Maya didn’t like losing four days of summer for odd reasons. School was about to begin in just a couple of days, and even though she was doing nothing but simmering in her own depression the entire summer, she thought it could only worsen after school began.

  She had gradually distanced herself from her friends and felt increasingly isolated. Despite her growing loneliness, no one seemed to notice her emotional withdrawal. The loss of her mother in a car accident five years ago was a wound that never healed. While her father was severely injured in the crash, Maya escaped unscathed—a fact she could not forgive herself for.

  Less than two years later, her father remarried, which Maya regarded as an attempt to replace her mother. She resented her father for moving on so quickly.

  “She’s good with kids and understands a young teenage girl better than I can. I think you two can become great friends,” her father would say.

  ‘If you needed a nanny for me, you didn’t have to marry her!’ Maya would retort in her mind. But on the outside, she could only retreat to her mother’s old book collection.

  Before Maya could adjust to her stepmother her father’s health declined. A foreign object from the car accident was lodged deep in his tissue. Due to its proximity to his vital organs, doctors decided not removing it would be less harmful.

  The foreign object didn’t bother him except for setting off metal detectors. However, it ended up causing serious harm after Maya convinced him to try pistachio ice cream. They both discovered they were allergic, and the resulting swelling caused the object to shift, leading to an infection. The infection spread to his heart, causing complications that ultimately led to a drug-induced coma. One from which he never woke.

  He remained in a coma for a year and a half before passing away in late spring. Even before his death, Maya felt that her life was over. She neglected school, friends, and her own life, spending her days visiting him in the hospital.

  Now, she was in a weird period of her life; hating her life and herself, but not willing to change anything about it. Pretty much giving up. Just mindlessly drifting through days, letting herself go to waste.

  Maya liked being home alone, where she didn’t have to put on a mask to pretend things weren’t as dire and hopeless as she felt them being. It was a place where she was once happy.

  Her mother always kept the house pristine, but Anna couldn’t seem to keep up with the dust. Now, every speck of dirt reminded Maya that her mom was no longer there. However, Anna wasn’t to blame, as she was working all the time. Now, it was Maya’s failure.

  Anna continued working at her old hairdressing job, choosing not to rely on the wealth that Maya’s parents had left her. Maya was grateful for this. Or, Anna might have been avoiding dealing with a depressed teenage girl and couldn’t use any money from selling her father’s profitable company due to his will’s stipulations.

  Maya had a hard time imagining Anna as virtuous. In her mind, Anna was still just a ‘fake mom’, a ‘gold-digger’, someone who considers her as a nuisance for being the only thing separating her from fortune.

  She hated when her thoughts would get this mean. After all, Anna was the only person she had left, and yet she felt like a stranger.

  Typically, Maya would seek refuge in books and fiction, immersing herself in tales far removed from her own reality. Though nowadays, she rather found herself only pretending to read, as it had become burdensome in itself—all while counting down the minutes until her next dose of medication that didn’t seem to have any effect.

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  But today was different. It felt as though there was something more to her, a hidden layer just beyond the blinds she couldn’t lift.

  Was it from the accident? Were there side effects?

  A sudden doorbell threw her straight into a panic attack. Visitors have always been rare in their household, but now, it was even less expected. Childishly, she hid herself, avoiding front lawn windows, pretending no one was home, hoping that whoever it was at the door would leave as soon as possible.

  Over the years, Maya developed an unsettling paranoia. She began to imagine a faceless woman dressed in black, bringing misfortune. It felt as if in every memory of terrible events, this woman was always lurking in the corner of her eye. At the hospital after the car accident, at the ice cream shop where they tried a new flavour, at the hospital around the time of her father’s death… And now, the doorbell somehow jolted her memory and she realized she might’ve seen the same woman again, just before the lightning strike.

  Maya’s heart was racing as she began to put the pieces together. Had she been outside to face her phantom? To prove to herself that it wasn’t just a delusion?

  ‘In my backyard?’

  Maya’s feet began to move. Rational thoughts told her that such a vague figure could be imagined in any crowd. Yet, her desperation to confront the apparition was true. If the figure was real, she wouldn’t have to shoulder the blame for her tragedies—though her therapist would say she was just shifting her guilt onto an imaginary figure.

  Looking up, Maya found herself standing barefoot on the carpet of well-tended grass. In front of her stood a maple tree, its canopy encompassing her vision. The lonely tree, planted in the year of her birth, had grown nearly to full maturity.

  ‘Thinking about it, this is where Anna said I was hit by the lightning…’

  Maya had unknowingly wandered to her backyard. The spacious, secluded plot of grass felt empty and undefined without the swimming pool her parents had once dreamed of installing, yet it had served as the perfect stage for countless childhood adventures.

  Maya had already forgotten about the unknown visitor who had triggered her apprehension earlier. Her attention was now entirely captured by something peculiar about the backyard — something she had never noticed before. With each step, the earth beneath her bare feet seemed to pulse with unfamiliar energy, as if the ground itself had transformed into something entirely new and strange. As if it was, somehow… alive.

  ‘Would an ant feel like this, walking on your skin?’

  Maya began making strange comparisons to this unknown sensation. She was unable to determine if it was comforting or terrifying.

  ‘Did getting struck by lightning seriously mess me up?’

  However, there wasn’t anything visible to the naked eye. Nothing had changed. There weren’t even scorch marks to suggest a lighting had struck a couple of days ago.

  On a whim, Maya raised her hand in the air as if reaching for the sky and immediately felt foolish.

  ‘It really was a silly idea…’

  As she lowered her hand, an ineffable feeling of a vaguely familiar action washed over her. Maya paused her hand awkwardly in the air.

  ‘Was I actually reaching out toward something, rather than up at the sky?’

  Overcoming the bizarre feeling of attempting to piece out something she had no recollection of, Maya took a step forward. Then her foot was met with unexpected firmness beneath the soft grass. Looking down, she noted no change in the landscape, yet the ground beneath her feet felt more solid as if something was concealed there.

  It was so vivid she imagined it was something that would make a ‘thud’ sound if it were stepped on.

  Then sudden realization made her recoil.

  ‘C-could it be?’

  A long-lost memory resurfaced. This was the spot where she had buried a time capsule with her childhood best friend, Leo, nearly a decade ago.

  Overwhelmed by nostalgia, she impulsively grabbed a shovel. As she dug up the remnants of her past, she felt a warmth ignite within her, a spark of excitement that she hadn’t felt in years. This long-lost piece of her childhood reignited a flame that had been extinguished for far too long.