The trees are where the squirrels live, and the deer, and the big old owl that goes who-who, who-who at night outside her window. She saw it once, all feathers and silence, flying across the yard like a dream, and she wanted to go with it, with the owl, off into forever. Going into the woods isn’t like going into the street, and it isn’t like going down the sidewalk when there’s no one to see you. Going into the woods is going to see the owl. It’s going to dance with the deer. It’s all good things, and no bad things at all.

Anastasia is three and a half years old, and she wants the woods like her lungs want air. She wants the woods so badly that some nights all she can dream about is what it must be like, out there in the trees, surrounded by rough brown trunks and soft green needles, with the sound of owls all around her.

Her mother knows she wants the woods, and most days, Caroline watches her like a hawk, ready to swoop in and carry her back to safety. But this day is different. This day, her mother is on the phone in the kitchen, distracted, saying things Anastasia doesn’t understand and doesn’t really care about. This day, her mother isn’t watching. Anastasia takes a few steps toward the edge of the wood and pauses to look back, gauging her mother’s distraction. All she can see through the kitchen window is the back of her mother’s head, brown-blonde hair tangled carelessly, like she hasn’t even bothered brushing it yet this morning.

Anastasia turns and runs, not aware that she will never see her mother again. She is consumed by her wanting for the woods, running as fast as her legs will carry her, and she imagines she’s faster than the wind, faster than the owl with its great brown wings, faster than anything has ever been or will ever be. She is a child racing toward the end of her own life. She is the only thing that has ever mattered, or ever will matter. She is a universe unto herself, and up until this moment she has been expanding, stretching toward infinity.

Her legs carry her past the edge of the trees, past the twilight zone of underbrush and fallen branches where she has played before, under the careful supervision of an adult, and into the woods proper. She stops, stunned, looking around herself with open-mouthed wonder.