Into the Fall

by Tamara L. Miller

The woods around here are thick with myths and stories.”

Aren’t they all?

How had Matt managed to slip out to the bakery without leaving a single trace in the snow?

Memory was a misplaced faith; we believed in our pasts only as far as we remembered them.

It was like that, grief. Dormant, but always ravenous, waking in its own time to steal away moments of contentment.

How do you process an unknowable loss? Grief was a mutable feast, she supposed, filled with every horrid flavor that the human mind could conceive. Who could even say where the line of normal ended? Certainly, anger was a reasonable response. And Sarah seemed angry, a lot.

“Denial is one way to explain her behavior. The mind’s unwillingness to accept a soul-crushing reality.”

“Magical beliefs and superstitious behaviors allow people to reduce the tension created by uncertainty and help fill the void of the unknown.”

“The wilderness is probably the purest expression of beauty there is in the world. There’s no right, no wrong, no good, no bad. The wild deals in life and death just as easily as we breathe. It’s primal and true. We can walk within it, even fool ourselves into believing we’ve tamed it, but disrespect it and it will swallow us.”

“The devil loves unspoken secrets. Especially those that fester in a man’s soul,”