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Amazon First Novel Award

Let the Forest Welcome You

The girl meant her to follow through the woods, down the unexpected path

FICTION / SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2026

Let the Forest Welcome You

The girl meant her to follow through the woods, down the unexpected path

ILLUSTRATION BY ANDREA “DRE” CHEUNG

Published 6:30, AUGUST 7, 2026

“Sorry, i’m so sorry,” the girl said, struggling behind the desk, oblivious to the line behind her, which was nearly to the door because the price went down in the late afternoon. “I just want this day to be really nice. You know, when you just need one good day?”

Her lids were lined in thick dark strokes. She wore a black-and-white checked shirt open over a ruched black dress, not warm enough for October, revealing the gooseflesh of her bare legs. A black pendant like a tiny memorial obelisk hung from a fine tangled silver chain tight on her neck, her open canvas satchel showing two swimsuits and an oily paper bag and a green banana. No outside food read the sign behind the desk, but Brenda let it pass. She couldn’t blame the girl trying to eke out more from a place she couldn’t afford, surrounded by burnished people ordering the most expensive drinks in the upstairs restaurant. The girl’s credit card was gummy, the coating peeling in strips like burnt skin.

“Enjoy your good day,” Brenda said. The girl didn’t acknowledge she had spoken.

Brenda watched her struggle with the pendant as she moved away. She paused at the top of the stairs, her hand at her throat, and thrust outward. The chain broke.

The spa appeared to rise out of the forest, reddish wood clamping together the glass walls. Visitors parked on the gravel and made their way uphill along a flagstone path which curved before the entrance, so when they looked back they saw only cedars and hemlocks. Let the forest welcome you proclaimed the lettering above the copper doors, but if the visitors were to clamber over the low stone wall that surrounded the saunas and cold plunges and hot pools and push their way through the trees, they would quickly find themselves on one of the well-kept cul-de-sacs edging the small city, or, in the other direction, on side roads running past farms.

Still, when Brenda worked the late shift (the spa was open till midnight; she would cough before entering the smaller sauna rooms, couples springing apart), she could almost believe that the trees were endless, the spa a glowing cube in a wilderness.

Brenda asked to switch off the check-in desk. With this many guests, it got messy if she didn’t stay on top of things. She was pretty sure that in their regular lives these people didn’t ignore marked trash cans, drop wet towels behind them. She carried a canvas bag for the laundry and a plastic one to gather the crumpled coffee cups, packages for Korean face masks (gel oozing at the tear), hair ties, and candy wrappers.

Lost jewellery Brenda slipped into her locker in the staff room. If no one asked after a week, she took home the earrings and necklaces and bracelets, stored them in a cookie tin on the shelf above the hot plate. Her piercings had grown over years ago, after she took everything out to show her dedication to God, though she could still feel the hard nubs of scar tissue when she pressed. Earlobes, septum, labia, the edge of her right eyebrow. The bags swung as she moved toward the biggest pool, limping slightly from where she’d fucked up her knee, falling on the sidewalk before she got sober.

She’d been living in her brother’s trailer since he’d married again and moved into his wife’s house. He charged her rent that she suspected was higher than the property taxes on the residential strip, orphaned between two failing farms. The trailer was so close to the spa she barely spent anything on gas; she believed she could walk to work if she cut through the trees. There’d be beer cans, an old mattress or a couch some teenagers had dragged from a basement facing a circle of burnt logs, the flashing shreds of chip bags, the logs smelling of charred magazines doused in lighter fluid, nothing like the dense dreamy scent of the hardwood she fed the saunas with.

She remembered those parties, staring into the blue-green chemical flames licking damp wood. Brenda had been the quiet one, smoking and playing with the leather thongs around her neck, the one who, when goaded, would come out with something harshly funny that made her friends shout at the trees, but she never laughed with them. A girl (what was her name?) had gashed her head open on a rock. They’d carried her to one of the cars, blood pooling in the back seat. The girl screamed all the way to the hospital and Brenda whispered in her ear, gripped her hand as the doctor stitched. He told Brenda she should consider nursing, but here she was, turning fifty, shovelling out the hot bricks, witchy and spiteful over the embers.

She’d left home early, was saved in an Evangelical church in Tennessee. She had believed God saw her but the feeling didn’t last and she’d left the church after a year. Drinking. Not pills, she’d seen enough with her mother to stay away from pills. Three abortions, none regretted, though she sometimes tried to summon regret, thinking God’s judgment might make her less lonely. A woman she almost married, who left because of the drinking. Sobriety. The trailer, the dog. He showed up during a storm, and she let him in. He stood dripping on the linoleum, shook himself and lumbered onto her couch. He stayed. She stayed. She stopped clearly wanting anything. Without noticing, she became as the well-mannered young women she worked alongside saw her. A person without a past.

The building held the reception area, the change rooms, the cafeteria, two restaurants, the staff room hidden in........

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