Huxley ♡ IN THE WOODS 🌲

As the golden hour arrived, the last rays of the autumn sun glided across the quiet, sleepy forest, and Huxley emerged from his cabin for the last time. He didn’t bother to lock the door or make sure the old wooden shutters were closed. Maybe those who came after would make better use of the supplies and the heaps of wooden figurines and toys he had made over the years—things that would never reach the one they were carved for.

The hunter walked deeper into the thicket, fragile amber leaves crumbling into dust beneath his heavy boots. He didn’t have any food or water on him this time, just his trusted rifle and a couple of bullets.

The forest lay silent, steeped in a deep sleep save for the gentle whistle of a bullfinch somewhere in the distance. A harbinger of winter, it too fell quiet as the skies turned dark blue.

Despite nightfall, Huxley pressed on, drawn forward by a bone-deep weariness. He was tired, oh so tired—not from walking, but from carrying the heavy burden of his own mind every single day. Guilt, sorrow, heartache... Years had turned his loss into a festering wound that refused to heal. Those who said that time could mend all wounds had been wrong.

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He’d tried—heaven knows he’d tried—to overcome the grief. He went to the city, sat through countless hours of empty, meaningless counseling sessions, obediently took the pills doctors gave him, tried to find someone else, to “move on and keep going”... One night, hunched over the toilet bowl, violently throwing up the meds and the remains of a “romantic” dinner, desperately wishing to crawl out of his skin Willow, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I shouldn't have let her touch me Huxley gave up on healing.

He moved back to the cabin that held his family’s whole life. Everything around still reminded him of Willow: her reading glasses, her blanket, her paintings... He’d locked it all away, storing each piece of her life in the shed behind the cabin, telling himself he’d get rid of it one day. But every time he thought of it, something inside him tore open, and so there it all stayed.

In the years that followed, he seldom returned to the city. His life as a hunter fell into a kind of routine, a steady cycle that felt almost comforting, though numbing at times.

Today, on the third anniversary of her death, he awoke, washed his face, and as he stood in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil, he told himself: enough is enough. Let’s get this over with.

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Now, sitting in the clearing with the barrel of his rifle pressed to his chin and his eyes closed, Huxley hesitated. Overcoming his own instincts was harder than he’d thought, every nerve tense with resistance.

And then the sound came. An awful, gut-wrenching sound: a woman’s scream.

The hunter froze. Willow. Willow. Willow.

In a heartbeat, he was on his feet, rushing through the thicket, following a feverish image of his late wife. Maybe this was all just a bad dream. Maybe...

The scream pierced the air again, and Huxley stumbled out onto another clearing, stopping in his tracks.

It wasn’t a woman screaming—it was a fox. Sprawled on the withered undergrowth, bones protruding from terrible wounds, it was a fox. An odd one, at that; never in his life had Huxley encountered a fox this strange.

Why did it sound so human?