I was in the woods, but it was peaceful. There was no winter. No ice to bite my ankles. Dappled sunshine was spread over the ground. Jacob and Jan were jumping from one patch of light to another, like I had, back when I was alive…

Back when I was alive.

In that moment, I saw myself as a ghost. Once, the seasons had mattered—I would grow and change with them—but now it was an endless flow of days that could never touch me.

Summer had come to the woods. We would play and watch the animals. At night we would watch the stars. Then it would be another autumn. Another winter where we never felt the cold. Another spring.

I watched time drift by. The animals were nothing but specks of movement. The trees grew up around us, towering with upraised arms, reaching higher for the sky—until the day they fell with a boom that shook the forest. Then we watched the wood soften and rot away. New trees, almost too tiny to be believed, peeked out from the ground. Jacob and Jan laughed and stood beside them, measuring their height with them, day by day, until those trees also reached far above their heads.

The world moaned with the effort of its sustained state of flux. It never rested. The forest floor looked like a crawling patchwork where a tide of snow, then moss, then dirt, came and went, replacing each other as they saw fit. Even the rocks would sometimes crack and break apart.

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Through it all, only four things remained unchanged: us, and one small evergreen tree.

Too often, I forgot about the strangeness of it—how odd it was that it should be locked outside of time with us. Its there-ness was accepted with the same indifference as one year succeeding the last.

Until one night, I opened my eyes and gazed at it from where I was resting with my back against the thick trunk of one of the neighboring trees I had watched grow up from a seedling.

The little tree had always been there. It would probably always be there. To me, it stopped being an unremarked monument; it started to feel like home.

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“Emerra?…Emerra…”

My eyes fluttered as I moved between sleep and awareness. There was light—sunlight—slicing across my blankets, barely missing my pillow. I rubbed my face.

“Good morning, Emerra.”

It was Jacky. He stood over my cot with his skeletal hands tucked behind his back.

I muttered something that was supposed to be “good morning,” but it came out more as a “muffwhufmm.”

“Forgive my intrusion, but Miss Anna was nervous. Understandable, considering how rarely you sleep in.”

I opened one of my eyes. Anna was standing beside him.

“I assume you didn’t have a nightmare?” he said.

I shook my groggy head. It didn’t help with the grogginess. “It wasn’t a nightmare.”

My mind kept slogging through its procession of thoughts. It wasn’t a nightmare. But I had dreamed. It was one of Anna’s dreams.

I sat up and threw off my blankets.

“Jacky, I know how the ghosts got in.”