Zigzag through the woods. Throat sore. He knows it’s stupid. A deer getting shot on TV, an idiot on the couch, who cares. You do. His mother used to say it was just depression. From her blood to his. Something as simple as sadness, easier to understand than grief. For what. Not for himself. If it was only that, he would just. Die. How much easier it would be. If it started with you, you could stop it. Stop yourself. But it’s much bigger than you. Xie looks at the house from the trees, a light on in the kitchen. Night soft on your face. Your back against a tree. The sound of a car starting on your road. Jason gone but you don’t move. The shot is still inside the house. It is almost everywhere you go. A thick rain falls, clouds knit hard together. No light from the moon but that old light, behind you, you’ve seen it every night for a year. You’ve watched it. It has watched you. The birch it touches luminous and if it is touching you then you, too, must be luminous. It raises the hair on your arms. And the thought hits you as the light hits you as the rain hits you. Get up. Walk the other way. Not to the bridge or to the house or to the road leading into town but the other direction, the only way you have not yet gone. The ground softening with every step, bark peeling in sheets from the trunks. Roots gathering the water, the wood always feeding itself, with the sky and the air and from every death that settles here, holding the land together, holding what is above to what is below; the chaffinch and the primrose, the wood sorrel and the violets, the bluebells and the woodcock. The crows. The pale moths with wings edged in black and brown and white, clinging to the serrated leaves. Witch’s brooms of dead twigs spread between the branches. The velvet mosses and ferns pulsing with beetles and worms, army of light and decay, of night and air. The husks of the winged seeds of the trees themselves, rotting since last spring in the seams of the earth. You can see it in pieces or all together, the parts or the whole, a chaotic encyclopedia in every square inch. Xie burrows deeper through the birch. In the city it was bright all the time, everywhere; but here you can track a single light for miles. He slips on a twig, his shoes soaked, hood heavy on his head. Soon he is at the edge, the last line of trees toeing the submerged grass. The light brightest. The light is brightest here.