We Are the Woods
By Christopher King
Corinne stands at the threshold, where the sunlight becomes patchy and the wind is torn. The trees before her are like veins, capillaries that run from the earth and into the emptiness of the air. The spaces between them are dark, as if they are bleeding shadows and the forest is a bruise upon the face of the world. She steps among them. She walks. Her footfalls are a thudding, broken echo of the pulse in her own veins.
Her mother used to walk this path everyday. Mother loved the woods. She said it gave her peace to be here by herself, that she did not feel alone, but instead free of the very concepts of together and apart, at one with nothing and everything at the same time, like the woods: life in harmony. She felt free in a way that she hadn’t felt anywhere else since she was a child.
One day, Mother walked down this path and did not walk back.
Father said it was probably coyotes, although they never found the body. Corinne hasn’t been in the woods since. It’s been years, and she’s fifteen now, and hasn’t felt free or peaceful or one with anything for what seems like a very long time. She wants to see the forest as her mother saw it.
And yet ... she is scared.
All around stand trees that should be pillars of life, but their trunks hang broken, splintered like crippled spines and shattered bone. Pallid grey bark peels from barren limbs like rotting flesh. Moss grows thick from decay, feeding on rot like a disease.
There is a buzz in her ear and a tickle on her cheek. She slaps herself. Her palm comes away with a smear of red and a crushed black body, fragile legs twisted, delicate wings ripped. More flies swarm around her, hungry for her blood. She starts walking faster now. Her eyes dart from side to side like the flies, searching for harmony.
Not all the trees are broken; some stand like majestic old kings, ruling for over a century. And there are bright new saplings and vibrant ferns and lush green shrubs ... but the roots of every one of them are sunken into the decomposition below, and they feed on it, scavengers picking meat from a corpse, sucking marrow from a bone. Only they’re not scavengers: they’re murderers, for as they grow bigger and more dominant they smother the lives of the sprouts beneath them, cannibal kings killing any possible usurpers — their own children included.
Everywhere she steps, fresh green shoots struggle for life. She tries to avoid them, but she can’t; there are too many. As she treads them into the dirt, she thinks she should have stayed away.
Her pulse is faster now. Her steps try to keep time with her heart, but the rhythm is broken and disjointed.
And suddenly a greedy twist of wood has claimed her foot. She’s falling. Her knees collide with the ground that is really a hundred years of death and rot, and her fingers dig in like roots. For a moment, all she can hear is the whine of a mosquito; then she feels the feathery touch of its legs in her ear, the pin-prick of its bite. She tries to lift her hand to swat it, but there is a bony tendril of root holding it to the ground.
“Help!” she cries out.
“We already have.” It’s not one voice, but many. It sounds like the whine of mosquitoes, the buzz of flies, the creaking of trees, the rustling of leaves, the whispering of wind, and it also sounds like a group of children, all speaking in unison.
She tries to look toward them, but there’s something around her neck, creeping up her head. “It ... hurts,” she gasps.
“We know. But it is what you wanted.”
No ...
“You wanted to be one with us.”
They seem to be everywhere, all around her. She forces her head up against the tearing of thorns, the suffocation of the weeds that suddenly engulf her head, and she sees them.
They are children: children whose bones are splintered wood, whose veins are twisted branches, whose flesh is peeling bark and rotting leaves, whose hair is the lush growth of moss, whose bodies swarm all over with flies and mosquitoes and spiders and wriggle with worms and centipedes and maggots, whose eyes are the darkness that forever lurks amongst the trees.
“Who are you?” she tries to ask, but she has no voice.
She feels them move closer. Their hands are on her now, pulling her into their midst.
“We are you, now, and you are us,” they say. “And we are the woods.”