WHAT THE PINES REMEMBER
She thinks the soup will be ready.
A note on versions:
This piece first appeared on Medium in its compressed form — a ghost story in miniature, fog and snow and mercy.
But ghosts, like stories, have weight they don’t always show.
This is the version with the weight left in. The woman has a name now, or close to one. A reason for speed. Someone waiting. The pines remember more than I first let them tell.
If you’ve read the Medium version, read this one beside it. Notice what the silence was hiding.
If this is your first time: welcome to the longer road.
No car has passed here in thirty-seven years. They removed the road from the maps in ’91. Liability.
The pines remember the smell first: antifreeze and copper, sap running early from the bark she took with her. A woman at a hundred kilometers per hour on a curve rated for sixty. The math was never going to work. Steel folded. Glass held its shape for one full second, then didn’t. No screech. No horn. Only the pines shifting once, then still.
The Valencian National Police found her at 11:47 p.m. The pines had kept the snow off the asphalt — root heat, the coroner guessed. He didn’t write it down.
She’d left the clinic in Morella at 5:47. Positive test in her coat pocket, the paper already soft from her hand closing over it. She was driving toward a man who was heating soup he’d forget on the stove, who would fall asleep in the chair by the window, who would wake to his sister-in-law’s car in the driveway and know before she knocked.
He buried her in March when the ground thawed. Did not bury what had been the size of a thumbnail, the weight of nothing. The priest said God’s plan and the man heard God’s mouth full of snow and never went back to mass.
Every December the road resets.
The trees lean in. Snow lifts from ditch to sky. A car appears — Loss Adjuster Black, the file said, 1987 Seat Málaga — driving the same three kilometers, headlights on high beam, and inside it a woman with one hand on the wheel and one on her stomach, pressing down like she’s keeping something from floating away.
She thinks the clinic smell is still on her fingers. She thinks the soup will be ready. She thinks I’ll tell him after dinner, when he’s sitting down.
The oldest pine holds thirty-seven rings of her passage. Each December the heartwood darkens. Each December the sap runs with something that isn’t sap.
The man died in Castelló in 2019. Heart. His brother found him in the same chair he’d been sitting in when she left.
The pines don’t know this.
The pines only know she’s late, and that the road is patient, and that some women drive forever toward a table already cleared.
This is excellent. Really, really good writing.