When she wakes she knows not to enter the woods. She knows that they are dark, damp and deep because her mother said to her
-Never enter the woods.
She may sit on the road, feeling the cold and wet asphalt beneath her bottom and legs - soaking through her jeans - and stare at the woods, stare for hours. She may do this, but not enter. Sometimes she dreams about the trees bending over her, their colossal shadow enveloping her, the grass stinging her bare legs as she passes through and finds the sky has disappeared. Sometimes the dreams take her far, very deep into the webbed green. Once there she can see only rain and moss and slimy things that look at her slowly passing. She feels the soft fungus beneath her feet. She hears the cracking twigs and the dripping water but not her footsteps, or her breathing, or her whimpering. She mimes a fear the deeper she walks. Always she comes to a clearing, a bright beam illuminating a break in the foliage. But it is here, always, when she wakes.
She asks her mother why the woods are so deep. The woods are deep because they have not been cut down. They have not been cut down because they are too deep, and damp, and dark. She asks whether anyone else goes into the woods and her mother looks as though she has left. The mother slowly responds that not many people ever go into the woods and even less come out. Then her mother seems to come back and smiles at her daughter and says that’s why they have such a nice and large backyard so she won’t ever have to want the woods for play. Still, she goes to the road and looks at the woods, listening to her breath knowing she is awake and can feel her fear building from a very small thing into an immense tower that excites her and makes her palms tingle and something small between her legs warm. That’s why the dreams happen so often, she thinks. It’s that excitement and that warmth down there. That’s why she sits at the roadside thinking long and hard about traveling inside; exploring the depths, and finding the clearing that always rockets her back awake.
Today she’s not siting like she usually does. Not cross-legged, or with her knees to her chest. Today she sits on her heels, knees to the ground, as though ready to leap up and forward. Today, that’s what she does. Stepping slowly at first across the dip that separates the road from the field before the woods, she soon lets her pace match her racing heart. The trees are nearer than before and her eyes cannot be moved from them and they are nearer still when she begins to smell the damp and strange odor crawling out from the dark womb.
She stops at the first line of trees. They tower over her and seem to bend. Her knees are trembling but she attributes that to the warmth between her legs. Her cold hands reach down, one pulls the waistband out, the other travels inside and touches a spot on her panties that is warm and feels nice when she pushes into the wet. She closes her eyes for a moment and can see the clearing so perfectly that upon opening those innocent jewels she rushes into the forest. Her mother’s warnings are echoing loudly in her head but she likes disobeying them. Her mother’s empty stare flashes before her and it feels good to not really see it. It’s good to not be around her mother, and their empty, quiet house filled with dust and shadows and pictures of a man she’s never met kissing her mother when she looked like a teenager. Now her mother looks like an old doll, her skin like a sack made of dried leather covered in powder. She is so glad to be running quick and bounding light through this bizarre cathedral of brush and webs that she never wants to leave. If she could run forever like this through the woods and never see her mother or that house or the humongous backyard again there would be no doubt. She would run until her feet bled and her lungs burst.
Shapes and shadows and strange sounds wrap around her as an oneiric veil; her world transcending sense and time. She runs so fast she can no longer grasp what she sees, how long her feet have been pounding the uneven forest floor, or what smell keeps getting stronger, more pungent - awful. The speed and excitement of her cutting path almost lets the sight escape her of a luminescence in the distant left. A quick glance and a stuttered step let her lithe frame crash into the brush. For a second she stayed there, among the damp and the dark; in the deep of the woods. She laid and reclaimed a steady breath, all the while letting her hands again travel down and inside - between the dense fabric and her soft skin - finding the warmth and wetness there. The searching hands make their way inside her. Cold drops of water falling from the high branches spatter her face and soon douse her thin clothes. Her eyes find the trees are more like fingers spotted with moss, emerging from swamped pools in the ground, they look like what she feels. Long and curving, her fingers feel all the textures inside of her and touch each spot that sings. Her body now curving and twisting into the soft ground, shoulders pushing up mounds of mud, hair trapped beneath her back, heart racing again and her skin flushing with a paramount ecstasy. Working diligently and with a presently foreign purpose, she feels a blindness in her senses, a swelling pressure that is releasing into something bright and intense and tidal; a swirl of pulse and rhythmic release forcing her eyes open to see the sky has disappeared and been replaced by a yawning black. Her lungs stinging from the crisp chill in the air, she looks around to regain her surroundings and her purpose. Quickly her hands retreat from the tiny death still floating between her legs, between skin and blood, in the space unmarked by her mother and the pale life she knows too well. Her eyes turn to the only lighted space in the woods.
Standing slowly, clumsily brushing dirt and leaves off her soaked clothes, knees shaking in nervous discovery of so many things, she sees the glow and knows that the clearing lays there. Among all that light, is something that should only exist in her dreams but somehow has found it’s way into this very real forest. Steadily, she makes her way to the clearing. Into the glimmering warmth and out of the legion darkness.
As she nears the opening in the forest, the light seems to grow more intense. Though she can clearly see the ground beneath and the frondescence around her, the allowance before her is blinding. A brief hesitation before she passes the last trees and into the bright wall, a hesitation allowing for a question
-Have I been dreaming? Am I still dreaming? If I walk through that light, will I wake up in my bed and be bored of my home and my mother will tell me ‘Never enter the woods’? Again?
No not again, this time she walks into the clearing and can see what stands and lies inside.
A man dressed in a long, shining wet black coat stands in the center. He smiles a little with one side of his mouth, his thin wrinkled lips part just enough to reveal stubbed, rotted teeth. He points at her in a gotchya way and croaks at her
-Been thinkin’ you’d come earlier figurin’ yr dreams n’ all.
-What? My dreams?
-Yup, yr dreams, my dreams, our dreams. We’ve been dreamin’ the same dreams for some years now. But, seems yr mother dudn’t like these woods too terribly much. Which is a shame, she’d find her some fun but good ‘round here.
-We’ve been dreaming… the same dreams?
-Yeah, like I just said. I’d kinder like it if you’d fuckin’ listen to my words lil’ missy. So’s I don’t have to repeat myself s’all.
-I’m sorry, I… guess this is weird for me, I guess.
-Lil’ girl like you’d better think it’s weird, heh. If’n you didn’t, well I’d s’pose I’d be the one weirded out.
-Um, yeah, I guess you’re right.
-Damn right. Now, guess you’d like to see what them dreams keep from showin’ ya?
-Yeah I would. I mean, I ran a lot to get here and it was so much fun but I fell when I saw the light here and I… well the light is weird too I guess huh.
-Aw, it’s always light here. Woods? They can get as dark and damp as that deep would like, but here, it’s always bright ‘gardless of the rain or wind.
-Don’t say that, my mother always says that, ‘dark, damp and deep’. Don’t say it.
-Alright. Yr mother’d spoil ev’ry damn thing if she got the itch to wouldn’t she?”
He looks down and she follows his eyes down to a patchy blue tarp thrown over something small. Not small like a bunny, or even a dog, but as though a child like her were laying prone beneath. The man looks back up and curls his finger at her to say “come closer” and as soon as she does, she thinks of her own fingers, curling, digging, going numb. She makes her slow advance towards him and wonders about his body beneath the coat. Despite his awful teeth he is not unattractive. Beneath dark brows his eyes shimmer with a boyish blue and are set in beautiful symmetry to each side of a greek sculpted nose. His jaw is strong but clean of stubble. But below the nose, framed by the jaw, was the horrid, cracked mouth that housed his carrion teeth. His finger uncurls and becomes rigid, pointing down to the tarp. Her eyes now fixed on the tarp, she barely registers the man dropping his coat. His fat folding over itself, warts covering his stomach, a thick green crust between his legs where his flaccid penis hung in a sick curve; he stood straight and looked right at the girl with a hunger nearly tantamount to her confused fear. She took one step backwards, quickly followed by one more.
-This isn’t right mister. You aren’t supposed to do that.
He reaches his thick hands down to the tarp and removes that crinkled blue from the shape underneath. For a second, her mind ran to her house, to her mother putting a plate before her for dinner, ran to her bed - no not her bed that’s where she dreams- runs now to her backyard, that safe and large yard with low grass where the only wood was the fence that held her in and the world out. Kept the world out. The only thing she needed was her mother and that safety and the food made for her. She imagines, but only for a second longer, a nice and hot dinner on a nice piece of china her mother got from her mother. A beautiful arrangement of vegetables and grains, almost glittering with moisture. She reaches for a fork and screams at what now lays upon the plate. A contorted mess of a woman, her eyes uselessly staring, her stomach full of gas. The man lowers himself to his knees and smiles his crooked smile at the girl.
-I’m goin’ to show ya how t’fuck somethin’ dead.
-To what?
-You heard.
As he spreads the dead legs and hunches over, the rain starts to fall again, this time torrential. His back becomes bumpy and viscous, assuming the texture of a snail. The rain absorbing into the brush around him, the body beneath splitting under pressure. Organs slide out and flesh twists and contorts to the squeeze of his hands.
She cannot handle this. The woods aren’t supposed to be this bad. Her mother said “even less come back” and this stings a little. She worries about her mother, and her dreams. The man continues splitting and violating the dead mound with every perverse passion he owns. She begins to finally, run. Over the pits in the ground over broken logs over fallen arms of trees prone flesh dead hair everything dead she runs on through all the pain and horror.
At the edge of the woods she stops and stares at the road in the distance. She rests her hands on her knees and breathes so panicked that she resigns herself to fainting… almost. Tumbling over half-awake could be embarrassing any other time, this time it felt natural and needed.
She wanted to be degraded. She wanted people to see her weak and overtaken. That’s what she lived, that’s how she found her singing body. Through weakness she realized that any dream, any fantasy, will hurt more than all of life contained in a room. No matter what you dream, you will still dream, and her mother was her dream forever consoling her in an empty house with a large backyard and her soft warm bed where no man or any death will ever intrude or harm her. No more panic, no more brave adventure. No more horror in her life for now, if ever.
