Hindsight

Hindsight

by E.B. Sommer

E.B. Sommer’s work has appeared in The Daily Tomorrow, Moonday Mag, and The Stygian Zine.  On April 17th, 2026 one of her stories will appear in the latest Harvey Duckman anthology, the Soup of Causality, available on Amazon. She is an Associate Member of SFWA and a full list of her published stories can be found on her website, at www.ebsommer.com. She lives in Minnesota with her family and their dogs, Sam and Sally.

These woods are violent.

I can tell by the curve of the tree limbs, and the solid twisted feeling in my stomach. Though it is an unseasonably warm fall evening, there is still the slight bite in the air that signals colder weather ahead. Sunlight filters through the branches of the trees, and maple and oak leaves coat the ground in shades of orange and red. I can smell decay in the soil, some rot that buried itself in the land here long ago.

I am close. There is evil here and I can smell it. Even after all these years, my body trembles with each step closer to the Source. I can no sooner stop myself from moving toward it than I can control my mental and physical reactions when I arrive. This drive, this madness, is the gift my family inherited three generations ago, and one we haven’t been able to be rid of since.

‘Gift’ is a funny word. It implies benevolence; grace. There is nothing graceful about what I can do. I–like my father, and his father before him–have the gift of Hindsight. We can feel the past experiences of our ancestors deeply, like they are happening in the present. It is my family’s great misfortune that the only pasts we can feel are the ones that hurt the most; the pain that members of our family have either inflicted upon others or experienced themselves. I feel the worst of what has come before; the things the land itself can’t forget. There is a small real gift alongside the torment of what I can do. On occasion, I can heal parts of the land. I can mend small facets of what was broken long ago. More often, I am a witness and nothing more.

I focus on the dirt on my tennis shoes while I put one foot in front of the other, leaves crunching beneath the soles.The fine hairs on my arms stand on end. Focusing on the physical means I am less preoccupied with what is happening to my mind. I am drawn to horrors, but when I’m confronted with the exact spot where they occurred, I would do anything to be elsewhere. To have some brighter, more useful talent.

The Source is closer now. The current season fades and is replaced with a colder, bleaker version of the woods. The sky is a dark gray and the limbs of the trees are bare and unforgiving. The sweatshirt and black leather jacket I’m wearing feel woefully inadequate in the face of the bitter wind that now cuts across my cheeks and the tops of my ears. My shoulder bag is full of odds and ends, a combination of what has been useful in the past and a best guess as to what might be useful going forward. Buried in a disorganized mass are such treasures as; a tangled rope and a compass, a few packages of jerky, a tightly wound roll of gauze, a lighter, a flashlight, batteries, and an ax.

One tree towers over the rest. The crooked limbs are grotesque things, so devoid of innocence that I wince in sympathy to every creature that has skittered across them or sought shelter within the great yawning maw of the tree’s trunk.

I move slowly, wary of the moment when the past will break into my mind and split it open. I have done this many times before, and yet I have never gained more courage in the moments before the pain.

When I rest my forehead against the bark of the tree, I feel each crack and splinter. I hear the wind whistling through the limbs above, and the layered whispers of dead and dying souls around me.

I blink, and then I am in some other ‘when’.

It is cold, so very cold. Snow covers the ground and falls gently down around these cursed trees. I force myself to look down. My feet are bare and my hands are trembling and numb with cold.

Knowing what comes next, I try to close my eyes but find I cannot. The Source comes to me in flashes. My back is against the tree, and the scenes flick from one to another.

Rope tightening, bare feet swinging, tongues lolling.

If I could look away I would, but it is like this memory has replaced all of my own. Just being witness to the atrocities here fills me with a shame so bottomless that I take a shaky step backward. What part did one of my ancestors play in this? Were they the murderer or the murdered? The memory holds me in its grip now, and I know that I won’t be let go until I have seen every last detail.

I do not only see the events that unfolded here, once, long ago. I feel them, too. With revulsion I realize–

I am the man pulling the rope through gloved fingers, sharing hurried glances with the man standing watch a few paces away. I am him first, before all the others. That means he is the one who is my kin. Then, I begin to feel the emotions of others. I feel everything from every person in this memory. I feel how they are each changed by this moment in time. I feel the raw pulse of adrenaline, the cold calculations of the man overseeing the hangings, the grief from the people watching, hidden, from across the field.

I gasp quickly, taking in a breath of air before being plunged back into the past version of these woods. I must heal the Source. I must fix the wrong done here.

Ice-cold fingers grip me fast and draw me back. A wicked grin hovers, and it does not have eyes and nose and ears attached. The tree, the twisted gnarled trunk, carries it. The grin widens, the opening stretching wide and eager across the bark, and I know I must crawl into it. I must follow the rabbit hole to its end. With this simple thought my vision seesaws and I am crawling down the throat of the tree, each breath filled with a musty sawdust smell underlaid with rot, my blackened fingertips digging through wood chips and mosses and earth. The farther down I go, the more putrid the air becomes. Each limb burns with the rapid change in temperature from freezing to lukewarm to warm.

I am a puppet on a set of strings I cannot see. I have no control; I can only watch myself perform in service to the memory. My jaw moves on its own, closing down on wood chips and moss. I am compelled to eat them; I cannot stop it in the same way I could not stop the visions. The earthy, rotting scent of this place is now a part of me and I am complicit.

Then I am falling. I land on hard-packed soil. I feel the sudden urge to vomit, but I tamp it down. My mind focuses on the roots. I must find the roots of the tree; the roots of this evil. The knowledge of what I must do comes to me quickly and clearly. I dig with my bare hands, fingers cracked and bleeding after only a few moments. I cannot feel my fingers, and the soil is so dense here. I want desperately to rip the roots from this tree and watch them burn.

The damp threatens to choke me. I can feel the beating heart of this place, the aching sorrow of the tree itself, the blood-soaked soil full of a dull and unending pain. Places do not forget violence like people do. I know that well enough by now. The trees and soil remember, and they have become twisted into something dark and unyielding. It is my duty– my burden– to release them from their suffering.

This tree yearns to be released. When I unearth the roots I see that there is a massive network, each tendril still living but hollow, weak with the weight of all that has come before. It is here, with dirt coating my fingertips and smudged across my skin, that I first hear the whispers of the tree itself. They come to me, soft and with a sinister edge. Please, end it. Please.

When I come to, it is dark. My shoulders and arms ache, and I am lying on my back looking up at the empty night sky. In my hands, gripped so tightly it hurts, is the handle of the ax. My breath comes in sharp waves, chest heaving. A thin layer of sweat covers my skin and the sweatshirt is plastered to it, soaked and freezing. I shiver, letting my mind come back to the present in stages. I blink so hard I see stars. I let the ax fall from my clenched and aching fingers. I retch into the dirt next to the tree, vomiting a muddy brown mass onto the ground. It is a relief to finally be able to empty my stomach, but I feel spent afterward.

The tree still stands, looming large above me, but there is a large chunk of the trunk missing and the roots are cut aggressively in certain spots, like a madman has attacked them. I suppose I am responsible. I don’t have enough strength to put the tree out of its misery. It stands tall and defiant, broken from my blows. Where before I saw only a wicked structure, now I see the sorrow of it; the harsh grief of being complicit in violence, and living on.

With shaking arms, I open my pack and place the ax inside. I find a place a few yards away and curl up on the ground to sleep, making a crude bed out of a pile of dead leaves.

I wonder, for the hundredth or thousandth time, why I have this power. Is it to heal the past, or simply acknowledge it? What purpose can there be for seeing the past clearly, each ripple effect and emotion from one point in time? Is it enough that these places call to me, and I answer them? Is it enough for them to be acknowledged, for them to be validated in their memories? It is the same every time, and yet it is different. They are different memories–different burdens. Each of them hold something I need to learn, even if I have yet to discover what it is.

The sleep I fall into is thick and dreamless.

#

When I wake, it is morning. A squirrel sniffs at my feet, and bolts away when I stir. I hear the call of a blackbird. I pull some jerky from the pack along with my water bottle. I take small bites and sips, my stomach still churning. I consider my options.

I am not trained in felling trees. In fact, the cuts I’ve made so far are crude and ill-placed. How can I put this tree out of its misery? More importantly, how can I do so without killing myself in the process?

It is when I’m ready to turn back, to leave this tree to rot and wallow in despair, that I remember the lighter. I take out my roll of tight-packed gauze, and spend a half-hour gathering kindling. In this dry autumn air, it is not especially difficult to start a healthy fire.

By late morning, I stare triumphant at the tree ablaze with color, at the smoke curling in the air. I feel the heat on my cheeks and grin like the madman I am in the face of the flames. This fire will leap from tree to tree in the cursed wood. It is one thing to be a witness, and another to do something-anything-in the face of a tragedy. This is something I’ve created, something I can control. I can put these woods out of their prolonged misery. I can end it.

Hindsight. What a beautiful, complicated gift. I see the past, and in knowing its intricacies like I do, there’s no recourse except to let the world burn.