Kennedi Jones
Paranoia
“Don’t turn around. I remember reading that,” I whisper to myself. The urge to look back is eating away at me. To distract myself, I try counting the trees I pass. Six maples, three oaks, five covered in moss. Light creeps in through slivers in the canopy above. Turn around.
“If you look you’ll become paranoid,” I whisper again. I’m struggling to convince myself otherwise. Birds. There were five birds in a tree.
Turn around.
Eight squirrels.
Look.
Twenty-three flowers.
Look behind you.
The urge consumes me, and I look.
I see nothing out of the ordinary, just trees and trees stretching as far as I can see. I sigh, relieved.
“Don’t stop moving to listen to the woods, I remember that too.”
A layer of goosebumps form on my skin as an eerie quiet looms amongst the trees. I push on, now hyper-aware of my breathing and footsteps. The urge to look comes crawling back. I get the same result, just trees. My boots crunch the wet leaves. The trees are progressively becoming more bare the further into the