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On Sunday, I awoke clinging to the image of the winding path through the pines, but the morning light dissolved the sway of branches and leaves. Before I could shake off the grogginess and reason clearly, I arrived at the station and boarded the train to Hitachi. When I exited the station, I mimicked the wandering that had led me to the passageway. An emotion magnitudes greater than any I had known guided me toward that spot, as birds recognize magnetic north.

I reached the point on the street where days earlier I had glanced up at the passageway on the opposite sidewalk. To my right stood the three white-and-red vending machines embedded into the cement building. I bought a water bottle. To calm myself, I sipped it while pressing my free hand against my side to keep it from trembling.

A delivery van passed. Two men in warehouse overalls overtook me. One stared ahead; the other’s gaze swept the pavement a hand’s breadth from his feet. An elderly man walked the opposite sidewalk, passing rusted sheds and an electronics store.

None of them had noticed the passageway. To me, the vision in the half-light—the path of trampled grass, the palm-like fronds of ferns flanking it, the clover field the path bisected—invited admiration, like a centuries-old fresco in a museum.

I crossed the sidewalk and entered the path’s curves. Beneath my soles crunched a layer of leaves and pine needles. An electric current heightened my fingertips and sharpened my awareness. Butterflies of light and shadow fluttered over pine trunks split by vertical grooves. Twisted branches, meters above the path, were cloaked in emerald-green moss hanging in fringes. Ferns and clover sprouted from the gaps of a stump, its structure barely protruding with splintered shards. Between two pines glistened the hammock of a spiderweb. Its owner, as large as my palm, swayed on the net as a breeze billowed it.

The grass thickened, a sign fewer feet had trodden here, and I pushed aside the fern fronds draping the path. In minutes, the lagoon would come into view. I hunched forward as if to arrive fractions of a second sooner, placing each heel down only to immediately lift it again.

Itches flared across my body, as if trapped in a room with an invisible mosquito. I had climbed to the peak of a snow-covered slope, fastened my skis, and now had to hurtle down at breakneck speed. What would I say to the woman, and how would she reply? What combination of words would seize her pale-blue gaze and draw out her voice?

I emerged into the clearing as rings of static constricted my vision. I exhaled. Beside the swampy lagoon waited the moss-upholstered rock, worn by decades of people sitting, where the woman had been the afternoon I met her. The clearing smelled of wet fur and stagnant water.

Of course, the woman was absent. I’d have needed luck for her to come on a Sunday morning. Perhaps I should be content just to have met her. This clearing remained, though her absence dominated it.

I sat on the rock, settling into the plush moss to occupy her ghost’s space. I filled my lungs with the air that might have filled hers. Leaves swayed in a mausoleum silence, where no sound muzzled the cacophony of inner voices passing judgment.

I hunched. My gaze fell to the pebbles around the lagoon, the scattered pine needles. A pain pierced my heart. Perhaps for years, perhaps for the rest of my life, I would return to this clearing in my daydreams and replay our conversation. I’d chastise myself for idiotic phrases, insert clever remarks that years later would occur to me. In my imagination, before saying goodbye, I’d ask for her phone number or propose another meeting.

The lagoon’s surface bulged into a green tumor, outlining a figure. The coat of algae and mud sloughed off, revealing the woman’s honey-blonde hair, and her face. Streams of water flowed over her eyelids, nose, and cheekbones, crossing the mottled patches of discoloration. She advanced toward the shore as if her legs cleaved air. Green foam stained her soaked dress, which clung to her shoulders and molded her breasts. With each step, the skirt, plastered to her thighs, wrinkled like a second skin, her bare feet imprinting wet marks on the shore’s pebbles. She noticed me as she brushed off lichen flakes stuck to her shin.

When I regained my senses, I flushed as if caught hiding in her closet to spy while she undressed. I stood and retreated a few steps toward the clearing’s exit. I forced myself to meet her gaze as my temples burned.

She eyed me like we’d bumped into each other in the living room of a shared home.

“You can sit there if you want.”

I didn’t know if I shook my head, though I’d meant to. I gestured toward the rock as if offering my train seat.

When she sat, her dress slapped wetly. Water trickled down the rock’s sides. She gathered her honey-blonde mane into a fist, wrung it, and water gushed from the darkened strands. Some slid from her scalp, circumvented her eyes, traced her jawline, and fell. Her skin, mottled with irregular patches, reminded me of a leopard trapped by a hunter for a zoo.

“Did you miss this forest?” she asked.

I straightened. My vision blurred as if recovering from a blow to the head.

“I needed to see you.”

I expected her face to show discomfort, even terror, but whatever raced through her mind halted before reaching her facial muscles.

“Why?”

“I had never met anyone like you.”

She nodded and rested one hand over the other in her lap.

I’d admitted it—the words had left my mouth without needing to unlock gates or lower a drawbridge.

“I had to see you again. You, whose name I don’t know, to whom I’m nobody. It should bother you. Does it?”

She shook her head. Contorting as if stretching, she adjusted the back of her dress.

“I enjoy talking to someone.”

My throat tightened. A pulse throbbed in my neck like a muscle tic as I fought the smile tugging my lips. I wanted to hear every word she’d share, uncover every detail of her life.

“How do you spend your time? Beyond swimming, I can’t picture you outside this park, this forest.”

“What do you think the answer is?”

“Do you wake early to trudge to an office and waste hours on nonsense?”

“I don’t need to do any of that. Whenever you come here, you’ll find me.”

Her lack of expression might have meant she’d forgotten, or never learned, that people use gestures to communicate. Beyond the mottling, she belonged to another race. A lifetime of rejection might have taught her to avoid others. She’d bond with the lagoon she dove in and the encircling pines. Perhaps she welcomed this conversation as if we were exotic creatures separated by zoo glass.

“Who do you live with?” I said. “I assume you don’t work. Does the state pay for your home?”

I cringed at my hunger for every scrap of information. I imagined her scowling, sharpening her tone, rebuking my impertinence.

“Before you came, I hadn’t spoken to anyone in a long time.”

I crouched on the shore’s pebbles, leveling my face with hers. Meeting her gaze—those pale-blue eyes flecked with white and green—sent electricity from my nape to my toes. No one else had interested me because no one else deserved it. Here sat a real person, not someone playing a role society had drilled into them.

“Do you want to know anything about me?” I asked.

“Tell me.”

“No, I’m asking. Are you interested?”

“In what?”

“Where I live, how I spend my time, what I like.”

She tilted her head, her gaze dancing across the trees as if weighing whether another human was worth knowing.

“Does it matter?”

My legs protested. I sat and leaned a forearm on my knees.

“I don’t know. There’s little to say. Little I care about.”

I searched for some nugget to share, but my past spread like a muddy expanse. I spoke before realizing it.

“My childhood was boring and miserable—the tedious kind. I went to university expecting the promised camaraderie. A week after graduating, I’d forgotten my professors’ and classmates’ faces. I’m on my second job. Since childhood, I’ve waited for some passion to seize me, something I’d crave to spend hours on unpaid. But for years, I’ve walked straight ahead down a gray hallway. When I paused, invisible hands shoved my back. I suspected that somewhere—behind walls, a door, an inaccessible wing—a luminous world existed. Meanwhile, I experienced a plastic, flavorless reality. I blamed myself. The world’s data filters through my distorting brain. I live like acting in a disjointed play during a fever dream. I followed instructions, excelled at them, but found only hollowness. I assumed someday I’d stumble upon why I bothered.”

I elongated a silence. Droplets slid down the woman’s forehead. She glanced away but soon locked eyes with me again, awaiting direction.

I inhaled as my cheeks burned.

“But let’s talk about you. What do you enjoy?”

“What?”

“What do you like to do?”

Her damp hair dripped onto her soaked dress. She laid her palms on her thighs, fingers relaxed. She stared unblinking, whick kept my eyes from wandering to the curves her dress hugged.

I shifted, thirsting to draw out her words.

“What satisfies you? What do you do whenever you can?”

“I come here. I swim.”

Her irises quivered within their orbits, pupils dilating and contracting. She studied my face like a beast’s cub encountering a human.

I listened to her breath mingle with the hiss of branches and occasional thud of fruit falling into rot.

“Give me your hand.”

She raised her left hand, palm down. Cloudy droplets swelled on her fingertips. I crawled forward and clasped her hand between mine. It was cold and wet, like something left overnight in a bucket of water. Chalk-white patches mapped her veins. The hairless arm, smooth as if waxed, showed no goosebumps, no tremors.

“Aren’t you dying of cold?” I asked.

“I’m not dying of anything.”

I squeezed her hand, warming it. She lifted her gaze to mine and curved her lips slightly. I brought our joined hands to her face, tracing with our fingers the mottled patch spanning half her cheekbone and jaw. I swallowed.

“Does it bother you?”

“It tickles.”

“Having these patches. Being different.”

She shook her head.

“I am who I should be.”

I glided my fingertips over her hand’s back, shifting pliant skin. I outlined a patch. Light carved white curves along her knuckles’ wrinkles. Her nails, segmented by microscopic ridges like pine bark, held mud under their edges. I turned her hand over. Water and cold had puckered her fingertips and creased her palm, aging it. I traced every line, imagining their formation from her birth to this moment, when I could touch them.

“I think I’ll return soon.”

“Tomorrow?”

Dizziness struck.

“I work.”

“In the evening?”

How could I focus at the office, counting hours until I returned? But my mouth dried, and the details of her face and the forest’s silence sharpened as if I’d shed nearsightedness and earplugs. I longed to transport myself to the moment tomorrow when I would descend the office stairs and realize that instead of spending the rest of the day resting in order to perform well at work the next day, I would meet the woman in this clearing where no one dared to venture. A smile surfaced unbidden. She lowered her gaze to my lips as if they were another pair of eyes.

“Will I find you,” I said, “like you promised?”

“Whenever you come.”

Reluctantly, I released her hand and stood. How did I know to leave? My wristwatch warned of dinnertime. The canopy of branches etched a granite-gray sky, and the same half-light that had greeted me upon entering the passage enveloped us.

I stepped forward, half-raising my arms to embrace her, but stopped even though my heart pounded like a radar nearing its target. I wanted to hold her, balance her warmth with mine, imprint the feel of her soaked dress and the body beneath until tomorrow. I’d just met her. What if she’d tolerated my touch only to avoid conflict?

I bid goodbye with a smile she returned. I promised we’d meet tomorrow. As I walked away, she raised a hand and waved. I left the clearing and quickened my pace to overcome the urge to run back to her side.

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Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los reinos de brea.

Today’s song is “Breezeblocks” by alt-J.