The park held all my best memories of childhood.

Through the short-cut horsegrass my friends and I would run without a care, up and down the slope that led into the beckoning woods.

In the ragged bushes and sharp brambles we would play, crawling like army soldiers through barbed wire, hiding like animals from each other.

All the while the woods watched, looming over all.

Tall, straight trees at the bottom of the hill, always weighed with leaves, always casting the forest in shadow. From the top of the hill, you couldn’t even see the forest floor.

As children we had been told to never go into the forest. We hadn’t, mostly, daring each other to get as close as we could at the bottom of the slope, brushing our tiptoes all the way up to the line of shadows and thistles that barred the entrance to the forest.

When I was a child I had loved the park, had loved the presence of the forest too, even though I never set foot inside it.

As an adult, it brings only dread.

My daughter was last seen running inside.