The Guest

by Emma Cline

Even though her heart was racing, she was calm, imagining a pearled line of possibility stretching on without end. She could always get what she needed. Wasn’t she taking care of herself?

Hundreds of years ago, their parents might have abandoned their babies in the woods. Instead, the neglect was stretched out over many years, a slow-motion withering. The kids were still abandoned, still neglected in the woods, but the forest was lovely.

But maybe some things could never be erased. Maybe they tinted some cellular level of your experience, and even if you scraped away whatever part was on the surface, the rot had already gotten beneath.