..And then, on a day in early autumn when the birds are not singing, the world pauses. The trees in the forest shudder in anticipation, the wind going out of its branches as though sucked in toward some center point far to the east.

White light erupts across the horizon, and the world is no longer what it once was. 

In time, it begins to snow. Too early. 

Seasons pass, and winter remains. The wood rots, deep within the snowbank. The forest is silent. The world is empty.

Then, footsteps. Slow, cautious. A hand, wrapped with cloth, reaches into the snowbank and pulls free the blackened body of the forest. It is stacked high, bundled, then hefted over a shoulder and carried step by plodding step for half a mile to the south. 

The wood is set, unceremoniously, at the center of a clearing. Tents of ragged fabric, temporary and hastily constructed, fill the spaces between stumps. There are people here. Nomads, moving across the ruined face of the land. Surviving.

One woman is in a worse state than the others, burns long since healed patterning her face and hands. Her breathing rattles her frame, thin and skeletal. She is dying. There is something rooted deep in her body, eating away, hollowing her out from the inside. She is not the only one. They are all dying. But for now, they are here, and they are still breathing, and they are cold.

The wood that was once a forest becomes a fire. The nomads gather. Lovers, prophets, families, all huddle close, warming frostbitten hands and plates of scavenged food. They prop the dying woman up by the fire, and she breathes in the heat, a smile at the corner of her eyes. 

The wood turns from fire into ash as the evening fades, and sinks into the snow and earth below. As dawn breaks, pale light reaching over the snow to stretch out shadows from the broken trees, the survivors move on, in search of others or supplies or salvation. The ash does not go with them, and so it does not know. Instead, it mingles with the soil, and the fragmented roots still buried deep within the earth, and it spreads beneath the surface as the roots grow and the animals in their burrows stretch and settle and wait.

Seasons pass, and the ash becomes the world. 

And in time, it is spring again.

Owen Shirrell is a College third-year majoring in Creative Writing with intended minors in Theater and Religion. Most of his stories are adapted directly from his dreams, and most of his dreams are strange.