Once, when she was pouncing on the little stones in the little creek in the pleasant woods close to her house, a little frog came next to her and croaked at her.

“Who are you?” the girl inquired.

“You cannot come here. This place is ours.”

“Whose?”

“Ours.”

“But I’ve always come here!”

“The ones you cannot see say that they are not pleased enough. They say they have banished you.”

“But I live here! They can’t banish me! And who are they? I want to talk to them.”

“You can’t. Go away.”

And the frog plopped into the water and swam away. The girl began to cry and ran back to her house, but on the way she tripped on a tree root and fell on the dry crinkly autumn leaves on the ground and sobbed. The tree reached its soft thin branches down to her and grazed her face. “There, there,”the tree whispered so softly. The girl lifted her face up and asked, “Why won’t they see me? I’ve always been good.”

“They do not command us. But they are powerful over the earth they live on. So if they don’t want you there then you shouldn’t go, for your own good.” The motherly tree caressed her face a moment longer straightened up tall to her normal position. The girl kept looked at it, expecting more, but the tree did nothing. So she curled up against her roots and rested there, nestling against the bark that seemed to be warm in a humanlike way.

She fell fast asleep. As she slept, the world darkened and a cool drift began to blow against the little wood. The moon rose high in the sky and illuminated everything in an eerie unflickering glow. Some disturbance in the air, a wrongness in the atmosphere made the little girl wake up suddenly, wondering where she was, for everything seemed familiar yet terribly different at the same time. The tree at her back was strangely warm and seemed to pulse with life, but in a bad sort of way. Slowly, she kneeled and got to her feet and surveyed the world around her. It took her a moment to let her eyesight sink in, but after that she felt terrible fear and hysterical horror and she let her legs flee numbly and thoughtlessly. She ran without looking back and behind her the tall tree with human skin seemed to wave its long branchlike arms with the wind, its hands motioning farewell in its maternal love. Some hands were missing fingers (carried off by the birds for their nests, you know) and waved tiredly, as if too exhausted by life’s misadventures.

The little girl ran and ran over the difficult ground, because every thirty seconds or so a heartbeat would shake land and move everything. She ran between the hair that was short and grasslike, and over sores of dried blood that sometimes sucked her feet in. She screamed in panic and fear wished she were home.

Very soon a buzzing noise appeared, and got louder and louder until the sound thrummed in her ears. It sounded like a horde of flies, no, a swarm of a thousand flies were following her tail and getting closer. When she felt the first hairy legs on her back her voice caught in a knot at her throat and instead she cried. Her vision blurred and she fell against the warm skin at her feet, but soon she wouldn’t have been able to see anyway because the flies were all on top of her and around her and filled her ears and her eyes and her mouth. She lasted a couple of more heartbeats from the earth and she fainted.




When she opened her eyes she was in her own bed, in the small hours of dawn. The air was cold and biting and the light grey and hostile. She breathed heavily and didn’t move, paralyzed by terror. Everything was as she knew it, and nothing moved and no noise sounded. Slowly, she sat pulled back the covers and stood. Her feet were as cold as the wooden floor. She padded softly across the room and with tremendous courage, she looked out the window, her breath frosting the glass.