The moss is darker where I kneel. Not wet-dark. Something else. I frame it, check the aperture twice, breathe through my nose the way I’m supposed to. Three-point-five, ISO 400, the light’s doing that thing again where it pools instead of filters. I take the shot.
The rustling to my left. I don’t look. Not yet. The moss exhales. I need the composition right first, need the focus points where they’re supposed to be, and then I can turn my head and catalog what moved.
Nothing moved.
I turn back to the camera. The moss in the viewfinder shows a displacement pattern, a curve like something pressed down and rolled. I didn’t see that with my eyes. Just the camera. I take another shot, bracket the exposure, check the screen. There. The pattern. I document the coordinates in my notebook, diagram the curve, measure the angle with the edge of my lens cap. The protractor is in my bag. I don’t use the protractor.
The branch above me twitches.
No wind. I felt for wind. There’s no wind.
I photograph the branch. Through the viewfinder, the shadow falls three degrees off from where the branch actually should be. It doesn’t waver when I move. I take seven shots, different angles, checking. The shadow doesn’t move with the perspective. It stays wrong.
My hands are steady. They’re always steady when I’m shooting.
Between the two root systems, there’s a shape that resolves into a body when I frame it. I don’t understand why I didn’t see it before. It’s right there, curled in a position that… The spine shouldn’t curve like that. The ribs expand. Slow. The eyelids move, tracking something in the canopy, and the fingers rest against the bark with no tension, like the hand’s forgotten it’s supposed to hold itself.
I take the shot. The shutter sounds too loud.
The body doesn’t react.
I take another shot. Another. The light changes, and I adjust for it, chimp the screen, check the histogram. The exposure’s good. The focus is sharp. The body is breathing, and the breathing stops for three seconds when the wind should start, and then it breathes again when the wind stops, and I’m writing this down in my notebook because patterns matter, patterns are data, data means I can understand…
I need to understand.
I move closer. The camera between us.
The body’s fingers are longer than they should be. Not stretched. Elongated. Knuckles spaced like something that grew that way. I frame the hand, the wrist, the way the forearm curves into the moss. Click.
The sound of the forest hums underneath my shutter, a frequency I feel in my chest, and I take another shot because I need to document this, I need to see it clearly, I need…
The paths aren’t where I left them.
I backtrack. The marker I left on the birch. There, that’s there, but the deer trail that ran parallel is three meters south. I check my GPS. The coordinates match. The trail moved. Trails don’t move. I photograph the ground, the root pattern, the way the moss curves in that same logarithmic progression I’ve been seeing, and my notes are filling up but they’re not making sense anymore, just measurements and angles and the word wrong four times in the margin.
The second body is worse.
I find it in a ravine I don’t remember walking toward. The fingers dig into the soil like roots, like they’ve always been roots, and the torso bends with the slope, and when I look through the viewfinder, I can see how it matches. How it fits. The body breathes when the canopy shifts. Stops when the canopy stills. The rhythm is perfect. Too perfect. I’m counting the seconds, writing them down, and the clicking sound, wet, rhythmic, like joints articulating, syncs with my shutter, and I need to stop shooting but I can’t stop shooting because if I stop I won’t understand and I have to understand, I have to see it, I have to…
From the hilltop, the forest spreads forever.
The smell hits first. Wet bark and something else, something like rust and old copper and the back of my throat closing. I count the shapes between the trees. Dozens. More. The undergrowth is too close, the ravines too regular, and my legs are shaking but my hands are steady, my hands are always steady, and the light… the light pulses in patterns, sweeps and returns. Not like sunlight. Like a signal. And I’m following it because my feet are moving and I didn’t tell them to move. My camera is up. I’m still shooting. The notes in my periphery are fragments now: alignment visible / accelerated by / forest doesn’t / I should…
Night is a series of strobe-lit data points.
Night is when I realize.
The flash illuminates a body ten meters away. I don’t remember raising the camera. Then another. Another. The third is closer than the first. Each one curved into the terrain, breathing with it, eyes open and tracking the canopy’s sway with a vacant synchronization. The fourth is directly in my path.
I’ve been photographing them for hours. The paths keep redirecting me. Back. Closer. The patterns are tightening. The viewfinder flickers. I can see them now. My observation accelerates it, feeds it, how the camera doesn’t just document. It invites. The forest isn’t watching me back. It doesn’t have to. It simply has a place for me. I am incidental. I am…
I keep shooting.
I can’t stop shooting.
The light moves and I follow.
The shutter won’t stop. My knees hit the moss. The lens is warm against my cheek.
