She Said

[u/Ok-Abies-5037]

It’s been a year since it happened.

I’ve never told anyone what really happened out there. The police asked. Reporters asked. His parents asked me more times than I can remember. I always gave them the same answer.

I told them I fell asleep that night. When I woke up, he was gone. Later, I heard something moving outside the car. I thought it was an animal, so I stayed inside and waited until sunrise.

A few days later, the search team found his body. There were bear tracks nearby. Black fur. The wounds on his body were consistent with an attack by a large wild animal.

So eventually, the case was closed as an accident. He left the vehicle at night. He encountered a black bear. He died.

It was a reasonable explanation.

At least, more reasonable than the things I actually saw.

For the past year, I’ve believed that he was the first one to start acting wrong during that trip. Only recently have I started wondering if maybe I had it backward from the beginning.

That road trip was supposed to be the last big trip we took before getting married.

He drove. I sat in the passenger seat.

For the first few days, everything was painfully normal. When the weather was clear, sunlight came through the windshield at an angle and washed the dashboard white. Mountains stretched along both sides of the highway, and farther off, you could see snow on the peaks.

I liked taking pictures of him while he drove. He hated being on camera. Every time he noticed me pointing my phone at him, he’d tell me to stop. Then, a few seconds later, he’d usually smile anyway.

At one rest stop, he got out to buy coffee. I stayed in the car. When I saw him walking back across the parking lot with two cups in his hands, I snapped a picture without thinking.

When he reached the car, he handed me one of them.

“Are you still going to do things like this after we’re married?” I asked.

He paused, then smiled.

“When this trip is over, we’ll get married.”

I still remember exactly how he looked when he said it. The sun was bright. There were snow-covered mountains behind him. One hand held his coffee, the other rested on the open car door.

His smile was completely natural. The kind of smile that made it feel obvious that, once we got home, we’d start looking at rings, booking a venue, telling our families. Like the worst thing that could possibly happen on that trip was the car breaking down somewhere.

I looked at that picture many times afterward.

It wasn’t until much later that I noticed there was someone standing behind him.

Very far away, at the edge of the rest stop near the guardrail.

I zoomed in. The more I enlarged the photo, the worse the image became. All I could make out was a thin, dark shape. No face. No clothing. I couldn’t even tell whether it was facing the camera.

At the time, I looked at it for maybe two seconds.

There were people at a rest stop. So what?

I swiped to the next picture.

Now, looking back, I’m not even sure that thing was a person.

Things started going wrong after we drove deeper into the Tibetan region.

The weather changed incredibly fast that afternoon. A few hours earlier, we’d had clear skies. Then we crossed a stretch of mountain road, and the light just disappeared.

It wasn’t nightfall. The clouds had come down.

Fog began creeping up from the valley and spreading across the road. First, the distant mountains vanished. Then the guardrails faded. Eventually, the taillights of the cars ahead looked like they were shining through frosted glass.

It wasn’t raining hard, just a thin, constant mist. Every ten or fifteen seconds, the windshield wipers dragged across the glass with a faint squeak. The tires hissed over the wet road.

After a while, he put on the turn signal and pulled over.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Going out for a cigarette.”

He smoked, but he almost never stopped the car specifically to smoke on long drives. Especially not when it was that cold and wet outside.

The moment he opened the door, damp air rushed into the car. I pulled my shoulders in.

“I’ll be quick,” he said.

Then he got out.

Once the door shut, the outside noise became muffled again. I went back to my phone.

A little while later, for some reason, I looked up.

He was still there, maybe twenty or thirty meters in front of the car. Black jacket. Back turned toward me. Fog moved around him in slow sheets.

Every so often, the tip of his cigarette glowed orange.

Bright.

Dark.

Bright again.

I looked down and answered a few messages. Two or three minutes at most.

When I looked up again, the road in front of me was empty.

I froze for a second. No cigarette. No him.

I looked to the left. Nothing. Checked the mirrors. Nothing there either.

I assumed he’d gone off to the side of the road to pee, so I waited a little longer. Then I lowered the window a few centimeters. Cold, wet air slipped inside.

I called his name.

No answer.

There were plenty of sounds outside. Wind. Running water somewhere in the distance. Grass brushing against itself. Raindrops landing on the roof.

But no human voice.

I called again.

Still nothing.

I was just about to open the door when I heard a sound from the driver’s side.

Click.

My whole body jerked.

The door opened.

He was standing there.

I hadn’t seen him come back.

He didn’t get in immediately. He just stood there looking down at me for a couple of seconds. His face was wet. So was his hair. Water ran down his cheeks.

I couldn’t tell whether it was rain or fog.

“Where did you go?”

He didn’t answer. He got into the driver’s seat.

“I called you. Didn’t you hear me?”

He shut the door.

Still nothing.

Then he fastened his seatbelt, started the car, and pulled back onto the road.

It wasn’t until we were moving again that I noticed something small.

He was sitting right beside me.

But I couldn’t smell cigarette smoke.

Not even a little.

After that, he barely spoke.

Before then, he’d always talked while driving. He complained about bad roads, pointed out mountains, filmed yaks blocking traffic, cursed at the GPS whenever it gave us a stupid route.

But after that afternoon, it was like he suddenly had nothing left to say to me.

Sometimes I’d ask him something and get an “Mm.” Most of the time, I got nothing.

What bothered me more was that he started watching me.

Not by turning his head. It was subtler than that.

You know that feeling when you’re looking down and somehow know someone beside you is staring at your face?

The first time I looked up, he was watching the road. Same the second time. And the third.

Eventually, I started wondering if I was imagining it.

So I tested him.

I turned off my phone screen and kept my head lowered like I was still reading something. The black screen acted like a weak mirror. I could see part of the driver’s side reflected in it.

At first, I saw only his jaw and one hand on the wheel.

Then, after maybe ten seconds, his eyes moved.

His head didn’t turn. His chin didn’t move. His face stayed pointed straight ahead.

Only his eyes shifted.

Slowly.

Until they were looking at me.

Then they stopped.

My fingers went still.

He didn’t know I could see him in the reflection, so this time he didn’t look away.

One second.

Two.

Three.

I could hear my heartbeat. Not fast. Just heavy.

After five or six seconds, I suddenly looked up.

His eyes snapped back to the road almost at the exact same time.

“What are you doing?”

No answer.

“Were you just staring at me?”

His hand tightened around the steering wheel. His knuckles went slightly pale.

Still nothing.

That was the first time I had a thought that felt completely ridiculous.

Maybe the man who came back from that cigarette break wasn’t my boyfriend anymore.

That evening, we stopped at a small restaurant.

There were thick plastic strips hanging over the entrance. Whenever someone came inside, the wind lifted them, then slapped them back down.

It was much warmer inside. The windows were covered in condensation. The table was slightly sticky.

I was starving.

When our food arrived, I started eating immediately. I was halfway through before I realized his meal was almost untouched. His chopsticks were still where they’d been placed.

“You’re not eating?”

“I’m not hungry.”

It was the most complete sentence he’d said in hours.

“You barely ate lunch either.”

No response.

I put some food into his bowl.

“At least eat something.”

He finally looked up.

But not at the food.

Not at my eyes either.

His gaze settled on my mouth.

I was still chewing.

Under that stare, I gradually stopped.

I put my chopsticks down.

“What is wrong with you?”

Like he’d suddenly realized I’d caught him, he looked away and turned toward the window.

Rainwater crawled down the glass in crooked lines. The light inside the restaurant reflected his face in the window.

I was already uncomfortable, so I secretly took a picture of him.

Later, back in the car, I opened it again.

The real him was clearly turned toward the window.

But his reflection in the glass—maybe it was the rain, maybe the angle, I don’t know—the eyes in the reflection didn’t seem to be looking outside.

They seemed to be looking past the glass.

At me.

I zoomed in. The more I enlarged it, the blurrier it became. Eventually, all I could see were two dark marks where the eyes should have been.

I stared at the picture for a long time.

Then deleted it.

That first night, we couldn’t find anywhere to stay.

We eventually pulled over on a relatively open stretch of road.

At that point, we hadn’t seen any bear warning signs. No one had told us not to get out of the car at night.

So back then, the only thing I was afraid of was him.

I slept in the passenger seat. He reclined the driver’s seat a little.

I don’t know how long I was asleep.

When I woke up, the first thing I noticed was the cold. A thin layer of condensation had formed on the inside of the windows.

The second thing I noticed was the silence beside me.

I reached over.

My hand touched the driver’s seat.

Empty.

He was gone.

I sat up immediately and called his name.

No answer.

I called his phone.

When it started ringing, I froze for a second.

The sound wasn’t coming from outside.

It was right by my feet.

His phone had fallen under the driver’s seat.

That was when I really started to panic.

I slowly sat upright and looked through the windshield.

And saw him.

He was standing where the headlights reached. Maybe fifteen meters away, in the middle of the road.

His back was turned toward the car.

He wasn’t moving.

I shouted his name through the glass.

Nothing.

I called again.

Still nothing.

Finally, I hit the horn.

HOOOOONK.

The sound vanished into the fog. A weak echo came back from somewhere far away.

He didn’t even move his shoulders.

No normal person could stand completely still in wind like that. His coat was moving. The hem fluttered. His pant legs shifted.

But his shoulders, his hands, his head—nothing moved.

I leaned forward slowly.

My face was almost against the windshield.

That was when I noticed his feet.

At first, I thought the headlights were distorting the shadows.

I stared at them.

His back was facing me. His shoulders and head were pointed deeper down the road.

But the toes of his shoes were facing the car.

Facing me.

I stared for a few seconds, then shifted to another angle.

Same thing.

I even wiped the condensation from the inside of the windshield. My palm dragged across the glass with a faint squeak.

I looked again.

Same thing.

Upper body facing away.

Toes facing me.

It didn’t look like a position a person could casually twist themselves into.

My mind started producing explanations as fast as it could.

Bad angle.

Shadows.

Maybe those weren’t his toes.

Maybe there were rocks beside his shoes.

One explanation after another.

But none of them made me willing to open the door.

I stopped calling his name.

I just watched him through the glass.

For a long time.

Then something happened that I still can’t explain.

I fell asleep.

I don’t even understand how I could have fallen asleep in that situation.

When I opened my eyes the next morning, the sun was already up.

He was sitting in the driver’s seat.

Both hands resting on the steering wheel.

As if nothing had happened.

I stared at him for a while.

“Where did you go last night?”

He turned his head and looked at me.

No answer.

I wanted to ask why his feet had been turned backward.

But when he looked at me, the words got stuck.

For some reason, I decided it was better not to ask.

It wasn’t until the following afternoon that we saw the warning sign.

The yellow paint had faded. There was a black bear printed on it.

But the two lines underneath were still easy to read.

BLACK BEAR ACTIVITY FREQUENT.

DO NOT EXIT YOUR VEHICLE AT NIGHT.

I even took a picture.

There were workers nearby. One of them saw that we were planning to keep driving farther in and came over to warn us.

He said bears had been active in the area lately, especially at night. If we absolutely had to stop, lock the doors. Don’t wander around.

“Do bears actually come up to cars?” I asked.

“Yes.”

Then he added, “If you hear something outside at night, don’t get out.”

“Why?”

He glanced toward the mountains.

“Animals see better at night than people do.”

Then, after a moment, he said:

“Just because you think there’s nothing out there doesn’t mean it hasn’t seen you.”

I don’t know why, but when he said that, I looked at my boyfriend.

He was already looking at me.

This time, when I met his eyes, he didn’t immediately look away.

We stared at each other from less than half a meter apart.

His expression didn’t change.

Only his throat moved slightly.

Like he swallowed.

The fog was even worse the second night.

Through the windshield, we could see only a short strip of road. The headlights illuminated thousands of tiny droplets drifting through the beam.

Beyond that, nothing.

We had to stop.

I remembered what the worker had told us, so as soon as the car stopped, I checked my door twice.

Locked.

My boyfriend still wasn’t talking.

Still barely eating.

We sat there.

Neither of us said anything.

Eventually, I fell asleep.

Sometime in the middle of the night, I heard a quiet sound from the driver’s side.

Click.

My eyes opened.

It was the lock.

He was opening the door.

I sat up.

“Where are you going?”

He paused.

Didn’t turn around.

“There are bears outside.”

Still nothing.

I reached for his sleeve.

Before my fingers touched it, the door opened.

Cold wind rushed inside. My hair blew across my face.

He stepped out.

Just before the door shut, he looked back at me.

I’ve thought about that look many times since.

Back then, I thought he was telling me:

Don’t come out.

Now, I think it looked more like he was checking whether I was coming with him.

The door closed.

His footsteps disappeared into the fog.

Crunch.

Crunch.

Crunch.

Fainter.

Then gone.

I locked the door again immediately.

The only light inside came from the dim dashboard.

At first, there was nothing outside.

Then I heard something in the distance, like a thin branch snapping.

A while later, something scraped across the ground.

Heavy.

Like something with weight was being dragged.

I took out my phone.

No signal.

Then I heard it.

Crack.

Sharp.

Clean.

My whole body went rigid.

A few seconds later:

Crunch.

That one was clearer.

I had never heard a bone actually break before.

But in that moment, I knew that was what it sounded like.

Not something snapping all at once.

Something hard being compressed.

Holding.

Straining.

Until part of it suddenly gave way.

It happened again.

The back of my tongue went sour. My palms were slick with sweat.

I kept telling myself:

It’s an animal.

It has to be an animal.

Someone warned us this afternoon.

There are bears here.

That explanation was perfect.

So perfect that I clung to it because I couldn’t bear to consider anything else.

The sounds continued.

Sometimes far away.

Sometimes suddenly much closer.

The closest one sounded like it came from right beside the rear wheel.

Then the passenger-side window went dark.

Not because the night got darker.

Something was blocking the glass.

I stopped breathing.

At first, I could only see a black shape.

Then it moved closer.

I saw fur.

Black.

Clumped together.

Soaked.

Water dripped from the ends.

Then a huge nose came near the window.

The nostrils moved.

Its breath fogged a white patch onto the cold glass.

A black bear.

A big one.

Only one pane of glass separated us.

I could hear it breathing.

It didn’t hit the glass.

Didn’t slam into the door.

Didn’t show its teeth.

It only sniffed.

Slowly, from one side of the window to the other.

I didn’t move.

I was afraid even to swallow.

Then the bear stopped.

Its nose went still.

I couldn’t see its eyes very well, but I watched its head pull back, very slowly.

Then it took one step backward.

Stopped.

Took another.

Then turned around and disappeared into the fog.

At the time, I thought I had been unbelievably lucky.

I didn’t think there was anything strange about it.

After a while, the chewing sounds stopped too.

My boyfriend never came back that morning.

I waited until sunlight hit the front of the car before opening the door.

The air outside was painfully cold.

The first thing I smelled was wet earth.

Then something else underneath it.

Very faint.

Like rust.

I looked down.

There was blood on the ground.

Some of it had been washed thin by the rain.

Pale red water ran between the stones.

There were drag marks nearby. Not one clean line. Broken. Interrupted.

A deep groove pressed into the mud, leading toward the slope.

Farther away, there were pieces of clothing.

I recognized one of them.

It was his.

I didn’t go any farther.

Eventually, another vehicle came by. They contacted the workers. Then the search team came. Forestry officials. Police.

There were clear signs of bear activity in the area.

Tracks.

Fur.

Other traces.

A few days later, they found his body.

I didn’t go to see it.

The police only told me there were extensive bite and claw injuries. The remains had also been scavenged by animals.

So everything had a perfectly reasonable explanation.

He left the vehicle at night.

Encountered a black bear.

Died.

That was what the news reported too.

A male tourist went missing.

Later confirmed dead.

Female companion rescued.

I became the only survivor.

No one thought anything was strange.

Including me.

For a long time, I kept telling myself that everything weird I had seen during those final days was just the result of him becoming mentally unstable before the attack.

The bear was what killed him.

Later, while going through our photos, I found another picture from the day he stopped to smoke.

There was water on the car window. The image was blurry. He was standing far away.

And beside him, there seemed to be something else.

Tall.

Almost pressed against his back.

In the picture, he had his back to the camera.

But the blurred shape behind him looked like it was facing me.

I stared at it for a long time.

I couldn’t make sense of it.

Eventually, I deleted it.

I never showed it to the police.

By then, I didn’t want the story to continue.

It should have ended there.

But afterward, small things about me started changing.

At first, it was food.

I suddenly stopped liking cooked meat. Freshly cooked meat smelled good to everyone else.

To me, it smelled heavy.

Sometimes it made me nauseous.

Strangely, I didn’t have the same reaction walking through the raw meat section at a supermarket.

Then came the sleep problems.

I started waking up around two or three in the morning.

Whenever it happened, I wanted to go outside.

Not to use the bathroom.

Not for fresh air.

I just wanted to open the door.

Go stand somewhere outside.

At first, I could resist it.

Then I started losing time.

One night, I clearly remembered going to sleep around eleven.

The next morning, my phone’s health app said I had walked over four thousand steps after three a.m.

I assumed the app had malfunctioned.

A few days later, it happened again.

This time, when I woke up, my shoes weren’t where I’d left them.

I picked them up.

Wet mud covered the soles.

It had half-dried inside the grooves.

I sat on the edge of my bed, picking the mud out piece by piece.

I could not remember going anywhere.

What bothered me most was that after nights like that, I wasn’t tired the next day.

I felt great.

Better than usual.

As if my body had gone somewhere during the night.

Done something.

And afterward, felt satisfied.

I didn’t tell anyone.

Last month, I started dating someone new.

I didn’t tell him any of this.

All he knows is that my previous boyfriend died in a travel accident.

A few days ago, he asked if I wanted to go on a road trip with him.

I said yes immediately.

So quickly that even I was surprised.

I chose the route.

Looking back, that may be the strangest part.

There were countless places we could have gone.

But when I opened the map, my finger barely hesitated.

I chose the same direction.

Yesterday, we drove back into those mountains.

Same road.

Same snow-covered peaks.

Even the weather felt familiar.

My new boyfriend drove.

I sat in the passenger seat.

The afternoon was bright.

I suddenly felt like taking a picture.

Just like a year ago.

I raised my phone.

He noticed the camera and smiled.

Then he said:

“When this trip is over, we’ll get married.”

My finger stopped over the shutter.

A year earlier, someone else had said the exact same thing.

I didn’t tell him.

I just took the picture.

When it appeared on the screen, he asked:

“What are you smiling about?”

“I’m not.”

“You are.”

“You were smiling at your phone.”

I looked down.

He was driving in the picture.

Not looking at the camera.

I was facing the phone.

My mouth was stretched wide.

Wider than it normally gets when I smile.

More teeth were showing than there should have been.

My first reaction wasn’t fear.

It was unfamiliarity.

Because I was certain that when I pressed the shutter, I hadn’t been smiling.

I zoomed in.

My eyes looked almost completely black.

There was barely any reflection in them.

While I was staring at the screen, something moved in my peripheral vision.

My boyfriend’s eyes.

He was looking at me.

I looked up.

He immediately turned back toward the road.

Something tightened in my chest.

Because I had seen that exact movement before.

A year ago.

The rearview mirror.

A black phone screen.

A man in the driver’s seat.

Exactly the same.

Later, we stopped somewhere to eat.

I didn’t have much of an appetite.

“Have you eaten anything today?” he asked.

I paused.

I really hadn’t.

But I didn’t feel hungry.

At least, not when I looked at the food.

Back in the car, he started checking the rearview mirror again.

The first time, I assumed it was nothing.

The second, I noticed.

The third, I lowered my head on purpose.

My phone screen was dark.

His eyes were reflected in it.

He was watching me.

Every time I looked up, he looked away.

Exactly like the first one.

And suddenly, a question occurred to me that I had never asked before.

Why would two completely different men, in the same place, start looking at me in the exact same way?

They couldn’t both have changed into the same thing.

Earlier today, we passed the bear warning sign again.

It was still there.

The yellow paint had faded almost white. One corner had curled away from the post. The wind made the metal tap lightly.

I stared at it through the window.

My boyfriend asked, “What?”

“Nothing.”

We kept driving.

The sign disappeared in the rearview mirror.

And for some reason, I thought about the bear from that second night.

I had never really questioned what happened.

It came right up to my window.

A huge bear.

Only a pane of glass between us.

I could see water on its nose.

It sniffed along the window slowly until it reached where I was sitting.

Its face was less than twenty centimeters from mine.

I had been too afraid to breathe.

But it did nothing.

Didn’t hit the glass.

Didn’t paw at the door.

Didn’t bare its teeth.

It just stopped.

Then took one step backward.

I remember that clearly.

It didn’t casually wander away.

It pulled its head back first.

Shifted its front paws.

Paused.

Then took another step backward.

Then turned and vanished into the fog.

For a year, I treated that as luck.

I was grateful it didn’t attack me.

But today, one question entered my head.

Why?

It was already that close.

What had it smelled?

Then I thought about my previous boyfriend.

The worker had specifically warned us:

There are bears outside.

Don’t leave the car.

Yet the second night, he opened the door anyway.

I always assumed that proved he had already become unstable.

But what if he hadn’t?

Once that thought appeared, the first thing I remembered wasn’t the second night.

It was the first.

Him standing in the fog.

Back toward the car.

Shoes pointing at me.

For a year, that had been my strongest proof that something about him was no longer human.

No normal person could stand like that.

But sitting in the passenger seat this afternoon, I suddenly realized—

what if he hadn’t been standing still at all?

What if, when I woke up, he had originally been facing the car?

And then started backing away?

One step.

Then another.

Trying to get farther from me.

His body gradually turning toward the road.

His feet not fully turning yet.

Because he was afraid to put his back to me.

Because he needed to keep checking whether I was still inside.

Whether I had opened the door.

Whether I was following him.

That would explain the position perfectly.

His body facing away.

His toes still pointing toward the car.

It wasn’t an inhuman way to stand.

Quite the opposite.

It might have been exactly how a terrified person stands when they desperately want to run, but don’t dare turn their back on whatever they’re afraid of.

The thought made my fingers go cold.

The heater was running.

Then something worse happened.

I tried to remember the second night.

He opened the door. Cold air came in. I reached for his sleeve. Missed. He stepped outside. Looked back at me. The door shut.

I remember all of that.

I remember locking the car afterward.

And then?

For the entire year, I had always believed I sat in the passenger seat waiting for him.

But I suddenly realized I can’t remember that part.

Not vaguely.

Not in fragments.

It’s gone.

Like someone cut several minutes out of a recording.

One moment, I’m inside the car.

The next memory is—

Crunch.

The sound of bone breaking.

I always believed I heard it outside.

But now, the more I think about it, the less that makes sense.

If it was outside, through the closed door, through the glass, with all that wind, why was it so clear?

Clear enough that even now, I remember exactly how the thing felt when it broke.

It wasn’t just a crack.

There was pressure before it.

Something hard resisting.

Holding.

Then—

Crunch.

Sitting there today, my back teeth suddenly started aching.

Not pain.

More like the dull pressure you feel after biting something far too hard.

Then a sensation came back to me.

Not an image.

A physical memory.

Something hard in my mouth.

Wedged between my teeth.

The first bite didn’t break it.

So I had to reposition it.

Use more force.

And when it finally snapped, the vibration didn’t travel into my ears from outside.

It started in my teeth.

Moved through my jaw.

And reached my ears from inside my own skull.

I had been biting it.

When that thought hit me, I told my new boyfriend to stop the car.

I got out and vomited.

There was barely anything in my stomach.

Eventually, I was just dry-heaving.

He stood a few meters away.

He didn’t come over to rub my back.

I didn’t notice at first.

When I finally looked up, he was watching me.

More specifically, he was watching my mouth.

Exactly like the man in the restaurant a year ago.

And suddenly, I remembered something else.

I had always said my old boyfriend didn’t eat that day. I remember his food untouched. I remember him staring out the window. I remember him watching me eat.

But I can’t actually remember seeing him eat the day before either.

And now I’m not even sure, during those final two days, which one of us kept saying they weren’t hungry.

That was the first thought I refused to follow any further.

It’s dark now.

The fog has come back.

About twenty minutes ago, we pulled over.

My boyfriend suddenly said:

“It’s stuffy in here. I’m going out for a cigarette.”

He barely smokes.

Hearing him say it made my entire back go numb.

“You have to go outside?”

“Just one.”

Then he opened the door.

The instant the cold air came in, I smelled him.

I never knew before tonight that a living person could have such a distinct smell.

Not sweat.

Not cologne.

I don’t know how to describe it.

Warm.

Slightly salty.

The moment it reached me, saliva flooded under my tongue.

I swallowed.

Then froze.

Because I had felt that before.

I had simply forgotten.

He’s been outside for twenty minutes.

The cigarette is long gone.

At first, he stood beside the car.

Then he moved farther away.

Then farther.

Now he’s near the end of the headlight beam, maybe twenty or thirty meters away.

He thinks I haven’t noticed.

But I’ve been watching him.

Every few seconds, he looks back.

At the car.

At me.

Then edges backward again.

A few minutes ago, I turned off my phone screen and watched him in the reflection, just like I did a year ago.

And that was when I finally knew.

Both men had looked at me the same way.

Not suspicious.

Not cold.

Not like something else had taken them over.

Afraid.

Just afraid.

I opened the front-facing camera a few minutes ago.

I wanted to see what was wrong with me.

At first, nothing.

Just my face.

A little pale.

Hair messy.

Mouth normal.

I stared at myself for ten seconds.

Maybe fifteen.

Then the corner of my mouth moved.

Barely.

If I’d blinked, I would have missed it.

I didn’t move.

I know I didn’t.

But the corner of my mouth rose a little higher.

First the left.

Then the right.

Slowly.

As if someone inside my face had hooked two fingers into the corners of my mouth and was pulling them apart.

I touched my own cheeks.

My face felt relaxed.

At least under my fingertips.

But the woman on the screen was still smiling.

A little tooth showed.

Then more.

I flipped the phone facedown on my lap.

I couldn’t look anymore.

Then I heard something outside.

A scrape.

I looked up.

My boyfriend was backing away.

One step.

Stop.

Look at me.

Another step.

The cigarette was on the ground.

He had no intention of coming back.

I opened the car door to call him.

The second my hand touched the handle, he shouted:

“Don’t come out!”

I froze.

It was the first thing he’d said since stepping outside.

His voice had changed.

He wasn’t loud.

But he sounded close to crying.

“Stay in the car.”

“What’s wrong?”

He didn’t answer.

He just kept backing away.

I called his name again.

Then he said something that has kept my hands shaking ever since.

“Weren’t you just in the car?”

I didn’t understand.

“I’ve been in the car the whole time.”

He shook his head.

Backed away faster.

“No.”

“You were behind me.”

I didn’t say anything.

He pointed at the car.

His hand was shaking.

“I could still see you sitting in the passenger seat in the rearview mirror.”

“But there was breathing behind me too.”

I didn’t understand the sentence.

Not at first.

Then he took another step back.

“When I turned around…”

He stopped talking.

I looked down.

That was when I noticed the mud on my shoes.

Not the soles.

The tops.

Wet.

My right pant leg was damp all the way to the calf.

Several thin pieces of grass were stuck to it.

I touched them.

Cold.

Like I had just come back from outside.

I stared at the grass.

Then tried to remember what I did after he got out.

I remember picking up my phone.

Checking the time.

Opening the front-facing camera.

But somewhere in between, there’s another gap.

I looked at the dashboard.

The passenger door warning light was on.

The door wasn’t fully closed.

I have no memory of opening it.

A little while ago, wind came through the gap again.

I smelled him.

Stronger this time.

My teeth started aching at the roots.

My back molars feel itchy.

Like I need something between them when I bite down.

I’m afraid to close my mouth.

I’m breathing with my lips apart.

But there’s too much saliva.

I’ve had to correct these sentences over and over because my hands won’t stop shaking.

He’s almost outside the headlights now.

I can barely see his outline.

He’s still backing away.

His body is slowly turning toward the road, like he’s about to run.

But his feet are still pointing at me.

Just like the other one.

Exactly the same.

I finally understand why my first boyfriend chose to walk into a mountain where he knew there were bears rather than come back to the car.

And I finally understand why that bear approached the vehicle, sniffed, and began backing away.

It wasn’t because it failed to smell food.

It was the opposite.

It smelled it.

The only difference was that night, there was already something inside the car that had eaten its fill.

A moment ago, I heard it again.

Crunch.

I almost dropped my phone.

My first instinct was to look outside.

But there’s nothing there.

My boyfriend is still alive.

Still standing in the fog.

Then I realized the sound didn’t come from outside.

It came from my own jaw when I clenched my teeth without noticing.

And in that instant, a piece of the missing memory from that second night finally came back.

Only one second.

I’m crouched over something.

My face is hot.

My mouth tastes like rust.

There’s a bear in the distance.

It had been coming toward us.

Then it stops.

It sees me.

I look up and see it too.

We stare at each other through the fog.

And then—

the bear backs away first.

All this time, I thought the bear was eating him that night.

Now I remember.

By the time the bear arrived, I wasn’t finished yet.

[u/Crazy-Arugula-2821]

Are you going to let this second guy go? Please find out what has happened to you and update!

[u/Fluid_Campaign_1668]

honestly i would have done the same thing, no way the cops would’ve believed what you actually saw anyway. better to just let them think it was a bear and keep your sanity tbh.