Short Form Horror No.1 - The Pines.
TW: Horror, gore, Animal distress/death, that kinda stuff.
I pace the little house restlessly again in the middle of the night, roused for the third time since arriving by a nightmare that shouldn't have been a nightmare. Again I count the pine tree motifs scrawled out on various markers and hangings-about on the walls – 17 of them. I sit and stew with a cup of tea, bothered more by the fact that I'm bothered at all than I am by the dream itself, the details already fading awkwardly and getting worn out and watery around the edges. I was in a car, my car, driving to this place I'd never been. There was roadkill.
The recollection is interrupted by my toaster strudel popping out of a small stainless steel complementary appliance in the kitchen with a metallic rattle and an ineffectual electronic buzz. I get up, grab the confection, then return with a sigh. There's a gnat in my tea now, I don't know where it came from, but there it is in my tea, thrashing around some, but less than you would think a creature would if it knew it was drowning. Maybe it doesn't know. Maybe it was all wind and blurry shapes and some kind of abstract hunger in whatever way tiny things can feel hungry, and then it was tepid warm brown all around, and performing choreographed flicks of legs and wings was all that was possible to do to be sure that they still existed in the same way they existed before. Like meeting god. I fish the gnat out of my tea and it dies on my finger. It twitched one more time before it died, like the eye did in the head of the deer in my dream. I'd seen roadkill deer before, of course, but that’s not what this was. The deer was strewn about the road; muddy smears pulled pitifully across the black slash of asphalt as my distorted vision gazed out of my window in a brief moment. I saw its legs, then one side of it's body, open ribs, limbs and tendons torn, then its head, one antler there the other torn away, separated from the rest of its body, then I'm out of my car and standing directly in front of this thing – not a deer I'm realizing but deer-like. Everything is still, I'm holding my breath. Its socket flicks open in a shuddering moment and a rolling wet yellow viscera of an eye, all goopy and shallow with death fixes itself on me, sees me, knows me, bleeds me dry. flies pour out and I wake to buzzing and silence. I hate the trees pasted on the walls everywhere and I have half a mind to take them down. It's like the forest is slowly making its way in, invading my linoleum and faux brick. I swear at night that I can hear roots growing under the house, shifting the soil and looking for gaps. I keep finding more pieces of pine themed knick-knacks every night when I wake. I realize with a start that I'm still staring at the dead gnat on my finger. I flick it away.
Taking a break, that's all I'm doing. Taking a break and figuring things out.
She told me and I ran away is really what happened, I turned back into a child, hiding in a tree away from everything that was wrong. I loved the woods then, but those woods were different, the trees were lower to the ground and they could envelop me in a moment, their branches dipping low and welcoming as I slipped and scuffed my way to the top till I could see everything that was known in the universe and the universe couldn't see me back. Pine trees aren't like that. They stand stiff and tall and aloof from everything, they watch with many small eyes, and that same child got lost in them when they were twelve. The pines lured the child, lured me, in under the pretense that all trees were the same, welcoming and kind. As soon as I was in, there was no backwards or forwards, just up and down and nothing else. My parents found me later sitting on a rock, they heard my sobbing and followed it, and they took me back to their car without a word. There, they admonished me, not for getting lost, but for crying. The pines would not have cared if I died then, under their canopy. The pines were like me–I would not have cared either. I hated the pines.
After the eye looked at me, that yellow shallow dead eye, had I not woken up then, the body would have gotten up, staggering and dripping, walking on it's torn ankles, bones cracking and splitting against the red-splashed-black as it bends its shattered neck against its head. If I did not wake up there sweating and crying like I did every night as a little boy, it would lift its now grafted-on head as I dropped to my naked knees in front of it and I would see as it shook and shuddered and turned away from me, like I was nothing, that the other side of it's head, the side I hadn't seen yet that had been resting against the road was crushed and broken and bloody as pale bones and pale maggots danced together in red pus and burst skin. I have not dreamed these extra things here, yet, in this house that doesn't belong to me, but I have a good imagination. Or a good memory. My tea is cold and my toaster strudel no longer seems an effective remedy to my thoughts. The wind picks up outside, just enough to set me on edge, as if the pines are testing me still, wondering when I'll let them take me again. I shouldn't have come here, but I did anyway.
I was with someone that day in the pines, it was my brother, or my sister, or my friend. I can't remember and that seems like something I should remember. we were playing a game and I got separated from them, I found a rock to sit on and sob. I don't know if they ever found that kind of comfort. People in uniforms and people from town who wanted to say that they were good people that evening at the bar went out and looked for them for three nights. They wouldn't find them; unless they knew to look for the center of the forest like we were doing. Which they wouldn't do because I never told them to. Most people would think that the center is the tallest tree, or the farthest from anything else, but it isn't. It moves and you move with it and when you move right, you just know. They must have known, my brother or my sister or my friend. But I didn't. I couldn't see it then and they hated me for it. They struck out and I ran. You can't get lost until you're trying to get back to something and that's when I got lost. That's when I ran away again the second time that day, to that rock, the only part of the forest that wasn't the forest. I don't think the pines ever forgave me for that. One of the people in uniform found a dead deer on the third day, its guts torn out and scattered in a clearing and its head gone. A Cougar, they said, and stopped looking altogether. I was the only one who knew it wasn't a deer. Only deer-like.
I've tried to tell myself over and over that I couldn't do that to the thing that I created, that I wouldn't wake up in the middle of the night and walk through my own house like a stranger into its room and take it up in my arms and swaddle it and love it as I walked it out into the woods and found the center of the forest, knowing how to move now, understanding so much better than I did then when I had all that hurt inside of me, and I would move with the forest and sway with the wind and the pines as they watched me with those eyes that you don't see unless you're alone with them, and I tell myself that I wouldn't leave it there in the center of the forest in that clearing with night blooming flowers and give it a kiss on its forehead with every part of gentleness and care in me and turn and walk without a sound out of that clearing and not look back and go back in my door and past my keys and jacket hanging in the front hall and up the stairs to my wife and settle back in bed and go to sleep like nothing had changed. I try so hard to convince myself that it wouldn't be possible to do that to something that I loved so much. But then what happened to my brother, or my sister, or my friend? Better to go, run away again. Better to be a sadness.
I open the front door for the first time since I arrived and it swings open with a calculated smoothness. I step past it and my bare feet sting on the composite wood of the porch as I look into the dark. The garage light flickers on, the only thing on the house that hasn't been updated it washes the misty lawn in front of me in yellow and the shadow of moths caught in webs. Past the glow are the pines, watching me as they always do, and in front of their huddled counsel is the one antlered deer-like. Its face crushed where I hit it with the rock, and its guts pouring out where my brother cut it open with the knife, and its bones shattered where we stepped and battered once it lay on the ground and wailed and crowed as the pines watched everything that we did, and its yellow gloopy shallow eye is fixed on me just as it was when I ran away from what I had done and left my brother there with the center of the forest and the pines crowding in and stepping forward to watch closer and my brother kept going and I left him behind as he cackled and shrieked in tandem with the deer-like. My parents never asked about the blood. They never asked about the broken arm as the roots tripped me and I tumbled down the hill away from that place, they just got rid of me. I went from school to school until I met a girl, and that girl fell in love with me, and I fell in love with the way the girl made me feel something for myself that was less than loathing, and then she told me about the it that we could have together and I ran.
I watch the deer-like, and the deer-like watches me. It walks backwards, dripping and sallow, and I follow it, across the wet grass, over the driveway, the sharp gravel bleeding my feet, and into the waiting pines.
monochrome.