The fox who she had followed into the woods now feared her—it knew what she was. What she had become. Yet, it had no choice but to obey her words, to trail her through the trees, to hunt for rabbits when she was hungry, to sleep beside her and keep her warm when she was cold and tired. For Eloise would never return to her strawberry-pink room in her house at the edge of the forest.
Eloise would become a missing child, believed to have vanished straight from her bed while she slept one cool, autumn night—taken or wandered off, her parents would never know for sure. Flyers posted to streetlamps and search dogs sent into the forest would never recover the missing girl.
Eloise belonged to the woods now.
She was a shadow. She was the cruel, howling thing that could be heard during a full moon. She was the monster who crept into other children’s dreams.
But this is how monsters are made: from innocent things.
BEE
The scent of rot is everywhere. In my nostrils, behind my ears.
I wake, knees to chin, my face pressed into the cold dirt, my dress torn at the hemline—threads snagged on a rock a few feet away. But I don’t know how I got here.
I was in Levi’s bed, his hands were in my hair, fingers tracing long, lazy lines along my sun-freckled flesh. But now I’m lying against the hard ground… a knife in my left hand.
The smooth wood handle is held tightly beneath my gripped fingers, and when I open my palm, the muscles of my hand ache, cramping down the center to my thumb. I let the knife fall to the dirt and I push myself up, ears ringing, the sounds around me swimming in and out of focus.
I can hear the creek some distance away, and the cold wind blowing through the trees at my back.
And I know: I’m beyond the boundary.
I don’t remember leaving Levi’s house, slinking down the hall away from his bedroom before his wife returned. I don’t remember wandering into the trees, carrying a knife. Why do I have a knife?
My mind feels frayed, little webs of pain peeling away from my bones, memories I can’t seem to pluck from the dark. I push myself up, sitting with legs tucked beneath me, and brush away the dead leaves sticking to my skin. I must have stumbled through the woods, the hem of my skirt catching on thorns and jagged rocks until I collapsed in the dirt and fell into a strange sort of sleep.
I touch my cheeks and the hollows of my eyes, feeling separate from my own skin—like I’m clawing my way back from my dreams.
This isn’t the first time I’ve slept outside the valley, past the border of Pastoral, but it’s the first time I have no memory of how I got here. These last few nights, I have stepped over the creek and into the sacred trees—I have allowed myself to be judged, appraised—I have touched the wounded elms and welcomed illness into my flesh, but it never came.
Something skitters away to my right, but it’s only a night creature—voles and bats and ground mice who seek out the scraps left behind by the more discerning daylight animals. I reach my hand across the ground and find the knife, the edge still sharp, but caked in mud. I grip it tightly and push myself to standing, holding the blade at my side.
Why do I have a knife? Why do I have a knife?
I press a palm to my left eye, to stop the humming. Did I hurt someone with this knife? Levi?
But there is no scent of blood on the blade—that awful metallic smell that burns the nose. The knife smells only of mud and earth and wood. The bitter sweetness of fresh sap. When I woke, I was gripping it tightly, as if I had wielded it for protection. For some unknown purpose.
My legs tremor, and I reach out for a tree to steady myself. My palm meets with the rough, scabbed bark of an evergreen, the scent of its needles fragrant and rich in the midnight air. And then my fingers feel it: the sap spilling down the trunk, the wet, honey-like texture. Sticky like glue. My hand follows the trail of sap, until my fingers fall inward, into the soft white center of the tree—where it’s broken open. I can smell it, the woolly fragrance of freshly split wood, that soft green scent.
The tree is sick. Bark peeled back, trying to rid itself of the pox.
My fingers slide along the edge of the wound, feeling its shape, the sharp serrated curve about three feet long, top to bottom. It’s only recently split open—the wood still fresh and tender inside.
The whole forest is infected.
I turn away from the sick tree and move swiftly through the dark woods, over the creek, and back into the safety of Pastoral. Fear boils in my gut, fear for something I can’t quite explain—not just the pox, but another thing. Yet, the knife in my hand comforts me, the balanced weight of it, and I pick my way back to the path. Back to the farmhouse.