In the House in the Dark of the Woods

by Laird Hunt

There are fears in the airs and on the earth that can call up a fire in your heart whose ash will blacken all hope.

The world has its ways and we do well to abide by them.

We all go to our ruin. We are all the same in this.

that all I had to do if I was lonely was go to the graveyard and play with the ghosts.

Its scratch was like the dry sparking of a flint and a page with fresh marks on it like a blazing porcupine. A tale written down must be like that, I thought. It must be like the block of wood of the body sprouting tiny tongues of fire and who knows where the next one will rise and burn.

A tale is a funny thing, and even when it’s your own and you have a quill in your hand you must be careful where you touch it.

Truth has many different drawers and shelves.”

For my own part I kept very quiet, as quiet as I have ever been, for there are things in this world that you think will never come to pass that will rob you of your voice for nothing but the joy of them when suddenly they do.

I knew that Captain Jane had stopped blowing, that it was just me, that I was at the ending of my own great tale, that I had lit the world with its telling and that we would soon burn along with it and make of ourselves a burning, blazing suffix to the sun.

even in a wood as dark as this one, there was always hope.

“A kiss when you want it is better than anything.”

The world, I told him, was a grand thing as long as you stepped straight and kept to your course. If you did not, the world would hurt you. Or it would make you hurt yourself.

“Words can make a circle,” I told them. “Words in a circle can set a page afire.”