The land known as the state of Ohio was once 95% covered in forest.

Today, less than 30% remains. —Source

As the girl stumbles forward in the too-dark forest, she feels herself become unbound. Leafy canopies blot the moonlight, and in the shadows spill into her like ink on ink. Where her hands stretch for branches and tree trunks, the flesh becomes stiff and rough and fragile. Her legs threaten to snap beneath her but she cannot stop. Move quickly or be consumed.

She knows better. Her mother says this all the time. You know better than to touch the cookstove while still hot. You know better than feed your scraps to the foxes. This is dangerous countryside. You know better than to stray too far in the twilight.

And yet, the evening had been so beautiful. Golden leaves surrendered from their branches and floated down over her head, coming to rest in her braided hair. The apple trees were heavy with reddened fruit, sweet and unblemished. She had feasted on them, then laid down to rest in the yellowing meadow. She dreamed of a sun-dappled Heaven. Her father had always claimed paradise waited in the Ohio Country. For the last few years, she had resented him for this belief, a conviction so strong it had uprooted her family from New England, replanted them here in the wilds. But in that sunlit meadow, she had understood. She forgave the moving and the cultivating of the land. She understood the necessity of chopping trees for a log cabin and slashing and burning a swath of the forest for their handsome crop of beans and pumpkins. It had to happen to make the land theirs. 

Then, she opened her eyes. Daylight had fled, replaced with the startling coldness of the stars. Ants scuttled across her arms and body, seeking claim to her, and the blades of long prairie were fused to her scalp, tugging her slowly but unrelentingly towards the earth. Prying herself away from their grasp, she ran, but the forest had already ensnared her. Now it seeks revenge.

As she scrambles, trees strange and unending, the ground rebels beneath her. Mud and detritus surge up past the futile protection of her boots. They heave her down. Unwind her. The wind snakes in and steals away her patella. Gravel and mycelium fill the space, sinking down into dark arteries. Her hands cling to and then disintegrate into a fallen log, and she ruptures into the sensation of being hollowed by squirrels, nested in by birds, and torn apart by thunderstorm winds. Then comes the unexplainable agony of the fire. Of being burned into control. This is not her own thought, and suddenly she is swarmed with souls too numerous to count. What remains of her body, singed and incomplete, topples.

The earth rushes up to engulf her.

It is not evil to decay, the leaves tell her as she becomes them. It is a joy to be the most impermanent part of a thing.. The leaves know no word for a death. Call it goodbye. This is the best translation.

The parts of the girl that do not become leaves sink deeper. Once, she had a father who dug into the soil. She remembers a memory that is hers and not hers—the cold scrape of a shovel against her layers. Fleeing it, she spreads further past the roots and the aquifers and submerged boulders carried by an ancient glacier and then, she comes to the edge of herself. Along a clean line, she feels where the trees had fallen into ash. In their place, the grass grows timidly. In a naked patch of soil, strange plants grow and grow. They are glutted with themselves. 

The only trees she can feel in this place are stacked and undecayed in a shelter. A woman stands on the threshold, calling a name out into the darkness before retreating into the home. Something warm and flickering blossoms at its hearth. Fire.

She—the forest, the girl, the being that is all of them—forms her plan of infiltration. From the depths come piece by piece an ear, a fingernail, a patella. The skin peels itself away from the leaves, wisps of hair from a starling’s nest, the blood from the season’s last frogs. The girl gains a jaw and then clenches it. Embodiment is a torturous binding.

The teeth she cannot find. Perhaps they are too small. Perhaps they have sunk deeper than the bedrock or been sown so far away, the land will not give them up. The girl snakes her newfound tongue over the substitutes: a hundred jagged teeth—molars, incisors, fangs—wrenched from the mouths of a dozen different creatures. She coughs up a swarm of deer ticks and wasps. Pebbles rattle in her lungs as she breathes. It is not a perfect replica, but it is good enough. 

She enters the home. The woman stands at a table, slicing into an onion while the children huddle beneath her, playing with wooden toys. The woman looks up and sighs. 

What do I always say about returning home past dark, she says.

On the other side of the room, she sees him—the father, the farmer. He sits by the fire in a wooden rocking chair, gazing into the flames. The girl walks across the home. It is made from the sibling trunks of the trees the farmer burned. She knows all their names: the walls, the floors, even the logs crackling in the hearth, so close to the farmer's fragile, flammable body. The girl places her useful fingers on the back of the chair. The farmer turns to face her, a twist of smoke unwinding from his lips. She smiles at him with all her many teeth, and then she shoves hard.