What Lies in the Woods

by Kate Alice Marshall

We knew the world was cruel and dirty and dull, and it was all so

brutally unfair that we refused to accept it. There was magic in the world. We only had to find it.

She’d said raising kids was a bit like that. You had to harden them, before they were ready to go out safely into the world. If you put

them out too soon, all at once, the shock of it would wither them. They would never grow to full bloom.