What Lies in the Woods

by Kate Alice Marshall

Once that fear was in your body, that knowledge that someone wanted you dead, it never entirely left.

She was stuck in this place where she needed me, but she wouldn’t let me be there for her.

I didn’t owe him a goddamn thing. Except that he was my dad.

But why should she be able to leave the woods, when I never had?

The dead don’t need our help.”

I’d come to Ethan’s door to make a mistake. It was what I always did. If I knew what mistake I was making, I wouldn’t be surprised when it hurt me.

The flesh does not acknowledge linear time, a therapist had once told me. The past is written alongside the present on our skins. I told him he should have written poetry instead of prescriptions. He accused me of deflecting insight with sarcasm.

Like that was that, pain balanced by pain. Like it didn’t leave cracks on your skin, whichever part you played.

You should get back to making pretty pictures of fancy people.” It was possibly the most supportive thing he’d ever said to me. “You’re a really terrible father,” I said, matter-of-fact. “You know that, right?” “Of course I know it. I’m dumb but I’m not stupid,” he said. “It’s not like you’re winning Daughter of the Year prizes yourself.” “Oh, fuck off.” “Same to you.”

The mistake was the point. You couldn’t let someone in without it breaking you, but you could choose the way you broke.

And so we’d done the rituals. We’d made the offerings. And all along, she’d been just some poor dead girl who’d dreamed of escape just like we did. I picked up a string of beads, flinging them angrily away from the skeleton. We’d turned her into this thing, an altar for our own unhappiness. We’d never treated her like a person. Like someone who would be mourned and missed. If we’d told someone what we’d found, her family might have answers by now.

Her illness was a wildfire, and the game was the spark that set it ablaze.

“I understand,” I said, because I did. I understood the weight of a secret, and the urge to bury yourself beneath it.

The pain would find me soon. It knew me too well not to find me.