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blood, and bleeding—who could
     save her.

    Hair like a trillion twisted threads of gold, a mole like a drop of blood on her collarbone, her name was Katherine Jane
     DeQuincey-Joy. And right now she sat on a mattress in her small apartment—the
enclosure
, as she called it—with a view of these woods and allowed the telephone to ring. She knew who it was—either Mark or Michele—and
     she certainly didn’t want to speak to Michele. But when the answering machine answered and she heard Mark’s voice, plaintive,
     worried, pained, she couldn’t help herself. “Hello?” she said, knowing the mistake she was making, knowing it would be the
     last one of its kind.

    I sat down in a clearing I thought I recognized from childhood. There was a tall maple, its branches like a parachute falling
     perpetually toward the flattened grasses and ferns. And with the quick-falling darkness I saw behind the limbs of the trees
     the sky smoothing over, its colors artificial and flat. I saw the rest of the woods leveling off like a painted backdrop.
     I lost my sense of language. I forgot who I was. The woods, I knew, were hungry to swallow things. The woods had already taken
     my mother’s house, and I could sense the trees and moss rolling forward like a wave to wash over the entire neighborhood,
     subsuming cars, backyard pools, carports, entire cul-de-sacs.
    I had already been swallowed long ago.
    I was an organ inside its body.
    I twisted the shoelace, threaded it between my fingers.
    The shoelace
.
    It wasn’t long before the sky was completely dark, and I could hear almost nothing in my immediate surroundings. The sound
     around me dropped away to an icy stillness, and Iheard only the cars on the highway, the faraway whir of the engines. I saw lights moving overhead and thought of my father
     in his little seaplane, flying somewhere. Perhaps Eric had placed surveillance devices, electronic birds and metallic field
     mice, all listening to the sounds of the forest, all trying to detect my whereabouts. Overhead were satellites watching the
     movement of the trees. Somewhere, my father piloted his little plane through the flat, backdrop sky. If I stayed perfectly
     quiet, I thought, and did not move, they couldn’t find me.
    I’d had to sacrifice my mother. I knew the woods wanted her, and I wanted to help, but she was gone for now, Eric having made
     the move before I could find my way to her. He had simply gotten to her first.
    Nothing made sense anymore. But everything made perfect sense.

    “What is wrong with him?” my mother was saying right now.
    Eric remained silent. He turned the radio on to an all-news station.
    Hannah put a hand over one of her eyes. “And what’s wrong with
me?
” The cancer cells inside her brain divided and multiplied, tendrils of aberrant DNA curling around her optical neurons. Her
     eyesight disintegrated one more degree.
    “I think maybe we should schedule an MRI,” Eric said.
    “Do you think it’s neurological?”
    “Well.” He was driving his sleek black Jaguar sedan. I could feel that automobile moving smoothly, animal-like, through the
     faraway streets. “I don’t know.” I could see out through Eric’s eyes.
    “Is it a symptom of something you’ve heard of?”
    “I just want to make sure,” he said.
    Hannah looked out of the window. “Where’s Pilot?”
    “He’s probably on his way back by now. Maybe he discovered your car, saw that it was empty—”
    “Do you think we should have waited?”
    “I want to get you home. Are you still seeing ghosts?”
    “Yes.” Our mother began to sing, “
Yes, I am, yes, I am, yes, I am
.”
    “Please,” Eric said.
    “What?”
    “I can’t hear the radio.”
    She stopped. They listened to the announcer, who described break-ins and robberies, car heists, and drug seizures. There was
     a new war in a Latin American country. There was civil unrest in the Middle East. There was a whole new country in the Balkans.
     Someone had