The Red Ribbon

Mariel had never been touched gently before.

This was fine. She'd gotten used to the sting of love under her fingernails a long, long time ago. In her little cabin, in her little strip of woods, Mariel had everything she'd ever need: a woodstove, her mattress stuffed with turkey down, and the rifle. Love was not among those things, and therefore it served her no purpose.

Rules kept a person safe in the woods. Contained. Free from accidents, or cold, or hunger. Accidents were the biggest concern- they were what made the rules so important. A person could go out hunting at night, if they wanted to- but you'd probably never see them again. Or a person could wander too far into the brush and fall down a ravine- and suffer bad, broken bones impossible to reset. The cold and hunger could be staved off; you could wrestle them into submission, if you were patient enough- but accidents happened quickly- and they were forever.

So Mariel followed the rules. She stayed within the strip of hunting cabins along the creek and only wandered into the woods as far as the swathes of faded red ribbon tied to the trees' more brittle branches. She stayed closed, and kept to herself, and followed the rules. At night, hunger twisted her stomach like eels, and the bite of early autumn snuck in through the gaps in the wood. It leached into her muscles and bled her dry of heat until her teeth chattered and rattled in her skull. When the sun rose and the light cast over her through her half-draped window, she knew she'd passed another test, and the cycle had begun again.

There were other reasons for the rules. Sinister, spine-chilling reasons: monsters that played unbalanced games. When a child wandered up the slope and out of sight, chasing after deer, there was no use chasing after. It was already gone. The wrong twig stepped on, gone. A voice answered in the low-down hush of a person's hearing, gone.

Mariel tried not to linger on the memories.

Tandy was waiting for her by the spit. Her hair was wet and her clothes smelled like beaver fat and musk. Wash day; Mariel wrinkled her nose and pulled up a seat as she turned the spike over the hot orange fire- licking up at the meat as it hissed and dripped onto the logs. Her stomach roiled.

"Sleep alright? You look terrible."

"Better than you." It was probably true. Wash days started early. She doubted Tandy had slept at all- and the beaver was a significant indicator of that holding true. "When did you have time for this?"

"I didn't. There's still half a day's washing in my cabin."

"You're joking."

Her shrug was slight. Mariel pretended not to see the creeping twitch at the corner of her mouth denoting pride in herself. She wouldn't say it, but then… she hardly needed to. It didn't take a genius to put two-and-two together.

Mariel surprised herself, the heat creeping up into her chest, and sat there like a rock. Tandy just turned the spit again, her fair, pointed face caught in the hot yellow glare. "...tell me you didn't do what I think you did."

"I needed food. You'd have done the same-"

"I would not." She kept her voice low, her fingers taut on the stump beneath her. Invisible spiders itched their way up her spine, but she made herself stay calm… made herself breathe out through her nose and think about what she was going to say. "...you shouldn't have gone out after dark. You could have gotten hurt, or worse."

"I was smart. I stayed close to the bank, and I kept a lantern going."

"It only takes a second- you know that. Can you load your gun in less than a second, Tandy?" She didn't like the way her words were shaping themselves like coals, hot and dark and breathless between them. She could see the marks on Tandy's face where their proximity burned her- or maybe that was just the heat from the cook fire.

The crackle and pop of skin splitting rang in her ears. Mariel bit her own tongue, and looked away. Iron ran hot in her mouth, and she swallowed it back rather than open it again.

"We can't keep living this way."

She said it like a truth- like it was something Mariel knew, and she was tired of pretending otherwise. The heat in Mariel's chest got hotter. Tighter. Denser.

Down by the northeast boulder, Tarin and Meeker were beginning their stretches, lean and muscular and magnificent in their furs. They looked like specks in the distance, and whatever noise they made in their bravado was muffled by the racing creek current.

Mariel picked up a creek pebble, turned it in her fingers, and skipped it out over the water. It sank almost instantaneously, not a foot from the shore. "You're a fool. This is the only way we can live. I'd have thought you'd understand that by now."

"I'm never going to understand that." The answer was as quiet as it was certain, and Mariel watched the way Tandy's hazel eyes tracked the flame as it grazed the simmering meat. "There were twenty of us when we started here… and one by one we've been whittled down to the bare bones. How much longer until one of us goes next?"

"What are you suggesting? That we leave?"

"Yes. It's better than staying here and waiting to die."

"That's not possible. We've marked the borders out for a reason. How do you expect us to move camp, when we can't get a foot beyond it?"

The clink and shift of a boot heel against a barrel caught her ear. Mariel blanched as Tandy nudged her rifle up with her toe and caught it in hand. Gleaming in the firelight, it winked at her and rippled in the heat like mirage- like an omen.

Mariel stood up. There were rules. That kept them safe- kept her safe.

"You can do what you want," Tandy looked up at her with such a cutting kind of pity it nicked her to the bone. "-but I'm not going to live in fear anymore. Whatever happens, happens Mariel. Are you going to be okay with that?"

No, she wanted to say, no I am not. Instead she turned on her heel and kicked up creek stones and gravel as she did, not caring as the fire sputtered and swore at her back.

***

The screeches that woke her were distinctly owl- not human- and she sucked in the air through her teeth as she sat upright on her bed. Her dreams had been plagued with the warbled impression of human voices- of irregular, bowed human hands the color of rifle barrels- and she'd tasted the salt on her lips before it had ever dripped off her chin and onto her knees.

Outside her window the sky was a pale and insidious navy, and the calls warbled and boxed at the window's edge, rattling her figurines. Her washing hung from the rafters by long stretches of rough twine and hand-carved wooden pegs, dripping placidly onto the thin blue tarp cut to fit the shape of her cabin's tiny floor plan. Mariel ran her hand over the nearest item- a damp, hooded storm coat- and raised her eyes back to the window. Drops of rain plinked against the dusty weathered glass in long, irregular patterns.

Rain was good. It meant more forage, and fuller reserve buckets of water that didn't need to be purified. How long did they have until dawn? An hour? Two? Enough time for it to pass before she could leave the cabin and open the drums.

Sleep was less than enticing, and there was little else to do, besides whittle herself some new little perfunctory charm to add to her growing collection. It seemed indulgent- wasteful even- to hoard something that could have kept her warm in the blink of an eye.

But then it would have been gone forever- and somehow that seemed worse.

Maybe she'd give it to Tandy.

She'd spent an hour carving the arms on a particularly fluffy bear, when the shuffling started outside the door. It was soft at first, and she mistook it for the rain, but as it got closer and closer to the walls of her little home the sounds began to sharpen themselves into the shush shush shush of creek silt disturbed by heavy steps.

Mariel's leg tightened first, tensing to the point of pain in her calves as she bit her lip and held her breath. Her spine followed close behind, her arms frozen where the particular piece of birchwood sat in her fingers like a forbidden vice. Her knife stuck in the divet where she'd begun that strip of shave, and the grip bit into her fingers as she sat there in utter stillness.

Shush shush shush. The heavy, slogging footsteps passed the mark of her door. Shush shush shush.

Again, the owls shrieked in the trees, and Mariel let her spine relax into a full-body shiver, her calves aching and throbbing in their tender twisted muscles. Each step tingled as she rose very carefully from the mattress and took tiny, light-footed steps toward the arched wooden frame. Its cool brass knob stung her fingers, and Mariel held her breath. Whatever it was, it had come too far into their camp to be happy with them; Mariel had seen them lure people from the edges of the woods, or out of their beds with enchanting dreams, but not-

The thought occurred too late. "...no no no no no."

Cold lard-smelling runoff ran down her face and into her eyes as she ripped the storm coat from its pegs and threw it on. The door was locked- propped with a collapsable wooden stick by the bottom hinge; Mariel kicked it aside with one booted foot and snatched her rifle from the corner. It felt heavy in her hands, loaded and ready.

"Tandy!" She called, not bothering to close the door- not now. The boot prints were shuffled and deep, exposing earth like bone where she'd dragged her feet in a dream-induced haze. The rain turned everything running shades of blue and gray, and even the brush had deadened in the dark as Tandy's staggering body shuffled up the slope to the lip of the woods.

Mariel blinked the rain from her eyes and ran. It didn't take long to reach the slope, but by then she'd made it farther into the brush, cutting her arms to ribbons on the branches. Blood glistened on her arms in what small kernels of moonlight peaked through the canopy, and the owls' screeches were loud and chorusing in a symphony from the treetops.

A warning…? Or something worse?

Tandy stumbled up and over a knoll, climbing her way over a fallen, hollowed out log, her limbs catching awkwardly on the stumps and knots. The ground was soft and wet, and it was an effort not to sink in the lower pits of mud that pooled that section of forest floor. Too slow… she wasn't making good enough time. If she couldn't grab her before-

She saw it, peeking out from behind a larger tree, less than a cabin's width away from Tandy's tree-prone body. The red ribbon caught the light off of the drops of rainwater it had accrued in rivulets, waving at her like a mocking enemy in the distance. Mariel's stomach sank. If she couldn't grab Tandy before she crossed the barrier… she'd be gone.

Her breathing felt heavy and labored in her chest. Owl screeches boxed her ears, and Tandy cleared the log. What was she doing? What was she trying to achieve? One more dead survivor… she was just one more dead survivor, and Mariel was going to be right behind her if she didn't start worrying about herself.

But her legs refused to move. She trembled there in the mud, and breathed through her nose, and watched as one shuffling footstep at a time, Tandy neared the barrier ribbon.

She felt it before she remembered it was there, clutched in her hand and damp now with the rain. The wood had splintered where she'd made her crude, rough slices, and the splinters had buried themself halfway up her nails. She hadn't noticed until she'd peeled them away.

The bear for Tandy.

Mariel took off running. Over the mud, through the overgrowth, under branches and wire-sharp twigs. She tensed halfway through her attempt to rush the log and slipped on a patch of ingrown moss that hit her nose when she fell and bloodied her lower lip. One hand at a time, bear pocketed and rifle under-arm, Mariel inched her way off the log stumbling and bloody; Tandy was nearly there, her hair a curtain in the dark, unbound and caught with damp and mud and forest. It was no use- she wasn't going to reach her in time.

"Tandy!" She tried again, hoping. She hated the warble in her throat- hated that she'd hesitated at all- but it didn't matter; she made herself scream it again, "Tandy, turn around!"

And she did. The second Mariel reached her- the second her hand caught around a bare patch of too-warm skin- Tandy turned around. Her eyes were red-rimmed and wide. She looked without seeing- and her voice was a rasp, mud and iron in Mariel's nose as she croaked: "...Mar… iel?"

"It's okay," She could hear her heart in her throat. It was the only thing she could hear as the twig crunched beneath Tandy's boots, sending her back half a stumbling step. The moisture in the air where the rain had started to come down through the canopy thickened enough to weigh on her lungs. Mariel fought the cough, but Tandy stayed standing stock still, her eyes a glazed and tremulous green. She finished the sentiment anyway, even as panic reached up its hand through her ribcage and squeezed both of her lungs. "-you're going to be okay. I'm going to get you out of here, just keep looking at me-"

Her hands were soft.

It was all she had the time to process as Tandy reached up at her as if in answer, and cupped her by the cheeks. Her palms were muddy and slick and cold to the touch; there were splinters in the crux between her left thumb and her palm, and something had bitten her middle finger at some point. But her touch was as light and proud as the sun through Mariel's window.

And then she was gone.

Mariel blinked, and Tandy was gone.

The place where she'd touched was still damp, and for a full minute, Mariel stood there at the barrier's lip. Her knees were the first to give, but she refused to hit the ground; the stumble backward was the only alternative she could think of. Her rifle clicked and clattered in her shaking hands. Trees rustled and leaves blurred beyond the barrier; crickets and birds and small chittering creatures skittering and playing tricks on the eye in the dark. She tried to breathe through her nose- to catch a glimpse of her in the foliage.

What owls had screeched for her in a chorus of goading voices had silenced now… and that was answer enough. Whatever happens, happens Mariel. Are you going to be okay with that?

The barrel of the rifle was warm in her grip as the rain came down, as though it was meant just to dissuade her. She wondered if it was just as bad back at the camp; she wondered if Tarin and Meeker would think to open the barrels or not; she wondered what they'd do when the next one of them wandered off to die.

"...no. No I am not." Mariel made herself stand up on shaking legs.

Wherever Tandy had gone, she'd find her… she'd keep her promise… and she'd bring her back. Rifle at the ready, she stepped beyond the ratty red ribbon and let the woods blur out of focus.