It was so dark in the tree tunnel.

She looked up and saw a narrow swath of night sky above, the Milky Way perfectly framed by the treetops.

A few steps later, her flashlight died, which was really annoying, because she couldn’t see a thing. She clicked the flashlight’s switch to the off position and then waited a few seconds and clicked it on again. The flashlight tried to beam—but couldn’t. Its batteries were dead, Ginette figured. Which was an easy enough fix. She always carried a couple of extra D batteries in her backpack, which she swung off her shoulders and onto the snowy ground. She felt for the zippers that opened the main compartment, opened the pack and rummaged through its contents and felt her space blanket and the granola bars and the matches and the utility tool and the water filter straw and the mini first-aid kit and the thermos of water.

But no batteries. Because there weren’t any in her pack. Because her mom had borrowed them a couple of weeks ago for her own flashlight—because the battery drawer at home was all out of size D batteries. And her mom had replenished the drawer with a twelve-pack last Sunday after she had done her Walmart run in Presque Isle after she hit the craft fair at the Methodist church. But she had forgotten to replenish her daughter’s backpack with her backups.

In all fairness, Ginette had forgotten, too, and now, there she was in the woods, all alone on a Friday night with no flashlight. She cursed herself for not being prepared—and maybe cursed her mom a little, too, for forgetting to replace her backups. And started to panic for a second because she really couldn’t see anything without her flashlight.

But her pupils were dilating, allowing her eyes to take in what little light there was from the stars above. As they did, she was able to make out the road in front of her and the bluish glow of the snowbanks that rose up next to her and the black silhouettes of the trees that were watching over her.

Ginette felt like her ears were dilating, too, as they tried to take in as much information as possible now that her eyes had become less useful. But there wasn’t much for them to hear in the silent night—except the sound of her own breathing.

And then she wondered if she was scared.

And decided that she wasn’t.

The forest is a dark place. And bad things can happen in the dark.

But bad things can happen in the light, too.

And she bet that far fewer bad things happened in the darkness of the woods of northern Maine than in the bright lights of cities like Montreal and New York and Los Angeles.

Maybe because there aren’t very many people where she was.

And there might just be too many people in those places. Which may have something to do with why the bad things happen in them.