He Found It in the Woods
It’s Short Story Sunday! For this week’s post, we revisit the external/internal battles that overcame the last story’s protagonist. Before I knew it, I had written three separate works of short fiction, where a character’s internal demons become external horrors. Although each theme is different—finding acceptance, denying the past, weathering the storm—the trilogy is connected through the anxious truth of self reflection.
The sting a foreshadowing—scrunched, sailing, flung out, vicious. He felt its shape bend over and across, the whipped rubber a solemn reminder laid out across his left cheek. Red.
Today it was a different hallway, but the sharp end of seventeen sunk deep in the same sore spot. It leapt off his body and writhed on the ground—fractured dignity or the rubber band—as a boom of adolescent laughter detonated in the hallway. His ears betrayed him again and throbbed crimson. He spun around. If he could turn red, he figured, he could turn away.
“Where’s flower boy springing to?”
An aftershock of laughter ruptured as the boy staggered away with tear-stained skin. The blue lockers began to transform into a disquieting black; a breathing field of fear with silver eyes staring disapprovingly. With a chemistry book clutched against his heart, the boy ran away from the teens and, still unknowingly, towards another familiar darkness.
These routine humiliations still somehow stoked the sickness he’d felt writhing in his stomach all year. He felt it now, slow scrapes along the stomach, as he ran to beat the bell. The bucket came unannounced, quick and powerful as an epiphany, sending the boy sailing.
He fell ungracefully fast into a teenage sea of hurried limbs, the cold splotchy floor reaching up and smacking the helpless squint of a boy in tune to the last bell. He kept his head down in vain hope, willing himself to sink through the floor, until a strong silver voice drifted down from the heavens. Or maybe a homeroom.
“Nasty fall. You okay?” All it took was a glimpse of the chiseled face tilting down, muscled arm outstretched, for the boy to short circuit.
“Comes with the territory,” he squeaked out with a sputter of blood. His body’s natural flirting mechanisms.
The muscled enigma cringed but stayed cast in concrete; still outstretched. A cyclone spiraled through the fallen boy, whipping him into sudden haste. “Thank you, really, I mean it,” he spouted, hoisting a torn backpack up. He corkscrewed past the stranger—a clear figment of his imagination—and stoically denied the marbled desire.
He ran, overly conscious of floor and face, past everything he wanted. Everything he saw. Past the dented chemistry books. Through the rusted back doors in need of repair. Down the stairs, past the yawning trashcans and left of the back building, smooth-slick on the concrete until soft-padded grass glided in underfoot.
The lockers and lots faded to sloped grass and towering greens. He was still running. Forest leaves crunched, loud and dehydrated, as the scent of damp wood grew heavy in the air. He was still running. As the slopes grew steeper and elevation sank greater, he lost sight of the hallway and found the world around him blanketed by something unseen. It was disquieting how it fell, a slow and sinister spell, onto everything alive.
The trees grew taller and leaned in. They grimaced, screamed even, as their branches twisted in hideous agony. He shouted, hands crammed into his ears, until he was reduced to a trembling pulp on the forest floor. The leaves welcomed him coldly, like an old memory. It was there he first saw it.
Rising, hunched, hairy and glistening below the sharp slivers of the moon—a distorted figure that seemed at once broken and growing in the moonlight. With a swift slink it approached, dragging old bones towards the shrinking boy. A wicked grin crept across its snout.
As the muscled being slinked closer from behind two trunks, desperation gripped the boy’s left sneaker and yanked him down a dark thicket. Twigs whipped his face through a sea of wooden desks and ghostly pine, the mist and musk blurring that specific darkness of a classroom with the devastating black of midnight canopy. The elevation fell deeper and deeper still—although he ran back exactly how he had descended. He ran too fast to notice.
He crumpled at the bottom of the ravine and gripped the wet earth to steady himself. To his left was a desolate clearing drenched in moonlight; to his right the slight rustling of deeper, darker woods. He could not see the figure but heard it reach the crest of the ravine the instant he wobbled upright and darted towards the clearing. They had to be in the middle of the forest now; of the night.
His ankles were brittle and bloodied, and as he ran down to the stream saw a reflection he could not grasp. There, running alongside him in the water, was something taller. Hairier. Dented and misshapen, angles bulging obscenely with each stride. A split tongue poked through sawteeth and licked its chops, although the boy did no such thing. He looked behind him and saw nothing, heard nothing besides his own beating heart.
Suddenly, inevitably, the water broke its silence and burst open. Thick talons erupted and clenched the boy’s bloodied throat, wrenching him into the river. They thrashed together on the muddy bank, swiping and spinning each other towards the murky depths. The massive presence suddenly lifted off him, and for a moment the boy opened his eyes under the water. His body turned away from the refracted light and sank headfirst into the lowest depth in the forest.
His eyes gasped for information in the stinging blackness. He soon felt a rippling hand reaching out from the abyss, and with no more energy to escape, gave in. Reached.
The water grew frigid in the quick descent. The gloom swallowed his last sputtered reserves of air as the cool ripple of a past life rushed past his lips. It seeped through his lungs and obliterated the bile in his stomach. It was threatening change.
He gazed up at the surface. The creature was spinning, gliding through the currents in a graceful display of power and self. Soon it vanished, and there was only the cool darkness, his unknown guide, and a head now pounding.
They reached wherever they were going—somewhere darker, drier—when the boy’s consciousness was wilting. It was a level place, crisp, and reflective. The rubber band from the hallway, which led him here, and the outstretched arm he refused, which led him to accept this one, were distant. Here it was only him.
It wasn’t a room, exactly, but more like an endless bedroom or celestial cavern—something was rippling above and would occasionally flash. When breath found him again, he got up and noticed it for the first time—the mirroring. Each movement happened too many times at once, an arm flutter imitating back at him in dark comedy. He stepped closer to the nearest reflection, but no sooner was he close enough to make sense of himself in detail did it shatter with iridescence and burst upward to be swallowed by the unknown. He stepped back.
He turned and limped toward the other side, a sea of simultaneous wobbles echoing back in the corner of his eye, until he reached a larger reflection to study. As his own image came into view and he found the imitated eyes with his own, the mirror burst and surged upward.
Running to the next one, he saw his disagreeable likeness again—another emulation fragmented. He peered at the one behind it and noticed an ugly red splotch across his left cheek before it, too, vanished ferociously. He was running again, from mirror to mirror, as dizziness seized him in the nightmare of false images; shattered hopes.
He fell to the floor and shielded himself from the broken shards that lay all around him. There was flashing; breaking; a violent rumbling in his chest. His breath caught and pushed his gaze upward—the ceiling, or whatever was above him, had now ingested all but one mirror.
Dusting himself off, the dark stain of a schoolboy staggered forward. Only this time the reflection did not shatter. It did not change. He reached out, seeing himself plainly, deconstructed and primal. The mirror held a school hallway behind him. A line of lockers, pack of athletes and handsome stranger were waiting. He picked the mirror up and heaved it towards the crackling abyss above. The glinting shape spun devastatingly high and plummeted down with wicked ostentation—only when it made contact with the hard floor, it did not break.
He stood motionless, crackling light cutting through the silence in slanted tempo. Seven steps closer and he noticed its wholeness—not a scratch, not a scuff, not even a smudge. He propped it up and finally studied himself.
Dark, rambunctious curls twisting from his head like a thousand wild ideas. Olive-gold skin, with its fair share of scars and a smatter of freckles. He landed on his eyes, dark and contemplative for most of the last year now, before collapsing in front of himself. He realized there was no longer anyone or anything behind him. He was truly alone.
All these years he had been avoiding this. The inescapable, inaudible weight he carried. Snickering strangers, prodding classmates, dysmorphic reflections in the bathroom mirror. All the time saying “it would be easier if,” or “why not everyone,” or “if I just keep lying, maybe—” But there was never a possibility to be anything but what he’d always been running from in these woods. The muscled arms or the glowing eyes; both were the same kind of frightening and conspired their way into the corners of his nightmares, lurking just outside the frame. He would dream of grabbing that hand, of killing the monster, of reaching the edge of the wood. But he would always wake up, soaking all over, to a desperate lie fraying at the edge of the bed and dragging him past the treeline.
He moved towards the reflection. It stood still. Stepping through the frame, he found himself glowing. Face to face with his likeness he stood, simmering, grasping the edge of the mirror’s grip on him. They stepped toward each other, holding gaze, and became one.
He fell, a crumpled teardrop, and let the cool hardness drink him in. Falling upwards, flittering past the serenity at the surface, over a canopy of trees and braided through chimney smoke from the city. To his front door, crisp white paint basked in moonlight and glowing like a ghost. To his room, his mirror, his past and his future. He grabbed a fistful of carpet—the same one he wailed on as a child and wept again on after the dance—and stood up, ripping it out.
The door flung open. A bout of warm air rustled the motionless boy as a figure darted in on lightning. “Oh, thank God!” the disheveled being screeched as mother embraced son. “All night we’ve been calling, searching, imagining—”
“Is that…” a deep voice called from the kitchen, dropping a phone book to rush to his child’s previously empty room. The boy shuffled upright, hand pulling away, and glanced at them through the very real mirror with saucer eyes about to break.
“Mom, Dad—”