The last solid memory I have is driving to my boyfriend Tucker’s house to rip him a new one for sleeping with Megan Bartlett, a girl I know from volleyball. My chest thumps in rhythm to the pounding in my head. I jump-startled, as though waking from a very bad dream. Something stirs from behind, disrupts the silence with the heavy crush of leaves.

Wisps of lamp-lit fog twist throughout the narrow trails as gnarled branches coil around the evergreens. I fumble through dense woods with roots that race across the forest floor like wild, petrified snakes. I marinate in that truth, baste in the beauty of its wisdom while peering out at the dull emerald world. In the grand scheme of things, you’ll be dead a lot longer than you’ll ever be alive. I plan to erase any memory of them as if they had never happened. I’m going to infiltrate their ranks-dismantle their kingdom-take them down until they all vanish, evaporate like smoke from the planet. Everything about this new world is a lie. I used to believe so easily, and now I strain the most insignificant details from each passing day as if they were poison. I don’t know how long I can go before they stop me or if they even care. They tried and failed, and now I’m nothing more than a liability-a spark in a bed of dried timber, waiting to unleash an inferno. I had my name, my life, and my eternal judgment revoked in one passing hour at the hands of madmen who share my bloodlines. Staring into the face of God, awaiting your final judgment. That was the day it would all start anew. It was the final vanishing act-your curtain pulled down and covering your casket. The sunlight, fresh air, a warm embrace, they would never be yours again. I used to believe once they put you in that box and tucked you away for one very long night, it was finished. But it was a world within a world, and you innately knew this could never really happen. You hear about it on the news, see their smiling faces staring back at you on milk cartons-their pictures plastered around town like wanted posters.

I used to believe memories were infallible-that they could never collapse around you like a house of cards or burn to cinders before ever touching the ground. I used to believe in things, in people, in places, and names-concrete forms of life that end at some point in the unknowable future. It is illegal to reproduce this novel without written expressed consent from the author herself. The author holds all rights to this work. Names, places, and characters are figments of the author’s imagination.

Any resemblance to peoples either living or deceased is purely coincidental.

Ephemeral by addison moore