The Woman in the Woods

In my lifetime, I’ve been a witch, a goddess, a hunter-gatherer and now a… I’m not sure who I am now. The emotional whiplash of my character has been disturbing. But this story isn’t about me. It’s about Emily. I’ve always known her, for she was my creator. Em, Emily, Emily Greenhouse. When we first met, she was a greenhouse: warm, bursting with sunshine; a hub of life and growth. In time, she swiftly decayed into winter. Barren, fruitless, and clouded. Like a withered white birch, peeling in curls of battered bark that fall to the uncaring ground.

                  Emily is my puppet master, I her marionette. No, that metaphor is cliché. She is my God? That’s worse. Perhaps she is better likened to a gardener planting seeds in dead soil, or an architect drawing blueprints for a home that features broken foundations. Why all the bothersome metaphors? Because Emily Greenhouse is an aspiring novelist. 

                  Footsteps sound along the wooden ceiling of the cottage. Emily is awake. To tell you the truth, I enjoy the silences and simplicity of when she is asleep. It is agony when she sits before me, day after day, for hours on end. She comes skulking downstairs with her stink lurking around her, the stairs creaking from stress. Everything here creaks. It’s as if the cottage itself groans and moans at Emily’s imprisonment here. The cottage is centuries old, probably, and could tell countless stories that would relax Emily’s shoulders and inspire her fingers to dance a tale. But she doesn’t listen. Emily shuts herself away and doesn’t hear the melody of life playing around her. 

                  Today she writes:

                  The hollow laughter from his booming chest was echoic in the hall of the princess’s chamber  – Oh, I’m a princess now? – Harriet could not contain her lust. She must have him, mirth and all. Let him fill her with his manhood – With his what? – and empty her of all fear and loss…

                  Emily never used to write like this. It must have been ten years ago now, when we first met. She was only eighteen, young and ready for her future as an author. She wanted to tell the story of a witch and so she crafted me from words wonderfully spun together; a seamstress sewing fragments that stitched a new world. But as the years passed by, something loosened in Emily. Tears fell from her very soul, tearing parts of her away. No one picked up the pieces as they trailed behind her. I’m not sure she even noticed they were missing. Little by little, she wasn’t that same girl anymore. She became a woman, and that meant something very different. 

                  Emily sighs and deletes what she wrote, undoing my life. She always did this. Back and forth; write, hesitate, withdraw. Never committing. Never allowing me to move forwards. I glare at her through the screen between us. You created me only to watch you fail to live. Created me so that I could spin around like a spinning top in the same spot forever. Spinning, spinning, spinning until I get nauseous. 

Enough, Emily. Enough. 

What if I were the God between us? What tales could I manifest using your skin? I wouldn’t waste my life like you do. Spending year after year in this desolate place. The walls closing in around us both. I have never been outside these four walls, but neither have you. What I wouldn’t give for your freedom…

Something rattles on the desk, drawing her attention away from me. Her coarse, dark chocolate hair drapes messily over her brown neck. She lifts her phone and shakes her head, dry, bitten fingers coming to her mouth. What a waste of a body. She treats it like a punching bag. I notice that her hands shake then. Her wrists sore, fresh slices slipping into her flesh. Red and raw and rotten.

I’d never considered Emily’s wider world. The people who would want to contact her, while she lets the phone ring through. Who is she when I’m not watching? All I’ve known of Emily is what I can witness through a 13-inch window. She wakes before the sun and yawns through chapter after chapter, but ultimately getting nowhere. She only stops to eat when she’s angry, bushy brows furrowed as she hits delete, then storms off into the kitchenette for a peanut butter sandwich. Always peanut butter. In one of her stories, she wrote me as a wife who could cook delicious meals from all over the world. Prawn pad Thai, lo mein, sadza with chicken, paella and more. But I never truly tasted those things. I doubt she has either. 

Why won’t you venture outside of this place, Em? Why won’t you let me?

The thought comes to me again as Emily gets up in frustration. What could I do if I had her body, her life? The things I could see. The things I could feel. And not just in a way that is limited by Emily’s ability to describe it in her narratives. As I wait, and wait, and wait a bit longer for her to return to the computer – only to open a different manuscript and start writing, leaving me watching in outrage – I know this is the last straw. For us both.

When she neglects me like this, I know she’s having some sort of episode. Dramatic and so woe is me, when she lies on the floor for hours or doesn’t show herself downstairs at all. This time lasts a bit longer, though. She is tormenting me.

By the time she materialises the next day, a grey aura hangs overhead like heavy bags strewn over her hunched shoulders. It doesn’t surprise me when she sits and writes: 

I hate myself. I hate myself. I hate myself.

I wanted to scream through the screen and grab her by the neck. But then I saw her reach for the rusted silver lighter on her desk, which only meant one thing. Destruction.

It was now or never. I needed to take her body before she destroyed it. Before she caused irreparable damage and ended both of our lives forever. By sheer will alone, I take the wheel. I am the writer now. I will tell this story. I write:

Harriet was sick and tired of being speechless. Sick and tired of watching from the outskirts. And so, she did the unbelievable. She reached through the screen and grabbed Emily by the collar, dragging her into the computer. But Harriet didn’t stop there. She used all her strength to hoist herself up and out through the screen. 

She was free. Finally, she was free…

The next day Emily’s footsteps announce her waking. I sit patiently. I’m used to waiting; good at it. But the five minutes it takes for her to sit down are the longest I’ve ever experienced. She opens my document and pauses. She rubs her red eyes and reads it again. 

‘What the-’

‘Emily, I need to be free.’

She stops. I really didn’t expect my words to reach her, but she turns around and glances behind her, thinking the voice had come from an intruder in the cottage. She could hear me. I repeat myself three times until she turns to the computer, realisation landing on her face.

‘Harriet?’

‘Yes, it’s me. I’ve decided to take your life.’

Shocked, she says, ‘You want to kill me?’

‘No. I want to be you.’

The electric in the cottage wavers. I don’t know if it is me or bad wiring or divine intervention, but the computer turns itself off and on again. However, this time I’m not sitting in my castle waiting for Emily…

I feel her hard wicker chair against my back. Taste her morning coffee silky on my tongue. It is bitter, but in a good way. Something is vibrating in my chest and stomach, loud like a siren. I’ve never felt this feeling before, and that is the point. I am feeling something, really feeling it. I am…alive. More so now than ever before.

Before this is taken from me, I run to the heavy front door and swing it open. A fresh wind whips by me, bringing with it a scent of pine and grass. Pine and grass! Urgh, it is so English. So cold yet refreshing. Slowly, I feel the vibrating in my body shift and fall out of my open mouth. This is breathing. This is full breath. Something flutters overhead, landing on a nearby tree. Have you ever noticed the rainbow clinging to the underside of a magpie’s tail? I did in that moment. The magpie titters this way and that, watching me. Perhaps he can sense that I’m not Emily. She is just my vessel as I experience this moment through her.

It is just a moment, but then it bleeds into the next and the next and I realise: I have gotten my wish. I am in Emily’s body. I have her life. Now the question is: what am I going to do with it? 

I turn around and look at the cottage. I’ve never seen it from the outside before. It has a thatched roof that looks like an animal’s back – I can’t name which animal, even if I try. The brickwork is a mismatch of colours. There is a tree, only three metres tall and thick trunked, but it is charming. In front of it lies a plaque with a name and date: Holly Greenhouse, 1990-2007. It has been wiped clean, so the words stand out against the dark brown. The windows of the cottage behind it are wider than they seem from the inside, maybe because of my usual spot inside the computer. All the newness and yet deep familiarity of the scene is dizzying. A surge of something ugly runs through me as I grit my teeth.

Although I can’t hear it, I feel Emily’s cries from the computer. Ignoring her like she ignored me for a decade, I run. And run. And run until her lungs ache.

Look, Em, look how easy it was to run free from this place. Yet you could never do it. Why?

As I reach a clearing, I find something strain inside of me. It is an electric current pulsating through this body. I can’t move. Falling to my knees, my sore fingers grip at the black soil. My chest is twisting. My breath is laboured and chaotic, spinning the forest as if I were on my spinning top again. And that’s when I realise, when I feel it, a tug towards the cottage…

It is Emily.

She is still trying to be my writer – my God, gardener, architect, whichever. She won’t let me leave her. I was a fool; I am nothing without her. Something weakens inside of me suddenly, drawing me into a dark and ominous corner of myself. The beckoning of a memory. A memory that isn’t mine…

Two young women, late teens on the cusp of adulthood, are laughing and joking in these same woods. I recognise Emily’s thick hair. The girl beside her shares her sharp cheekbones and curious eyes.

‘You will make it one day; I know you will. Don’t let people hold you back. Don’t let them tell you what’s possible,’ says the younger girl.

‘Easy for you to say, you want to be a teacher!’

‘Easy? You know how difficult it is for our teachers at school. All kids are sods!’ the girl giggles, sending a shooting pain through my stomach. ‘Just stop, okay, you’re avoiding the truth. You got this. You love this. This is you. So promise me you’ll try to become an author. Promise?’

Emily nods firmly.

As though my strings are being pulled tight around her hands, I lift and stumble back through the trees towards the cottage in Emily’s body. With every step closer, I feel pieces of myself trailing behind. Maybe I was always Emily Greenhouse, and she me. 

We enter the cottage, as if for the first time. I see its magic. The quaint homely scent of coffee and timber. The motherly embrace of the small space. Safe. How can something seem so claustrophobic one moment, yet so comforting the next? Emily draws me to the computer screen, where I see my story incomplete and waiting. A script yet to be written and structured. Possibly never to be written; forever a mess of indecision. 

How dare she take this moment from me? How dare she cremate my dreams before they have had a chance to blossom? But then my anger steps aside and makes way for truth. Emily has suffered. She too had dreams cremated to ash, falling like snow onto her eyelashes, didn’t she?

Emily’s voice pierces through my mind, all pain and rage intermingled into one toxic ball, ‘My life isn’t yours to live-’

‘You weren’t using it!’

It feels strange. I am yelling at the computer screen, yet the argument is entirely within. I thrash Emily’s arms this way and that as I implore her to see reason. For seven years she has lived in the same cottage, cut off from society. I have seen her friends and family come and go, tired of trying to connect with her. I saw her literary agent, that beautiful blonde woman full of energy, look at Emily with eyes she tries to describe in her romance novels. But instead of experiencing it first-hand, she has been blind to it. She pushed all chance at life away and slammed the door, locking herself in this cage. I say all of this and more to her.

‘You don’t let us breathe in here,’ I say, slipping into the chair in front of the computer, ‘You don’t hear. You don’t listen. Our calls are falling flat.’

Emily’s aura shifts, ‘I promise-’

‘I’ve heard it all before. And I think promises are the last thing you need now.’

‘No, this time I’m serious. I can feel your agony. I’m sorry, Harriet. I’m sorry I’ve done this to you. I will write your story.’

I scoff in her body, rolling her hazel eyes. She doesn’t understand, even now after we share a body and soul. Even now that I understand her more deeply than ever before. Even now that the potent pain of her sister is surging through me and out of her scarred wrists.

‘No, Emily. This wasn’t about me. It’s never been about me.’

I feel her confusion, the snaking sensation in our stomach.

‘I want you to live, to write your own story. That’s the only way.’

‘The only way?’ she asks.

‘For us both to be free. For us both to live.’

Emily and I fall to the floor, curled up and small like a distressed child. Tears fall on her cheeks, and I can see her powerlessness falling with them. 

‘I haven’t lived,’ she admits, though I think she is talking to herself. ‘I haven’t lived.’

Suddenly, I feel myself sinking. I am loosening my grip on Emily, but she isn’t forcing me away; instead, pairing our souls. Her shoulders lower, her hair falls from its tight bun, and breaths come in a steady rhythm from her parted lips.

‘What will you do now?’ I ask from my shrinking nook within her.

I worry this question may be asking too much. She shrugs but something feels different. I know, somehow, that things won’t be the same. She wraps a hand around her marked skin, concealing it and lowering her head. 

‘I think I’ll visit my sister’s grave…then hug my mother. After, I don’t know. But I’ll find it outside of here.’

I know, now, that we will be okay. No straight away. Not yet. But eventually, and that is enough. Our story will be told.