Whispers Beneath the Tarp
Rain stitched the night shut, hammering on the thin rubber of my tarp as the forest exhaled around me. I had come to this bend in the river seeking quiet, the kind that rumors whisper about in towns where the lights never sleep. The moon wore a bruise of clouds, and a chill crawled up the spine of the hill like a finger tracing a scar.
I pitched the tarp tight between two pines, tying knots I used to trust. The world narrowed to the crackle of a wind-driven fire and the soft drip from the edge of the shelter. It should have been enough. It wasn’t. Something lived in the space beneath the shelter, something that learned my name in the quiet syllables of rain.
At first the whispers sounded outside, a rustle of needles and the ash of a cough that wasn’t mine. Then they learned to ride the wind beneath the tarp, a breath from the dark that felt like someone standing just out of sight, listening to the rhythm of my heartbeat. A voice, soft as moss, would say, "Stay awake." Then, a sigh: "He sleeps too soundly." I told myself it was the river talking, the trees, the old camp invaders who never left, only rearranged themselves into new shapes of danger.
Before sleep I counted what kept me alive in the quiet hours:
- Knife, sharp as a prayer
- Water bottle, half full, the other half memory
- Firestarter, flint cold as a winter star
- Paracord, long enough to bind a truth you cannot say aloud
- Compact tarp, a thin shield against the weight of the sky
- Pocket compass, blind to the North but steady in the heart
The whispers grew bolder and slunk along the edge of the tarp like a thin, damp animal. A bead of rain ran along the seam and disappeared between the folds as if the shelter itself inhaled. I pressed close to the small fire, but the flame refused to behave, curling into a pale, frightened creature that refused to die.
“Keep your back to the fire. Do not turn your face toward the dark,” a voice breathed from beneath the tarp, not mine, not the wind, but something older, patient, hungry.
When I finally dared a peek, the inside of the tarp did not reflect the world but contained it, a pocket of midnight that clung to my skin. The whispering was not words but a chorus of memories: a mother tongue of rain, the hiss of a storm long buried in the forest floor, the squeal of a hinge that never belonged to this world. The shelter, my shield, had become a doorway, a mouth that waited to swallow a secret I did not know I carried.
Morning never arrives with the eagerness of daylight here. The tarp hums with a quiet that could be breath or binding. I listen, and the woods listen back. The whispers persist, a soft chorus beneath the tarped world, reminding me that survival is not merely a matter of shelter and fire, but a negotiation with whatever has learned your name in the dark.