Don't Let the Forest In

by C.G. Drews

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.

Thomas’s whole body tilted toward the sound, as if even amid the crush, his name from Andrew’s lips would always be heard.

Everything looked the same—auburn hair and sharp jaw and face like someone had upturned a whole jar of freckles on him.

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.

It seemed as natural to him as breathing, that need to check that Andrew hadn’t been left behind.

Other people existed only in Thomas’s periphery, but the Perrault twins eclipsed his entire galaxy. There was something intoxicating about meaning that much to one person. Addictive.

“Nothing bad will happen to you. I swear.”

“Sometimes I don’t know what reality you live in.”

Their story had begun in the forest, a collision both violent and beautiful.

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. The teacher stormed toward them. Thomas casually tossed his stick into the trees and didn’t look concerned. “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.”

An extraordinary amount of intimacy lay in exchanging art. Not for critique and not for class. Just to look. To feel. To understand each other.

“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.”

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.

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.

But no one who was innocent needed to be so violently defensive.

“I like how you are. There’s an entire world of ink and magic stuffed inside your head, and I think it’s beautiful. I just wish everything didn’t hurt you so much.”

The forest had left its teeth marks all over them, and it would never leave them alone.

He materialized like flame struck from a match, his scowl already monstrous

Andrew would write them as a story someday. He’d make the blackest parts beautiful and he’d write the kisses bloody and the vengeance sweet.

“It’s ruining me.”

“You could cut me open and devour everything that I am,” Thomas said, ragged and thin. “I would let you. I’d ask you to. But I have no idea what it means to you. What … what I mean to you.”

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

“We can just be what we were. I swear I won’t ask for anything else. It’s just—I make monsters. I am a monster. I lost my mind for a second and freaked out that you could never love someone this wicked.”

Sometimes there was no stopping pain. There was just seeing how much you could swallow before it spilled out your throat.

His twin had been severed from him, and he hadn’t even been awake to feel it.

He would stop when he’d obliterated every last piece of glass into stardust that he could coat his tongue with and whisper a magic wish to the forest. Give her back.

He’d thought there was a monster in the mirror and he only meant to kill it.

“I don’t care how dark the world is for you. I’ll hold out my hand until you find it, and I won’t let go.”