They found her. She’s back – but she’s wrong she’s different the woods made her different made her different changed her and she’s crawling up the foot of the bed and her hair’s made of leaves and her hand gripping on my blanketed leg feels like fire have you ever felt yourself decay it’s like

For comfort in trouble she whispers her name,

And Orion waves,

Orion waves …

and there’re spiders falling from empty hollows of her eyes and they’re on me, me, they’re in my mouth and my nose and everywhere every where ev ery where

Up!

The year is 1986 and the sleepy town of Sandown Bay is –

Wake up!

Up.

Up.

The room is dark. I’m not in the woods. I am in a bed. My bed. Mine – does any of this belong to me? This bed. Peyton’s asleep, breathing softly from across the room. I’m intact. I’m alive and breathing and beating.

I am Mona. I am Mona. I am Mona.

But I don’t believe it. And the bed still feels gory and wet so I need to get out.

I rip my headphones from my ears; I’d fallen asleep with them in. Roxy had been playing. Orion. It’s four-thirty in the morning.

I’m on edge, that’s all. I’m exhausted after the weekend and yesterday, trying to keep my cool in front of Ellis, in front of Peyton – the awful call from my dad.

Originally I might have been thrilled by the ease of the leaving, my ability to be anywhere in the world at any given moment, as long as I had enough money and nerve. But now without any familiar sense of place or normality I’m tense. I broke into a police station a couple of nights ago to illegally look at the decades-old police report of a woman whose body was never found; of course I am.

Am I becoming myself or moving further from her?

Run. I need to run.

I slip on my tennis shoes. I’m going to circumnavigate the island, up past the isthmus to the edge of the forest and back down towards the pier. Twice, hopefully. Maybe three times. In high school, before a run, there’d be a compulsive itch in my feet, in all of me, the sort of itch that is only quelled by propelling yourself forward on your own volition, a reminder of what your body can do and where it can get you.