Beneath The Pines

BENEATH THE PINES
by Alex Price

Stephanie Koff thought she knew the man she married. Quiet. Careful. The boy who once knelt over a campfire until every log sat exactly right, who promised her, at seventeen, in the same stretch of pines where they grew up, that he was never going anywhere.

Then one evening, in her own kitchen, twelve feet from where their son keeps his shoes, everything she believed about him falls apart in a matter of minutes.

What makes a man capable of turning on the mother of his own child? What does it take to reach a place where that becomes a plan instead of a thought he pushes away?

Stephanie doesn't have time to answer that question. She only has time to fight for the one thing that matters more than her own survival: making it back to her son.

Will she make it out? And if she does, is out ever really out, or does a night like that follow you into every room you walk into afterward?

Beneath the Pines is a story about how far one person can go to make sure a family stays exactly what they've decided it should be, and what it costs everyone around them to survive that decision. No one in this story walks away whole. Not the ones who suffer it, not the ones who witness it, and not the ones who spend the rest of their lives trying to understand how it happened at all.

The pines remember everything. So does she.