By Wendy Simons

In a single moment, lasting not nearly long enough, for certainly there would be more to the vision, some ending other than what was delivered, she saw her whole life as it had occurred and as it would unfold, enveloped in one tiny insignificant packet; the packet tossed aside, caught up in a breeze and carried to a field where it was discovered by a child who liked the color of it and the thickness of it, just bulky enough to suggest contents of significance, and the child carried it into the woods where he was distracted by a woodpecker dismantling a dead log, and the packet fell from his hand to the leaf litter at his feet and disappeared into it. He would not think about it until several days later when it would cross his mind that he’d found something and lost it, beyond that, his interest would wane. And there lay her life, in a packet in the leaf litter in a woods. Like her body, it too would decay into the earth, a life undiscovered.