What Lies in the Woods

by Kate Alice Marshall

That was the problem with writers. They couldn’t help digging the edge of a fingernail under your scabs so they could feel the shape of your wounds.

This place. I swear, every time I come back it’s like the ground starts crumbling under my feet. And what’s underneath is all the shit I’d rather leave buried.”

The trouble was he’d mistaken drama for virtue and suffering for art, and felt impoverished by his own good fortune.

We’d wrapped our hands around our secrets like barbed wire, even when they cut into us.

Sometimes it seemed like the only thing I’d ever been good at was surviving being broken. I didn’t know how to be whole. So any time I felt like I was healing, I found a way to break myself again.

They thought she was bossy, a term that mysteriously only ever seemed to be applied to girls.

“I want it to be easy to forgive you. But it isn’t.”