Still Here, After Everything

She goes west. She walks through the rest of the night without stopping, without looking back, and she reaches the trailhead at dawn with mud to her knees and a blister opening on her left heel and nothing resolved, nothing explained. She sits on the hood of her car and watches the light come up over the ridge, that slow and impartial brightening that turns the firs from black to green, and she thinks about the station that should not exist and the man who may or may not have seen her and the woman who appeared from nowhere and vanished the same way.
She will file a report. She will describe what she saw. She will be thorough and precise, because that is what she is.
But sitting there in the early light, she already knows how the report will be received. She already knows the words she will hear: the fire was in 2019, and nothing is left out there, and sometimes the mind does strange things in the dark, alone, far from everything familiar.
She doesn’t start the car. Not yet. She just sits, and the light keeps coming, and the eastern ridge holds its silence like a secret it has no intention of sharing.

0 likes

About the Author

Helena Ward — a crisis psychologist writing ordinary people thrown straight into survival mode. She turns stress into words and stories.

— Helena Ward

Full author profile

September 1, 2026

10min-stories