🌲 Out of the Woods

The night the trees started whispering my name, I knew something had shifted. The forest didn’t do that for everyone. Some folks could walk beneath its tangled canopy for a lifetime and hear nothing but wind. Others, like me, got claimed. Gathered up. Folded in. I guess that’s what happens when you grow up at the edge of a place locals call “the maze with a pulse.”

People joked about that name, but not really. The elders never set foot past the first ring of pines. Even the park rangers kept to the outer trails, always telling campers the same half-laughing warning, “Stay visible.” Nobody wanted to test the deeper paths. That’s why my family was always the odd one out. My father was one of those in-between souls, half skeptical, half convinced that the land could think. He’d say, “You don’t need faith or disbelief. You just need respect.”

I lost him three years ago. And because grief messes with your logic, I returned to the one place that could match the heaviness in my chest. The woods behind our cabin. The ones that swallowed sound. The ones that either held you or spat you back out.

That was mistake number one.

Or maybe blessing number one.

Still deciding.

I left the cabin around dusk, that eerie hour when the sky goes bruised purple and the moon plays coy. I wasn’t even planning to wander. I only wanted to stand among the trees for a moment, maybe let them wrap my memories in quiet. But the forest had other plans. It tugged. Nudged. Whispered.

I followed.

At first, it was fine. Warm breeze. Soft leaves. A path so familiar I could walk it blindfolded. But then I crossed the old creek bed, the place where Dad always stopped us and said, “Anything past here and you’re not visiting the woods anymore. You’re entering them.”

Yeah… I crossed it anyway.

The air cooled. The light dimmed. Pine needles muffled each step in that way that makes you hyper-aware of your own heartbeat. And then the forest did the thing I’d tried to forget it could do. It shifted. Paths rearranged. Branches curved. Echoes multiplied.

I wasn’t lost.

I was being moved.

After maybe an hour of drifting deeper, I spotted something impossible. A glow. A soft, wavering ribbon of light that didn’t look natural but didn’t look artificial either. It was the color of candle flame and moonlight combined. My breath caught, because my father used to tell a story about that very thing.

He called it a “welcome,” though he never explained to what.

As I stepped closer, the glow stretched into a shape. A doorway made of thin, trembling light balanced between two leaning pines. The forest held its breath. So did I.

When I crossed its threshold, the world didn’t change all at once. It shifted gradually, like someone turning down the volume on everything that wasn’t meant to be heard here. The wind faded. The weight of the trees softened. A new smell entered the air, sweet and cold. A memory smell.

My dad’s cologne.

I swear it.

And then I saw him.

He stood a few feet ahead, exactly as he looked the year before the cancer. Healthy. Tan. Laughing at something I couldn’t hear. It was like watching the past leak into the present. My chest tightened. I froze. Every part of me screamed to run to him, throw my arms around him, beg him to stay.

But instinct held me back. This wasn’t him. Not really.

It was the woods speaking.

“Why now?” I whispered.

He didn’t answer. The image only smiled, then tilted his head the way Dad always did when he waited for me to understand something on my own. Then he lifted a hand and pointed behind me.

I turned.

And that’s when I realized I wasn’t alone.

A girl stepped forward from the swaying glow. She looked about ten years old, wearing a faded blue raincoat and muddy yellow boots. Her hair was tangled and her eyes were tired. She looked like she’d been wandering for days.

“Are you real?” I asked without thinking.

She shrugged, which was not comforting.

“I’m supposed to follow you,” she said softly. “That’s what happens after you see him.”

“Who?”

“The one you miss.”

Ice rippled down my spine.

I swallowed hard.

“Okay. Follow me where?”

She didn’t blink. “Out.”

“Out?”

“Out of the woods.”

The phrase slammed through me like a door swinging open. My dad used to say that too, whenever life felt overwhelming. “We’ll get out of the woods,” he’d promise, even when he knew he wouldn’t.

The girl tugged my sleeve. “Come on. Before it notices you.”

“Before what notices me?”

She shook her head. “Just move.”

Let me be clear, I hadn’t signed up for any of this. But survival tends to override analysis. And this kid looked like someone who belonged to the forest in a way that terrified me. So I followed her.

We walked through corridors of trees that bent in shapes they shouldn’t bend. Shadows stitched themselves together like living threads. The whole place felt aware. Observing us. Testing us.

The girl kept glancing over her shoulder.

“You need to stop thinking about him,” she whispered. “It hears thoughts like that.”

“My father?”

“The thing pretending to be him.”

Yeah. That shut my brain down real quick.

“Why me?” I kept asking. “Why am I seeing this?”

“Because you’re loud,” she said simply. “People who carry grief glow in here. It tries to use that.”

“Use it for what?”

“To keep you.”

Keep.

As in… never leave.

My stomach dropped.

The deeper we walked, the more the forest revealed its true nature. The trees leaned inward, listening. The ground pulsed faintly, as though something beneath it breathed. And every so often, I felt a tug at my mind, a soft suggestion: Stay. Rest. Let go.

It didn’t feel evil.

It felt seductive.

Like the grief-shaped comfort of giving up.

“I don’t think it wants to hurt us,” I murmured.

“That’s how it works,” she replied. “It shows you what you want. And then you forget how to walk away.”

I hated how much that made sense.

After what felt like hours, the trees finally thinned. I saw a sliver of moonlight that didn’t flicker unnaturally. Real moonlight. A way out. The girl tightened her grip on my hand and pulled harder.

Almost there.

Almost safe.

Almost out of the woods.

But the moment we stepped toward the boundary, the forest shifted again. A figure appeared ahead of us. My father’s silhouette. But not still, not gentle like before. This one was wrong. Taller. Sharper. Tilting its head in jagged, unnatural increments. Watching us.

Every nerve in my body screamed.

The girl whispered, “Don’t look at it. Walk.”

I tried.

But the thing began speaking in my father’s voice.

“Stay,” it said. “You’re tired. You don’t have to keep going.”

My throat burned. I kept moving.

“You don’t owe the world anything anymore,” it coaxed. “Stay. For me.”

That nearly broke me.

Because grief talks exactly like that.

Soft.

Convincing.

Soothing in the worst way.

I stumbled, but the girl steadied me.

“Look at me,” she demanded.

I did.

“You miss him. I know. I miss mine too.” Her voice cracked. “But you can’t stay here. And neither can I. We’re going out together.”

That snapped something inside me. Strength, maybe. Anger, definitely. I squeezed her hand so tight she winced, then we both bolted.

The trees shrieked.

The ground trembled.

The figure stretched toward us like a shadow trying to snag our ankles.

But we didn’t stop.

And then—like crossing a threshold—the world shifted back. Crisp air. Real stars. The forest behind us quiet again, the way normal forests are supposed to be.

We’d made it.

Out of the woods.

When I turned to the girl to thank her, she was gone.

Not vanished.

Just… released.

Maybe the forest had held her too.

Maybe freeing me freed her.

Either way, the silence that followed wasn’t haunting. It was peaceful.

I started walking back toward the cabin, shaky but steady. The trees no longer whispered my name. They just stood, tall and old, as if nodding at what I’d survived.

And for the first time in years, grief felt lighter.

Like I’d carried it to the edge of something that finally let me put some of it down.

I stepped onto my porch.

Looked once more at the dark treeline.

And whispered to the night,

“I’m out. I get it now. I’m out.”

The woods didn’t answer.

It didn’t need to.