The Mist Moves

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. A girl stands, holding the flickering light and looking out. The lone cabin was the last trace of human life on the edge of the woods. She takes a breath and opens the door.

The mist moves.

Through the trees, leaving some in the branches, and over the muddied ground. It goes through the air, too light to land but too heavy to join the clouds above it. The girl walks through the mist. As it wraps around her legs, she plods on. Every step breaking through the fog and meeting more.

In the haze and under the empty trees, she continues, never stopping lest she disappear and be forgotten in the darkness, hidden in the mist. Brushing her limp dark hair out of her face, she moves her eyes, trying to see. Her eyes are as dark as her hair, almost black and they look helplessly into the wall of cloud. In desperation the girl calls out his name through trembling lips, her brother’s name, her lost little brother. The white barrier clings to her, trying to stop her legs as she trudges through, calling for boy missing in the forest.

Tears slide gently down her pale face into the trailing mist as the shadows deepen around her. Walking blindly into the darkening night, her thin limbs tremble and her breathing falters for she knows the stories of monsters in the bare white trees. Monsters she had only ever met in her dreams, monsters who left husks of men and women behind them.

The fog leaves her, returning to the rest, abandoning the young girl to the frightening darkness. Cold, shivering, and alone, she stumbles over fallen branches, rocks, and holes, searching without any real hope.

Webs, delicate and intricate, hang from the skeletal tree branches above the child, who pushes past without seeing their fading golden light. Whispers, murmurs of stories and secrets, softly uttered loves, wants and hates; each step seems to bring these haunted voices to her ears as she walks into the spiders’ silk.

With every stride she hears the voice of a person, telling her who they really were, until her hand brushes through a golden strand and that tale of a life ceases with another taking its place. She hears and listens to the haunting sadness of unrequited love, the despair of a man who sees only darkness, the threnody of a barren woman. The joy of a mother, the hope of a lover, and the memories of an old man. As she remembers every life, her own seems to fade away.

Small spiders draw silken strands across her skin as she absorbs every quiet story. Wrapping webs which give a golden glow on the white skin, the spiders crawl across her arms while she listens to the lives which came before her.

The girl drifts through the trees, not noticing the silent others who do the same, and as she walks, she forgets.

She forgets who she was, she forgets her brother she lost in the trees, and she forgets the family who is searching for her. Her story fades out into the golden strands and the spiders spin their silk, capturing everything that she was.

An empty husk of the girl wanders under the white branches and in between the ghostly trees, no longer fearing monsters, and leaving golden webs caught in the woods behind her. The body lives, it breathes, but it is empty. No longer a person, it moves aimlessly throughout the chilling forest without true life inside it. The soul is gone, trapped in the webs hanging from the trees, whispering.

Whispering the story of a girl who loved and was loved. Murmuring of loss and of fear. Telling of courage and laughter. And shedding what little light she had into the shadows of the darkness.