Into the Deep Wood

Where had it gone so wrong?

What moment in time had brought her here?

How long had she even been here?

She was lucky that she remembered her name still. If they did not repeat it out of the darkness in the trees, she may not have.

"Valeriaaaa..."

Stop speaking. Stop whispering.

A soft step toward the thick water in the swamp. Were she to go too far, she wouldn't be able to get out. Perhaps that was better. It's better than listening to the whispers. Better than the blows to her back. The ashes of the stone stove filling her lungs. The scraps of food that turned rotten on her tongue. Better than the tricks her own eyes played on her, the visions of her mother and grandmother just beyond the clearing.

She looked at her hands. They were not as smooth as they had been when she arrived. Visible veins ran across the tops of them, blue against her pale skin. When did they have time to age so?

Another step. The moss was soft on her bare feet, even if it hurt where they had been cut up and her heels cracked. It sank beneath her step. Atop the water were small-winged insects. They dashed about, unbothered by her presence. What had noticed her, however, was a large shape hidden right underneath the surface by the cattails. She could see the long skinny arms, spotted and almost translucent.

"Go away..." she whispered. "Go back to where you came from."

A snout appeared as the long webbed fingers swatted at the bunches of plants. It was trying to pull itself out of the water.

"Go away. I already fed you." She said louder. The rabbit had still been alive. They all had to be alive.

What was it? Five steps? And it would all be over. It would be slow, and she would struggle, she thought. Maybe that thing would eat her before she could drown. What would it feel like?

But, just like every day before, she could not do it.

All she could do was recite the memories she still held, turn, and go back up the winding trail to the hut.

She knew where it had gone wrong. She just tried to convince herself she no longer remembered.

Once upon a time, there was a girl in the forest.

She wandered the familiar trails and picked mushrooms in the fall. Her grandmother would pickle them or hang them up to dry. They looked like little laundry suspended near the window.

The sky turned orange and red, coloring the trees with a golden hue, promising the descent of darkness soon.

You must not go into the forest at night.

Her grandmother told her stories passed down by her grandmother, and her grandmother before. She said that at night, the forest spirits would wake up and play. They would crawl and frolic, and they would run through the woods, bumping into each other in their blindness.

No one in the village had ever seen a forest spirit before, but no one had seen a bear either, and Val was pretty sure those existed –there was a time when they found a cow that had wandered through the field and into the woods. It was draped across several trees, its various parts swaying in the winter breeze from crooked branches. It had been drained of blood, frozen streams of it still coloring the tree bark below.

Val hated thinking about that. She hated thinking of bears climbing trees.

The light began dwindling faster than she could walk.

Something in the brush scurried out of the way. A rabbit, probably. The boys in the village would hunt them. They would gift the pelts to the girls they fancied most. The truly beautiful girls had collections that ran every color, the most coveted being the pure white furs.

Val did not receive many of those. There was only one boy, Ura, who had brought them to her.

Ura was not a particularly handsome boy. His head was too square, and his ears stuck out almost comically on the sides of his head.

Val had not been a very brave girl. In fact, she was afraid of many things. She did not jump at the opportunity to try something new. She was not outspoken. She was not loud. And that was why Val liked Ura; he was also quiet and not very brave.

The tree line was ahead. She strode confidently and switched the arm that was holding the basket of mushrooms and berries. She saw smoke rising in wavy pillars where the village stood among pines.

It was not a big village. It was remote and isolated but had not been poor like many others. The houses were made of rough-hewn logs and decorated with carved depictions of flowers and birds. They’d been painted and repainted red as the seasons took their toll.

Val walked down the main road where horses had created grooves, and gravel had been mixed with the earth to keep it from sinking through.

Val was an ordinary girl. Her father passed away when she was only nine years old. He had been a tall, strict man with a stoic face, a man of few words but many thoughts.

He was a renowned physician. His reputation could have easily bought him a large house in the city, and often Val wondered why he chose to live in the village so far away. She knew he had grown up there, and perhaps that was why he didn’t want to leave.

After studying at the finest university in the capital, he traveled to exotic faraway lands; returning with a bride from abroad—her mother.

Where he had traveled was a mystery to Val, and she often thought it a mystery to her mother as well, as she avoided the subject.

Not many people in the village could read, but her father taught her at a very young age. He would bring her books from his travels, and although they were not exciting in the least, she loved them very much. They spoke of medicine and animals, of the human body and remedies for illness. They were factual –like her father.

Past the houses, Val heard the rising songs. Most nights, whether summer or winter, they would gather at the bonfires. The girls, with their hair long and loose, their voices beautiful and rolling, would sing folksongs.

But Val did not sing.

The other women were quite a sight, their eyes brown like a doe’s eyes, while Val and her mother had dull green ones. Their hair was thick and dark, while Val’s hair was thin and mousy brown, and after long summers under the sun, it showed shades resembling straw. They stood tall, but she was only to their chest in height.

Val often wondered about the faraway lands her mother had come from. She was only sixteen when her father, a man of over forty, had brought her back. Perhaps the girls married off to old men there? Who, then, did the boys marry? Did they have to wait until they began to gray? Did they have to wait until their callused hands were like tree bark to the touch?

Val imagined that perhaps these lands had mountains and strange animals too. Elephants, like in her books, must have been made up, Val thought. They were described as ugly, with their noses long and their ears large. Their ears had reminded her of Ura.

But he had called her pretty. He called her pretty while waiting outside the gate for her to come out to the stoop.

Many of the girls would be proposed to soon. They would be married off and braid their hair forever.

Val wondered, would it be Ura? The village was small, and he had been the only boy who wanted to hold her hand.

Would she then have a family? And kids? Would they have large protruding ears?

She did not want children with big ears. But, women who could not bear children would cause all great grief. She would become the village matron, an All-Mother. She would care for all the kids, midwife, and help all the new mothers when the weight of their babes was too much to bear.

Those women were lamented and celebrated in the same breath.

If only Val had not been so indifferent to this.