Fog comes in like a promise. Low and slow, like a ghost with secrets. I open my eyes beneath cedar roots and breathe in the earth like it’s an old lover. Cold. Damp. Sweet with rot.
There are no clocks here. Only tides.
I move quiet.
Bones like smoke. Skin like river light. I’m not a man, but I remember what it felt like to be one. That’s the curse, isn’t it? Memory. That tight little whisper you can’t ever drown.
The water’s warm today. Too warm. The kind of warm that brings hikers. Solitude seekers. Broken-souled wanderers. God, I love ‘em. They taste like hope.
There’s one now—I feel him before I hear him. Heart thudding against rib like a war drum. Young. Lost. His sadness hangs off him like soaked cotton.
I follow.
I do not stalk. I… accompany. He doesn’t know it, but he’s already said yes. Yes to the sound of his brother’s voice, yes to the lie carved from memory. “Help me,” I whisper. It’s soft, cracked, human. Perfect.
He turns.
It’s the eyes. The eyes always do it.
He falls.
The moment breaks like a mirror dropped in wet moss. I kneel beside him, wear his brother’s skin like a borrowed coat, and I look down at him with the kind of love only monsters know.
Not yet. I don’t kill. Not now.
I convert.
My hand on his chest. His breath catches, and the water begins to teach him the first hymn.
He’s going to forget everything. And when he wakes tomorrow, he’ll swim like a ghost and think like a god.
I don’t sleep. Not in the way you understand it. I fade—folding softly into the stillness, resting in the hush between midnight and mourning. When the trees exhale and the stars feel closer. That’s where I live.
They call me the White Woman.
They don’t understand that I don’t haunt the woods. I belong to them. I was not cast out—I stepped away. Quietly. Deliberately. When the world grew too loud, too cruel, too full of men’s machines and men’s lies.
The fog is thick this morning, and I love it. It holds the world in soft hands, like a mother who’s lost too many children. The dew clings to my feet as I walk. My dress trails behind me, still white. Always white. It doesn’t stain, because I don’t let it.
There’s a man on the road—one of those wandering types. Lost in thought. I feel his pulse from yards away. It skips, then steadies when he sees me. He thinks I’m just a woman. At first.
He’ll look again.
They always do.
The first glance is curiosity. The second is uncertainty. The third? That’s when it happens. That’s when they know.
I don’t speak. I don’t have to. My silence tells him everything. That I know who he is. What he’s done. What he buried in the walls of his mind and told himself was gone. I can taste his guilt like smoke.
He starts to cry. That part always feels the same. Men like him were taught to conquer, to dominate. But when they face me, when they see something they can’t charm or chase or kill—they fall apart.
I don’t pity him.
I keep walking.
By afternoon, I’m near the town. I don’t go inside anymore. I just stand at the edge, where the trees touch the backyards and the wind carries warnings. People feel me. Dogs hide. Children glance through curtains and pretend not to see. But one woman, red hair like fire in dying sunlight, opens her door and watches me with tears in her eyes.
She remembers.
Maybe she saw me once, long ago, when she was a girl with bruises no one asked about. Maybe she heard the stories. Maybe she just knows.
I want to walk to her, but I don’t. My time with her passed. It was enough that she survived. That she grew into someone who now locks the doors and teaches her daughter that silence is not weakness.
By dusk, the light softens. I love that moment—the in-between. When shadows stretch like fingers, and the world doesn’t quite know if it should breathe or hold its breath.
That’s where I wait.
They say I don’t have a face. That isn’t true. I have a thousand. One for each woman who vanished without justice. One for every girl who was never believed. One for myself—though I don’t use that one often. It hurts too much.
I don’t hurt them. I don’t have to. I just appear. I make them see. And in that seeing, they change.
That’s my role.
Not ghost.
Not witch.
Just truth, walking on two feet.
And if you see me three times—if you meet my gaze with open eyes—then your world will never be the same. I won’t chase you. I won’t speak.
