Don't Let the Forest In

by C.G. Drews

For the monsters in your head

It hadn’t hurt, the day he had cut out his own heart. Andrew had written about it later in spidery lines from a sharp pen—a story about a boy who took a knife to his chest and carved himself open, showing ribs like mossy tree roots, his heart a bruised and wretched thing beneath. No one would want a heart like his. But he’d still cut it out and given it away.

It didn’t matter if Thomas read the truth in the story or not, how he alone owned Andrew’s heart. The thrill of the confession had been terrible and beautiful—and retractable. Just in case.

Once upon a time, Andrew had cut out his heart and given it to this boy, and he was very sure Thomas had no idea that Andrew would do anything for him. Protect him. Lie for him. Kill for him.

Andrew hated the way his brain did this. Destroyed beautiful things. It was like he couldn’t just hold a flower; he had to crush the petals in his fist until his hand was stained with murdered color.

to be so full of fierce life it spilled over his edges.

A horribly delicious feeling flooded Andrew’s chest. He could taste pain in the air and for once it wasn’t his, and he loved that.

“He won’t touch you again,” he said. Andrew could hardly breathe. “You’ll be in trouble.” The light in Thomas’s eyes was bold and ferocious. “But he won’t touch you again.”

Pretty sure their feelings are mutual

“I think someday you’ll hate me.” Thomas’s voice stretched with a loneliness Andrew had never heard before. “You’ll cut me open and find a garden of rot where my heart should be.” Andrew let the silence sharpen between them, waited until Thomas’s breath caught in quiet anguish from being made to wait. “When I cut you open,” Andrew finally said, “all I’ll find is that we match.”

The world smelled of sweet cloying decay, rotten leaves, and earth.

It was strange, Andrew thought, how when something moved in the dark, everyone’s first instinct was to go inside and hide under the covers. As if monsters couldn’t open doors and crawl into bed with you.

Once upon a time, a cutthroat queen and a wormwood king had seven sons. They loved them all except for the last, who was made of sarsaparilla and foul tempers and had beautifully pointed teeth. They gifted their first six sons crowns made of willow switches. But they ordered the seventh son to be switched with the leftover rods. They gifted their first six sons golden apples. But for their seventh son, they put worms on his tongue and made him swallow. They gifted their first six sons a wishing well. But to their seventh son, they gave the hacked-off head of a wolf cub. The years passed and the seventh son’s skin toughened under the switching, and he developed a taste for flesh, and he befriended the murdered wolf cub and told it all his secrets. When the wolf decided justice was necessary and ripped out the hearts of the cutthroat queen and the wormwood king and ate their six perfect sons, the seventh son did not even notice. He had found his reflection in the wishing well and liked staring at his pointed teeth.

Narcissus?

To write something nice, he’d need something nice to say. But his ribs were a cage for monsters and they cut their teeth on his bones.

Once upon a time there lived a woodcutter who crept into an enchanted forest and took his ax to an enchanted tree. It was said a log from here would burn bright and merry forever. Indeed, the woodcutter spent a comfortable night roasting apples with no care in the world. But the next morning, he found the enchanted forest had come walking. Acres of trees surrounded his cottage, all crying bloody tears. He ran through the forest, but could not find his way out. All he found were trees weeping blood and blood and blood.

They gently lowered the fairy prince’s body into a glass coffin, leaving bloody fingerprints smudged on the case. His chest had been caved in from battles fought and lost, and they’d filled the space between his ribs with flowers. Even now the flowers grew, blossoming as they drank the last of his blood. The princess’s silver tears fell like rain upon the coffin. True love’s kiss should wake him, but she had tried seven times and nothing had happened. Behind the princess stood her brother, a poet with soft lips and soft moss for hair. He whispered, “Let me try.” But no one heard. They buried the fairy prince alone. By evening, the flowers had grown over his whole face.

It was the drawing Thomas had snatched away on the roof—the seventh son staring into a wishing well, while a monster with a torn-off wolf’s head ate his parents in the background.

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. Andrew squeezed his eyes shut. That wasn’t him. He was infected by this night of woken nightmares and ebbing adrenaline—and the starved desperation of wanting Thomas, Thomas, only Thomas.

“You don’t know anything about me,”

“And you know less about Andrew if you think he’s some delicate wallflower that you need to ball up in cotton wool. He could cut me to bloody pieces if he wanted. I couldn’t stop him even if I tried. So can you stop pretending he needs saving from me? Back up and leave us alone.”

If the trees belonged to Thomas, midnight was in love with Andrew. It made him braver somehow, invisible, hiding his delicate edges and leaving behind a lean and hungry shadow. In the dark, no one could see his hollow and empty places. Instead he looked like he could have teeth.

“Did you mean”—Thomas sounded quiet—“to write your notes … in mirror reverse?” Andrew looked up. Thomas slid the pages back to him, but his expression had gone carefully blank, a useless precaution against Andrew, who knew him well enough to dissect it. He didn’t even know how to write in mirror reverse. He hadn’t … he didn’t know— He scrunched the papers and stuffed them in his satchel. Silence sat between them: Andrew frozen while his brain

Once there was a boy who slept in an enchanted tower, his back flecked with whip marks from battles lost and monsters who’d won. He wore a crown of cherrywood and firebird bones, gifted to him by his sisters who were trees in the forest. But they had not been able to protect him, and his capture meant endless years of torture. The boy whimpered in his sleep, waiting for the whips to return. Instead, a witch climbed through his tower window. She wore a cloak covered in the gold dust of wishes, and she promised to save him. For a price. “Take this ax,” she said with a coy smile, “and cut down every tree in the forest. Then nothing will ever harm you again.” “But the trees are my sisters,” he said, his bones already filled with dread. “Why do you care for them?” the witch asked. “They do not love you. They did not come for you. Take the ax.” He began to cry, but he took the ax.

needed their lungs sewn inside each other so he could remember how to breathe.

What would it even look like, to cut their feelings out, bloody and aching and raw, and compare them? To find they didn’t match. To be left with guts vivisected and no way to sew themselves back up so they looked the same as before.

“Everything inside me is in ruins,” Thomas said. “For you.”

He loves me and I put a knife through his ribs.

he was the reason you put your hand through that mirror.”

a yawning emptiness opened in his mind, an endless black nothing where a memory should be. He had no idea what she was talking about.

What the hell? He was all angsty about whatever happened last year that made him punch a mirror and the fact that Thomas hasn't spoken to him all summer

A boy crept softly through the forest, looking for a white stag that legend said could grant three wishes. From his back grew gossamer moth wings that dragged on the ground and tore at a touch, and words had been cut into his skin that wept indigo blood. A wish would cure him of these peculiar miseries. But he grew tired as he searched, and his feet bled and his tears left tracks of salt down his weary cheeks. He did not find the stag. He did find a fairy prince, though, with a sharp smile and roses blooming from his wrists. “You should come with me,” the boy said. “A wish from the white stag will fix me and it could fix you, too.” The fairy prince looked at him quizzically. He bit a rosebud off his wrist and twirled it before handing it to the boy with a shy smile. “Why?” he said. “You’re beautiful just as you are.”

“For the last time,” Thomas yelled. “I wasn’t in the forest with her! I wasn’t there! I wasn’t there.”

Dove is dead. That's why she's been missing and when Andrew went to find her in her dorm Lana stopped him. Holy shit!

Everything inside Andrew had been scooped out, and he’d been left a hollow thing, impossible to fill. Dove would absolutely freak out when she saw what he’d done to his hand. He’d explain it to her over breakfast, how it had been a tough, stressful year, and he’d spaced out for a minute. He’d thought there was a monster in the mirror and he only meant to kill it.

Every good story ends with a wishbone snapped, a bloodied kiss, the prince’s sacrifice. —cut out a heart— and bury it in the woods. But he already knew that.

“She wanted to protect you,” the forest said softly. “She wanted everything to stay the same,” Andrew said. “And it couldn’t. It didn’t. We let our love for each other cut us to the bloody core.” “You didn’t bring a pen.”

And to you, reader, thank you. May this one haunt you.