Victim

Toward the Sun

The villagers return a few days later, as planned. There aren't many of them left. Mostly the oldest and youngest.

They don't find much.

A patch of feathers near the town square.

A tuft of hair on a broken doorway.

Near the edge of the forest though, almost within the shadows of the trees, is a new patch of mushrooms, vile smelling and black. The patch is roughly the shape of a man, or possibly bear.

The villagers burn the mushrooms. They collect the ashes and dump them in the river.

They find the trail the girl took into the woods. The orphan girl who talked all day to the trees, who begged to go when everyone else begged not to. Few of her berries remain, but the path is also marked by birds. Large, dead birds with poison berries still in their beaks.

The villagers have brought torches for light, but today there is no need. Today, for the first time in memory, sunlight penetrates the canopy. Green shoots poke up between dead roots. Songbirds chirp as they build nests in the trees.

Hours later, the villagers reach a clearing. They cannot say why, but the place seems to them to be the very center of the woods, the very heart of the forest. It seems the kind of place where a cottage might once have stood, though today there is none.

Today there is nothing in the whole clearing except green grass and sunshine and a single flower, improbably large, growing toward the sun.