Sometimes the beginning of a story is unpleasant. The tale of Ann begins one rainy morning when she opened her mail and found she no longer had a job. Even though Ann hadn’t really liked her job, she had kept up the daily grind to pay rent on her room in a big city and to be closer to its galleries and curators. In her free time, she was an artist. After each endless day in the design studio where she positioned and re-positioned company logos on press-releases hailing the accomplishments of corporate vampires, Ann painted a world which was as far as possible from her own. Ghosts and spirits peered out of a sleepy forest, mermaids would sunbathe on the banks of a wide river, and the moon winked lovingly at the sun. Ann had four hundred and fifty-six followers on Instagram, but to be honest, no one was particularly interested in her work.


Once she knew she had been fired, Ann finally understood that she had long been sick of living in a big city, sick of failing to make her way in a world which couldn’t care less about her mermaids and fairies. And she didn’t need to be tied to an office to work on her commissions. For the past three years, the view from her apartment had been a brick wall and a pipe. What was the point in continuing to spend days upon days staring at that? A new forum post caught Ann’s eye. “For rent: a room in a house situated by the woods and mountains. Inexpensive, but a zoom interview is required beforehand. The room is an acquired taste, please do not be offended if refused.” Ann immediately felt some sort of fond connection towards this quaint little house.

The interview turned out to be an hour and a half conversation about life with a stern old granny called Katlyn. The granny looked like the star of an old vintage film; she was stylishly and neatly dressed, the room behind her seemed cozy and retro. A carved wardrobe, a fireplace, and a table lamp with a huge lampshade… Katlyn reminded Ann of her own dead grandmother. She had died before she could finish an incredibly long story about a cat who could, from time to time, transform into a parrot. The parrot would then fly into the homes of unfortunate, unhappy people, carrying both chaos and wonder into their lives.

“My dear, I must warn you, if you want to go out to party and see friends, then my home is definitely not going to be a good match for you. You understand, this is a forest and the closest civilization is 40 minutes away. And the road isn’t great either…”

Ann had been unlucky in dating for a while now. They had either been neurotics, married, or both. So, as she walked on the path towards her feminine joy, she was glad to know that only the dark foliage of the forest lay ahead of her.

Ann arrived at Katlyn’s with a small suitcase, a pot with a sad succulent called Theodore living inside it, and a toy bear which had once been given to her by her grandmother. Oddly, all of Ann’s boyfriends had disliked this cute fluffy bear. Now she was settled into her new home, Ann did not experience a new sense of happiness. In fact, the place scared her. The lady of the house kept her new tenant at a chilly distance, while messages from her friends in the city became increasingly infrequent. And no matter what she did, the will to paint eluded her.
Just as Katlyn had warned, her small home stood in the middle of a dark, mighty forest. The trees were so huge and tall that almost no sunlight fell inside the house. “Apparently there are no hummingbirds in this forest” Ann thought to herself as she stood by the side of the house.

Next to some battered brooms, she was examining a small plant bed with just a few succulents growing inside it. She was remembering a nature program she had once seen; one scene in particular had imprinted itself onto her memory. It had shown a woman in a beautiful dress, in the ideal home, feeding hummingbirds with sweet syrup. As if in answer to the thoughts in her head, a nearby representative of the forest cawed from the very tops of the trees: “Caw, Caw, Caw”. At night, right by Ann’s window an owl would hoot sadly. “Okh, ukh, hukh” for hours… In the mornings a fog would hang in the forest, so thick you could eat it with a spoon. Ann looked out the window and pined for her old landscape of brick walls and pipes. Ann was afraid of the forest. She avoided it completely; everything in that world was unfriendly, foreign, and somehow always too big.

Without quite noticing, a couple of months passed. Ann barely left the house, if only for the occasional food shop, and even then she mainly went with Katlyn. One Sunday morning the lady of the house invited En to share breakfast with her. Once the young tenant had been filled with pancakes and maple syrup, Katlyn got straight to the point.

“My dear” (This was how Katlyn always addressed Ann), “my sister has been taken ill and I must go away for a few weeks. I want to leave the house, and Doughnut, in your care”.

Doughnut was a small shaggy dog of no particular breed, and upon hearing his masters’ words he pressed his ear down and stared at Ann with a kind of silent anguish.

“There should be very little to do, although you will have to take him every morning and evening for a long walk. You know Doughnut will tear the whole place apart without any exercise”. Ann went numb in terror. She felt physically sick at the thought of living alone in the middle of the forest and walking each day into its dark heart.

Katlyn, seemingly, sensed Ann’s anxiety.

“I can see that you don’t like the forest. But that’s just because you don’t know it. I’ll tell you a story. Once, titans used to stand in this place. The trees here now are but babies in comparison. There was a great tribe of old redwoods here, all of them thousands of years old. But then bad people came. Maybe they weren’t so bad, but all the same they were desperate for wood to build their huge cities. And then other cities after that. Those people cut down almost the entire forest. All that remains from those old redwoods are perhaps a couple of photographs of lumberjacks showing off, with a whole group of them posing on a single tree stump, along with their horse and cart. If those were the stumps they left behind, can you imagine the kind of trees that used to stand here?

“Later, farmers decided to try and plant fruit orchards where the redwoods used to stand. But it wasn’t long before it became clear their business was unprofitable. The farmers then abandoned their farmsteads and the forest began to slowly return. All the trees that you see around the house are young by redwood standards. They are children of the forest. Tom is the one exception. That’s the name of one great redwood who stands right on the path you’ll walk Doughnut on. It’s impossible to miss him, he is much wider than the rest of the trees. Tom was still small when the woodcutters plundered the old forest and he wasn’t of much use to them, though they did tie their horses to him when they sat down for lunch. No-one touched him, and it was thanks to this that Tom survived. While this forest might look powerful it is actually young, delicate and defenseless. You will fall in love with it, I promise you”.

Ann looked gloomily out the window, the sun barely breaking through the huge trunks before her. “I can get through this, I won’t be afraid.” She remembered when Alex had rung to say he had fallen in love with someone else, and then proceeded to apologize for treating their relationship like a game for all the years they’d been together. “Nothing will be more terrifying or stupid than that” she thought.

The next morning after Katlyn had left, Ann took Doughnut and left the house. A fog stood in the courtyard and the path was barely visible. Drops fell from the redwoods; En had read somewhere that these trees had unique properties like turning fog into water. “Amazing” thought Ann. “Humans are planning to fly to Mars, they’re building the Metaverse, and yet at the same time no-one cares at all that our planet is crumbling. I spend entire days scrolling social media, dreaming of wizards, fairies, and mystical madonnas, and yet haven’t even noticed that the world around me is a complete miracle”. As Ann walked through the milky veil it occurred to her that something terrifying could suddenly jump straight out at her. However, the only thing that did jump at her was Doughnut, who was happy to be running free, circling around En and demanding her attention. Ann began throwing a ball – Katlyn has informed her that this was Doughnut’s favorite toy. The dog chased the ball, searched for it in the grass, and brought it back so Ann could repeat this joyful ritual again and again. Ann was so charmed by this primitive game that she didn’t even notice how far she had walked. Suddenly a huge redwood stood in the middle of the path. “Perhaps this is the Tom that Katlyn told me about”. The fog had started to disperse and the sun sparkled through the remaining fragments of haze. The dew-covered trees shone and rejoiced at the new day. Tom looked so beautiful, standing tall in the light, that En couldn’t stop herself from wrapping her arms around his trunk.

The rest of the day passed without particular incident, though by the evening Ann had become fearful again. An owl was hooting outside the window. Doughnut started to whimper, maybe he was pining for his mistress, or maybe he could sense the stress pulsing out from Ann in expanding, concentric circles. Light… all the lamps must be turned on. Now the house was lit up like a Christmas tree, the girl curled up in a ball on the armchair. She was trying not to let her fantasies get the better of her, yet still she saw monsters and ghouls crawling out of the forest towards her. Ann remembered how she had been deathly afraid of darkness as a young girl. Sometimes she had even had hallucinations of ghosts and spirits, as well as a woman in white who would sit right next to her bed. Many years passed before Ann understood that she was alone in the darkness, and ultimately, the thing she was most afraid of was herself.

A deep night fell. The hooting of the owl by the window became louder and louder. As a way to distract herself, Ann decided to google why owls hooted. “Owls hoot to defend their territory, to scare away predators, and also to find and be reunited with their partner”. Oh, so the owls are alone too. En was so struck by this that she even, for a moment, stopped being scared.

Owl, would you like me to tell you a story?

Ann started talking to the owl, and at a certain moment it seemed like the owl started to talk back. The owl’s sad hoots began to sound different, like each one was a valuable contribution to understanding the meaning of life.

This is how An spent the coming days and nights. She would walk Doughnut for hours during the day, hugging Tom at each pass. Those hugs had turned into an important ritual, although Ann was more pressing herself against the huge tree than actually hugging it. She would have needed several people if she had wanted to hug the tree. Ann laughed: “Look at that, I survived… I’m hugging a tree who gives me such happiness, and not only that, I am friends with an owl”. Each night they were having long, heartfelt conversations, marked by a true depth and intimacy. Ann didn’t think she had ever, in all her life, experienced the like of it before. A couple of weeks passed and the forest ceased to feel strange or hostile to Ann. She knew every tree on the forest path and every day she watched the birds and squirrels flap and run across the tops of the trees. And Tom was always there waiting for her. Ann thought that Tom was protecting both her and Doughnut from harm.

In the end, Katlyn spent two months with her sister instead of just a few weeks. In the time she had gone, summer had fully arrived and the forest was fragrant with the smell of pine needles bathing in the building dry heat. The sharp, bright sun painted a pattern of deep shadow on the forest path. Each day, Ann read about a record-breaking regional drought. However, her thoughts were far away from the apocalyptic news she was reading. She was absolutely by herself amidst the wild forest, though for the first time in her life, she didn’t feel alone.
Trouble began that evening when finally, her landlady returned. The noticeable smell of smoke had begun to appear a few hours before. Fire. The biggest fear for those living in the forest. Usually, the wind carries the smell of burning from many kilometers away, but there was worrying news coming from the villages that were terrifyingly close to Katlyn’s house. Katlyn arrived, her face pale. Doughnut jumped up out of joy, but in that moment, his happiness was misplaced.

“Ann. (This was perhaps the first time that her landlady had called her by her name). Some idiots ignored the rules and lit a bonfire in the nature reserve. The fire is approaching incredibly quickly. The local government is just about to announce an evacuation, even though the roads are already blocked with people fleeing. You know what our roads are like. A true apocalypse could be just a few hours away. Take your things and go to the nearest available hotel in the valley. You will be safe there.”

“And you? Are you coming too?”

Katlyn gave Ann an strange look and went into another room. From there she answered Ann quietly but firmly.

“No, I’m going to stay here. I have to protect my children.”

Ann quickly gathered her things, sat in the car and turned it on. A cloud of smoke stretched across the sky, and the smell of burning got stronger and stronger. Ann sat in the car for ten minutes, silent as a stone. Then she jumped back out and ran into the house.
Katlyn was stood on the porch, her face full of anger.

“You’re still here? Everyone must evacuate at once!”

“I’m not leaving. It was here, in this forest that I felt complete happiness for the first time. Maybe you think I’ve lost my mind, but I love Tom, this is my home, these are my friends, and I want to help.

“And don’t pretend you don’t understand me. I know all about you. The owl told me how the queen of the redwoods, the powerful sorceress and mother of the forest, once tried to stop the wood-cutters destroying this land. The owl told me about the grief that overwhelmed her and how, once she had breathed life into new trees, she turned herself into a woman so she could continue to protect her children. Mother, I know who you are. I want to transform too, I want to become a redwood. Help me.”

The owl sat on the edge of the porch and listened carefully to their conversation.

A bright, inhuman green flashed across Katlyn’s stern eyes. Although now there was no anger in them, only tenderness.

“I have searched for you for a long time. So many girls have stayed with me and not a single one of them showed any interest in the forest. They would arrive, consumed by their own problems, unable to see the world you and I see. I am but an old woman, and I don’t have the strength to guide and advise everyone. You were my last hope. But stop now, there is no time for emotion. Give me your hand and let us fly.”

Spirits and ghosts emerged from the sleepy forest, mermaids posed and chattered by the stream, and the moon complained to the sun about the smell of burning wood. Mother and daughter rushed into the sky to save their family.