Sam’s New Girlfriend

More about Sam’s New Girlfriend

No one in the valley had seen Sam in months. They said he’d gone to live deeper in the forest, past the point where moss eats the light and roots hum like low machinery. Then one night he walked into the tavern, beaming like a lantern, beard thick as river weed, eyes too bright to be sane.

“Met someone,” he said.

They thought he was joking until she followed him in. She was quiet, eyes green and depthless, her skin rippling with a shimmer like dew over leaves. When she smiled, something in the air changed—tiny spores floating in the lamplight, the scent of wet earth.

Sam told them she came from “the Old Growth,” a place where trees dream and vines remember. He said he found her at the center of a fallen cedar, asleep in a hollow, her skin still growing from bark. When she opened her eyes, she whispered his name—though they’d never met.

“She’s teaching me things,” he said, voice trembling with awe. “How to breathe through the ground. How to listen to the sap moving. How to stop being separate.”

After that, Sam stopped coming to town. People who went looking said the woods felt different, thick with whispers. One man swore he saw Sam’s cabin covered in moss, roof sagging under vines that seemed to pulse faintly, like breathing.

Weeks later, when a hunter stumbled into the clearing, the cabin was gone. In its place grew a great tree with roots like arms. Beneath its bark, faces shifted—one looked like Sam, eyes wide, grinning through the green.

The hunter said he heard laughter from inside the trunk, soft and rhythmic, like two people whispering secrets to the soil.

Now, when the wind moves through the forest at dusk, the leaves murmur a strange duet—half human, half chlorophyll—and those who hear it say Sam finally found a love that would never let him go.