Over the Hill and Through the Woods

Please note: this story was provided by the author and published as is.

The beaten down Ford slid off the side of the road. A webwork of tree branches and great green fronds overtook the world, obscuring the sky, obscuring the ground, obscuring everything in a shade of slime green that made me sick.  

Maybe that’s why it felt like I was jammed in the middle of a spinach smoothie just waiting for unseen blades to begin chewing my legs into a digestible sludge.  

I parked the car directly behind Brock’s vehicle, an even more beaten down wreckage of deflating wheels and cracked windows and passenger doors held together with duct tape and loose screws––firefighting didn’t exactly pay the bills, it only made the news.   

I didn’t get out yet.  

Instead my eyes began performing their own version of jumping jacks: first to Brock’s car, second to the great green forest, then back again to the abandoned vehicle.

Car. 

Forest. 

Junker. 

Green, green like swamp water. 

Back and forth my eyes jumped, until my head began to ache, until the seconds and minutes and hours of the daylight became more important than ever. I didn’t want to be in this green forest after the lights were turned off, fighting through pricker bushes and reaching vines––vines like fondling fingers.  

For what felt like the hundredth time since leaving home some two hours before, I reached for Brock’s note crumpled into the center cup holder. By now the note looked like a natural disaster survivor: lines like a leftover earthquake cut through the center of Brock’s message. Not that the piece of paper really mattered anymore. I had memorized his words by the time I drove away from our house this morning.  

Mary– 

I found you, I finally found you again! I think everything is going to be okay now, I think I can glue back the pieces.  

Can you believe our luck?  

I’m sure you are surprised to see a letter with my handwriting on it, surprised to find I can still scratch ink onto paper even after that horrible fire barbequed my body into an unrecognizable black shadow.  

You probably think this letter is some type of hoax.  

It’s not.  

You may even be considering calling the police; perhaps your fingers have already pressed the nine and the one key.  

Stop it, just quit right now, Mary.  

It’s taken over three years to locate you, though time works differently over here, and I can’t even begin to tell you how many tortured souls I’ve had to shake down in order to find the passing between my land and yours. But I found it, Mary, the place where we can be together again. It’s in a cabin away from the rest of civilization, deep in the woods, deep and private from prying eyes who just aren’t ready for our return to this world quite yet. I know you aren’t much of the outdoorsy type, you’re not exactly the blue-collar woman with wood shavings and mud stamped into your boots. But I think this cabin is the best place for us to start over. Maybe the only place, hell, I don’t really know how it works, only that it does.  

You will come, won’t you? I can’t begin to tell you what I’ve had to face to get back home to you, but I’ll try to explain. There’s only one request I ask, just a small something I need you to grab from my old work bag before you head out this way. I’ll attach the directions to the bottom of this letter, but first I need you to grab… 

My eyes glazed over the last bit of Brock’s letter.  

Maybe Brock was right, I wasn’t exactly a blue collar woman because my hands weren’t jagged with callouses; I wasn’t exactly a white collar professional because the dresser at home housing all my clothes did not contain a single pants suit, or jacket with pads sewn in the elbows. I was a woman without a collar, and terrified more than I ever had been, even more so than that time in high school when I went to see the latest Batman movie only to watch a group of real life villains spray gunfire into the theater. 

Collar or not, Brock’s letter crumpled in my hand before falling back to the center console cup holder. You didn’t need a collar to go searching for your husband––your dead husband, the man whose ashes have sat on your dining room mantel these last three years, you didn’t need a collar to go hunting for a corpse that now talked and dictated letters.  

I’m a green collar woman, I thought, pushing open my car door and stepping out into foreign oxygen, I’m a green collar and damn it if I’m not scared. But green means go, and I’m a green collar woman.  

It was crazy, I knew it, but the thought gave a cool sort of comfort all the same. 

The great green forest pressed even closer now that I was free from the safety of the car. I expected this stretch of unmanned land to ripple with the sounds of mating birds; restless cicadas; the steady drone thrown from a congregation of dragonflies zipping from plant to plant.  

None of these sounds existed.  

A silent hush held sway over the trees. Something sinister lived on the other side of the forest fence, something hungry and silent and awaiting fresh meat––something green. Was I foolish enough to peek my head over its wooden hedges and chance the risk of decapitation? 

If a soul expires in utter silence does death even bother making a sound? 

None of this was about me, though, not any longer. The abandoned car in front of mine doubled down on this point. Somehow Brock was back from the land of the dead and the damned, and he needed my help. 

For better or worse, I closed the Ford door behind me. 

Before setting forward for the forest, I did a lap around Brock’s car, which had been sold after the funeral some years prior. All of the doors were locked, their handles warm from a sun who cared little for living or dead things. Poking my face directly against the driver’s side glass window, I spied a number of empty soda bottles piled on the passenger seat. The upholstery was ripped to ribbons, grayish fuzz bubbled out in many spots on each of the seats; the empty soda bottles looked as if they had grown gray beards. The steering wheel and gear stick were both covered in thick cobwebs. A meaty layer of dust stuck to the dashboard. More trash cluttered on the floor mats.   

I pulled my head away from this tomb with four spinning wheels, my sight set back toward the forest only a dozen or so yards away from where I stood.  I took a few steps before I stopped, looking back at both cars a final time. Safety, and only a stone’s throw away, waved at me from the roadside. I turned back around. 

A minute later, the great green forest sucked me inside with a silent slurp. 

Brock’s letter directed me to walk a distance of a “few football fields” once I entered the woods. Yet in which direction did he mean? And how long was a football field? Now that I was here I realized I should have dug up more research, but all I had on me was a cell phone (without service) and a bag of tools and meat Brock had requested. Just what did I hope to accomplish out here anyway––was I this desperate to believe a dead heart could somehow breathe again?  

I tried finding a path or any semblance of human construction, but nothing looked concrete, nothing seemed like a marker pointing toward where I should go next. Shrugging, feeling more and more like a fool following a fool’s errand, I surged straight ahead. Bush fronds ate at my ankles; dirt crunched and munched under my feet as if I walked among many hungry mouths. In every direction trees bade me come forward with twisted wooden limbs. An unseen wind licked my face as if tasting fear for the first time.  

I’m a green collar woman, I thought, surprised at how calm my inner-voice sounded even while fear squeezed at my throat and a greedy wind licked at my armpits. And green means you passed go, green means you must collect two-hundred dollars even if you tremble at the way old man Monopoly runs his greedy fingers all around your body. You are green, now keep going!  

The forest sucked me deeper inside. I walked for what felt like at least an hour, though my phone argued only fifteen minutes had passed since entering this green world.  

I paused at the base of a hill, feeling my heart kick and riot against its chamber of muscle. Sweat fell in a puddle at my feet, and my breath snarled like a jungle cat’s. A flash of silver on the ground had caught my attention. I bent down, rubbing away dirt clumps from the face of the metallic object. The object suddenly glowed a dull blue color, displaying a picture of Brock and I standing in front of a skyscraper of hay bales at the last county fair we’d ever attend together––Brock’s cell phone.  

I punched in the six digit passcode. The phone gurgled and warned another errant password would be grounds for the penalty box. Trying to steady my hands, I re-typed Brock’s passcode. It had been over three years since entering the numbers, though I somehow remembered the right combination on my second attempt. This time the screen melted. A red 2% symbol brooded at the top of the screen like a storm cloud. I clicked at the messenger icon, but there was nothing, not even a single text. Toggling back to the home screen, my fingers punched at the photos button.  

The red battery symbol clapped to 1%.   

I’m not sure what I expected to uncover, if anything at all. My brain, like my heart, punched at its box of fibrous muscle, leaving very little space for coherent thought. There wasn’t time to sit and ponder why (or how) Brock’s phone had joined the party. There just wasn’t time to think. My trio of galloping organs, the brain and heart and fingertips, punched at the photos button, then punched at the last photo snapped and saved to this failing piece of machinery.    

I couldn’t make sense of the picture. Not because it was blurry, nor due to poor lighting or a shaky hand behind the camera. I couldn’t make sense of it because rational thought wouldn’t hold up in court.  

The photo showed my beaten down Ford saddled behind Brock’s own junker. A great green forest hugged the frame of the snapshot. There I was, standing on the edge of the road. Staring into the lens of the camera. Me, as if I were center stage in a play I didn’t know the lines to.

Created by: Danny Ingrassia

Silence throbbed like an open wound.  

I walked up to the front of the home where a fat wooden door stood open. I didn’t bother hiding my footsteps any longer. Dirt crunched like a chewing mouth; grass snapped under my feet. A numbness usually found at the bottom of a beer stein stole over me. I didn’t care what happened any longer, I only wanted for Brock to be where he belonged––in the bottom of an urn.   I paced one step into the open doorway. Immediately I swung my face back around and choked down clean oxygen from outside. An inhumane stench festered from inside the cabin. Holding my breath, I attempted to enter the cabin a second time. It felt as if even my eyeballs could smell decay and death here. I walked down a hallway barren of any furniture or picture portraits. Wood the same color of the trees outside framed the walls, framed the ceiling, framed the floor. Dark stained wood and the smell of rotting carrion, that’s what held this cabin erect now.  

The hallway fed into a quaint living area, with a single cot bed stuffed in one corner and a swathe of mismatched tables clustered around the room. A number of windows streamed sunlight into the living quarters, though I doubted very much sunshine would have any positive effect on the experiment being held inside the cabin.  

A collection of stiff, dried animals sat glazed on each of the tables: a raccoon missing its golden eyes, a brown bear with most of its fur hacked off, a male deer without any of its skin and a female doe without a snout to sniff out oncoming danger; dozens of bird species missing a beak, missing a wing, missing a heartbeat; a pot bellied pig, its hoofs sticking straight into the air, stiff and lifeless, its plump belly dissected open to showcase a mass of pig intestines and pig organs. There were more woodland creature carcasses stacked against the walls. Gobs of yellowing teeth stuck to the floor like peanut shells, and the air in this room made a slaughterhouse seem sterile.    

My Brock lay on the single cot stuffed in one corner of the room. He stared at me with rodent eyeballs, bright gold things like leprechaun coins. A black snout careened from his face; jagged, mismatching teeth leered from a mouth wrinkled with bits of animal fur. Brock’s skin was a dull leathery shade, with green slashes of yarn tying each piece of hide together. He resembled that Chucky character after the fifth or sixth movie where you couldn’t tell if it’s a doll you’re supposed to be afraid of. When you start sewing skin you breed a new kind of monster.  

This was my monster here in the cabin, here in this halfway space where the dead breathed right alongside the living.  

“Brock!” I yelled. “You’re back! You’re back!”  

My voice felt stuck on repeat. I couldn’t believe it was really him–my Brock alive and kicking cemetery gravel from out his shoes–I just couldn’t believe death had let him walk away so easily. Wasn’t death like the mafia? Once you’re in you never come clean again.   

I moved toward Brock, intending to embrace the man who had once upon a time dedicated his life to fighting fires. Heroes deserved their flowers, and I meant to seed affection over my dearly departed husband. Who cared if he was half-animal now; he was also half-Brock, and that had to still mean something.  

I moved closer, and as I did, he began to change. It looked as if wires breathed under his animal skin. Long elastic tubes popped up across Brock’s forehead and cheeks. More elongated strands blossomed on his hands and wrists. Something alive, something shaped like electrical lines, crawled beneath Brock’s skin. Pain must have fizzled through his reconfigured body; Brock ricocheted against the cot, thrashing and beating his hands against all parts of his borrowed skin. His nails dug like mad into the meaty underbelly of a forearm. He scratched harder, one nail slicing a slit into the exposed hide.  

A number of red-coated worms fell from his open wound and slithered on the cot all around him. More worms wriggled from the bleeding hole in Brock’s forearm. The room was alive with the sound of slippery skin and pooling, purple blood.   

Brock’s eyes jumped to mine, then to the backpack hanging from my side like a forgotten gun in the midst of a shooting gallery. He opened his mouth, perhaps to command me to throw over the backpack and its contents. Instead, an army of beetles and other flying insects flooded his tongue and teeth. A particularly girthy beetle latched onto Brock’s lower lip, dangling like a black piercing. It’s not as if the dead can’t still make a fashion statement. He continued to vomit insects from a throat clogged with the slippery devils; his nose acted as an airplane and bugs parachuted out each open nostril––bombs away, boys!  

Do you know that feeling when time slows, and slows, and nearly stops? When it seems like the world is suspended in a pink sticky solution––a cough syrup slowness. That’s how it was flinging the backpack onto the ground.  

Sticky time made it nearly impossible to unzip the bag.  

Cough syrup slowness held my hand as it plunged into the open sack, then pulled back out, slowly, so damn slowly, to unfurl an AED machine ready to kick-start Brock’s heart. I shuffled forward to Brock, but he waved a hand at me, then nodded toward the upturned pig carcass on one of the tables next to us. Standing this close to the dissected pig, you could see a delicate surgery had taken place. Where its heart should have sat now lay an empty nest of frizzled pig muscle. A pinkish pig heart lay next to a number of pinkish surgical tools.  

Without thinking, I reached for the pig heart, my hands growing slimy and purple and wet with animal goop. The Brock-thing on the cot grew more and more quiet, though a nest of insects and blood-soaked worms huddled around his body and suckled at the exposed bits of his leathery skin. There was a smell to the place like a summer meat market.   

I sneezed.  

Pig meat flew through the air and landed on Brock’s chest and neck.  

Those gold racoon eyes of his swiveled to one side as if too nauseous to watch what came next. My hands fumbled to pickup the slippery pig heart. Brock once more gestured toward the surgical instruments next to the pig. Suddenly the cabin had converted into a transplant center, and I was asked to play the role of honorary surgeon.  

I paused, and purple pig goop dribbled between my fingers. None of this was natural, that much was obvious, so just what the hell was I doing?  

“You aren’t really Brock,” I whispered aloud inside a room swarming with infection and disease. “My Brock fought against the coming of fires, he didn’t create any of his own. My Brock was a hero; my Brock didn’t fear the consequences of death. Not like you do. I can’t help you, man.”  

The Brock-thing just stared the other way with those bright golden eyes stolen from nature, from beasts who didn’t want any part of humanities beastly customs. 

I dropped the AED machine at the foot of the cot. Pig organs dried like cement on Brock’s chest and neck. His hands feebly tried reaching toward his midsection as if hoping he could stitch his own humanity back inside. Those wasted arms of his wobbled two or three times before falling dead at his sides.  

I backpedaled away from Brock, away from the room cursed in spoiled animal carcasses. My back bumped against the open door of the house, yet I continued backpedaling even as the outside dirt crunched beneath my feet and the air no longer tasted of leprosy. It felt like I backpedaled all the way back down the hill, back through the green forest, back back back, until I finally bumped against the back of my beaten down car. It wasn’t until I was speeding a mile down the road did I stop looking back and started looking forward.  

It’s been over a month now. No other letters have shown up in my post box addressed from dead men with rodent eyeballs, thankfully. I’ve asked the postman to stop leaving any pamphlets from grocery stores, though, especially for sales on meat. Bacon just doesn’t taste the same anymore. 

I thought all of this was over and put to rest.  

But then I stumbled onto your website today, I read about the miraculous letter you received in the mail from a wife who has been dead for the better part of a decade. I read about your Go Fund Me page, and how you’re hoping to collect enough money to make the journey halfway across the world to a forest I once visited too, a great green forest with a cabin tucked deep in its belly like a cancerous tumor.  

And I know I can’t convince you to drop this fantasy, I know what lengths a broken heart will go to in order to regrow, to recover. Even if you believed half my story, hell, even a quarter of what I’ve shared with you, I still think you’d head out this way anyway.  

Because the dead speak in a language we can’t resist.  

Because even a wife that is half-human is better than a wife that is fully green with tree algae, at least that’s what we tell ourselves at night when the bed pillow next to us grows cold with loneliness.  

But there’s no hope hiding inside those woods, only the sharp smell of death, that’s what I need you to believe. All the animal hides and pig organs in the world won’t bring back the one you love most. You can’t skin and sew a mangled heart back from the grave.  

But you won’t believe me, I know this, because I’m alive and living, and only the dead speak in words we understand; only the dead whisper stories we care for. Why do you think funeral services claim such an awesome turn-out? We’re drawn to the siren song of the dead and the damned.     

So, I’ll wait here in my busted down Ford each morning if I have to, I’ll sit in front of this great green forest anticipating your arrival, praying I can convince you in person what I’m failing to do online.  

Stay away from here.  

Please. 

Leave a dead, silent heart alone, for God’s sake. 

Be human. 

Please.