Terrible Things

The scent of dead leaves filled Marji’s nose as she climbed from her bedroom window. A crescent moon carved away the blackness of the night sky with a yellow sliver of light. Marji felt in her core it was a solid sight to see. There only ever seemed to be a fraction of light in the face of overwhelming darkness. 

The soil sucked at her shoes with hungry tugs as she dropped from the window. The recent rains had left mud where there was once solid ground. The October air clawed at her bare arms whispering rumors of a winter yet to come. She shivered against its cool voice, but there wasn’t any turning back. 

Her pale auburn hair disappeared beneath the oak trees behind her house. Their star-shaped leaves welcomed her in as one of their own dressed in different shades of orange and red. She greeted them back with silence as she slid in amongst the trunks of wood. The dark and damp solitude of the trail underneath the cover of woods allowed her a place to breathe. 

He will be fine tonight, like all the other nights. 

Her face scrunched with worry against her thoughts. The ones she had in her mind wanting to convince her of different and darker things. She picked up her pace and her steps sank her deeper into the woods. Owls sang with their enchanting voices through the crackling of dying tree limbs. Nature belonged to the animals. Any intruder who dared to enter knew it was so. She plunged deeper in all the same. 

Marji had learned something taught only through experience. A lesson which kept her moving in the night despite the lingering fear she tasted as she moved her body forward. It was something tip toed around in fairy tale books with hushed voices when she was a child. Or it was hinted at with words so light in sing-song fashions no child could see the darkness below their surface. 

It lived at the edges of unruly behavior in not-quite-right kids when teachers looked the other way. Grownups hid it behind artificial smiles with eyes void of empathy. It flashed on the news before protective parents flicked the channel to cartoons. Most adults could no longer deny its presence. If it touched a child, it was always a secret until it was too late. 

Evil existed in the world.

It was a terrible truth. Yet, she determined early on she wouldn’t let the fear of it keep her from moving forward. Her backpack bumped against the small of her back as she reached a clearing in the trees. The opening in the woods led to a small pond. It appeared as an inky black pool of liquid. Only a small portion of light from the moon reflected on its blackened surface. A large rock rested at the right edge of the water. On the rock sat a dark figure. Relief escaped her lips in a soft breath as she eyed it. 

"I worried you wouldn't be here, Samuel." 

Marji rushed to the figures’ side with quick steps. Samuel sat hunched on the rock with his face angled away from her. He said nothing as she ran a small hand over his shoulders. It didn't look like he registered her next to him at all. His hands remained clasped tight in his lap, an unmoving statue in the dark. 

She took slim fingers and pulled at his chin with a gentle tug. A pair of dark eyes drifted from the water until they met with her own. Marji couldn't help the tightness at the back of her throat at the sight of him. His face was handsome even though it was marked with cuts and bruises. Tangles of black hair curled around the planes of his cheekbones. A tear slipped down her cheek like a single rain drop falling from a darkened sky. He watched it wet her skin and his lips slipped into a practiced smile. 

"You came," his words cracked against his throat with a hollow sound belonging only to deep sadness. "You always come... Marjoram." 

"Of course, where else would I be if not with you?”

Her hands dipped into his and she looked down at them in surprise when they met the gritty texture of dirt. Samuel was already pulling her into himself when she noticed the smell of rust. The heavy metallic smell filled her nose and she steadied herself against him. A moment of unnatural silence passed between the two before she pulled away from him as much as he would let her. The front of her white night shirt felt damp after they interlocked. Fear pricked at Marji’s neck when she looked down and noticed her top stained red. 

"Sam, what happened... are you hurt? I brought a first aid kit. Let me bandage your wounds." 

A small shake escaped from his shoulders in what Marji thought was a cry. Alarmed, she rested her hands against him. His body swallowed hers through the gaps in his legs until there wasn't an escape between the two of them. Heat poured through his clothes, yet she felt a chill inside her chest she hadn't felt with him before. Another shake escaped his body, and she realized he wasn't crying at all. He was laughing. 

"Are you okay?" 

Sam's fingers sank into her arms until it hurt. She let out a yelp, she wasn't used to anything from her friend but gentleness. He buried his head into her chest as more laughter escaped from him. Marji felt uneasiness settle over her at the foreignness of his actions. 

"Why do you always say the right things?" 

He looked up at her after he spoke. The diminished moonlight cast shadows over his face. His eyes twisted with agony, rage, and a fraction of delight. For the first time, Samuel frightened her. 

"What happened to you?" 

She edged her fingers along the broad space of Sam's back. It was strange to touch someone who seemed so far away. As if it didn't matter how tight she pulled at his frame, he existed in a place she couldn't reach.

Owls continued to croon from a safe distance. The wind haunted the leaves above them. The foliage, without anywhere else to go, fell from their branches to their final deaths on the ground below. Despite all the sounds around them, Marji had trouble finding any sound from herself at all. Her voice abandoned her in the presence of such a familiar stranger. 

"I did a terrible thing, and I can't take it back." 

Sam said his words without apology. They came out of his chest, flat, like the last line of an electrocardiogram for the recently deceased. His eyes slid to hers drinking in her reaction. She met him with a steadiness he hadn't known anywhere else in his life except for her. 

"What kind of monster I must have been in my past life... to deserve such misery in this one," he mused. 

Marji took in his tall frame and remembered the first time she met him. She ran away from home and decided to live out her life as a self-proclaimed orphan in the woods. It was a trivial thing, the reason she ran away. Did her father love her sister and not her? In her eight-year-old mind she had convinced herself so. She didn't know at that age what it actually looked like when a father held no love for their child.

Samuel was quite a bit smaller back then. He was an eleven-year-old kid running away from his own troubles. He had a mop of curly black hair and large dark eyes. His shirt hung on his wiry frame in tatters and his feet were bare. His left ankle was swollen in an angry storm of red and purple. She did her best to treat him and discovered underneath his rib cage he had another storm to match. A broken boy with a broken smile.

It wouldn't be the first time they met in their special place. Even so, it was the first time Marji went home and looked at her father with gratitude. He fed her, clothed her, and kindled strength inside her. Her father's discipline wasn't a cruel thing born from an enduring evil in the world. He corrected her path with a fair and caring sternness. It was a father’s love which allowed him to see his child wandering away and then guide them back to safety.

Her new friend's relationship with his father was a sinister shadow of the one she held with her own. He hadn't known a father's compassion. In its stead, a dark relationship between rage and fear existed. She could see it in the pain behind his smile. She could feel it in the way he flinched when they touched. 

It didn't take long for his physical wounds to heal or for them to become fast friends. She began to sneak all kinds of things to the woods. First it was food, then clothes, books, and games. So much so, her family thought they had a thieving gnome with a knack for grabbing things unseen. She couldn't be his father. Still, she could show him what love looked like. 

Later that same year, they took the most climbable tree near the water and worked to build their castle in the woods. She declared him Fairy King and her Fairy Queen of the Far Away Forest. Their magic would grow as they grew. One day, when they were big and strong, they would erase all sad things from the world. He fought off imaginary monsters for her. She decorated his head with flower crowns fit for royalty. In a small cut away from the trees, at the edge of a pond, they made a kingdom where peace existed, and fear did not. 

"You're no monster," Marji observed the older Sam in front of her all while seeing the boy he used to be. "Let’s get these wounds bandaged." 

"You can't," he told her.

She responded with stubbornness and tugged at his shirt to look for the wounds underneath. All she found was his muscled stomach and although covered in blood, there were no wounds for her to find. 

"It isn't my blood, Marji." 

He gave her a twisted smile. Her fingers hesitated at his bare skin when she noticed the large amount of blood covering him. Ice tapped on her spine like fingernails as she realized the weight of his words. 

If it wasn't his, who's was it?

 "He didn't leave me a choice." 

Fear curled around her beating heart with sharp fingers as Sam tightened his grip around her. Marji didn't resist. She stood, unmoving, caught by her friend as he made the most frightening sound she had ever heard. The sound a human makes when it collapses in on itself. It wasn't a loud sound. No, it was a sound so quiet it could only be felt, and not heard. 

"He didn't leave you a choice." 

Marji repeated his words aloud. Like they were the only possible correct answer to a multiple-choice question. Her voice wasn't any different from the coo a mother used to hush their unsettled infant. She felt the tension between them as her friend voiced to her the kind of poison that seeped from his body. It permeated his skin, soaking into hers, and infected them both.

"He would have killed her," he told her.

“He would have killed her,” she echoed.

"I couldn't let him continue. I did what I had too..." His eyes told her he didn't believe his own words. "Marji, you believe me. Don’t you?" 

Marji didn't respond right away. She looked around their peaceful kingdom as it became infiltrated. The outside world had snuck in and brought all the terrible things inhabiting it. Before long, Marji's eyes landed on something near them that didn't belong. It was a shovel. 

It stood against a tree across from them and glared at her with sharp yellow skin. Beneath the tools metal smile, an offensive heap of dirt defiled its surroundings. At the edge of the heap, a shallow grave cratered the ground. Even in the dim lighting she could tell something filled the hole. The fear gripping her heart gave a tight squeeze. 

"What have you done, Sammy?" 

"He would have killed my little sister,” the strange man replied to Marji while he gripped her tight.

Marji wondered how a human could fracture into pieces and still look whole from the outside. This was a thought that occurred to her as she unraveled the meaning behind her friends’ words. As she did, she found she had become many different versions of herself all at once. One of them, a sweet pig tailed girl who pulled at Sam's hand as they splashed in the water. He only laughed for her. Oh, how she loved to hear his laugh. She was an eight-year-old Marji.

After that, she splintered inside of herself again. This time, an older fourteen-year-old version. This Marji felt heat in her cheeks when Sam gripped her fingers in his own. Too afraid to lose her best friend from the risk of unrequited feelings, she hid her face from him behind her hair. He made her heart speed up and climb out of its regular rhythm. The time between them seemed to pass both slow and fast simultaneously.

Next, another piece of her cracked open. It was the Marji she had been before she left the house that night. One who hadn't considered the heaviness every October carried with it. A month where living things met their inevitable deaths. A seventeen-year-old Marji who promised her dad this past year to apply to colleges close to home. She received an acceptance to one of them with a thick letter in her mailbox before breakfast. 

Last of all, she found a version of herself she had never met before. She stood in Sam's arms, a pale white figure in the dark night that surrounded them both. It overwhelmed her. She questioned if it would swallow her whole. She shivered against the chill inside her as it inhaled and exhaled against her organs. 

"You can run," he whispered. "I'll let you go. I'll never look for you again." 

The words came out sick with self-disgust. As if he knew there was nothing, nothing she could do to save him. He let go of her arms leaving behind crescent shaped indentions from where his fingernails bit into her skin. The Sam she knew disappeared from his eyes while she watched. He was severing ties with her like it was the last comfort he could provide for himself. She was the final drag of a cigarette from a man who vowed never to smoke again. 

"I did a terrible thing, and I can't take it back," he said, in a voice devoid of humanity.

Marji untangled herself from him and started to walk away. She heard the catch in his breath at the sight of her back. She considered the stranger he had become to her. Moreover, she couldn't overlook the stranger she had become to herself. Her steps pulled her further away from him until she reached her destination. She grabbed the shovel resting against the tree and began to fill the shallow grave with loose dirt. The shovel bit into the ground a few more times before she spoke.

"We all do terrible things sometimes."