Written By RowanCarver

Lightning bugs blinked in the trees, so vast in number, it was like someone scooped up the stars and painted the forest with them. All the lights blurred together through Charlotte's alcoholic lens. She stepped on a twig and jumped at the crack. A coyote barked. She looked behind her and realized she wasn't sure where the path was anymore, much less her house. What the hell am I doing? She thought, then said out loud, "What the hell am I doing?"

Her heart broke through the slurry in her veins and started to tap against her ribcage. Nothing is more sobering than realizing you're lost in the woods. She turned out her pockets in search of her phone, grabbing handfuls of lint instead. Damn, left it on the counter when I was putting on my shoes. She was alone, and very quickly feeling sick. If I pass out here, no one will find me, she thought. I'll be food for the coyotes and no one will know.

She turned and tried to retrace her steps. Rocks poked through the soles of her cheap rain boots. The ground was slippery here, wet leaves sticking to the mountain stone. She looked down and realized she was on a rather high cliff, the tops of pine tree saplings swaying below. A hundred visions of falling to her death made her step from the ledge.

"Oh my god," she said. "Where am I?" She clapped her hands over her mouth and said into them, sobbing, "Where the hell am I?"

She wanted to curl up on the rocks, close her eyes, and wake up back home. She thought about how long it would take to starve to death or if the wind would blow her off the mountain. How the fog would cover her body and Allison would never know what happened to her. She would be left to sort spreadsheets all on her own or with some new hire selected by her dad to keep an eye on her, some old woman with bad breath and crust in the corners of her mouth. That idea was more distressing to Charlotte than falling off the cliff.

She pushed her hair behind her ears, spun, and marched in the opposite direction where her house should be at the wood's end. I can't let Allison work with some old bitch, she thought and soldered into the fog. She listened to her heart and the mountain wind for a while, the canopy rocking above her. Every tree was like the evil ones from Snow White with the gnarled faces barring long teeth at Snow as she fled. Charlotte hated that movie when she was little because of that part.

The trail didn't look familiar anymore and the bent-arm trees were nowhere to be found, although it was getting harder to see anything in the fog. The back porch light should have appeared through the brush by now. She managed a few more steps before sinking to a crouch and scraping her fingernails through her hair. Her ears were rushing, her stomach roiling. "I just want to be home," she told the mountains. "Please, just let me go home."

How long until dawn? She thought, listening to the ocean in her ears, the coyotes barking somewhere on the other side of the static. A few hours? Will I ever get to see the sunrise? At least it wasn't cold. Greyson always wanted to go camping anyway, right? Isn't this just the same thing?

Camping. She could do that. This wasn't the best spot though with a rock face above her shoving her to a ledge. Since the ground was damp, she would wake up with snails and a few of their diseases if a predator didn't get her first. She needed to find a dry spot on higher ground.

The blue and yellow lightning bugs had disappeared when the fog overtook the forest. Mountain fog was dangerous. One moment, Charlotte could see the moonlight through the pine needles, the next, she couldn't see the outline of trees. She reached out, found the bark of an oak, then traced its rivets until she stood. She found another tree, this one pine, its scales flaking into her palm. She shuffled forward in this way: passing from one tree to the other and feeling the ground under her boots until the fog tumbled down into a valley. She found herself in a meadow of starlight, the lights gleaming both in the sky and on the ground.

The fog stopped at the clearing's edge as if afraid to creep inside and disturb the thousands of blue ghost lightning bugs dancing through the meadow. The entire valley hummed with the buzzing of insect wings, and the beetles flit through the grasses like strings of neon lights. They were almost as spectacular as the stars above them which, without the pollution of the city, were breathtaking. Charlotte had seen brochures with pictures of the mountain sky at night before with stars innumerable enough to be a photoshop job. Seeing it now, she realized the photos weren't edited. The stars really could be that innumerable. What was even more impressive to Charlotte was that there were as many lightning bugs in the valley as there were lights in the sky, as if they were reflecting one another in a clear pool.

There was a sense of magic about the place. At its center was an oak tree accompanied by a few young shoots, the elder tree a guardian for them and all the valley's creatures. The oak likely saw the mountains in the time of the Cherokee long before the logging industry turned the Appalachians into patches of young forests. Its trunk was massive, its branches full of thick leaves, and it was tall enough to bury its crown into the sky. The tree challenged the mountains with its height and scraped the celestial bodies with its branches.

Man, I really am drunk, Charlotte thought. The valley shouldn't be that bright and the tree shouldn't be that big. Nothing was really that beautiful, that's what the past two years had taught her. The valley was probably a patch of overgrown grass full of bugs. To her, it was lovely because of the alcohol. The fact that she could only find pretty things while intoxicated was incredibly sad. Otherwise, the world was either terrifying or boring.

At least this spot seemed like a safe enough place to wait for dawn. Air traffic might spot her in the open like this. She sat on her butt, then used roots and rocks to slide into the grass. The shoots were tall enough to scrape her elbows. She moved through the stalks, trying not to think about snakes.

Lightning bugs hovered beside her boots. Between their glow and the immense field of stars above her, she could see the valley clearly. "How come you assholes didn't show me the way home?" she asked the bugs. Talking to them was stupid but it helped her feel less afraid.

The idea crossed her mind at some point to climb into the tree's branches and avoid predators as well as any other unwelcome visitors. Standing at its roots now, she'd never felt so tiny. Its branches began several feet above her with no way to shimmy up without a rope and upper body strength that's a little better than that of an average desk job employee. The drunk part of her brain told her she could do it. The other part determined that the only thing worse than getting lost in the mountains was getting lost with a broken leg.

The longer she stood beneath the tree, the better she felt. Her heart wasn't beating so fast. She shouldn't feel safe and shouldn't let her guard down, but that sense of peace she found at the valley's edge had found its way inside of her now. She sat between the roots and put her back against the trunk and watched the lightning bugs blend in with the stars. Maybe this isn't so bad, she thought. Locals like Mike probably camp like this all the time.

She was just the right amount of drunk to be comfortable anywhere, and the tree roots presented no challenge to her when she settled on top of them. She stared at the branches where the lightning bugs traced blue and yellow patterns between the leaves. One of them landed on a piece of bark inches from her face: a ball of blue light that expanded out and in as if it were breathing. She searched for the beetle at its center, then swore she saw a person there instead.

There was a child between the beetle's wings. They wore a white dress. Wings sprouted from their shoulder blades, the membranes like stained glass windows painted blue. The child was neither a boy nor a girl, and they had yellow curls, pointed ears, and a pink nose. They didn't seem to notice Charlotte as they walked on bare feet through the divots in the bark.

Charlotte blinked. The child came to a hole in the tree and crawled inside. She caught a glimpse of their stained glass wings quivering before they disappeared.

She sat up fast and then froze, the valley spinning, spots exploding in her vision. Nausea pooled at the base of her tongue. She steadied herself, grasping the roots to do so, then figured that the fairy child was nothing but a hallucination fueled by little sleep and many bad decisions. Just to be sure, she searched the canopy and the tree bark where the blue lights were still collecting, then breathed a sigh of relief when she found a handful of lightning bugs with black beetles between shiny onyx wings.

They were amazing nonetheless. Blue ghost lighting bugs appeared only in the Appalachians and even then they were incredibly rare. Helen was one of the few lucky spots where the beetles came to breed; North Carolina was another. Charlotte had seen them in her backyard once a year ago when the lightning bugs danced over the mosses, turning them a cerulean color, and she'd stepped outside to see if it was some sort of trick. She was alone then just like she was now and wished she had someone to share them with, but Allison wasn't the nature type and Greyson was the only other person that might've cared.

That little bit of peace she'd found at the valley's edge had grown now. She wasn't afraid of the mountains so much anymore, the coyotes barking in the distance, or any other nasty things that might find her fit for a meal. She knew that the tree couldn't actually protect her, but was secure among its roots regardless, and began to drift away. She dreamed of fairy children watching her from the branches, their wings made of stained glass, their bodies made of starlight.

She woke up with the sun turning the sky pink and stones placed in the tree roots around her, each one with a perfect cross etched in its center.