by Corey Farrenkopf
(820 words)
When Rain entered the glade, poplars shifting silver-leafed in the moonlight, she found the space empty. The gnarled vines of the woman-shaped cocoon sprawled across the forest floor. They’d been severed, a harsh gash running down the pod’s center. The scent of sap wept from the wound. The cut hadn’t come from inside. Lee had no space to shift within, no axe to cleave her ties. Rain visited the glade each full moon, redrawing the circle, leaving a fresh kill on the altar. There was no reason the binding should have failed. She’d been repeating the process for twenty-eight years.
Lee’s once-fiancé, Cal, was now Rain’s husband.
After the first year of Lee’s disappearance, Rain had moved in, played the sympathetic friend for a month before inviting him over for drinks. The rest unraveled in predictable fashion. The sex. The commitment. The wedding. The child. She’d known Cal since high school, had kissed him on and off stage during their theater guild’s rendition of Romeo and Juliet, had played pool with him in the Rec Center’s basement, had screwed him on their senior trip to DC. But he’d chosen Lee after his first semester away while Rain was knocking out pre-recs at community college. She’d never paid much attention to her actual studies, her interests shifting to the books her grandmother left in the in-law apartment after she died.
Rain turned, listening for forest footfalls, the snap of twigs, the bite of thorns in fabric. She was met with silence. The air was damp. A recent drizzle passed an hour before. The wet ground would muffle approach.
“Are you out here?” she screamed.
She knew Lee wouldn’t be alone.
A second set of hands sheared the vines.
Rain searched her mind for a spell, some words from the book to make everything right. There were spells to find things that were lost, to bleed what needed to be bled, to bury what needed burying, but those required preparation, herbs and minerals, time to ferment. She had none of that on her person, just the carcass of a raccoon she’d found in the road earlier that morning and the small paring knife she used to skin it. The blade would be a poor defense against whatever Lee’s rescuer carried.
Her heart was in her throat, the beating sickening against the root of her tongue. She spun in circles, trying to take in all angles at once, searching for movement between the trees. Then there was a harsh crack on the side of her skull and she was on her back, staring at the moon, a watery blear spreading behind her eyes. The shadow of a man passed before her. Moonlight glinted off steel.
It had to be Cal, she realized as blood wept from the wound. Cal had finally realized what she’d done all those years ago, how she’d separated his old life from his new. Their love had been different. The spark less bright. The connection cemented in nostalgia instead of the present. She never thought he’d follow her into the woods, that he’d raise an axe against her, that…
“Why did you do it?” came another voice she knew well.
Her son, James, came into focus, his broad shoulders, identical to his father’s, bathed in silver, one hand holding the splitting maul from the woodpile, the other supporting a withered woman of twenty-three. Lee’s time in the cocoon halted her aging. The pale blue dress she’d been wearing the night Rain led her into the glade billowed around her shrunken form, her hair tossed with fallen leaves and briars.
“This isn’t what we do. It’s not what the books are for,” James continued, voice shaking, his image growing fainter with each heartbeat.
Rain had thought it was a good idea to turn the books over to her son on his eighteenth birthday. She regretted that now.
“What did she tell you?” Rain managed through split lips.
“She told me about her sorrow wrapped in a living coffin, of the woods always stretching away, endlessly repeating itself through the eyeholes you left her. I can’t fathom eternity. Neither can you. No one can.”
“And that’s enough for you to…”
Rain’s reply was cut off by the drop of the axe, blade burying deep, blood dampening the moss beneath her.
The last thing she heard were the faint words dribbling from Lee’s mouth, incessant, bordering on gibberish with each breath.
The forest is all and will be all and belongs to all, but not her, never her. It will devour her, bones to compost, blood to rot. It won’t hold her close, won’t whisper kindnesses in her ear. She’ll be left to molder, to weep, leaves marking her grave, a grave she never prepared for me. No, ever alive, ever breathing, ever watching, ever…
The third axe blow brought silence to the glade.
So many things could never be saved.
END
Corey Farrenkopf lives on Cape Cod with his wife, Gabrielle, and works as a librarian. He is the fiction editor for The Cape Cod Poetry Review. His work has been published in The Southwest Review, Tiny Nightmares, Flash Fiction Online, Reckoning, Bourbon Penn, Wigleaf, and elsewhere. To learn more, follow him on twitter @CoreyFarrenkopf or on the web at CoreyFarrenkopf.com