Denial came first. It was a powerful, comforting wave.

  This is a dream. I fell asleep at the wheel. That’s it. I’m about to wake up to a cop rapping on my window.

  I pinched the skin on the back of my hand, hard. A sharp sting blossomed, and the impossible forest remained stubbornly real. My gaze fell to the ignition. A desperate, foolish hope flared in my chest. Even if it worked, where would I drive? There were no roads. Still, I tried anyway. I turned the key.

  Nothing. Not even the sad, clicking sound of a dead battery. The dashboard remained dark and lifeless.

  The vehicle was a metal corpse.

  That cold finality shattered my stupor. I slumped back, my head thudding against the headrest, and barked out a single, dry laugh. A goddamn magic forest. Perfect. The eviction notice stuck to my front door and failing my midterm wasn't enough for the universe to drop on me today. Why not toss in a complete psychotic breakdown?

  I slapped my cheeks twice, hard enough to sting. The panic sat in my gut like a lead weight, but this wasn't my first rodeo with disaster. I'd been tumbling downhill for years, always managing to dust myself off after each new crash.

  "Alright, Garber," I muttered to the empty van. "Since this doesn’t seem to be a dream, you might as well get your ass moving and have a look around. Being dropped into some kind of fairy’s fever dream is a slightly bigger problem than usual, but same approach as always. One step at a time. You've got this."

  I unbuckled my seatbelt, the click of the mechanism unnervingly loud in the profound silence that hung like a physical weight. The driver-side door swung open with a metallic groan that seemed sacrilegious in the cathedral quiet of the forest. It swung out over a patch of iridescent blue-green ferns, their fronds spiraling in perfect Fibonacci sequences like they belonged behind museum glass. The air that greeted me was cool and humid, thick with the scent of loamy soil, decaying vegetation, and something sweetly alien, like cinnamon mixed with ozone. I stepped out of the van, my worn sneakers sinking a full inch into the spongy moss that carpeted the ground in a patchwork of emerald and silver. The slam of the door shutting ricocheted like a gunshot against nearby trees with trunks as wide as grain silos, their silver-veined bark stretching up hundreds of feet to canopies that filtered the sunlight into dappled, dancing patterns. When the echo finally ended, the only thing I could hear was the buzzing of insects and the distant trilling of birds. There was no wind or the sound of rustling leaves. Not a single thing in this forest was something I knew. And as someone with a science teacher and a museum curator as parents, I knew a metric ass-ton of useless knowledge about nature.

  “Well, not this nature apparently,” I mumbled. “That’s not unnerving or anything.”

  I looked back at the van, its white paint now garish against the forest's fairy garden-esque palette. It was the most absurd thing I had ever seen: a 2016 Dodge Grand Caravan with a dented rear bumper and coffee stains on the passenger seat. The quintessential symbol of suburban soccer practice shuttles and carpools, sitting in the heart of a mystical forest that defied every law of nature I'd ever known.

  The peeling, stylized 'R' of the Rydr app logo on my window cling seemed to mock me with its corporate cheerfulness. I stared at the keys in my hand, my first instinct to crawl back into the driver's seat where the worn fabric still held the impression of my ass. It was the only familiar thing in this whole mess and felt like a lifeline to reality. But I'd learned the hard way over the last few years that sitting around waiting for your problems to go away on their own never worked.

  For some reason, the smell of the forest made me think of the last time I saw my parents. My dad was loading my bag into the car while my mother hugged me, telling me to have the best time and take lots of pictures. It was late spring at our cabin, and it smelled like pine and fresh rain that had fallen overnight. Dad was going to drive me to the airport for my senior class trip to LA to hit up all of the theme parks. We drove with the windows down and just talked for the entire hour; I don’t even remember what about. It was a good memory that was ruined by what happened next.

  I returned home with an armful of souvenirs to a very different smell. The acrid smell of ash and flame retardant chemical that clung to Sheriff Nils's uniform when she met me at Fresno Yosemite airport. She was a friend of the family and would often come by for Sunday dinner. She grabbed me up in a hug so tight I knew something bad had happened.

  One moment I was eighteen and laughing, fresh off a plane from LA, a Universal Studios hat perched on my head while my best friend Ben and I scrolled through roller coaster pics. The next, I was staring at tear tracks cutting through the sheriff's stoic face. She told me my parents had been at home when some out-of-towner had left a campfire smoldering. One of the cardinal sins of outdoor life. Unaware or unable to get away from the fast-moving fire, my parents were found burned to death in each other's arms.

  Our cabin in the northern California woods had become a funeral pyre while I'd been busy posing with actors dressed as cartoon characters.

  That day taught me what I know now: disaster waits for the perfect moment to strike. Five years later, I've become a connoisseur of catastrophe; I’d collected them all. From bosses who fired me on Christmas Eve to girlfriends who cheated with my best friend/roommate. Just last week, the sewage pipe above my apartment ruptured directly over my closet, baptizing every piece of clothing I owned in someone else's filth.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  Standing still had always been my enemy. After the fire, I'd learned that lesson the hard way. Dwell on things too long, and the darkness swallows you whole. So I always kept moving. Sometimes stupidly, sometimes desperately, but taking action meant at least some possibility of success. That philosophy landed me in Omaha, of all places. I'd picked the University of Nebraska's acceptance letter out of a hat, not because I dreamed of cornfields and college football, but because their scholarship meant I could afford to breathe again, and because two thousand miles of highway between me and that charred California cabin seemed like the minimum safe distance.

  But now my heart hammered against my ribs as I stood in absolute solitude, surrounded by a forest that looked straight out of a Thomas Kincade painting. To someone that had spent the last couple of years in the city, the alien silence of the woods pressed against my eardrums like cotton wool.

  "Get your shit together, dude," I muttered, my voice unnaturally loud in the stillness. "Remember what mom and dad taught you about getting lost in the woods." The irony hit me as I recalled the number one rule: stay put and wait for rescue.

  "Yeah, I don't think the Omaha Search and Rescue team is going to find me here," I whispered, watching my breath swirl in the tiny clouds of spores in the strangely cool air. "Car's dead, phone's dead, and last I checked, Nebraska didn't have trees so tall they blocked out the sky."

  I circled the van carefully, my sneakers sinking into spongy ground that felt almost like walking on flesh. Each turn revealed impossible wonders: crystalline flowers that chimed softly when my sleeve brushed them; a beetle with mandibles like curved daggers and a carapace so smooth that it reflected my terrified face in perfect miniature.

  Then I spotted a narrow depression where the luminous moss grew sparse, revealing dark soil beneath. A trail. My pulse quickened, hope and dread tangled in my throat. Should I follow it? A trail could mean people. It could also just be a game trail.

  I can’t exactly assume that my woodcraft is relevant here. It might lead to safety, or deeper into whatever alice in wonderland bullshit I'd stumbled into. I took three steps toward it, then pivoted back to the van, then to the trail again. The van was dead, but it was something I knew. Human-made. The last piece of my life. If I walked away from it I may never be able to find my way back. Did that even matter? It’s not like the van was useful here.

  "Shit," I whispered, pacing between the trail and the van. "Stay put, that's what they tell you." But the words rang hollow. Staying put had kept me in that black mold-infested Fresno apartment for two years after the fire, drowning in grief. It had kept me in a toxic relationship until Erika left me for Ben.

  The van's rear hatch popped open with a reluctant groan. I snatched my Louisville Slugger first; the kid's bat wasn’t going to help me fight off a bear, but it felt reassuring to have it nonetheless. Then I grabbed the heavy, high-powered flashlight I’d purchased on a whim when a flash sale had popped up. From the center console, I fished out my roll of duct tape, the universal solution to problems mechanical and otherwise. After that, I clipped the carabiner of my metal water bottle to my belt.

  My hands trembled as I assembled this pathetic arsenal. Was I really doing this? Following a trail into an impossible forest with nothing but the "My Life is Falling Apart" starter pack? But the alternative was what? Sitting in the van waiting for someone to find me in this place that looks like it hadn’t felt the footsteps of a person in a long time, if ever. I stepped onto the trail, looking back at the van one last time.

  The path wound almost aimlessly between the massive, silver-barked trees. The air felt strangely heavy, almost like breathing underwater. I walked cautiously, my bat held loosely at my side. I’d expected maybe squirrels, deer, the usual forest critters. Instead, tiny, six-winged insects buzzed past my ear, their bodies sparkling like cut jewels. Vines snaking up the tree trunks pulsed with faint, internal yellow light, illuminating intricate patterns on their leaves. I saw a patch of the glass-petaled flowers again, noticing now that drops of a golden liquid, thick as honey, beaded at their centers.

  A creature that looked like a cross between a ferret and a lizard, covered in orange fur with blue scales on its head, darted across the path in front of me. Its long tail flicked nervously before it vanished into the undergrowth. The spores released by the pulsing mushrooms still filled the air, catching the sunbeams like clouds of glitter. I waved a hand in front of my face, half-expecting them to trigger some bizarre allergic reaction, but nothing happened. I even heard some birdsong, but the melodies were complex, alien, full of trills and warbles that sounded both beautiful and vaguely unsettling.

  The whole thing felt like stepping into a painting, or maybe a high-concept nature documentary about life developing on an alien planet.

  I know I’m freaking out right now but Dad would have loved this, I thought, the familiar ache returning.

  Mom would have been taking samples of everything already.

  I kept walking, pushing deeper into the woods over the next hour. The path remained clear, though the silver trees gave way to slightly darker, thicker specimens with bark like overlapping, gray scales. The air grew colder here, the sunlight struggling to pierce the denser canopy. The jeweled insects became less common, replaced by larger, moth-like creatures with velvety black wings and a long proboscis that I saw one use to stab straight into the bark of a tree.

  I watched the moth extract its needle-like proboscis from the tree bark, a shiver running down my spine. "Great. As if regular mosquitoes weren't bad enough," I muttered, gripping my bat tighter. "Getting exsanguinated by the world's creepiest butterfly wasn't on my bucket list."

  In the darkening woods, the birdsong faded, the vibrant colors becoming muted. Something ancient in my DNA screamed a warning before my conscious mind caught up. My skin tightened, my stomach hollowing out. I pivoted on the trail, ready to retreat toward the friendlier part of the forest, when the sound reached me.

  Well, not quite a sound at first, more like the earth itself trembling beneath my Nikes. Then it evolved into something physical, a bone-deep vibration that climbed up my legs and rattled my teeth. A wet, gravelly noise that didn't belong to anything I'd ever encountered in real life or on TV.

  I didn't make a conscious decision to hide; my body just moved on its own, plastering itself against the dragon scale-like bark of the nearest tree. Whatever had made the sound was just ahead. I clutched my bat against my chest and forced myself to peek around the trunk. I’d like to say that I was just being a chicken shit and that it was all in my head. But no. That was very much not the case. What I saw looking out from behind that tree was even worse than anything I could have imagined. And I have a great imagination.