My father and I are running through the forest. Our footsteps pound with silent desperation over roots, fallen leaves, forest detritus. We have been running for so long that I can’t help but think of what would happen should we stop — what would catch up to us. The eerie quiet of the forest leaves too much room for thought. Sound has managed to flee this place, unlike us. The silence means it takes me a moment to notice that my father is not beside me. I twist back, still in motion, to see that he has stopped, tripped over a root and crashed to the ground. I double back for him, but there is already shadow forming around his body. I reach out a hand anyway to pull him from the tendrils of shadow matter; he reaches towards me. They form into a shape — a ghastly, monstrous shape, wrong in the ways fairy tale monsters are wrong. I cry out silently; lunge forward; the shape consumes him until only his bright blue eye is visible —

Before we begin, let me set the scene.

You protest. You want to know what happens next, why we are running, if he’s going to die, all the basics. We’ll get there. But as you’ve so astutely pointed out, this is the middle of the action, the climax, the most important part; how can it be impactful without context? How can you visualize the imagery of the whatever other writing jargon unless you know where we are?

So I say again: Let me set the scene.

It is a beautiful autumn day, the kind that’s crisp with cliches. The air feels antithetical to the decay happening throughout the forest: it is bright and clean and new. It is just cold enough to hurt going into my lungs as I gasp in horror. I said the forest was quiet, do you remember that? There are no birds singing, no branches rustling, no chittering of small animals. The leaves do not fall to the ground because there is only the creeping shadow, suspending the forest in time, crystallizing it like an insignificant bug. But we’re not there yet. I’m not ready to return. I’m talking about the trees, immense and dressed golden. They grow close together, sprouting from the same place or connecting farther up, trunks intertwining like lovers. I catch flashes of a brilliantly blue sky between the leaves as I fall forwards and —

We return to the characters, frozen as they are in mid-reach. I can tell you that my hair is brown like the mottled, striated leaves I fall onto, and my eyes are hazel, and my clothing is a polymer blend. Some cotton, maybe. Some denim. Lots of holes and patches. We have been running for a long time; the soles of my boots are nearly worn through. The laces on my left one came undone a while ago and they hang limp. The little plastic tips are called aglets, if you care. They are made of plastic. Did I already mention that?

You start to say yes, but I can’t hear you. The shadow eats sound, nonsensically.

I have a mole behind my left earlobe. I touch it whenever I’m nervous, smoothing habitually over the soft bump. My father has the same mole and the same habit. My face is contorted into an open-mouthed scream: a beetling of the eyebrows and widening of the hazel eyes and an opening of the mouth in a scream that no one will ever hear. If a girl falls in a forest and she can’t be heard, does she make a sound?

Do I make a sound, as the shadow drives the blade through my father’s back? My father with the mole and the nervous habit. Maybe I am delaying the inevitable with these details. The shadow swoops over me. The scene is set. We begin.

Editor’s note: Tal Newman previously worked as a copy editor for The Pitt News. All writing contest submissions were judged anonymously.