The girl emerged from the hole on a bright autumn morning. The sky was a pale and delicate blue, and the breeze carried with it an invigorating chill. The cemetery was empty, as it nearly always was. She was thankful for that.

The girl took a moment to assess herself. She seemed healthy. Intact. Perhaps a little tired. She had a sketchbook in her hand. A jacket on her back. A bone in her pocket. She felt as if perhaps she were a different person than she had been before, but there’d be time to evaluate those feelings later.

She felt a little jolt upon hearing the sound of an SUV arriving in the parking lot over the hill, and of indistinct conversation as its doors slammed shut. After taking a moment to compose herself, she shuffled off toward the bike rack near the cemetery’s entrance.

The girl fiddled with the dials on her bike lock, and entered a four-digit code: The date she had buried a pet mouse she’d had as a child. She hopped atop her bike, and rode home.

The girl had been missing for nearly seventy-two hours. It wasn’t long enough for someone to have filed a missing person report. After all, the girl was an adult, though she rarely felt that way. But it was long enough for loved ones to worry, and despite the girl’s loneliness, she did have a handful of loved ones.

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She made excuses. Told them that it was no big deal. That the jacket on her back had been found in a ditch, and justified its retrieval with a price check online. Indeed, the price of such a jacket was considerable.

In the days, and months, and years that followed, the girl often left peculiar happenings in her wake. By the time they were noticed, the girl always had an explanation at the ready. Never a truthful one, but always a plausible one. Either that, or she had already slipped away, unseen.

No one ever discovered the atlas the girl carried in her pocket, despite it being on her person at all times. Occasionally, she would wonder if she might be able to pass it off as the bone of an animal, should it come to that. But the girl was clever enough that it never did.

Whatever it was the girl was hiding, it remained a secret to anyone but herself. She had decided long ago that no one would ever know. That no one needed to know. And indeed, no one ever did. Not family. Not friends. Not you, or I.

And in the end, the girl was content with that. Her choices were her own. Perhaps she had made the right choice. Perhaps she should have known better. But one thing can be said for certain:

She was never lonely.