"WAIT!"

The locals won’t hike the trails on this particular mountain. Legend, maybe; superstition, almost certainly. This, of course, is exactly what prompts me to do so. What is it, I scoff -- creepy? dark? They’re only trees.

I set off at dusk, because of course I do; if I’m committing to the mystery, if I’m flinging myself headlong into someone else’s fears, I’m going to do it at the time of day they explicitly recommend you don’t.

“WAIT!”

The sharp cry nearly makes me jump out of my skin. I’m not usually prone to startling, so the locals must have gotten into my head with this mountain-trail-at-dusk nonsense. When I turn, there’s a quite lovely elderly woman standing there expectantly, looking for all the world like she’s been waiting for me.

In an unwelcome moment of paranoia, it occurs to me that maybe she has.

Something about the look in her eyes makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up, but I shake my head in an attempt to dislodge the nonsense. She’s just an old woman.

She speaks before I do.

“The sky belongs to you but the trees are mine,” she says firmly, and for a moment I’m concerned that she owns the part of the forest I’m hiking in and she’s about to kick me out, but she continues before I can offer any explanation: “If you find bones in the forest, use them for protection.”

I want to ask a question, mostly about why on earth I would find bones and what I could possibly need protection from, but she’s still speaking: “There are places for us all; you must mark them as yours. There is only ever one chance. Your sky, my forest, our bodies. Your sky will throw water and light, just to be heard. My trees will shed their leaves and laugh; their bodies know what it is to become fire.”

This woman is peculiar but doesn’t seem dangerous, unless her comments on fires were a confession of arson. I wonder briefly if she’s just been creeping people out for years, with sudden appearances and eccentric speeches, and I shake my head at the superstitions of small mountain towns.

“Make your body your own,” she orders forcefully. “You are your own altar to the sky; make sure you are not invisible when the storm comes.”

Now I’m concerned that it might start raining, and I realize quite suddenly that I haven’t said a single word since she appeared. I clear my throat; I don’t know what I’m going to say, but it’s irrelevant; at the sound, there is a loud flutter behind me, and the woman vanishes. She hasn’t gone somewhere else, hasn’t stepped out of view; she has truly vanished, like a drop of rain into a puddle, like the shadows you sometimes see out of the corner of your eye. There are no shoe marks in the dirt. As if she was never standing there at all.

I’m suddenly not sure if she ever was.

I stand in bewilderment for a long moment; all of the wind, the birds, every sound around me has gone suddenly and eerily silent. “Okay,” I say out loud -- partly to bring myself back to reality after her vanishing act, but partly to reassure myself that I still have a voice; for a fleeting moment, I doubted it.

I turn to leave, thinking about how I’ll scare people in town with a story about a vanishing woman, but am brought up short by a huge crow, sitting on a branch directly at eye level. It’s so close that I could reach out a finger and touch it. I’ve never seen a bird sit so still, and certainly never this close to humans. More to the point, it’s staring over my shoulder in a way that gives me chills. I look over my shoulder, but there’s nothing -- no one -- standing there. I want to leave but something is keeping me rooted to this spot.

The crow can’t stop staring at the spot the woman vanished.

I can’t stop staring at the crow.

Who was that woman? I wonder, still staring. But the more I watch the crow, and the more the crow looks past my shoulder, the more obvious the truth becomes about her:

She hadn’t been talking to me.

Did I spook you? Leave a tip if you like this content! Thanks for reading!