Short Stories

In the Forest

The hammer slams down and he hears a wet thud. A flash of white crosses his vision then darkness. Pain barks through his hand. A scream tears the silence of the thick forest, only to be swallowed up by the moss-covered earth.

Her delicate fingers are casually wrapped around the wooden handle and blood drips down the metal head as she raises the hammer above her auburn nest of hair. She giggles and her small frame shakes gently as she looks down at the rugged man by her feet, his hands chained down to the tree stump.

This time as the hammer makes contact with his hand, rather than a wet thud, the two hear the crunch of bone against wood and metal. He screams again and he's sobbing uncontrollably, struggling against chains, trying to cradle his mangled hand.

A final time she strikes his hand with the hammer and the metal head meets the wood through his flesh and shards of bone. His hand is unsalvagable.

Not that it matters too much. What's he to use it for anyway?

He takes a look at his hand - a proper look - and turns his head away from the hand to projectile vomit the few scraps of food he had been fed two days prior. When his stomach empties, his eyes roll up to the back of his head and he becomes limp on the ground.

The girl's wicked grin disappears. She crouches over him and tucks her long unruly hair behind her ears, slowly reaching down to grab his face between her thumb and forefinger. Her mangled dress is draped over the moss, a dirty white over the bright green.

Her face is emotionless.

She draws a bone saw from underneath a section of moss and cuts his mangled hand off in quick and precise movements. Placing it onto the moss she walks off and grabs an anchor shackle. His breaths are shallow as she places his amputated forearm in between the anchor shackle and places a bolt in a hole at one end, hammering it through his flesh and bone until it's through the other hole, and reattaches the previously used chains.

She's still expressionless as she checks on his state of consciousness. His face is pallid and he's still knocked out. She picks up the severed hand as if it were a filthy rag and walks a mile out from where he's resting. Here is an arrangement of wood with a pan set up over for cooking purposes.

With a quick strike of some matches she drew from another patch of moss sets the wood alight. The stocky man's mangled hand is placed on the frying pan and the sizzling of flesh is heard not too much later.

The rustling of leaves from above has her head whipping around looking through the trees for the source. A feral snarl escapes from her lips and she turns back to make sure the meat doesn't burn. The fatty pork-esque aroma wafts through the heavy foresty smell of pine and damp wood.

Minutes pass by in silence and when the small girl unflinchingly picks up the cooked, steaming hot flesh and walks over to the black-haired man. She places the meat on the wooden stump where the stump of his arm is.

I knock an arrow onto my bow and aim at her from my position up in the trees. I already know how this goes.

She feeds him his own flesh, bone shards and all. Slowly, over a long period of time - usually taking weeks, she tortures her victim until a part of them is mangled and unrecognisable as being part of a human.

When they fall unconscious, she carves the mangled bits out and cooks them to feed back to the origin. Eventually, she either tires of them or they become so sickly that she puts them down and cooks them like a rotisserie chicken to feast on.

I've been in and out of these trees, watching, for months on end. It was fun to see at first but has slowly become boring and repetitive, no longer entertaining me.

I slowly take a deep breath and as I exhale I release the arrow. It strikes true, cleanly going between her eyes and killing her almost instantaneously. Careful aiming ensures that another arrow finds itself impaled through one ear and poking out the other of the man.

A sigh escapes me and I drop down from the branch I was perched on. I drag the girl's limp corpse to the fire she hadn't bothered to put out and carefully carve her flesh from the bone - not that she has much on her anyways. I rummage around looking for any sort of seasonings but come up short so just smack the meat onto the hot pan with a satisfying sizzle.

I trudge over to the stocky man and quickly remove any chains or restraints she had placed on him. Grunts and groans are the results of me attempting to haul the man across the soft forest floor.

Maybe I should have gotten him to crawl over to the fire himself then killed him.

By the time we reach our destination I'm huffing and sweating, unbothered by the biting cold of the winter air I felt before. The meat already on the pan smells like it's almost burning so I flip it over using the flat edge of the carving knife.

With that same knife, I start to work on him. The two's meat pile up on the moss together, united at the end.

I won't cook it all; I'll dry most of it and keep the rest raw to use as bait. At the end of the day I am the one who benefits most. I am the survivor here.

I am the Artemis of these woods.

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A/N

Sorry if the ending didn't really make sense, this one was a bit rushed and I wasn't totally sure where it was gonna go exactly tbh. Thanks for anyone who stick around to read these short stories and any feedback is 100% wanted and welcomed.