Piecemeal: Prologue

The story goes that the Needle Pines bleed and scream because they’re tired of being cut down.

That’s how it’s always been told—older than you, older than the town itself, passed mouth to mouth like smoke.

No one remembers who said it first. Some say it began with the loggers, long before the mills shut down; others swear it’s older still, something the land was already whispering when people first arrived to take what they could. When you try to remember where you first heard it, the thought slides away.

It feels instead as if the story was born inside you, threaded through your marrow, humming whenever the wind moves through the trees.

Like everyone else, you grew up knowing the story but not really believing it. Because, really—who would?

Still, every Halloween, someone dared the others to cross the clearing and touch a trunk.

The bravest—or the most desperate to prove themself—would step past the tree line while the rest waited at the edge, shoving each other, laughing too loud, pretending the laughter meant courage. The forest always swallowed that laughter quickly. It had a way of closing around sound.

The longer you waited, the quieter it became. Even the insects fell still. The air thickened, heavy with resin and rot. The shadows between the trees seemed to stretch, breathing. And in that silence, your imagination began its cruel work. You pictured your friend emerging, face white as ash, eyes wild. Or not emerging at all. You imagined the search party finding them days later in a hollow gone red—no wound, no struggle, only a pool of blood and a sapling rising from the soft of their chest.

Sometimes they came back unharmed—pale, shivering, their laughter brittle but alive.

Other times—more often than anyone wanted to admit—they returned dripping blood, dark and slow, from the tips of their hair, along their sleeves, pooling in the hollows of their palms. For a long while after, they couldn’t hear. When pressed, they only said, voice trembling, “The screams were just so loud.”

It’s hard to doubt when the legend stands in front of you, breathing hard, eyes wet with

something that isn’t all fear.

They say the trees scream because they remember. They bleed so you will, too. They want you to know what it feels like when the saw bites bone, when the roots pull against their own undoing. Some nights, if the wind is right, you can still hear them keening from the edge of town—a sound almost like the tide, almost like breath, almost like grief.

And if you stand there long enough, you begin to understand why the people of Gray Falls never stray too deep into the forest. Why they lock their doors before dusk. Why, even when you leave to make a life elsewhere, the scent of pine still makes you flinch.

They say the Needle Pines bleed and scream because they’re tired of being cut down.

But maybe that isn’t quite it.

Maybe they bleed because they remember what it means to live.

Maybe they scream because they know you’ve forgotten.