The trail was steep.

As Sarah climbed, she pushed from her mind the mangled doe carcass she’d passed on the drive up. Instead, she embraced the growing distance between herself, and the road, and life back home in the city. The woods became quiet. The only sound was her breath and heartbeat, and the crunch of dry leaves underfoot. A gentle wind moved through the tall blue-green pines with the occasional low, slow whoosh. With every step, her mind stilled, the relentless waves of intrusive thoughts calming, so that the flotsam of ideas simply flowed past her.

After this weekend alone in the mountains, she’d find a way to reduce her workload.

She’d read to Theo’s kindergarten class.

Make more time to connect with her husband.

Prepare a meal for a friend whose mom was dying.

Call her own mom.

She’d do better.

Almost an hour had passed, when Sarah realized that the trail’s blue blazes were no longer visible anywhere around her. There was no cellular reception. And, to her dismay, retracing her steps only seemed to bring her further off course. Since Theo’s birth five years earlier, the snare of real and imagined terrors had caught her in the jaw of its vicious teeth and clamped down. The woods darkened around her. No clear path was discernible.

Rushing water on the other side of a dense gathering of trees and shrubs lured Sarah with the potential of a definitive route back down to the road. Hunched over, her chin tucked to protect her face from the undergrowth’s scratching and clawing, Sarah pushed through the tangle of low-hanging branches. As she emerged from the brush and straightened, a loud crack echoed through the forest just before something blasted into her chest, almost knocking her over. Her hands reflexively pressed against the searing heat above her right breast. She heard what sounded like a child yelling, then another, lower voice, yelling back, followed by silence.

Stumbling, Sarah dropped to her knees in the thicket of trees. Across the gorge cut by the river was a teenager, a child really, staring back in round-eyed horror. She could see a man’s bulky figure scrambling down the rocky embankment, making his way to her, before she slumped onto her side and rolled onto her back. Splayed beneath the canopy of long-needled conifers, she turned her head towards the spot from which the man should eventually emerge, but her eyes remained fixed further afield on a small, ghost-white stand of leafless birch trees, striking against the canvas of near-black evergreens.

Just a few weeks earlier, she and Theo had ventured into their local park to paint watercolor landscapes, the early November afternoon surprisingly warm enough for them to sit in the flaxen sunshine without jackets. The birches had shone a bright, spectacular canary yellow.

The man crashed through the trees and arrived at Sarah’s side, clumsily pulling off his thick flannel shirt, and pressing it hard against her chest. She was transported to the night before. How lying side-by-side in the darkness, Theo had fallen asleep, his head against her shoulder, one hand resting gently over her heart, so close to the spot from which she was now bleeding out.

Sarah looked up at the man’s bearded face, the fine lines around his grey eyes. At the same time, she was adrift, watching everything from a great distance. The man was talking steadily but his words were unintelligible while her own lips refused to move. All she wanted was to hold Theo in her arms.

When she got home, she would flutter her lashes against Theo’s pale, soft cheeks while he squealed and squirmed with delight. She would memorize the tiny constellations of faint brown freckles sprinkled across the bridge of his nose.

Suddenly, the teenager appeared behind the man, gesturing wildly, his voice penetrating her delirium. He was shouting about an orange vest. She should have been wearing an orange vest. Then he was sobbing.

Sarah wished she could comfort him. Instead, her mind settled on the flat black stone of the dead doe’s eye, staring blindly from the side of the road as she’d driven past.

– Sylvia Baedorf Kassis

Author’s Note: Becoming a mother opened up a whole new world of worries and feelings of inadequacy, competing priorities, and a yearning to feel fulfilled and self-actualized in other ways. Yet, the time with young children is relatively short and I found I could only avoid the reality of this period being fleeting for so long. This piece, in particular, grapples with these themes.