One fall afternoon, right as the sun was setting, Lana thought it might calm her down by taking a walk. She slammed open the front door of her car and stomped down the street. A few minutes later, she found herself in the middle of the woods.

“I must have been in a blind rage,” she whispered to herself.

Despite the fact that it was a beautiful sight and it wasn’t a very crowded place, the trees were scattered everywhere. Millions of fall colors blew in the wind. She was still angry. Lana lay on the beautiful green grass and stared at the sky for a while. About an hour later, she woke up from a long nap.

“Waking up to this view is wonderful, isn’t it?”

Lana, surprised, looked around her, wondering who said that. She noticed a small shadow, though it wasn’t a person. It was a small squirrel lying below a tree. Frightened, Lana grabbed her stuff slowly, and ran as fast as she could. Because she didn’t know where she was, she just ran, or at least until she reached the top of the hill. At the top of the hill, there was a single tree and small daisies. She was able to see her house in the distance.

Lana was getting scared because it was getting very dark outside. It seemed as if the moon rose and sucked all the color out of the woods. She heard another voice calling out to her.

“There you are!” The voice was rather squeaky and had a very happy tone. It was no squirrel. It had been the one yellow tree on top of the hill. In the moments before she decided to run, she wondered if it had been the tree this whole time. Then she ran.

The next day Lana brought the local sheriff to check it out. He is a tall, older man with a huge hat that covers up 50 percent of his face. Since it was the middle of fall, he was wearing a long brown coat that complimented his uniform quite nicely. They searched for the hill for over an hour. When they finally found it, they saw a girl. She looked like an ordinary kid, with a long floral dress, hair in braids, and a cute smile on her face.

When they went up to see the tree, it fell in front of Lana’s and the sheriff’s faces. The tree had been chopped down. A man appeared from behind the tree and said, “This will make a fine chair for you, my daughter.”

Then the man noticed Lana and Mr. Willow, the sheriff. “Hello, how are you doing, sheriff?”

“Great, how are you?” Mr. Willow asked the man. It seemed as if they knew each other.

After that encounter, Lana felt a bit off. The sheriff did know about everyone in town, but she wondered what the man was doing, chopping down that tree. There were dozens of other trees, but he chose her tree. Now everyone thought Lana was going crazy. “A talking tree?” they would say. Lana also felt it. She felt crazy. Now nobody would ever know if she was telling the truth about the talking tree.