PART 7

. . .She had as strange dream that night that she remembered the next day, which was unusual as she hardly ever recalled them. It disturbed her enough to write it down in a notebook where she sometimes made notes about significant events on any particular day. In the dream she was wandering through some woods in foggy place, not lost, but not sure where she was going either. She could hear the leaves underfoot, making slippery paper sounds while a dog was barking somewhere nearby. It went on and on, this walking, the leaves, and that dog that always seemed not so far away but not getting any closer. She could see the ground rising ahead and a lawn with scattered tombstones in the distance. . .

PART 6

. . . The storm pissed through, and a brief, but oddly warm and comfortable wind followed, knocking down a few cricky branches and blowing mushy trash around in the alley way behind the house. Days like this spun the woman’s head like a top, filling her with all sorts of strange ideas and clever feelings. She thought about a friend she hadn’t spoken to for years, someone she lost touch with and couldn’t really remember the reason why. A phone call seemed the natural thing but she couldn’t quite muster the confidence, as if to be absent from another’s life long enough meant too much had changed, things were impossibly different and unfamiliar. Ten years seemed like an impossible amount of ground to cover and all the dated reference points would undoubtedly prove strange and awkward. . .

PART 5

. . .The next few days it rained, a kind of continuous, half-frozen mess that nobody in their right mind would get caught out it. It’s the very worst sort of weather, thought the woman, who stayed inside for two entire days rather than experience an inevitable discomfort. . .

PART 4

. . . Some people feel absolute horror when they find themselves alone in the woods, it is as if to step off a sidewalk and onto a trail is to invite an inevitable heinous result of an encounter with the evil that lurks in the tangles and hollows. There is no amount of reassurance that can make them feel safe, their minds filled with visions of shallow graves or drainpipes and their own misshapen selves stuffed haphazardly inside. It comes naturally for these individuals to think the woods are refuge to thieves, rapists and murderers, that some nefarious human element means them harm and stalks them like easy prey from behind every shrub or bramble, and to let the mind wander in solitude is just simply impossible. It would seem that enjoying the natural is almost pointless when it requires such a high degree of vigilance, but the drowsy woman—who was still drowsy but for other reasons—felt rather fascinated but the the sudden absence of ambient sound. She would have stayed longer if she wasn’t getting such a chill, which always made her want to curl up and sleep. And so she went home as night fell. . .