The woman lived on a small pension, barely enough to survive. To make ends meet, she found a simple way to earn a bit extra: every morning she went into the forest, gathered mushrooms, sold some at the market, and dried or fried the rest for herself.
That day was warm and bright. After the recent rains, mushrooms were sprouting everywhere. She followed a familiar path — the same one her late husband had once taken her along. Her basket soon filled with firm boletus mushrooms, and she felt light-hearted. The scent of moss, the chirping of birds — everything reminded her of better days.
Lost in thought, she wandered deeper into the forest, beneath a wide old spruce tree, where she spotted a large white mushroom. She stepped toward it — and suddenly, the ground gave way beneath her feet. There was a sharp crack of breaking soil, and she fell. The drop was short but hard, the landing knocking the breath out of her.
When she opened her eyes, she was at the bottom of a deep pit. The sides were soft and crumbly. She tried to climb out, but every time she grabbed a root or clump of grass, it tore away in her hands. Her cries for help vanished into the silence of the forest.
Then she noticed something strange — a section of the pit wall where the soil looked darker and packed tighter than the rest.
She crawled closer. Something pale was sticking out of the earth. At first, she thought it was a stone. She brushed away the dirt — and froze. It wasn’t a stone. It was bone. Human.
Her heart began to pound. With shaking hands, she dug deeper. Slowly, the outline of a face appeared — pale, hollow-eyed, half-buried in the damp soil.
His hair had mostly decayed, but his shirt collar and a single rusty button still clung to the fabric. And then she recognized him.
It was her neighbor — the man who had vanished a year earlier. The whole village had searched for him, believing he’d run away to the city and left his wife behind.
Now she understood the truth. He had been here all along, buried beneath her feet. The pit she’d fallen into had formed because the earth above his body had finally collapsed.
The woman stood frozen, too terrified to scream. The forest around her grew deathly still.
