There are other things. A week after the tendril she is lying in bed, listening to the house settle, her bones against the mattress feeling solid and good, and the wind whistles through an oak tree that’s fifty feet away from the house. Only she hears it so much closer, and when with thumb and forefinger she peeks open the curtain the tree looms, enormous, not four feet from her window. The next morning the tree is where it was, almost, but she could have sworn that yesterday it was fifty feet away and not thirty.

She bakes bread and finds a hard shiny holly leaf in the middle. The holly bush is behind the cabin, near the outhouse, and it’s possible that a leaf caught on her sweater and fell into the dough as she kneaded. Possible.

She brushes her shoes against the doormat but when she pulls them on to go out again, there’s thick chlorophyll suffocating the boot treads. Pine needles. Maple leaves.

The flowers she takes inside to vase and sit on the living room window go brown and dead in a few hours. The forsythia bush outside, glassed away from its withered petals, shivers in anger.

One day she is walking, just walking, rustling through years of dead leaves and gathering herbs when she sees them, rosemary, sage, and a high branch of a pricker bush gets tangled in her hair. She nearly falls, drops her gathering, and raises her hands to unsnarl herself. The branch draws her away from the path, deeper in. It pushes into the nooks of her hair, burying itself in her curls. She turns in exasperation and breaks off the branch, and the pricker bush shudders backward.

She stamps home with the branch dragging painfully on her scalp, and she gets the scissors and tries to cut the locks the branch has incorporated itself into, but it seems as if every hair is somehow tangled into the mess. “All right then!” she screams, and begins chopping her hair in big hanks, letting it fall on the rag rug, tossing her hands to get rid of the errant hairs tickling her neck and yelling in anger.

Erratically shorn, she runs out and stands on the front porch. “I haven’t done anything to you!” she yells out, her fists clenched. “I just want to be here! I’m not going to hurt you!”

The trees whistle at her. A bluejay calls, to the east. Her hands uncurl. “I’m not going to hurt you,” she repeats, and goes back into the cabin.

Hurrrrt yooooouuu, the wind cries back.