[Fiction] Dear Posse No. 13: Common Threads

I’m working on a serial fiction project. Each segment will be published here and on Patreon. It is available in full to Patreon supporters:

Dear Posse,

Something happened today—something that makes me think we might have a chance to make things right, or at least understand what went wrong.

Eliza and I were sitting under the black tree, which has become our meeting spot, listening to its song, when a group of people appeared at the edge of my property. They looked wary, scared, but also curious.

They too had been drawn by the tree’s hum, they explained. There were five of them, from different parts of our neighborhood, each thinking they were alone in seeing the twilight world.

“We heard the hum for nights,” one of them, a retired schoolteacher named Mr. Hawthorne, told us. “Thought it was the wind or my mind playing tricks.”

“We need to share what we know,” Eliza said, and everyone nodded. We spent the afternoon exchanging stories, finding the common threads that linked our experiences.

The shadow children, the whispering winds, the changing animals—all of it seemed to be part of a larger tapestry we were only now beginning to see.