Written for Crimson’s Creative Challenge.
Here’s where Crispina’s image took me.
They found the wheel before they found the rest of it.
Detective Harrow crouched in the wet grass, latex gloves bright against the green, and studied the thing without touching it. Wooden spokes. Iron rim, eaten through with rust. Someone had leaned it here deliberately, that much was clear. You don’t carry a wheel this heavy by accident.
“How long has the hedge been growing over it?” she asked.
The groundskeeper behind her shifted his weight. “Five years? Six? I don’t come to this corner much.”
Nobody does, she thought. That was rather the point.
The hedge was dense here, unnaturally so, bulging outward as if swollen with a secret it had been holding too long. Behind the wheel, just barely visible in the shadows between branches, was the edge of something painted blue. Wood, maybe. Or the remains of it.
She didn’t move toward it yet. She’d learned to look first, to let a scene tell you what it wanted to before you started asking questions it wasn’t ready to answer.
The white flowers on the right bothered her. Too cheerful. Too deliberate.
Someone had planted them. Someone had come back and planted flowers.
She stood up slowly, knees aching, and pulled out her radio.
“I need forensics at the east hedge,” she said. “And tell them to bring lights. It’s darker in there than it looks.”
NAR©2026
This is “Meet Me in the Woods” by Lord Huron
Everything seen here was created by me, unless otherwise indicated. Thanks for your consideration. NAR©2017-present.
The Elephant's Trunk 