An Intruder to These Woods

A flash essay

Photo by Ray Hennessy

In the woods, one of the tree stumps turns its head. She is so silent, so still, I don’t see her doe face at first. Lying in a bed of silken leaves, she belongs so well. Only my human eye would see her as separate from the ground, the air, as if her pointed ears were not branches moved in the wind. When I point my camera at her, does she think I’m taking something from her? Is it mine to take, the photo?

I go back in search of her the next day. Where she was, a tree has fallen. No sign of her hooved body. Returning the next day, trailing along the swamp, and the next, I’m an intruder to these woods, uneasy in its silence. I don’t understand my need to see her again. It’s not long before I pull out my phone, checking for— no new messages. A polka-dotted woodpecker patrols one tree trunk. I look up and it flies off.

*

In the concert hall, a student entered the light, cradling an accordion to her chest. She played it with no keys, only giving the bellows a gentle pull.

It announced itself with a breath. One valiant exchange with air, then another. A heave, a puff. Newborn lungs inflating, shuddering.

I remember no other songs played that night in the music school. Only a woman’s song of silence. Her accordion’s human breath.

*

Nets sit over native plants stringing themselves up to the sky. No foraging, a sign reads. No picking or collecting. I collect portraits of each plant, document the site where she was. My camera is my weapon, my testament that she was real and right here among the ferns.

Further along the trail, the swamp gleams as a mirror laid down in tall grass. Soon, a woman walks across it and I look up to see her walking parallel to me on a trail I didn’t know was there. I backtrack, pass the main trail I usually enter this bird sanctuary from, and come to a crossing.

I’ve been a surveyor of silence. Of white heat. Counting the minutes. Listening for the unspoken. My mother was afraid once, interrogating a taxi driver about his city, that we’d disappear in the quiet of looking out the window. Silence is punishing. When someone doesn’t text back, it is their silence that answers. In school, it meant obedience. Whoever could sit most like a statue was rewarded.

But here, in the clean mirrors of water, among dotted feathers and ferns, serenity roams. I move almost as wind. I quiet just long enough to see a doe, the doe, her neck training through tall grass, others in sanctuary with her.