The pale woman sits cross-legged atop a mossy boulder, her skin almost luminescent against the deep green. Her hair hangs in loose, silver strands, catching the sunlight as she stares into the rustling underbrush. She wears only a faded bra and a pair of worn shorts, her slender limbs folded gracefully beneath her, as if she were some spectral spirit born of the woods. Her piercing gaze tracks a squirrel darting among the ferns—her eyes are hungry, but not unkind.
Her stomach rumbles—deep, insistent. She stretches, her body taut and elegant, as she surveys the forest for her next meal. Without a sound, she slides off the boulder and glides through the brambles, moving with an unnatural grace that betrays her outcast status. She pauses near a thicket, lips parted, nostrils flaring as she inhales the scent of life all around her.
She kneels and, with astonishing ease, lifts the deer in her slender arms. Her jaw unhinges, impossibly wide, and she swallows the animal whole—alive, silent, and swift. Her stomach swells, rounding out until she appears nine months pregnant, skin stretched tight over her strange fullness. Birds scatter from the trees, and the air becomes still, the forest holding its breath at this uncanny sight.
As darkness descends, she traces the scars on her arms—faint, silvery reminders of a life before the woods. She recalls voices, sharp and dismissive, echoing through her mind. "You don't belong here. You're too strange, too hungry." The words sting, but she has learned to let them drift away on the night wind.
Her belly still swollen, she hums softly to herself—a lullaby remembered from childhood. The animals keep their distance, but none challenge her any longer; the forest has accepted her, and so has she. "Perhaps this is all I ever needed," she whispers to the night, feeling the weight of her hunger and her loneliness settle into something like peace.
She rises, stretching her arms to greet the morning sun. Today, the hunger will return, and she will wander the woods again, devouring what she must to survive. But for now, in the hush of dawn, she is simply a part of the ancient forest—a ghost, a legend, a woman who eats and is never full, yet finds a strange comfort beneath the endless green.
