Don't Go Into the Woods!

The sign says “Don’t Go Into the Woods”. Some certain types of events happened in these woods a very long time ago. The rumors of which created such nicks in the frame of the story that a legend emerged from the base. The legend is also very, very old. Sarah had heard of the legend, but hadn’t paid attention. Somehow living here her whole life didn’t automatically qualify for that knowledge. Anyway, it was more of a popular story with the older generation….

…Sarah slowly walked past the area on her way back from school, and through the wood she sees what appears to be a man...a man grilling cheap meat on a grocery store-bought grill. Red and metal, the bucket of its body stood round on its thin black legs like a baby cardinal in the dirt. The smoke rises and weaves into the leaves above. It seems like a normal window of nature: the sky behind curves over her and bleeds down onto them in the same shade of blue, animals of feather and fur chirp and skip under bush. She looks to the little park next to him, where a baby loses its shoe as the mother continues pushing the stroller along a paved trail. No one else sees, and Sarah stops. She twitches with the desire to run over and grab that shoe and save them the trouble. It would be so easy. The mother would thank her and Sarah would be able to see the whole playground, and her face, and the man’s face, and even the type of meat he was cooking, and what it smelled like... But she’s almost gone from sight, and Sarah follows a path parallel to hers until the swell of trees becomes too deep for the eye to penetrate.

The bell rings on Tuesday and she’s the first out of Spanish class. It’s one of those classes where the students hate the teacher and the teacher detests herself as well. She leaves through the back doors, to avoid the parent-coddling situation in the front. Her school starts from kindergarten and goes all the way to eighth grade, and at 2:45 on the dot about a thousand parents with the strength and agility of Hollywood paparazzi hurdle through the front doors, and take about a half hour arranging a biblical scene over the steps and hallways on the first floor. No exit is left unblocked. Sarah feels liberated as she pushes past the metal door into the autumn air and races down a slowly crumbling concrete stairs. The building is extremely ancient. Somewhere on a cornerstone is inscribed the year of inception, a faded number that one might understand to mean it was erected some time before the existence of Christ himself. 

She wanders mindlessly down the path she takes everyday, stretching and skipping but not really seeing where her feet are taking her. The air in her lungs and the cells in production and the blood in her veins move from head to toe in time with the swinging pendulum of her untied sneakers. It seems she’s been getting taller everyday since the school year started. Her mind done rummaging through another day of hormonal gossip and preteen paperwork, she refocuses on the world around her. The leaves that were before being crunched into the cracks in the sidewalk were now being smothered into a soft bed of wet earth. She looked up:

“AH!!” Sarah screamed. Then silence...and then:

 “Stop! Don’t Go Into the Woods!”

Sarah just about jumped out of her skin. Three green…things stared at her with huge, glistening eyes, like a trio of toddlers on vacation looking for their mother at a gas station stop. They had coats of thin, velvety fur, and they stood side-by-side like a doo-wop singing group ever-poised for performance. Sarah stared up at where they sat perched on a low-hanging branch. The wood of the tree they occupied was light and smooth, and looked impossible to climb. Not that she could. Standing at about two feet tall, tiny indigo flowers in various stages of bloom scattered its frame. The buds were pumpkin-burnt orange and the younger flowers had splotches of bright yellow hanging on the petals. The ball of fur in the middle faintly shifted where it stood, and left a glowing footprint on the sand-colored bark.  

Sarah didn’t know what to say. They watched her with a tandem gaze, pairs of eyes from left to right trailed her features, watched together when a strand of hair or an untied shoelace got taken by the wind. A heavier wind picked up and the three bundled together. It was getting chilly. The creature farthest to the right looked rather drowsy, its black eyes drifting briefly out of focus. It seems that at this point they had expected Sarah to have fled, as all the children before her had done. But she was focused on the forest...and how it glowed with strange marks, on the trees and their leaves and fruit and even the roots could be seen glowing faintly beneath the dark soil. The trio finally blinked, one long blink in unison: it was time to retreat back to the nest. They had never dealt with a human beyond their mandatory warning, and so gave it one last time: “DON’T GO INTO THE WOODS!”. It was an old lady’s voice, Sarah noticed. One voice, as if pre-recorded. Satisfied with their effort, they turned and marched in line into a very small hole in the trunk of the tiny tree. A tiny hole that shouldn’t have accommodated them, but somehow did.

It was silent. Sarah looked back at her school in the distance. And at the house next to it that had the cranky old man, and the one next to it with the scary family with the scary dog. And at the cars at the far intersectioning, honking their horns at each other because they had nothing better to do. She looked at the plaza next to it, where the high schoolers stood outside the dollar store yelling rude things at each other and blowing smoke the color of sickly rainbows at the passersby. She remembered the man in the wheelchair who told her that her jeans were too tight, and the woman cashier who laughed condescendingly at her when Sarah asked for the price: “You go to math class at that place everyday, right? Everything’s a dollar, you got five things, how much do you think it is?” It made her cheeks and insides heat up. 

She turned back to the woods, where she stood the only human. And she walked…

….

Sarah took a few steps and then paused, swung her backpack around, knelt down, unzipped the biggest zipper, and pulled out the following: knitted hat, knitted scarf, and knitted mittens. Her grandmother had made them, and it pleased her that Sarah had not only accepted them as birthday presents in the middle of July, but actually wore them when winter finally rolled around. 

The green glow emanated from almost every surface in the forest: every rock, every berry, every thorn. She moved in and out from their shine, there were less marks in some areas than others. She passed by a swirling, glowing pool of mud, around which the dark of night overtook the light-less wood. It was particularly quiet. She felt the danger that the calmness created, but wanted to get a little closer to the pool, just to look. She stepped carefully closer and closer, until:

“Aaaahaha!! I’ve got one!” Sarah looked up. Something was falling fast towards her. Always on time for her field-based extracurriculars, her reflexes sent her running into the space between two bushes, each the size of a feature on a parade float. She crouched and stared back through the huge, soft leaves that cradled her silhouette. Someone with high boots and carrying a long stick walked around the pool, sniffing at the air in a wild, untamed manner, like a tiger smelling the new arrivals through the metal bars of its zoo cell. “Come, come my pretty! You would be well in my stew! I’ll make it with lots of love! AHH HAHH!!” She ended with a piercing laugh, one that sounded fit to rip apart the walls of its owner’s throat. They were carrying a stick, but a broom, the handle which was soon being used to poke violently into the surrounding foliage. Sarah backed up slowly, noticing that her footsteps had not given away her hiding spot: while the witch’s rampage glowed angrily over the leaves, Sarah’s left no trace. She backed up slowly for a long time, keeping the witch’s progress in sight. Eventually she hopped on her broom and took off like a rocket into the night sky, where she merged over moonlight with other floating figures whose hats bent like thorns in the wind, and which had to be held down by hand. Their laughter could be heard from down below, a hideous cacophony that reminded Sarah of her father’s sisters at the annual Christmas reunion. 

Although she felt certain she was out of harm’s way, she continued to watch the raucous party swirling and chasing in the night sky. She walked backwards and watched, not really sure that she believed what she was seeing. Unfortunately this meant she couldn’t see where she was going, and tripped up the front stairs of someone’s house. Her head hit the door, and, without the presence of any supervising adults around, Sarah swore loudly. She had stumbled upon a small cottage...a gingerbread cottage. It was in poor standing: the roof had caved in, and the icing had begun shedding onto the forest floor, creating a powdery white mess surrounding the property. Huge pieces of candy decorated the outside. Sarah stood and was faced with an enormous purple gumdrop that jutted out where a peephole usually stared. She looked around...then licked it. “Ack!” She recoiled in disgust, she left her tongue hanging outside her mouth. The gumdrop had gone moldy, having grown a layer of thin white fuzz across its  once-plump shell. She tried tried to scratch the taste off her tongue with her fingernails, not with much success. She stopped scratching when she noticed the house next door: a huge wooden house, the size of a palace, with deep dark wooden panels and a high window that showcased a stunning chandelier atop a magnificent staircase. Warm lights burst out from every room. Sarah walked to it, now feeling nauseous but also realizing how hungry she was. 

Five minutes later she left that house too, after witnessing three man-sized bears roaring at each other over what seemed to be a larger-than-life pot of oatmeal, in a kitchen covered in it. Something about a queen of golden hair waiting for her supper. Sarah walked and walked, passing a crowd of men in uniform huddling over a quail’s egg, attempting to repair it. She passed a brother and sister fighting stubbornly over a pail of water, hitting and scratching, ignoring her. She passed a knight in shining armor ride valiantly by, shouting about a sword he’d broken in an angry rage against a boulder that had looked at him funny. A sound of broken glass popped as he rode on, and Sarah witnessed a distraught prince pick up the pieces, weeping about a lost slipper, and questioning her about what size shoe she was.

She never tried to make conversation, for it seemed everyone she passed was woefully preoccupied. At around eight o’clock, she made it to the other side of the woods, the back lot of the convenience store where Sarah sometimes bought her egg sandwiches. The owner was always very friendly to her. She stood there, thinking that she was still hungry. And that Rocky, her dog, was probably waiting for her to feed him. She turned around one last time, and saw through the woods the outline of the playground that she was used to. She might return,... but then again, she might not.