 Image by Stefan Cosma on Unsplash They told me not to go alone. The locals at the diner leaned in when I asked about the trail. Old woods, they said. Best left quiet. But I am not a believer in ghost stories, and my grief needed silence. My sister had loved hiking—she died in a hospital bed, sterile and still. I wanted to give her something better. I brought her ashes in a tin and took the path marked by stone and moss. The forest greeted me with stillness, and for a while, that was enough. My boots softened into the dirt, birds muttered in the canopy, and I whispered my sister's name as I scattered ashes beneath a red pine that looked a thousand years old. Then I turned to leave. And the path was gone. Not overgrown. Gone. The stones I would step over—vanished. The way I came curled behind me like a fern folding into itself. The sun was dipping fast, and the trees had shifted. Taller now. Closer. I did not panic. I had a compass. I had done this before. But the compass spun. The needle twitched like it was afraid to choose. My phone flickered dead in my hand. When I started walking, the forest seemed to inhale. Every step deeper felt like sinking. The birds no longer muttered, and the pines stopped rustling. There was a sound behind me, soft as fur, quick as breath, but when I turned, nothing moved. That night, I made camp without fire. I dreamed of my sister. Only her skin was bark, and her eyes were hollow knots, and said, I am still here, you know. I never left. When I woke, pine needles were on my pillow that had not been there before. On the second day, I tried to mark my trail. I carved notches into trunks, broke small branches, and laid out stones. But the forest closed them behind me. Trees stood whole again when I looked back. My trail was being swallowed. The sound returned that night—closer. I stayed awake, listening to my breath and the sound of something else breathing. By the third day, my mind was cracking. I could not tell if the whispers were wind or voices. I saw faces in the bark. I heard my name in the crunch of leaves. Leila, they said: my sister's voice. Leila, stay. When I ran, the forest ran with me. Trees blurred. The light filtered strangely, like through stained glass. I tripped. Cut my knee. When I stood, I was back at the red pine. The ashes were gone. In their place was a hollow in the earth, pulsing gently—like a heartbeat. I understood then. The forest remembered her. It had taken her. It was offering me the same mercy. I knelt. The earth was warm. I do not remember lying down, only the softness of moss and the weight of pine needles falling like snow. I felt bark bloom along my skin, roots threading through my veins. I felt her beside me in soil, in sap, in song. We are quiet now, but we are not gone. We listen when you enter. We bend the trees. We hide your path. And if your grief hums like ours once did, we might call you closer. We are what the pines remember. Zainab Khamis is a Bahraini writer whose work has appeared in the Inlandia Institute, Vermilion, and The Progenitor Art & Literary Journal. She won first place in Bahrain’s Young Authors Contest (2024) and was recognized by The New York Times “My List” contest. Her writing explores identity, memory, and belonging.
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 My mother spat me out when realized she couldn’t digest me. Pushed until all traces of fermented beauty and soured anger had been expelled. I think a part of her was relieved when I stubbornly screwed my mouth and refused to suckle on the very body that I came from. It started small, as all things do. She would feed me jaundiced milk formula in pink bottles. Pulpy pea and pureed black beans. Sips of stories of birds with human faces that brought death to crying babies. Soggy bread and milk-soaked crackers. Cloying nightly prayers to the people in the paintings on our altar. Raspberries mashed to look like emboluses and slimy banana disks. Warnings of disembodied hands, hungry for fat infant ankles. This was before my baby teeth had burst like rice grains from the banks of my gums. She later began feeding me pasta, soft like animal entrails smothered in red sauce and small helpings of self-doubt about my scabby legs. Fish with spines like lice-combs and eyes that popped like gummy candies. Legends about moon-faced ladies with animal feet who called men like my father into the forests. Bowls of bone broth frothing with wilting greens, cooked with languishing love and gossip about the kind of women we shouldn’t be. Whatever she fed me, she measured. I survived like this until I gorged on what I wanted. By the time I turned fifteen, my pallet had expanded to soft, tongue-like seafood boiled in blighting spice leaves and nibbles of straight romance novels stolen from my mother’s shelves. I sucked dribbling white chocolate from my fingers and chicken bones after ripping the pink meat off. Slurped drinkable yogurts, picked at pomegranate seeds, gnawed on toughened jerky. Sometimes my mother still served me berations candied in sweeter, back-handed compliments about the acne scars that peppered my cheeks and dough that molded over my frame. After I left home, I acquired the taste of waxy lipstick from the lips of one-night stands and the briny wetness from between their legs. The salt of sweat mixed with perfume that I lapped from collarbones and the metallicness of ringed fingers. I could now have my fill. When I visit my mother now, I feed her a daughter she can stomach. One she won’t regurgitate into my lap and tell me to clean up. Spoonfuls of a daughter that doesn’t fuck girls, that won’t get stuck between the gaps of her twisted teeth. I add salt when she tells me that I am not enough, that I could have been more. I add sugar when she says I need a man in my life to fix me, to satiate the hunger all women have. I bite my tongue until it bleeds and my mouth begins to rust. I think perhaps I could leave her here, to waste away and let the ulcer in her stomach eat her from the inside out.
 Image Via Pixabay AlkeMade Flooded twenty years ago, abandoned, now the castle slumps like a collapsed birthday cake, the jungle boat run aground, Peter Pumpkin Eater’s cracked concrete shell filled with dry vines, leaves rattling, too much like snakes. We trespass. She points her phone, snapping while I throw empty beer bottles of my 12 pack behind me, hear them bounce on gravel. “Dad’s here,” she says. “Somewhere.” A waste of a Saturday to hunt his belligerent ghost. And why here? Sure, we visited twice the year we lived with him. Surprise afternoons of freedom from Wilson Elementary, we headed through the mountains with a canteen of coffee, ham sandwiches coated in mustard, wrapped in aluminum foil. My sister hated mustard but forgets this to glorify our adventures. “Remember, the stagecoach picture? In a frame on his desk forever?” It was the 70’s, people couldn’t scroll memories or pass them back and forth like insults as they can now. It took effort to have a photo developed, printed, framed. I was not smiling in this picture, having just been stung by a bee as I climbed into the velvety cabin of the stagecoach. My arm throbbing and tears near the surface, I thrust myself out the window because missing the picture, crying over a bee sting might ruin the whole day, might get me walked to the car, Dad’s fingers tight around my arm, my feet barely touching the ground, his rage over my betrayal strong, like the smell of dirty laundry, strong like his hand reaching for his belt to signal some rule we were breaking. With four beers left, I find a bench under an oak tree, and lean my head back. The bark a maze of deep rivulets and shadows, uneven as I drink and rest, drink and close my eyes, drink and let the memories fade as much as they will. She talks to herself, searching and snapping, hoping, although I suspect she might not really believe herself. Point the camera here, I could tell her. Find your ghost here in my blood, my throat, my birthright to be who he was, the set of my lips, too often the slump of my shoulders when I look in the mirror at all the broken promises. “Come on,” my sister insists, kicking my foot to get me up. I open one eye, roll my latest empty down the length of the bench and watch it skitter across the grass. There is almost a buzz going, the quiet tingle I can trace up and down my body until it lets me rest, like I’m a shirt slowly ironed free of wrinkles. “You’re so much like him,” she says, no longer pleading. “I know.” This moldy truth is not comfortable. I pat the space beside me, feel the bench take her weight, only a slight shift but then she’s leaning against me, solid, real, our bodies almost the same size now. I reach in the box, hand her a beer, and wait.
 Photo by Mahdi Mahmoodi on Unsplash “You can’t go through there,” Jason shouts across the rooftop pool. The girl, who’d been blissfully unaware of the rule she was breaking, quickly removes her hands from the door, revealing the words “Emergency Exit. Alarm Will Sound.” The door snaps shut with a metallic click. “Oh, I am so sorry! I thought this was the way back inside.” Jason nods his head, flashing her his charming grin. “Other set of doors, sweetie. That one’s the emergency staircase.” She blushes and nods back shyly before maneuvering around the pool. I lift my glass to my lips. “There wasn’t an alarm.” Jason turns his head towards me but doesn’t take his eyes off the girl. “What?” “The alarm. It didn’t go off.” He finally blinks out of his flirtatious stupor and glares at me. “Anika, what the hell are you talking about?” I take another sip, this one burning down my throat. “Nothing.” “Yeah, you’re always doing that. Talking about nothing.” I look away from him. My vision blurs, and the dozen or so people in the pool become nothing more than colorful blobs. Girls’ giggles sound shrill in my ears, men’s voices too deep and grating. I notice another couple, like us, is standing by the railing. The man leans in close to the woman. She smiles like she means it. “You want a beer?” Jason asks. “No.” “What, so you’re only gonna have water?” I swirl the liquid in my glass. “I don’t like beer.” He knows this. “Well, you could at least try something else.” “I told you I didn’t want to come here.” I start to walk away. “Oh right, Anika, because everything’s about you, huh? You can’t do a single—” Jason grips my arm tight and pulls me back to him as one of his friends approaches us. He leans in close, lips grazing my ear. “Act right for once. Can you do that?” he says through gritted teeth. I do not hear anything Jason or the friend say. I do not look at Jason’s blindingly white smile, pay no mind to the fingers tightening around my bicep. Whenever a fingernail digs into my skin, I know to smile, know to laugh, know to nod. I am here but I am not. I am looking past the friend’s head, at how beautiful the sky looks at this time of day. The sun is low and dyes the clouds pink, purple, orange. Orange is my favorite color. I am wearing green, Jason’s favorite. “Anika,” Jason snaps, and I come back. The friend smiles apologetically. “I was just asking if you’re enjoying the party.” I smile. I will have a bruise on my arm when I get home tonight. “Of course.” “‘Of course?’” Jason hisses when the friend has walked away. “Not even an idiot would’ve believed that.” I lean back against the railing. The metal is cool against the skin of my back. I look over my shoulder at a bird perched on the railing further down from us. “Are you even listening to me?” The bird dives for the street below. “Do you ever wish—” “Wish what? Wish my girlfriend wasn’t such a buzzkill?” He laughs, loud, but he makes it sound so genuine. He throws his head back, smiling so wide, anyone would think I’d just told him the funniest joke. “Yeah, all the time, Anika. All the damn time.” I close my eyes. The sun is warm on my face. “Jason, I want to leave.” “Of course you do. You always want to leave. And what if you did? If you just got up and left my best friend’s party? How would that look?” I hardly notice the rest of what he says. All I can hear is What if you did? What if you did? A gong clanging in my head. Jason leans against the railing beside me. He jerks his chin out at a girl in the water, the same one who’d opened the wrong door. She smiles and waves to him. He grins back, and he says to me, “I give you everything, Anika. I do everything for you. What more could you want?” The metal no longer feels cold against my back. I lean into it, looking up into the sky. The clouds are all orange, all orange, all mine. There are no sirens, no alarms going off in my head, when I make the decision: I am going to leave him. “Anika!” he screams when I am already falling.
 Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash Dear Dr. Lorenzo, (former) Dean of the School of Lifelong Learning, I want you to know I did it with tenderness, that when the order came down, I considered your impressive legacy and tireless commitment to the School before allowing my finger to hover over the Delete key. I could have highlighted your entire name and title and disappeared you with one keystroke. But I was gentle, killing off the letters one by one, and even having a moment of reflection before hitting Save. I want you to know you’re not the first person I’ve erased. In my years working in both academia and the private sector, I’ve removed many people. Some have gone on to bigger and better, been promoted or transferred or taken on a new role in a different department, happily blossoming to life on a different website. But when the deletion means you’re just gone—in the event of suicide, fatal car accident, or, as with you, being unceremoniously canned—it’s always sad. You’re there one minute—2x3 color headshot, full name, and official title—and gone the next. For a day or two, you’ll still come up in search results, but anyone clicking the link will find the space you occupied empty. And then after the spiders’ next crawl, even those phantom results will disappear. Maybe someone will have cached the page on the Wayback Machine, but few people even know about that dusty museum hiding in the far reaches of the Internet. I want you to know that I wonder how you’re feeling. What you’re thinking as you stare out the window of your huge house bought with public funds, at that expansive green lawn kept trimmed by underpaid gardeners. Letting it all sink in, I imagine. Nonexistence takes some getting used to. When the President called a hasty meeting at 3 o’clock on a Friday, the younger staff went into a frenzy. But experienced with this sort of thing, I was already digging out my executioner’s hood. All-Staff meetings on Friday afternoons only mean one thing. You weren’t even allowed to gather your belongings before the Associate Vice President of Human Resources marched you off campus and held out her hand for your keys. You must have really crossed the line to have not been given the option to retire and spend more time with your family. I will not dignify the rumors by asking which of them are true. I want you to know I waited until Monday morning. After your decade of service to the School, a two-day grace period seemed only fair. I wanted you to be reassured of your existence a little longer by the ten-year-old headshot you insisted I use in place of the more recent one where your hair is gray and your eyes look tired. But maybe you’re not the type to visit a website for proof of your existence. You probably have old-school ways of validation: some crumbling monument of yellowed paper at home in your desk drawer. A commendation from the mayor with the city seal, or the governor’s invitation to join an ad-hoc committee. A wife who can hide the alarm in her eyes and tell you it will be okay. For people like you, it will always be okay. Whether you’re on the website or not, we know who you were. You may not have seen us, but we saw you. We’ll miss you rushing through the hallways in your Armani suits trailed by the exotic scent of sandalwood. Smiling and nodding at your constituents like you were the Pope or a Mafia Don. Whatever you plan to do next, please don’t worry about us. I want you to know we’ll continue to do our jobs—so well we’ll never be noticed. And when your replacement is named, we’ll serve at their pleasure just as we served at yours. Carrying out our tasks. Performing our duties. Doing the things us invisible people do.
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