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woodsdyke · 10 months ago

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She spends the quiet, calm mornings on the trail, untangling the messy web of her thoughts like she’s repairing a barbwire fence. It bites and draws blood like a cornered animal, holds fast and stubborn as you try to force it to behave, like you ever had a chance, like it would ever stop fighting.

She thinks about the town in North Dakota that disappeared overnight more than she probably should. She thinks about a herd of deer she’d seen up in the mountains last week, eyes shining pink in the dark, too many pinpricks of light against the flickering red and orange of her campfire.

She thinks about the man with his face on fire, standing in a prairie burn scar and looking at her with eyes long melted out of his skull like wax down the side of a candle.

It’s been a few years since she decided to leave Illinois for good. The city was never for her, the streets of Chicago too narrow, constricting, the factories and warehouses taking over the fields and forests like a sickness that can’t be treated nor cured. At first, she kept coming back, took trips west and north until the trail brought her back one way or another. She fell in love with Montana, quiet, rolling fields and sharp, jagged peaks on the horizon. Rushing rivers the wild horses drank from when she sat really quiet on the bank in the early hours of the morning.

She used to head back to rest up, catch up with the few folks in town she found herself missing, and then she was off again. After her parents die, heading home doesn’t feel important anymore, like the obligation to do so died with them. It’s not like she and her brother ever saw eye-to-eye, and even now, Arden meets the city halfway like an old friend, arms outstretched, while Dani turns and runs from it like a rabbit chased by a pack of dogs with fresh blood on their tongues.

So, one day she leaves and knows she’ll never be back.

A pristine estate in the suburbs of Chicago isn’t home – never was, when she stops to think about it, stop seeing home as the place you grew up rather than the places and the people you love. Home is the mountains, the prairies, the red sand and hot sun and those big sandstone arches in the Utah desert that cast long, strange shadows. Home is a little farm in the woods in western Colorado that she’ll make it back to if it’s the last thing she does, come hell or high water.

---

She stands in her camp at the edge of a stream and watches the sunrise turn the Wyoming peaks a split of orange and muted purple, the line slowly descending as the sun climbs higher into the dusky sky. It’s a sort of beauty that can’t be described, only experienced.

A deep sense of grief soaks into her bones like melting frost. It’s an ache that spreads out from a central point like a barely healed burn or a puncture wound. She feels it in her chest and behind her eyes like those first few moments waking up from an accidental nap. It’s always there, at the back of her mind, unobtrusive, like that little twinge in her hip she’s had as long as she can remember, right up until it isn’t.

Maybe it’s always been there, but now she’s let it loose.

She’s not sure what she’s grieving. She hasn’t put in the time to think about it much.

But she lets herself feel it, something she’s never done before. She lets it pull her down with its weight, because she’s always needed something to ground her. Any port in a storm.

---

Sometimes, when she can’t sleep, she looks up at the stars and thinks about graves in the woods.

Maybe she buried her grief and it dug its way out. Maybe that’s what happens when you ignore things and hope they go away. They go bitter, like a cup of tea steeped too long, like the crab apples left under trees, their sickly-sweet scent of rot hanging in the air –

- Like the tongue of a woman who hasn’t gotten the peace promised to her, since it might as well have bled to death on that expensive carpet, too.

There’s an empty hole in the dirt somewhere in the woods that she can’t stop thinking about and maybe that’s a sign that she knows she should be in it. People die and they stay dead and here she is, grappling with the weight of survivors’ guilt when she didn’t even have the decency to survive.

She tosses some more logs on the fire and watches as sparks spiral away overhead into the inky dark sky.

If nothing else, she’s a dead woman who can still feel the warmth of a campfire. She’s a dead woman who still has that twinge in her hip, still has a few wayward streaks of gray in her hair and the first stages of arthritis in her hands that she only feels on a crisp winter morning. She’s a dead woman who got that boot hill burial she always joked about, shook the dirt from her shoes, then clawed her way out of the grave and kept walking.

---

Dani remembers the voice in the woods, that day. It had sounded so sad.

Oh, little witch, what have you done? it had said, in a tone that seemed to pull her into a soft embrace, as Dani took off her ruined coat and held it in trembling hands, dried blood and dirt caked under her fingernails, seeped into her skin like cigarette stains,

this was supposed to be your final resting place.

#forest writes #original fiction #oc: dani lovelace

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woodsdyke · 10 months ago

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It’s hard to tell if it’s six feet, but it’s close.

The hastily dug hole, not much of a rectangle but he can’t say he was going for precision, yawns up in front of him like a pair of waiting jaws.

He sits on the ground with an exhausted groan, dead grass crunching underneath him. He wipes sweat from his brow and the back of his hand comes back streaked in blood. Maybe his, maybe not.

When the body lands in the hole, it does so with a dull thump that makes nausea roil in the pit of his stomach. “I’m so sorry,” he mutters as he reaches for the shovel, and isn’t quite sure if he means it.

---

It was over money, because of course it was. People have always loved killing each other over a bit of gold, just enough to get another meal or so much that they will never know what to do with it, hoarded for no reason other than a deep-seated sense of greed that, if they’re unlucky, will strip away their humanity piece by piece, like wet parchment.

It’s enough to make him and his whole family comfortable for the rest of their lives and then some, for their children and their children’s children.

It doesn’t stop the guilt from following him like a hungry coyote, always just two steps behind him, matted fur and bright yellow eyes.

---

She looks at him, calm, gaze even, says ‘what the actual fuck is wrong with you’, and drops dead on the floor.

---

He tells Sadie. He has no idea why he tells her, but does all the same, because keeping her in the dark just feels like another strike against him, another tentative step towards the point of no return. ‘Jesus Christ, Arden,’ she tells him, sitting across the table, leaning forward with her hands clasped on the tabletop in front of her. He doesn’t know what her expression means, brow furrowed, lips pursed into a thin line. He looks at her, hopelessly, and tries to say something but no words come out and then that’s it. Sadie gets up from the table wordlessly and walks out of the room. Arden doesn’t follow her.

They never talk about it again.

The final story is that his sister got into a bar fight that ended badly, sudden and tragic. But she was always a difficult one, hot-headed and always ready for a fight, so it doesn’t surprise anyone much.

That night, Arden dreams of a mound of soil in a clump of trees in the middle of a cornfield.

He receives the inheritance in full. He signs the last piece of paperwork, pen scratching against parchment, and his hand shakes so much the letters look warped. He tells himself this is how it was supposed to be. She wouldn’t have even wanted it. She didn’t care about the money. She would have thrown it away on a whim. He’s using it to provide for his family. A voice somewhere in the back of his head asks why he murdered her over it, though, why he let her bleed out on his expensive Persian rug, why he dragged her bloody corpse to that clump of trees and dug an almost-six-foot-deep hole and didn’t even put a cross or a particularly nice rock, because he thinks and overthinks and feels a deep-seated terror of someone finding that pile of dirt and asking questions.

That Sunday, he goes to confession.

He worries the hem of his shirt between his thumb and index finger, looking down at the floor, at the bit of dull, yellowed light shining through between the floor and the confessional door.

“I killed my sister, Father,” he says, helplessly. “I killed my sister, and I don’t know if I regret it.”

He wakes up covered in cold sweat, heart in his throat, and climbs quietly out of bed, taking care not to wake Sadie. He throws on a coat and some boots and closes the front door silently behind him. It’s cold, frost crunching under his shoes as he walks, breath a small cloud of fog with every exhale. It’s a new moon, so the darkness stretches on for miles across the plains. Arden goes to the shed in the backyard and finds what he’s looking for. He heads for the cornfield with the shovel (the same one he used to bury her, he thinks, faintly ill) over his shoulder.

The clump of trees in the middle of that field is more threatening than he remembered the last time he was here. Dark, spindly shadows loom up at him.

He starts to dig.

He doesn’t know why. Doesn’t know what is compelling him to do this, what the end goal is supposed to be, what he expects to find. What sort of closure he thinks this will give him. He digs all the same.

Then it’s done, five feet and change into the dirt, and Arden fights the urge to just lay down and stay there. His arms are shaking from exertion and his clothes are covered in dirt and grime. He wipes his face with his sleeve and it comes back red.

Arden looks down at his sister’s final resting place and curses an empty grave.

#forest writes #original fiction #oc: arden hawkins #oc: dani lovelace

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