The Darkest Part Of The Forest

She dropped her basket at the edge of the woods, and walked forwards, leaving it behind.

She had been dreaming of going there for weeks. She imagined it would feel different to what she felt then—she didn't realize the pine needles on the forest floor would hurt her feet, or that the chilly air would make her want to turn back home.

But she kept walking, because she had decided she would. Her feet carried her through the grasping thorns of blackberry bushes and burrs clinging to the fleece of her sweater. She lost her hat to a tree branch, but kept her resolve. It would be worth it, she told herself, to finally get the dreams to stop coming. The dreams she had of walking into that room in the woods, of sitting in the middle of it and feeling dark things swirling above her, and then—she doesn't know what comes next. That's the problem, that's what leaves her with a sense of loss when the dream finishes without telling her the ending. The question remaining in her mind of: What next?

As she took her next few steps she removed her gloves and let them fall to the ground. She let her sweater fall too. By the time she was naked enough to really feel the cold in her bones she had arrived. The church rose up like a tombstone from the middle of the forest, and she felt a sense of déja vu come from looking at it. Sunlight illuminated her path as she stepped out from the forest floor and onto the cold stone of the abandoned building.

It was the kind of room that makes one afraid to close their eyes, she thought to herself. The fear didn't come from the look of the room its self—those graffiti covered walls and empty soda cans on the ground didn't inspire much fear in her—it came from the feeling all around her. The feeling of shadow which permeated even in those rare patches of stone bathed completely in sunlight from the decaying and frayed ceiling.

She wrapped her arms around herself for a moment and felt a little silly, to have come so far out of her way, and for what? For a dream? To get rid of a dream she had been having sometimes while asleep and admittedly, occasionally, in the middle of the day? She felt absurd to re-enact what her imagination had conjured. But still, she had come so far. She could not leave now.

With a huffed breath she sat down on the ground, pressed her knees into the dirty stone and her palms onto her thighs, and she waited.

With a shiver up her spine she made herself close her eyes, just like in her dream, and imagined herself somewhere better, somewhere warm and happy, with rolling hills, vibrant green grass, electric blue skies, and a sun so warm you could soak it in all day without a sweater on.

But then, behind closed eyelids she began to see dark clouds moving across her otherwise spotless scene. These dark clouds seemed to roil like pools of lava, and in her mind they bubbled over themselves like infected wounds down to the green grass below, charring it brown. And then she felt that if she opened her eyes that very scene is what she would find waiting for her. That those shadows she felt collecting in stagnant pools within the air of the old church would spill onto her like rain from a leaky roof, or ash if that roof had been burnt. 

But then, oddly, she continued to look at the bubbling scene, behind closed eyes, and she realized that she no longer felt afraid. She felt just as at peace looking at her imagined destruction as she did looking at her imagined beauty. So, when she finally did open her eyes, moments later, she felt fully prepared for whatever might've lurked beyond them. She was prepared for the worst.

But what she found was not "the worst". In fact, when she opened her eyes she felt better than she had before, she did not feel afraid or cold, or lonely anymore. She felt remedied, and with a tentative hand on the ground she pushed herself up off of it. She looked down at her underwear clad body and saw no imperfections, no scars or stains, nothing to indicate anything strange had happened while she had been sitting, and she felt silly. Then she walked out of the room without a backwards glance, finally rid of that haunting dream.

But if she did glance, back she might have noticed that the room no longer contained a single shadow, even where the light would require one to be. If she looked backwards she might have also noticed that her own shadow was twice its length, and that wherever it fell sprung up un-natural mushrooms of the brightest greens, and flowers of the purest blues, and that in her darkness the grass withered away.