It’s autumn again, or at least the aspens are dropping their leaves as if it is. You will soon be saying that we must get warm for winter. You will ask me, again, the question that I am still too afraid to answer. Beyond the copse of aspens, I still think of myself as the girl I was formerly, lonely and locked securely inside herself, even though these days I am not that girl even when I wander far from you. Miles away, I bend to investigate a wild mushroom and you are the one that clutches the mushroom hat through my fingers; I feel you curl my fingers, feel you make a fist of my hand, see the shredded mushroom flesh in heaps on the forest floor even though I did not want to break it. The same goes for the sparrow that lands unluckily on my shoulder one night. Only my eyes are still entirely mine, and even still I can feel you flitting in certain moments at the back of my vision, pressing on the thin membrane that separates me from only being us.

I don’t tell you that I go wandering to be alone for a while; I only say, truthfully, that I can’t be fed by the forest like you. The forest nourishes me more haltingly. I collect wild currants and huckleberries, dig for parsnips. But food is getting scarcer as the forest starves, and soon I will have no choice. I will answer your question. I will climb, alongside you, into the yoke of the aspens. I am only waiting for the first snowfall. For a sign, definite and irrefutable, that you are the only thing left to me now. In the meantime, everything before our shared existence is getting blurrier. I have to try, like a wanderer through dense undergrowth, to thread my way back to before it was only you and me.

You would not remember Father’s stories. He would not have told them to you. They encompassed a whole world of characters, but at the heart of that world was The Angry One, who commanded all Father’s fear and half-sacred loathing. Father told me that our home was on the border of The Angry One’s territory, that The Angry One could use the entwined roots of the aspens to see me from its hiding place in the very bowels of the forest.

The very bowels, he would say, his voice low and roiling.

The Angry One was seemingly younger than me, because Father never mentioned the name before the summer of my eleventh birthday. The birth of The Angry One coincided with the births of all the many other fears that began roaming the dark landscape of his imagination. As I outgrew all my clothes and scrubbed blood out of my underwear, Father threw out the television and the radio, nailed boards over the windows, covered all the mirrors in the house and then finally ripped those mirrors from the walls and carried them outside and smashed them one after another. He never said, but seemed to believe, that hiding would protect us, and writing too. He spent hour after hour filling cardboard sketchbooks with dense columns of his neat square-looking handwriting, although for what reason I couldn’t know. He only buried the books in piles underneath his bed when he was finished.

I was not interested in what he was writing, not then. I was distantly afraid of The Angry One the way that children in old books are afraid of the Devil. I wouldn’t have said so to Father, but I thought I was too small and obscure to be seen through the roots of the aspens. What I was afraid of was Father, who could at any moment, if he chose, abandon me in a windowless and mirrorless house that I did not even know how to imagine leaving.

That same summer, Father had begun vanishing at night. He would come home after midnight smelling of ash and vinegar, stories spilling from his mouth as if they couldn’t be contained inside of him. I knew without being told that I was supposed to stay awake until he returned, although it was long past my usual bedtime. Those were the nights when he explained how The Angry One tore open the belly of the forest and poisoned the trees with its own blood.