Mason

The second day is when the first small thing happened.

Small enough that if you heard it in someone else's story, you'd shrug and say, yeah, people do weird stuff in the woods.

We came to a junction that should have been simple.

Trail goes left for the loop, right for a spur that leads to a different drainage.

We had talked about it the night before.

The map was clear.

The sign at the junction was not.

The wooden post was there, but the signboard looked wrong.

Not broken, not vandalized with spray paint, just wrong.

The arrow was pointing left, but the lettering was sloppy, like someone had tried to rewrite it with a marker.

The name of the trail was spelled wrong, an extra letter, a missing letter, then scratched over again.

It looked like a kid had done it, but it wasn't bright or playful.

It was ugly and forced.

The old carving underneath was still faintly visible, like the original had been scraped and then covered.

Mason stopped and stared at it longer than he needed to.

"'Maybe they replaced it,' I said.

"'With what?'

he said, and his tone was flat."

We checked the map.

We checked the compass.