Snow ✓

Into the Woods

The shutters were cracked wide enough for the girl to look outside with a single eye at Mat and Gran milling about something on the ground she could not see under a darkling sky.

She ducked when Mat turned back toward the house, then scrambled to the bedroom and picked up the book she'd been reading: Hansel and Gretel. She'd read it before, and while the ending made her squirm, she enjoyed the detailed descriptions of all the sweets. But when she tried to concentrate, the words swam on the page and her hands shook. Feeling feverish, a small part of her thought she knew what was coming; the rest of her prayed she was wrong.

The front door opened and she clutched the book, creasing the pages, trying to focus with all her might on the word gumdrops, but her hands continued to betray her.

Mat came into the doorway with a mumbled greeting.

She bit her tongue until it bled, refusing to look up.

He came close, the way he often did, as if her silence meant she was simple or prone to distraction, that she was never listening. He squatted before her.

"We've found something—someone, in the yard."

A scream bubbled up in the tender folds of her psyche as her eyes snapped up to his like magnets. All that he said after that fell on deaf ears. Her eyes bore into him until he left, and then, she stared at the space where he had been. Her throat threatened to close as she longed for the seconds before she'd thought to go to the window, when her mind knew only sugarplums, gingerbread, and a witch about to meet a fitting end. Now the pretty painting of the edible house soured her stomach as the uncertainty of a terrible thing, the absolute worst thing plagued her imagination.

Keep your emotions inside where they can't betray you, Mother used to say.

A clangor of pots and pans compounded the panic bouncing around her skull as Mat started to putter around the kitchen. A tiny pain blossomed on her finger. She looked down to see she'd torn the page, which had nicked her in retaliation. Her blood seeped down its jagged edge. Her heart trying to punch a hole through her chest, she got up and peeked around the corner, unable to see Mat, meaning he was at the counter. She darted back to the front window, her stocking snagging to a tear on a splinter in the floorboards as she went.

The sun hadn't quite dipped below the horizon, and she felt an unexplainable longing for it to stay, to not suck all the light out of the world and leave her alone in this place.

Gran was hauling a tarp and tool that looked like a long metal stick with a tapered end toward the spot where the girl had seen them standing. Her toes cramped as she strained to see, but she was too far away, it was too dark, and the slush too tall.

She ran to the door but Mat was already there, hand against it as she tried to yank it open.

"No. You don't need to see."

"I do," she said, voice rusty from disuse as she pushed against him.

He wrestled her arms to her sides as she screamed.

"You must have read that book twice over today," Mat said from the kitchen, snapping the girl out of her trance. "Why don't you help me with the dishes, so there's no work for us when Gran returns."

Eyes bent toward the floor, she complied, her feet not feeling like her own as she shuffled to the kitchen.

All the while, she itched to return to the window. She got her chance once they had set the table and Mat excused himself to use the washroom. Her eyes roved over the dark yard. It was empty, the only movement a faint glow gamboling at the Burnt Forest's tree line.