40
WIL FISHER
The Woods
Oh no. God no. They said leave. They said turn away and
come here no more. But I came, and I know what it is they have done. Become as the air that you breathe in and out, and so I have. I have kept my secret. I have lain down and am asleep.
My hands and feet were once unbruised in the awakening of
the world. My head, unbowed before they came. And my darkness, my darkness—the light of the world has gone out, and that which is left is no more real than the vanished phantoms of my mind. I’m struck by what has been and what I have known, but then it is gone like dreams when I awake.
At nightfall I heard them. The muffled cries of the children and
the hushed whispers. Cold in their down-frayed blankets and starving. “Please,” they say. “Please. Don’t kill us.”
“I am not going to kill you.” They stare with eyes of sadness and
fear, like the condemned going to their doom. Are we all alike, then? Each one in his own nightmare? Christ.
“Where have you come from?”
“Down there.” She points south. “There was a village hidden
in the woods. We’ve been there since the tanks came and destroyed the towns. A band of men found us. They took some to work for them and the rest of us hid while they were in the streets. We saved what we could. We walked until we found this wood two nights ago.”
A child looks up, too spent to hold the world in his gaze much
more. I want to smile at him, to give him a look that will tell him that he is safe and to not be afraid, but I, too, am afraid, and he knows. He sees.
“They say the roads are watched. We found the place in the
hills where our people once lived. My niece was one of them. But the
