Silvie relaxed into the rocking chair on the creaky porch. Her feet ached from the long, rainy walk home, and her hair was damp and wrinkled. Before Silvie’s dad passed away a couple years ago, he moved the whole family into the middle of the woods. “It’ll be good for us,” he had said. Silvie told herself that she needed to go inside, but she pushed herself to watch the rain fall from the sky. Her eyes stung and she was tired, but Silvie sat on the porch until her vision became blurry and her eyes closed. 

The cry she let out as she pulled herself out of a deep sleep seemed quiet compared to the continuous ringing in her ear. Silvie’s hair was still wet, and she sat in the chair wondering how long she had slept. This was not the only thing that confused Silvie. She noticed gray slime on the porch that blended in with the bizarre amount of dust in the air and the woods around her that seemed to be drained of any color except gray. The slime was not only on the porch, but on the rocking chair where she was sitting. Silvie immediately stood up feeling disgusted, for she was covered in it too. The slime wasn’t thick, it was wet and thin and as soon as she stood, the dust started to stick to her wet clothing. The dust was traveling with the soft current of wind.   

Silvie peeked through the dust covered window behind her and found that the kitchen table had been flipped over and the inside of the house was full of slime and dust too. This made Silvie panic and she felt lost. She turned around to face the endless forest that surrounded her. She walked down the porch steps and strained her eyes up to the sky, then spun around slowly, thinking this would help her decide what to do next. There was a strong urge inside her to walk in one direction, so she did.

Silvie walked, afraid to stop. She feared that if she stopped, she might lose sense of any direction. After walking no more than five minutes, Silvie came to a mound of pine needles that looked more like some sort of nest. She accidentally paused from walking and swiveled her head around, puzzled. She continued walking in the same direction, she thought. She started to hum a song that her mother used to sing to her, and tears streamed down her cheeks when she thought of never getting to see her mother again. As Silvie was singing, she didn’t notice the twigs snapping behind her. The snapping got louder, closer, and to the point where it couldn’t be mistaken that Silvie was being followed. She started quicken her pace, when she saw the small bridge that crossed over the stream that ran down from the lake, but the stream was dried up and the rocks in it were slimey. Silvie started to run towards the bridge only to hear the footsteps coming up behind her and as Silvie reached the bridge she felt a shove which caused her to slip off onto the rocks in the dried stream.

The fall left her weak, to the point where it was hard to breath; and it wasn’t until after she caught her breath when Silvie felt the excruciating pain that came from her shin. It was a fight to get back up and lay on the slippery grass by the stream. Blood was already making its way to her ankle. Silvie could remember the snapping and the sudden shove in the middle of her back. Before, she hadn’t given a single thought to what could be lurking in these shadowy woods, but now her imagination was running wild. The fear forced her to get back up and start walking again, but that’s all she could do. She heard the snapping in the back of her mind.

Would she keep on walking through the treacherous woods forever...or was it a dream?