.

Images broke through anyway.

A white crib in a window, price tag tucked beneath the rail.

A couch at home, sunken in two places.

A door with her name on the glass, pen hovering over the line. Waiting to make it official.

A strand of moss dangled within reach. She raised a hand, lowered it. The strand swayed once, twice, then stilled. Whatever question it carried slipped loose.

The path wandered, then broke off into brush. She kept walking, even after the trail had vanished.

Bare prints appeared beside hers. Small. Heel to toe. She pressed her shoe into one; it consumed the print. The prints led forward, each step evenly spaced.

The trees opened to a room made of trunks. A girl stood inside it wearing a dress Zora recognized from a photograph: cotton with a faded spray of flowers, hem crooked where an aunt had grown tired of the needle. Her part was uneven, a faint burn where the hot comb had kissed too close.

In the child’s arms, a stuffed animal meant to be Bram the bear. Brown, round-headed, his belly seam long since split open.

The creature had a rabbit’s outline and the wrong river-blue. One button eye, too big. The other, cloudy as milk.

“Hey,” the girl said.

Zora stopped. She couldn’t think what to say.

“You left him once,” the girl said, shaking the rabbit by its ear. “At the laundromat. You cried until the woman with the red coin thing gave him back.”

Heat rose in her face: dryers, quarters, the woman’s laugh. But Bram had been a bear. Hadn’t he?

“I had a dog,” Zora said instead. “Patches. Tan. One ear up.”

The girl frowned, the look of someone fixing a mistake on the page.

“We loved him.”

The word we slid under her ribs.

A laugh rose somewhere. Hers, years old. Thin and bright before vanishing. Pine needles stirred, a quick presence passing through their silence.

“What if I don’t come back this time,” Zora said, low enough the trees could claim the line.

“You left once,” the girl said, gap-smile steady.

“You always came back.”

The rabbit’s blue ear brushed the child’s cheek as she hugged it. Zora reached without meaning to. The fabric had the thin give of something washed too many times, softer than it should have been. The color stayed wrong.

She stepped past the child.

The bare prints followed for a while, fitting themselves into the right-hand margin of her stride. At the edge where needles deepened to a darker litter, they stopped, toes aimed forward, consent ending at a border.

Zora went on. The prints did not.

The ground lifted, then rolled into a shallow dip. Something moved ahead, slow and heavy, pressing through the brush. Patient.

She stepped into a clearing. A doe waited, one body carrying two heads.

A single chest, ribs, and flank moved in unison. But above rose twin necks, twin muzzles, twin sets of eyes.

One head turned left, toward a narrow trail disappearing into a press of trees. The other faced right, where the woods opened into light.

Both watched her. Both counted her pauses.

Zora set her fists at her sides. The right head blinked. She raised her chin. The left flicked an ear. The air pressed against her chest until she couldn’t step forward.

Her breath shortened.

The left head lowered its jaw. Small, neat teeth flashed white. The right turned slightly, answering an instruction Zora couldn’t hear.

Together, the two muzzles reached and pressed against her hand. Warmth. Breath. A soft insistence.

It felt like a knot pulling tight under her skin, binding her in place.

Then came a memory she could feel more than see.

An empty hallway at two in the morning. The hush between a partner’s sigh and turn. The weight of a small head in the crook of an elbow that her body knew before her mind agreed.

Another memory followed, clear as the first.

A small desk in a strange city.

A keycard light blinking green.

Her signature on a page that opened a door no one else would open for her.

The trees around the clearing leaned closer. Their branches creaked. Waiting for her to move.

“I don’t know,” she said. Her chest didn’t move. Like it forgot how.

The deer stamped. The ground answered. Both heads turned in mirror toward each other until the wet black of their noses nearly touched. Then they looked back to her. Their breath washed over her knuckles.

Between the left and right trails, a narrow seam of path opened, pine needles pressed flat where nothing had walked before.

She stepped into that seam. The trunks eased. The two-headed deer stayed where it was, four hooves planted, like a gate left open with care.

For twenty paces the way felt true. Then the forest changed its mind. Light and shade bending the trunks into a new alignment. The pine needle-floor lifted into a low ridge, dipped, rose again.

The silence thickened. A house rose from the clearing.

Its siding had no color. The door had a hand-lettered note: Ring if you like.

Inside, light lingered without glare.

On one side, a desk stacked with pages. Proposal stamped at the top. A pen uncapped beside a signature line written in a hand steadier than hers.

On the other side, a cradle rocked, hinges creaking once, then stopped.

A white thread snagged on the rail. She wound it until her finger purpled, then slipped it into her pocket.

“Will you tell me what to pick?” she asked.

A figure moved in the hall and paused. A woman with Zora’s shoulders and a patience shaped by years of use. Silver threaded her hair. She watched Zora, her expression half-welcome, half-warning.

“That’s not how it works,” the woman said. “Want sneaks in from the corners. By the time you notice, it’s already cut through.”

The cradle rocked once more. Until nothing moved.

Zora wound the thread in her pocket once more and left.

Outside, stones lined a path that had not existed when she arrived. For three steps the small bare prints returned beside hers, heel and toe aligned, then stopped again.

Not vanishing this time so much as turning, a hesitation stamped into the dirt. The toes that had faced forward now angled back toward the rooms of trees.

Zora crouched. Each print pooled with shadow where pressure had been. She touched one. The dirt kept its shape under her finger. Solid as wet clay drying.

She rose and walked on. The forest thinned. Bark roughened, posts in a fading fence. The branches pulled back. Ahead, gravel glittered in the open.

At the place where needles gave way to gravel, she tied the white thread to a twig and tugged once.

The knot held.

Knots hold when fingers mean them.

A knot remembers what hands forget.

“Zora,” a voice called. It came from ahead. It came from behind. Her name carried two faces: her mother in a doorway, a partner calling in a grocery aisle. Both at once.

“Here,” she said. The forest held the word like a bead, deciding where to thread it.

She stepped into gravel. The car waited, door still open.

On the dashboard lay a folded note, a grocery list in her handwriting: bread, apples, soap. In the corner, a signature curled. Her name. Neater than she remembered. A white loop cinched around the Z, pulling the letter taut.

She sat, the seat molding to her.

She inserted the key into the ignition, paused.

The rear seatbelt lay coiled and tidy, empty. In the mirror, trees crowded the frame, refusing to recede.

She turned the key. The engine started, unfamiliar.

In the rearview, her child-self sat in the back, rabbit in her arms, one cloudy eye fixed where Zora’s reflection should have been.

Her heart knocked once. Then again.

She turned. The seat sagged with only fabric, creased where no one sat.

Outside, the forest leaned close, listening.

She faced forward. Hands at quarter to three. The wheel vibrated to her bones. The knot on the note quivered, paper fibers drawn tight, holding more than they should.

She eased the car forward. Gravel popped. The trees receded, or the road pulled her on. In the mirror, the path remained.

The white thread at the forest’s edge caught the light, then let it go.

Her name sounded again, softer now, closer. A child’s laugh crackled in the engine’s hum, sharp as glass, then gone.

Zora smiled, careful, then wider. Both felt right.

She drove. The forest held close enough to follow, if it chose.

The knot would remember, until her hands chose what to keep.