Whispers Beneath the Deep Woods
Night pressed into the valley as I traded the town’s glow for the lantern’s wary light. They warned me to listen for the mouth of the forest, to keep my steps light and my breath slower than a rumor. Yet the old map burned with secrets along its margins: the deep woods kept memories as surely as they kept rain. So I followed the worn ink into the black line where trees crowded close enough to touch the stars, and the earth itself seemed to inhale.
Roots rose like disembodied hands, and moss cloaked stones with a soft green smile. A robin’s song faltered and vanished, leaving an eerie quiet that pressed against the skin. The air tasted of pine resin and mineral, as if the forest had stored rain inside its chest. I counted the puffs of my own breath between trunks, and the forest answered with a chorus of rustling—the whispers of countless witnesses, murmuring names, regrets, promises broken and never forgiven.
“We remember your footsteps,” the echo seemed to say. “We remember your fear. And we have not forgotten the sound of your breathing.”
Signs the forest is listening became merely moments of recognition:
- A branch snags your sleeve just as you tell yourself you’re alone.
- The path you mark with chalked steps dissolves under a sudden mist, as if the ground herself blinks.
- Footprints appear where you just stood, circling your last position like a captive audience.
- Your name echoes in bells of your heartbeat, repeated by a chorus of unseen observers.
When the path forks into shadow and rain, the deeper truth reveals itself not as a monster, but as memory—the forest keeping what people have carried in their pockets and their prayers. The whispers do not lure me toward danger; they test my willingness to belong to the timbered dark. The deeper I go, the more the woods resemble a living ledger, tallying every step I take and every sigh I release into the night.
I chose to listen until the murmur settles into a patient silence, until the wind itself becomes a boundary I refuse to cross. Somewhere beyond the last birch, the world narrows to breath and shadow, and I realize that to walk deeper is to become part of the litany I had come to hear. If I vanish, it will be because the deep woods finally decide I am ready to be counted among their stories, a whisper kept safe within bark and rain, a name that belongs to the darkness now.