Don't Let the Forest In

by C.G. Drews

“You’ll cut me open and find a garden of rot where my heart should be.”

They called it the Wildwood tree and had been climbing it since they were kids. They used to whisper their fears into the bark so it could swallow their words whole.

For a vicious moment, Andrew thought about slipping his fingers into Thomas’s cut. Taking hold of his rib and breaking it. Pulling the soft crumbling bone from his chest and sewing it into his own. They’d be forever together, rib against rib, fused in gore and bone and adoration.

Vines grew out of the wallpaper. They shot across the floor, growing and writhing like fat green snakes. Roses blossomed as he watched, each petal the red of pooled blood. They didn’t stop. Ivy punched through the broken windows, and brambles unfurled over the carpet. Everything took a breath together, loud and wet and rasping.

He cast a glance over his shoulder at the floor covered in vines. They tangled in each other and grew with every pulsing heartbeat. More wallpaper shredded as brambles grew up to the ceiling. Roses cut free and wept blood up the walls.

It was a nightmare and it was alive and there was nowhere to go.

Moths ate holes in his mind and their wings beat a frantic migraine behind his eyes.

This school grows foul, poisonous spores and calls them roses.

The Wickwood manor’s foyer had been decorated with pumpkins covered in spiderwebs and unsettling skeletons with button eyes holding trick-or-treat buckets.

Now he was all feral wolf with a mouthful of broken glass.

He felt too light, his skin so thin that if they pulled back the throat of his shirt, they’d see his heart pulsing, raw and bloody, through his glass chest.

The world smelled violently of roses.

But already another had grabbed his ankle, sneaked a tendril around his wrist, crawled toward his waist with leaves blossoming with a green so lurid it stood out like a scream in the dark.

This was how they were, bones broken and mended crookedly, each entwined with the other. He thought maybe you could love someone so much you ruined them, and then you ruined yourself.