The Longest Night

8:47 PM

The sun was dying slow behind the tree line, a dark cherry bruise spreading across the fading ember sky. Phoebe killed the engine of her VW van, listening to the ticks and pops of it cooling down as if it would cool her nerves along with it. The urn on the passenger seat gleamed like bone in the growing purple light.

Flat tire. Of course. Of course the town itself would throw a rusty nail into her path as soon as she passed the town limits sign. The road behind her was dark now, a ribboning snarl of switchbacks leading to the middle of nowhere. No headlights. No turning back.

She stepped out into the heatless hush. The air smelled heavy with dry pine and something older, fungal. The old chapel still stood, slumped across the road, half-swallowed by ivy, its steeple snapped in half like a broken finger. No one’s worshipped there since before she was born, and she’d often wondered if anyone ever had at all.

Phoebe lit a cigarette with trembling hands. It’d been thirteen years and she had not visited once. Not even when her mother mailed clippings of obituaries like a warning shot. Not when she’d called with the bad news, speaking of omens and oaths. But now she was here, driving her mother’s ashes into the belly of the woods like a bad offering, as she’d promised she would.

From where her tire failed, the river was four miles out. Uphill. Through the woods. She looked up to the sky with a heavy sigh. The stars were already starting to blink on, silent sentinels - watching, judging. The meteors won’t fall for unclean souls. Her mother’s voice echoed somewhere in the back of her mind.

Phoebe shouldered her backpack with a groan, tucking the amethyst urn into a side pocket like a secret.

9:36 PM

She crossed the deserted road and charged passed the broken church that the earth was mightily reclaiming. The forest swelled around her like a lung inhaling, the trees packed so tight their branches knit an awning, shielding her view of the sky. She clicked on her flashlight, carving tunnels of pale icy blue light through the dark. Every crackle underfoot made her leary, stomach tightening the knots within it, hair on her arms standing on end.

As she passed an old logging marker, the light in her flashlight flickered.

She was small again, rain-soaked, mud up to her shins. Her mother was screaming across the creek. Her hands were bleeding from blackberry thorns. Hot pink glittery beads from a snapped necklace litter the river bank near her shoeless feet.

The flashlight flickered again. The ground, dry, solid under her feet, though she was shaken. She took a few slow steady breaths. It’s just trees. just wind.

10:12 PM

She saw the girl at the bend in the trail.

Barefoot. Mud-smeared. Bright-eyed in the beam of Phoebe’s light.

"You came back," the girl grinned.

Phoebe froze. "Are you… lost?"

The girl tilted her head, auburn hair waving, wild, unbrushed. "You smell like cinders still."

"Where are your parents?" Phoebe glanced around manically, but the forest was silent, and still, except for right here.

"Don’t need them. You know the way."

A breeze kicked through the trees, the rustling beginning to roar, and just like that, the girl was gone. No crack of a twig. No shuffle of a footfall. Just vanished, like a light clicked off.

11:04 PM

Phoebe found the clearing where her mother used to dance on solstice nights. Circles of stones. Blackened stumps where candles melted to nothing. Her flashlight illuminated the remaining scars left by the rituals, places where the earth, and her, became never quite the same.

She’s twelve. Her mother is wild-eyed, sweat-slicked, spinning under the meteors with ash smeared across her brow.

"The sky listens, Phoebe! You have to ask it to forgive you!"

She’d run that night. Locked herself in the truck, refused to speak until morning.

Now the air hums with heat, though there’s no fire.

The girl appears again, only this time she’s half-shadow.

"Do you remember the prayer?"

Phoebe shook her head in disbelief. "You're not real."

The girl just smiled, and then again, she was gone.

12:18 AM

Phoebe was getting close to the river now. She could smell it, iron and moss, and something sharp underneath. Her calves ached. The backpack was digging into her shoulders, the side with the urn weighed heavier.

The forest’s silence was begging to break with signs of life. Loud chirps. Cracks of twigs as animals moved passed. Hushed whispers in the leaves and running water.

She stopped beside a tree older than her mother had been, its trunk split open like a scream. Inside the hollow: trinkets, charms, bones wound in red thread.

She reached into her pocket, digging out an old coin indistinguishable as a penny except for the copper color. She placed it amongst the other offerings, sighing heavily.

1:06 AM

The river met her wide and black and somber. The rocks at the bank gleamed like the teeth of a Cheshire cat’s smile.

Phoebe set the urn down and sat, breath ragged, and thirsty.

The girl reappeared then, crouching near here by the water.

"She didn't want a burial. You know that."

"She didn’t want a daughter either," Phoebe snapped.

The girl looked up at her. Her eyes, too large. Too knowing.

"She loved you… in her way."

Phoebe scoffed, "She hurt everything she touched."

"And so do you."

The river sang a low murmur of words without shape in the silence that settled between them.

Phoebe gripped the urn, whispering, “What are you?”

The girl walked into the river. She didn’t float. Didn’t sink. She just melted away into the current. For the first time in a long time, Phoebe cried.

2:27 AM

Eyes dry, and somewhat collected, Phoebe slowly opened the urn. The wind rose up suddenly when the lid popped, the ashes threatening to spill themselves before she could decide when and where to place them.

She holds them to her chest, and breathes deeply.

It’s the night she left. Her mother is clawing at her coat. Begging. Cursing. Weeping. "If you go, they’ll never stop following you!"

Phoebe had shouted back at her, "Good. Maybe they’ll eat me."

Now, in the rush of the river and wind, she understood something her mother didn’t.

The forest was never haunted. It was never chasing her. It was always listening.

And it was remembered.

3:18 AM

She took off her boots and socks, stepping into the swirling water.

It’s freezing. It cuts through every layer like a hot knife through butter. But she kept walking until the water was up to her thighs. She peered down at the uncapped urn, into the ashes, wondering if any of what’s left of her mother could hear her.

"You wanted this, didn’t you?"

The wind shifted. She heard her mother’s voice. Not from the trees, not from the past, but from inside her.

"Phoebe Lynn, don’t you dare cry for me anymore. Cry for yourself. Cry for the things you buried. Unbury them."

She tilted her head to the sky, as if to beg from it some meeting, and as she did, the meteors started to fall. Soft streaks of silver scars across the indigo sky. She let out a soft laugh.

“The meteors won’t fall for unclean souls.”

Phoebe sprinkled the ashes into the river in a slow stream. They swirled like smoke in the air. Undulated like breath in the river. Like regret and grief made visible.

4:04 AM

Phoebe stumbled back onto the bank, soaked, shivering. The girl is waiting.

"What happens now?" Phoebe asks.

The girl shrugs. "Depends. Are you clean yet?"

"What if I never am?" Phoebe wondered

The girl smiled, softly, "Then you’ll stay."

"Here, in the woods!?"

The girl shook her head, "No, in yourself."

Phoebe buried her head in her hands for a moment, pulling her hair out of her face before turning to ask one more question, but the girl was already gone.

5:23 AM

The sun was cracking open the edge of the world, pouring gold into the ink, paling the indigo into shades of cerulean.

The urn was now empty. The sky softened. The stars were gone. But they had fallen.

For her?

Or for her mother?

Maybe there was no difference anymore.

Phoebe stood up, facing the trail back home feeling lighter, different than the woman who had walked here.

She doesn’t want to be that woman.

She placed the urn in the tree’s hollow, patted the bark good by, and never looked back.