A woman and a man were walking through a park that, on its western side, was well-maintained and clean, but to the east and north had grown into a wild forest, with rare, nearly impassable paths. The woman turned onto one of these narrow trails, and the man, glancing around, followed her.
They moved in silence along the boundary where forest met park. To their right, through the pressing trunks of trees, a playground shimmered in the distance, surrounded by trimmed bushes, tables with benches, and further off—a public restroom.
The noise of the forest stilled for a moment, and from the direction of the playground came a hum, swelling rapidly. The woman and the man froze, their wary eyes turning toward the sound, which seemed to be approaching them from above. As the hum grew nearly unbearable, it was joined by the rustle of wind through the treetops, and their faces tilted upward, toward the crowns and sky.
There, beyond the trembling green canopy, hung a dark void. The air spun with broken twigs and dust. The man, snapping briefly out of his stupor, leapt toward a nearby tree and went still. The woman remained where she was, gazing upward.
Through the forest ceiling, a pillar of bright light descended onto her, and in an instant, the woods turned black. The man, peering out from his hiding place, saw her feet lift off the ground as she began to drift upward, drawn along the beam of light. Slowly but insistently, her body was pulled toward the humming treetops.
Through thinning foliage, he saw her head and torso push through brittle branches, snapping them one by one. Higher still, a thick branch, nearly vertical, pressed into her back, bending taut under the force of her rising body. It trembled with strain, hovered for a moment—then, like a released spring, pierced through her.
For a while, her torso continued to rise slowly along the branch until it wedged among the limbs and came to a stop. A few seconds later, the light vanished, smacking the path below with darkness. The hum ceased, and her impaled body slipped off the branch under its own weight and dropped into the ivy.
Then the man, neck cracking under tension, looked around. Leaping over bushes and fallen logs, he ran to the woman’s body. She was no longer breathing, her clothes soaked in blood.
Voices, anxious and human, echoed from the direction of the park. The man bolted down the trail, deeper into the forest, as though the guilt of what had happened rested solely on him, and no one would believe that such a thing could have occurred in any way other than the only one they knew.
