Page 10 of The Bleeding Woods

When I awaken, the sky has become a haze of crepuscular gray.

The forest is now devoid of all color. The blur of greenery is a blur of red-tipped leaves and branches like the appendages of a multiarmed eldritch beast. Its bony black fingers claw at the windows of our vehicle, scratching and scraping, desperate for entry.

We’re on the same road. It’s still perfectly straight, but now it’s been suffocated by barren trees and muted bramble.

The road remains, but the realm has changed.

It’s like nowhere I’ve ever seen, a place pulled from paintings on the walls of ancient art galleries and run-down antique shops.

How long has it been?

My head feels stuffed to the brim. Cotton balls of confusion pile behind my eyes, adding a sufficient amount of puff beneath my lids.

I feel as though I’ve been sleeping for days.

I feel as though I haven’t slept in years.

The dashboard clock has glitched, displaying only a row of zeroes where the time should be.

Grayson drives, seemingly in something of a trance.

Jade and Joey snooze against one another behind us.

All is uncannily, eerily serene. It’s still, too still.

The world’s become a slab of stone. I’m swimming through embalming fluid.

I’m dreaming while I’m awake. I’m here in the passenger seat, I’m everywhere in this forest, and I’m nowhere at all.

How long has it been? I want to ask, but my lips don’t move. Have I forgotten how to speak? Have I ever spoken before? Yes, of course. I spoke to that dreamy clerk at the gas station minutes ago, hours ago, lifetimes ago.

The engine gags on gasoline and sputters to a slow, pathetic halt. Grayson blinks a dozen or so times before he seems to register it.

“What the hell?” Jade groans, groggy as she straightens in her seat.

“It . . . wasn’t me. The car just stopped,” says Grayson, practically part zombie.

“Oh, Mom’s gonna kill you.” Joey stretches through a yawn. “She’s been doing overtime for months to pay it off. I haven’t had a proper conversation with her since, like, my birthday. You’re in big trouble, mister.”

“But I didn’t do anything.” Grayson frowns deeply, his hands hovering above the wheel like he’s too afraid to touch it.

“You must have done something. Cars don’t just stop.” Jade’s temper gets the better of her, her voice a thunderous boom compared to Grayson’s woozy rumble.

“Well, sometimes they do.”

“You packed us into a car that just occasionally decides to stop? For a drive this long?”

“Jade, come on . . .” I cut in.

She gives me her attention, insulted by the fact that I had spoken at all.

Unfortunately, I can’t help but remember the summer Dad gave us a crash course on small-engine repair.

As always, Jade picked it up effortlessly.

I broke my finger and landed us in the emergency room for four hours.

She brought me fast-food fries and accused the orthopedist of price gouging.

“Let’s just open it up and see if we can figure out what’s going on,” I continue.

I disembark, pad around to the front of the Hummer, pop open the hood, and stare into the maze of mist and chrome.

I bury my head in the innards of the engine, trying to remember our father’s lessons.

He’d be ashamed of me now. Twisting pipes and sputtering monitors mock me, and from somewhere in the stars, Dad shakes his head.

“I . . . don’t know what’s wrong with it,” I admit after some directionless fiddling.

Jade nudges me aside. I watch in awe as she assesses all that I couldn’t understand.

Yet again, she stands as an effortless example of human intuition.

She learned faster, understood with such ease.

After aggressively messing with a few valves and switches, she reemerges with flushed cheeks and greasy hands.

Dad would be proud of her; he was always so proud of her.

“Oil’s good. Coolant level’s fine. I checked the battery, and we have a full tank of gas. This car should run fine.”

Yet it is completely stalled, and we are stranded in the middle of nowhere.

I suppose it is a somewhere of some kind, but most people in their right mind avoid landscapes like this one.

We are in a tunnel of ghostly trees split by the road, which has devolved from a path of freshly laid asphalt to a thin, crackling trail large enough for one car to pass at a time.

Nothing suggests another car has been here for weeks—months, even.

This far into the forest, there is only decay.

Everything is stained by the markers of it.

The bushes and weeds strewn across the ground look like bony hands rising from shallow graves.

The trees are mutilated and disfigured, like bodies standing at attention.

The sky remains overcast, a terrible ombré of light gray to gunmetal that suggests nighttime is inching near.

Blackstone Forest is still alive. Only, it is alive with death.

Blackstone Forest . . . there was something important about Blackstone Forest. There’s a reason I’m here. There’s a reason, I’m sure there is. My hand meanders to my hip, and in my pocket, two flimsy plastic reminders come to my rescue. The cards. The pills. I’m here because I need my pills.

“Great. Goodbye, hot tub; hello, choosing which one of us is expendable enough to be eaten.” Joey jokes, though his voice reflects a seriousness elicited from years of watching reality television.

He quickly puts his finger to his nose. “Not it. I vote Grayson. He’s taller, has more muscle content, and he’s a vegetarian. ”

Grayson folds his arms over his chest. “We are not going to eat each other.”

“He does have more muscle content, but wouldn’t the constant influx of stress hormones mess up the meat?” Jade forces a crooked smile for Joey’s sake.

It dawns on me that Joey, at only fifteen years old, was the one to break our terrified tension.

Unsettled as I am, I slip a smile onto my face for him too.

He’s the closest thing to a younger sibling I have, and a chance to resurrect all Jade once was for me.

“Yeah, but the vegetarian thing is a major plus. Sorry, Gray. I’m siding with Joey on this one. ”

“Don’t apologize to him, Clara. You’ll get too attached. We’re in the wild now.” Joey pokes at his side, scoping it out for tenderness. “It’s eat or be eaten.”

Batting him away, Grayson pulls out his cell phone and holds it in the air, trying to gather a signal. “Very funny. Come on, I’m not getting any service here. Maybe if we hike for a bit, we’ll pick up some bars.”

“My phone’s almost dead.” Joey shrugs.

“You didn’t charge your phone?” Grayson gapes. “Why wouldn’t you charge your phone?”

“Excuse me for trying to foster appreciation for the present moment,” Joey defends himself. “Some people enjoy a good dopamine detox every once in a while.”

“Joey, that isn’t the point. You should always have your phone charged, just in case. You never know when you might need it.”

As Grayson and Joey slip into a brief battle about the importance of maintaining a satisfactory cell phone battery, Jade pulls a pack of cigarettes from her pocket.

She lights one, then breathes a deep, nicotine-infused puff through her lungs.

With the others arguing, it feels as though we’ve been left alone.

It’s just me and her. We’re not sitting cross-legged on our grandmother’s Persian rug, but somehow the scent of lavender fills my olfactory memory.

“Are you okay?” I blurt.

She narrows her eyes. “Does it matter?”

“To me, yes.” I’m dizzy. It’s dangerous to drop my filter like this. “I’m sorry, that came out weird. I just . . . I just wanted to—”

“I’m fine, Clara. I’m always fine.” She blows a faceful of secondhand smoke in my direction. “What do you want, my medical records?”

My stature shrivels as I fan away the fumes. The ash of the present replaces the flowery notes from the past. “Thanks for checking out the car.” I shift the subject.

“It’s not like it helped.”

“Yeah, but . . . it was still impressive. I’m sure we’ll get this all sorted out, but in the meantime, maybe we . . . I mean, I guess, we could—”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she hisses.

“About what?”

“Are you kidding me? You know what.”

“Actually, I wasn’t referring to . . .” I shouldn’t be upset with her.

I’m not entitled to anger in this arena, and I must remember that.

“I was going to ask about Blackstone Forest. It’s a historical landmark.

While we’re stuck here, we might as well admire it.

” And I might as well see how much information I can get out of her.

If she won’t be my sister, I’ll make her my accomplice.

“Do you know what kind of trees these are?”

“Ugly.”

I laugh, but I cannot let her make me laugh. I don’t deserve it. Laughter, like love, is for real people, good people. It isn’t for me.

“They aren’t ugly. They’re just . . . different. I think they might be maples or beeches, though the color palette doesn’t match at all. I wonder why . . .” Easy, Clara. Easy does it. “I heard a rumor about some fire that happened up here a couple of decades ago. Maybe it has something to do with—”

Her eyes fire ocular lead through mine. She holds a finger to her lips, demanding my silence before throwing her gaze at Joey. “Shut up. You’ll scare the kid.”

“I’m sorry, I—I didn’t think—”

“You never do,” she snaps. She turns on her heel, offering stiffened shoulder blades in place of information. Conversation with her is now out of the question, leaving me about as close to finding more pills as I am to bonding with her.