I. The Circle in the Pines

You can drive past the turnoff three times and still miss it, even if you’re looking. That’s the first thing they tell you about the Devil’s Tramping Ground, and the first thing you laugh at if you’re young enough to believe a road is only a road and a legend is only something old folks say to keep their evenings warm.

The road is there, all right—narrow as a snake track and shouldered by pines that lean in close, whispering together in dry green tongues. It runs off the county blacktop near Bear Creek, where the mailboxes are dented and the houses sit back from the road like they’ve done something wrong. In summer, the ditches steam. In winter, the frost clings late to the dead weeds. And at any season, if you follow that road long enough, you come to a clearing that looks as if it was made not by axe or plow, but by an argument.

The trees stop.

The ground opens.

And there it is: a hard-packed ring of reddish earth, roughly circular, not perfect but too deliberate to be called chance. Around it grows the usual scrub—wiregrass, pine straw, bramble, the stubborn little weeds that will root in gravel if you spit on it. Inside the ring, nothing.

Not one blade.

That was what brought my brother Daniel out there in the fall of 1998, with his college friends and two twelve-packs of cheap beer sweating in the backseat of his Honda. He had heard the stories all his life, same as I had. Our grandmother called it “the place where the old fire walks.” Our father called it “tourist trash.” Mama didn’t call it anything at all. She only crossed herself in the quiet, embarrassed way of people who no longer go to church but still fear the building might remember them.

Daniel was twenty-one then, handsome in the careless way of boys who haven’t lost anything yet. He had a grin that made strangers forgive him and a habit of proving he wasn’t scared, even when nobody had asked. I was sixteen, all elbows and suspicion, and because he knew I’d tell Mama if I learned he’d gone out there drunk, he brought me along.

“Witness,” he said, tossing me a flashlight with weak batteries. “Every great scientific experiment needs one.”

“There’s nothing scientific about beer,” I told him.

“There is if you drink enough to understand the universe.”

His friends laughed. There were four of them: Clay, who chewed tobacco and spit into an empty Mountain Dew bottle; Marlene, who wore black lipstick and carried a little tape recorder to “capture phenomena”; Eddie, who had borrowed his mother’s camcorder; and a quiet boy named Seth whose hair hung over his eyes like he was hiding from bad news.

We reached the clearing just before sunset. The sky behind the pines had gone the color of an old bruise, purple at the edges and yellow near the wound. Crows moved above us in pieces, not flocking so much as abandoning the place one by one.

Daniel stepped into the ring first.

“Behold,” he said, arms spread wide. “Hell’s treadmill.”

No one laughed quite as much as they meant to.

The air inside the circle felt different. I remember that clearly. It wasn’t colder, exactly. It was thinner, as if something had been burned out of it. The dirt under my sneakers was smooth and packed tight, with little shallow grooves winding through it—not footprints, not tire tracks, but faint arcs where the ground seemed polished by long use.

Marlene clicked on her tape recorder. “October seventeenth,” she said in her grave, theater voice. “Approximately six forty-two p.m. We are standing inside the legendary Devil’s Tramping Ground of Chatham County, North Carolina. No hostile entities present at this time.”

“Present,” Clay said, and belched.

Daniel put a beer can in the exact center of the circle.

“That’ll be outside by morning,” Eddie said, aiming the camcorder.

“Or a raccoon’ll get it,” I said.

Daniel shook his head. “No. The Devil hates littering. He’s very civic-minded.”

Then he dropped his backpack beside the can. In it were a sleeping bag, a flashlight, a bag of pretzels, and a little red Bible he’d stolen from a motel drawer that summer. He pulled it out and waved it.

“Insurance,” he said.

“Don’t,” I told him.

He looked at me then. Really looked. The grin softened.

“Aw, Jessie,” he said. “You don’t believe this crap.”

I wanted to say I didn’t. I wanted to say every sensible thing. But the ring lay around us like the rim of a blind eye, and the pines beyond it were already growing dark.

Instead I said, “Mama will kill you.”

“That’s a tomorrow problem.”

It got dark fast, the way it does in the woods, not falling from the sky but rising from the ground. One minute the trees were green-black, the next they were only shapes against a deeper shape. The six of us built a fire outside the circle because Clay had heard fires wouldn’t catch inside. That wasn’t true, as it happened. The kindling flared just fine when Eddie tried it, though the flame guttered low and blue and made everyone shut up until Daniel kicked dirt over it.

We drank. Or they drank. I held a beer until it got warm and foamy, then poured it behind a stump when no one was watching. They told the old stories. A hunter left his dog inside and found it whining half a mile away. A preacher slept there to prove God’s dominion and came out white-haired. A girl vanished and was discovered at dawn sitting in a ditch, speaking backward. The usual things. The kind of stories that grow best in places where the night is bigger than the houses.

Around ten, Seth said, “Do you hear that?”

We all stopped.

At first there was only the fire ticking and the distant rasp of crickets. Then came another sound, faint but unmistakable.

Footsteps.

Not in the woods.

In the circle.

A slow, dragging scrape. A pause. Another scrape.

Daniel stood up so quickly his beer spilled down his jeans. Eddie swung the camcorder around, but its little light showed only the empty ring of dirt, the beer can glinting in the middle, the backpack hunched beside it like a sleeping animal.

Scrape.

Pause.

Scrape.

Marlene whispered, “That’s not funny.”

Nobody had been laughing.

Then the backpack slid.

Not far. Maybe two inches. Just enough that the straps shifted and the pretzel bag crackled inside.

Clay cursed and threw his bottle at it. The bottle landed in the ring, bounced once, and rolled—not away from the slope, not with any natural tilt of the ground, but outward, straight toward us. It crossed the invisible boundary and stopped against Clay’s boot.

For a moment the world held its breath.

Then Daniel laughed too loud.

“Fishing line,” he said. “One of you set up fishing line.”

We all denied it, and maybe that should have been the end. Maybe fear, once spoken, loses some of its teeth. But then the beer can in the center crumpled inward with a sharp metallic pop, as if squeezed by a hand we could not see.

Marlene screamed.

And from the black wall of pines around the clearing, something answered.

It was not a growl. It was not a roar. It was a long, low chuckle, full of dirt and old smoke, the laugh of something that had been waiting before our grandfathers were born and had never learned impatience because time belonged to it.

Seth ran first. Clay followed. Marlene grabbed Eddie’s sleeve and dragged him with her, the camcorder still running, its little red light bobbing like a demon eye. I started after them, but Daniel stayed inside the ring.

He was staring down at the motel Bible, which lay open near his feet. I hadn’t seen him drop it. Its pages fluttered though there was no wind.

“Daniel,” I said.

He didn’t answer.

His head tilted, listening.

I stepped toward him, and something pressed against my chest—not a hand, not exactly, but a force, broad and cold and absolute. It pushed me back across the boundary. My heels skidded in pine straw.

“Daniel!”

He looked up at me then, and all the boy had gone out of his face.

“Jessie,” he said, very quietly. “Don’t let Mama come here.”

Then the flashlight in my hand died.

By the time it flickered back, the ring was empty.

II. What Came Home

They found Daniel at dawn, walking barefoot down the county road three miles from the clearing. That’s what the sheriff’s report says. It also says he was dehydrated, disoriented, and suffering from exposure, though the night had been mild and he’d had both shoes on when he disappeared.

It does not say his feet were uncut.

It does not say the soles were black as coal.

It does not say he smelled faintly of sulfur and wet leaves.

Those are family details, and families keep their own reports.

Mama drove him home from the hospital with her mouth pressed into a seam. Daddy followed in his truck, smoking one cigarette after another, though he’d quit two years earlier after a scare with his heart. I sat in the backseat beside Daniel. He watched the trees go by and never blinked.

“What happened?” I asked him.

Mama’s eyes flashed in the mirror.

“Leave him be.”

But Daniel turned his head toward me. Slowly. Like he had to remember how.

“He walks,” Daniel said.

His voice sounded scraped hollow.

Mama began to pray under her breath.

After that, Daniel slept for almost two days. When he woke, he was hungry enough to frighten us. He ate six eggs, half a loaf of bread, and a bowl of cold stew standing at the counter in his socks. Then he went outside and began walking around the house.

At first we thought it was nerves. Trauma, the doctor said. A bad night, mixed with alcohol and suggestion. He gave Daniel pills in a brown bottle, and Daniel took them with the obedient blankness of a boy swallowing punishment.

But he kept walking.

Around the house. Around the barn. Around the old oak in the side yard where Daddy had hung a tire swing when we were little. Always in loops. Always counterclockwise. He wore a path into the grass within a week.

At night, I heard him.

Scrape.

Pause.

Scrape.

His bedroom was next to mine. The floors in our old farmhouse sighed under every step. He paced until dawn, and when Mama cried through the wall, Daddy would say, “He’ll settle. Give him time.”

But Daddy stopped sleeping too.

A month passed. Then another. Daniel withdrew from school. His friends came by once, all together, standing on our porch with their caps in their hands like mourners. Clay had stopped chewing. Marlene wouldn’t meet my eyes. Eddie brought the camcorder tape and gave it to Daddy.

“Maybe don’t watch it,” he said.

So of course I did.

I waited until everyone slept—or pretended to sleep—and crept downstairs. The tape was in Daddy’s desk drawer, under insurance papers and a rusty .38 he never loaded. I put it in the VCR and turned the volume low.

The image was shaky. Firelight. Marlene’s black mouth. Clay’s stupid grin. My own pale face, annoyed and afraid. Then the sound.

Footsteps.

The camera jerked toward the circle. For a few seconds there was only darkness and the crushed beer can and Daniel standing with his head cocked.

Then the camcorder image distorted. Lines rolled across the screen. The audio warped into a low, thick hum. In the static, I saw something behind Daniel.

Not a figure. Not exactly.

A height. A darkness darker than the night, bent forward as if whispering into his ear. It had no face, but I felt seen by it across the years of magnetic tape, across the dead glass of the television screen. My skin went cold from scalp to ankle.

The tape hissed.

A voice came through, deep and intimate.

“Round and round,” it said. “Wear it down. Wear it through.”

Then Daniel’s recorded voice, small as a child’s:

“How long?”

The answer was laughter.

The screen went black.

Behind me, someone said, “You shouldn’t have watched that.”

I screamed and spun.

Daniel stood in the doorway in his pajamas, bare feet blackened on the bottoms, though Mama had scrubbed them raw more than once. His eyes were open too wide.

“What does it want?” I asked.

He smiled then. It was not his grin. It was a borrowed thing.

“Room.”

I ran upstairs to Mama’s bed, though I was too old for that, and she held me like I was six again. Daddy took the tape outside and burned it in a coffee can. The smoke that rose from it was greasy and green, and every dog in a two-mile stretch started howling.

Winter came. The path around the house deepened. No grass grew there in spring.

People began to talk. They always do. At the Food Lion, in church vestibules, at the gas pumps—folks asked after Daniel with voices soft as funeral fans. Some said he’d got into drugs. Some said brain damage. Some said, more quietly, that the Devil never left anything where it found it.

By April, Daniel had stopped eating meat. By June, he stopped eating much at all. He drank black coffee and tap water and walked. His body thinned, but his legs grew hard and corded. He could pace for ten hours without resting. When Daddy tried to lock him in his room, Daniel walked circles until his toenails tore loose and blood darkened the floorboards.

Mama brought preachers.

The Baptist preacher came first, red-faced and determined, with a Bible big enough to stun a mule. He prayed in the yard while Daniel circled the oak, smiling politely each time he passed.

The preacher left before supper.

Then came a Pentecostal woman from Siler City, small and fierce, who laid hands on Daniel’s head and commanded whatever held him to release its grip.

Daniel leaned down and whispered something in her ear.

She slapped him so hard the sound cracked across the yard.

Then she got in her car and drove away without taking the money Mama tried to give her.

“What did he say?” I asked from the porch.

She looked at me through the windshield. Her face had gone gray.

“He told me what my baby smelled like in the coffin,” she said.

Then she drove.

After that, Mama stopped calling preachers.

The end of Daniel, if it was an end, came on a hot August night when the air lay over the fields like a wet quilt. Thunderheads had piled up all day and gone nowhere. The house smelled of dust and sweat and coming rain.

I woke to silence.

Not ordinary silence. Not the country kind full of frogs and insects and settling wood. This was a silence with weight. I sat up in bed and knew, before my feet touched the floor, that Daniel had stopped walking.

I found him in the kitchen.

He stood by the back door, dressed in jeans and the blue shirt Mama had bought him for Easter two years before. He looked almost like himself. That was the worst of it.

“Jessie,” he said. “I need you to tell them I’m sorry.”

“Don’t go.”

“I’m already gone.”

Outside, beyond the screen door, lightning flickered without thunder. For an instant I saw the yard illuminated white and sharp: the oak, the barn, the path Daniel had worn in the grass. And standing all along that path were shapes.

People-shaped, mostly.

Some tall. Some bent. Some small enough to be children.

All facing the house.

Daniel opened the door.

I grabbed his arm. His skin was cold, but beneath it something moved, not blood, not muscle. A turning, grinding motion. Like stones being dragged in a circle.

“Please,” I said.

He kissed my forehead.

Then he stepped outside.

The shapes parted for him.

He began to walk the path around the house, counterclockwise, as he always had. Once. Twice. Three times. With each loop, the lightning flickered brighter, and the air smelled more strongly of smoke.

On the seventh turn, the ground opened.

Not like a sinkhole. Not with dirt collapsing. A line appeared in the path, red and glowing, and widened into a ring of ember-light. Daniel did not scream. He did not look back. He simply walked down into it, as if descending a staircase we could not see.

The shapes followed.

By morning, the ring around our house was bare earth.

No grass ever grew there again.

III. The Things We Leave Inside

Twenty-six years is long enough for grief to change clothes.

It does not leave. Don’t let anyone sell you that sweet little lie. It stays in the house. It learns your schedule. It sits in different chairs.

Daddy died five years after Daniel disappeared, if disappeared is the word you like. His heart finally did what it had been threatening to do. Mama lasted longer. She became very small and very devout. She moved through the house with rosary beads in one hand and Daniel’s high school class ring in the other. At the end, when the cancer had made a paper lantern of her, she caught my wrist and pulled me close.

“Don’t sell the land,” she whispered.

“I won’t.”

“Don’t go to the circle.”

“I won’t.”

Her fingers tightened with surprising strength.

“And if he comes back,” she said, “don’t open the door.”

Then she died with her eyes fixed on the corner of the room, where nothing stood that I could see.

I kept the farmhouse. I did not live in it. I married, divorced, taught eighth-grade English in Asheboro, and learned that children can smell loneliness the way dogs smell fear. I came out every other weekend to cut what grass would grow and pay a man named Hollis to tend the rest. He never touched the bare ring around the house. Said his mower stalled when he tried. Said the blades came off once and nearly took his foot.

“You ought to salt it,” he told me.

“I thought salt was for ghosts.”

He spat brown tobacco juice into the weeds. “Ma’am, I don’t know what it’s for. I just know folks been using it longer than they been explaining it.”

The original Tramping Ground remained where it had always been, deeper in the pines, gathering beer cans, dares, and nervous laughter from each new generation. People put videos online. They left chairs and bottles and sleeping bags in the ring, then came back at dawn to find them tossed into the brush. Some claimed hoax. Some claimed magnetism. Some claimed soil toxicity. The world had become crowded with explanations, most of them thin as receipt paper.

I did not go.

Until my daughter Emily did.

She was twenty-two, Daniel’s age, with his easy grin and my talent for pretending not to be scared. She had grown up on the story in fragments. A missing uncle. A sick grandmother. A mother who hated backroads after dark. I never told her everything because mothers are fools. We think silence is a locked door. We forget children are born picking locks.

She called me on a Friday night in October.

“Mom,” she said, bright and breathless, “don’t be mad.”

Those four words dropped me back through time so fast I had to sit down.

“Where are you?”

A pause. Voices behind her. Boys laughing. A girl saying, “Ask her if ghosts have Wi-Fi.”

“Emily.”

“We’re just checking it out.”

The room tilted.

“No.”

“It’s folklore, Mom.”

“Listen to me. Get in your car and leave.”

“We’re fine. There’s like six of us.”

“There were six of us too.”

Silence on the line.

Then, softer: “Mom?”

In the background, someone said, “Whoa. Did you see that?”

The call crackled.

“Emily, put your keys in your hand and walk to the road.”

“Mom, there’s something—”

The line went dead.

I do not remember the drive. I remember pieces. My headlights tunneling through pine trunks. The taste of copper in my mouth. My hands gripping the wheel so tightly they ached for days after. I remember praying, though I no longer knew to whom.

When I reached the dirt road, three cars were parked crooked near the clearing. Doors open. Interior lights glowing. A phone lay facedown in the mud, buzzing with a cracked blue pulse.

I got out.

The pines were silent.

Not quiet.

Silent.

I carried the flashlight Daddy had kept in the truck, the big metal one heavy enough to break a jaw. The beam shook as I entered the clearing.

The ring waited.

Inside it were a backpack, two folding chairs, a half-empty bottle of vodka, and Emily’s red scarf. The scarf lay at the center, curled like a wounded thing.

No people.

“Emily!”

My voice did not echo. The trees swallowed it whole.

Then came footsteps.

Scrape.

Pause.

Scrape.

Around the inside of the circle, shallow grooves appeared in the dirt, pressing themselves into being one by one. An invisible walker. A patient walker.

I stepped toward the ring.

The air thickened, pushing against me, familiar as a nightmare you forgot until it laid its hand on your shoulder. I pushed back.

“No,” I said. “Not her.”

The footsteps stopped.

From the far side of the clearing, beyond the reach of my flashlight, Daniel’s voice said, “Jessie?”

I knew it was not Daniel. Of course I knew. My brother had been gone longer than he had been alive. But grief does not care what you know. It only cares what you want.

The flashlight beam found him at the edge of the pines.

He looked twenty-one.

Blue shirt. Bare feet. Dark hair falling over his forehead. The same gentle mouth, the same eyes. Behind him, the trees leaned close, listening.

“Daniel,” I whispered.

He smiled.

“You got old.”

I laughed then, one broken sound, and almost went to him.

Almost.

Then Mama’s dying whisper rose in me: If he comes back, don’t open the door.

I stopped at the circle’s edge.

“Where is Emily?”

He glanced toward the ring.

“Inside.”

“There’s nothing inside.”

“There’s more inside than out.”

“Give her back.”

Daniel’s smile widened a little too far.

“It doesn’t give. It trades.”

The pines creaked though there was no wind. The dirt in the circle darkened, and for an instant I saw below it—not a hole, not flames, not any simple Sunday-school hell, but roads. Endless roads, coiled upon themselves, all made of hard bare earth. People walked them. Men, women, children, animals with rolling eyes, soldiers in rotted uniforms, a woman in a wedding dress blackened at the hem. Round and round. Wearing the roads deeper. Wearing something thin.

And among them, Emily.

She was walking barefoot, her face blank with terror, her red scarf dragging from one hand.

I screamed her name.

Her head twitched, but she did not stop.

Daniel said, “You can bring her out.”

“How?”

“You know how.”

I looked at the ring. At the empty center. At the place where nothing living wanted to remain.

“A trade,” I said.

He inclined his head.

The thing wearing my brother’s face watched me with eyes like pits under burned-out stumps.

I thought of Emily at five, asleep with a book on her chest. Emily at twelve, furious because I would not let her ride her bike to the highway. Emily at twenty-two, rolling her eyes and loving me anyway. I thought of Daniel saying don’t let Mama come here. I thought of all the things we leave inside circles: beer cans, backpacks, Bibles, brothers, daughters, blame.

I stepped into the ring.

The pressure vanished. The air turned warm. Not summer warm. Body warm. Breath warm.

Daniel’s face changed.

For one instant, it was truly him. Not the grinning thing. Not the echo. My brother. His eyes filled with horror.

“Jessie, no,” he said.

Then the ground lurched under my feet, and the world turned.

IV. The Last Footsteps

People will tell you I was found at sunrise beside the road, just like Daniel.

That is partly true.

Hollis found me walking near the old mailbox with Emily in my arms. She was unconscious but alive, her feet dirty, her red scarf knotted around one wrist. My hair had gone white in a single streak above my left temple, which the doctor later called trauma and which I called a receipt.

The other kids were found scattered through the woods, all alive, none willing to discuss what they had seen. One joined the army. One joined a church that did not allow musical instruments. One moved to Oregon and mailed Emily a letter every Christmas with no return address. Fear makes missionaries of some people and fugitives of others.

Emily remembered very little.

She remembered walking.

She remembered a road under a sky with no stars.

She remembered voices calling from the ditches in the voices of people she loved.

She remembered me taking her hand and saying, “Go.”

“What did you trade?” she asked me in the hospital.

I told her I didn’t know.

That was the first lie.

The truth is this: I traded a promise.

Not my life. Not then.

The thing in the circle had reached for me with all its patient dark, and I had felt its hunger—not for blood or souls, not in the way stories teach us, but for motion. It wanted wearing down. It wanted the skin of the world thinned by footsteps, by grief returning to grief, by fools daring other fools to stand where mercy had worn out.

I took Emily’s hand on that road beneath the ground. Around us walked the lost, their faces gray and shining with sweat, their mouths moving in prayers or curses or names. Daniel walked beside me for a while. The real Daniel. Or what was left of him.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said.

“I’ve heard that before.”

He almost smiled.

The road curved endlessly. Ahead, I saw an opening no bigger than a keyhole, bright with moonlight. Emily drifted toward it like a sleeper.

“It won’t let both of you go,” Daniel said.

“What does it want?”

He looked down at his blackened feet.

“What it always wants. Someone to keep the circle.”

I understood then.

The Devil’s Tramping Ground was not a place where evil came to plan wickedness. That was the children’s version, and maybe all human stories are children’s versions of things too large to bear. The ring was a hinge. A scab. A worn place between the world we know and the road beneath. Something had to walk it from the other side, always, or the hinge would rust open.

For generations, it had taken volunteers, fools, drunks, skeptics, the grieving and the proud. It had taken Daniel. Now it wanted me.

So I promised.

“Not yet,” I said. “Let her go, and when my time comes, I’ll walk.”

The darkness around us chuckled.

“How long?” it asked with Daniel’s mouth, with Mama’s mouth, with my own voice as a little girl.

“Until she’s safe from you.”

Laughter rolled under the road like thunder underground.

No one is safe, it seemed to say.

But a bargain is a bargain, even with things that hate the shape of words.

I shoved Emily through the keyhole of moonlight.

Then Daniel put both hands on my shoulders and pushed me after her.

He should not have been able to do that. I saw what it cost him. The road beneath us buckled. The walkers moaned. From far away came a roar like a forest catching fire.

“Run,” Daniel said.

I fell upward into dawn.

For three years after, nothing happened.

That is the part no one appreciates in horror stories: the mercy of ordinary mornings. Coffee brewing. Bills arriving. A crow on the fence. Emily recovering, graduating, getting a job in Raleigh, calling every Sunday. I treasured every dull hour. I worshiped boredom. I could have built an altar to a grocery list.

But bargains wait.

They sit politely in corners.

Last month, I found a bare patch in my backyard.

Not large. The size of a dinner plate. Hard-packed, reddish earth where there had been clover the day before. I salted it. I prayed over it. I covered it with sod. By morning, the sod lay folded on the patio like a blanket kicked off in sleep.

The patch grew.

A week later, it was wide enough to step inside.

Emily wanted me to leave the house. “Come stay with me,” she said. “We’ll figure it out.”

But we had already figured it out, long ago in the dark.

Tonight, the circle fills half the yard. The air smells of pine sap and smoke, though I live miles from the woods now. My neighbors’ dogs have been whining since sunset. The moon is high. My feet ache with a pain that feels older than bone.

I have put my affairs in order. That is the phrase people use when they mean they have folded their fear neatly and placed it where others may find it. The house is locked. The letters are written. Emily’s is on the kitchen table under Daniel’s class ring.

I hear the footsteps now.

Scrape.

Pause.

Scrape.

They are not outside.

They are in the hall.

My brother’s voice calls softly from beyond the bedroom door.

“Jessie?”

He sounds tired.

I am tired too.

When I open the door, he is standing there in his blue shirt, no longer young, no longer false. His face is lined with all the years he never got to live. Behind him waits the dark road, curling away through pines that grow upside down beneath a starless sky.

“Is she safe?” I ask.

Daniel looks past me, perhaps toward Raleigh, perhaps toward a future I will never see.

“For now,” he says.

For now is all any of us ever get.

I take his hand.

Together we walk through the house, past the photographs, past the old grief sitting in its favorite chairs, out the back door and into the waiting ring. The ground is warm under my bare feet. The first step hurts. The second hurts less.

By the third, I understand.

The circle is not empty. It never was. It is crowded with everything we refuse to bury and everything that refuses to stay buried. It is worn smooth by love as much as wickedness, by longing as much as evil. The Devil may walk there—I won’t tell you he doesn’t—but if he does, he is not alone.

Round and round we go.

The grass at the edge trembles but does not cross.

Somewhere above us, morning is thinking about coming.

And when it does, they will find nothing in the circle. Not a woman. Not a brother. Not even footprints.

Only hard-packed earth.

Only the old red ring.

Only the place that remembers.