Page 15 of The Bleeding Woods

I gaze through closed eyelids, counting veins like red wine spilled on an apricot tablecloth.

Only after a few measured breaths do I slip them upward.

The sunlight stabbing past our Hummer’s tempered glass isn’t normal.

It’s barely sunlight at all. If the sky wasn’t a marbled swirl of hydrangea blue and abalone, I’d swear it was coming from the moon.

Beams plummet toward the earth, refracted raindrops of white rolling down a clear umbrella.

Joey has curled into a boulder of muscle and bone.

He’s asleep, not resting. Jade couldn’t be more unconscious.

She lies with her head tipped back over the center console, her mouth a megaphone for snores.

I haven’t the slightest idea how she rose from off her duffel bag pillow and wriggled between the seats.

Clara is pressed against the wall, her back to the woods.

A sipped bottle of water shut haphazardly sits in the nearest cupholder, beside her plastic bag of pills.

She’s taken double the dosage.

In the front seat, I’ve stacked two cases of spring water and a backpack full of road-ready snacks.

It isn’t the breakfast of champions, but it’ll keep us from starving.

I ration out four protein bars, four cereal cups, and a bag of baby carrots.

Then, as quietly as possible, I step out into the air.

The chill of the receding night lingers, prompting goose bumps to bloom on my arms. The earthy smell of pine and petrichor sweeps over my senses, familiar and foreign in the same instance.

There’s more to it than that. The forest is at the apex of an exhale, half alive, half dead.

It’s like there’s a rotting tooth hiding somewhere in this great, green jaw.

There’s a corpse inside a distant closet wafting the sickly sweet stench of decomposition.

Today, we’ll hunt for cell service. We’ll take turns: two stationed at the car in case someone drives past, and two wandering down the road on foot.

Clara volunteers for the first shift. Jade announces that she’d rather swallow a handful of rocks than join her.

Joey murmurs something about the likelihood of loose bowels with a gesture to his bowl of chocolate puffs.

Clara and I make it a few miles from the car, ants on a trail wedged between parallel walls of greenery. The forest is an ocean split by whatever cruel god insists we stay the path. Its uncanny silence settles into my bones.

“So, uh . . .” I cough. “Do you want to talk about yesterday?”

“Yesterday?” She stiffens. “There’s nothing to talk about.”

“Come on, Clara. It’s me. You can tell me. Was it the ride? Were you in the car for too long?”

“Gray . . .”

“Does it have to do with the gas station? With that guy you met?”

“Why would it have anything to do with him?”

The image of his face, made anonymous by those dusty windows, sails across my memory. I pause for far too long. She’s smart; she’ll see right through me if I let her. I change the subject. “Your pills . . . you never did tell me what they were for.”

The gravel gathered at the asphalt edge produces a rough sizzle. She’s stopped dead in her tracks, heels half buried and gaze severe. “It has nothing to do with my pills.”

“Sorry, sorry. I’d never judge you, though, especially not for having some kind of condition. I just need you to talk to me. I need to keep you safe, and I can’t do that if you don’t—”

“I never asked you to keep me safe, Grayson.”

She’s become a pillar of granite, a stone carving, still as the tree trunks huddled behind her back.

Her shoes, rimmed with dry splotches of brown, have become roots.

If I were as imaginative as Joey, I’d worry for the integrity of the road.

Right now, she looks ready to riddle it with cracks and embed herself in the crust. Only after too many moments of stomach-tightening tension does she break eye contact.

“I’m sorry. That came out wrong. What I mean is, you’ve already got enough on your mind. You’ve got Joey. You’re the only thing keeping Jade under control. I won’t add more to that. I won’t be a burden to you. I won’t be a burden to anyone.”

I close the space that’s gathered between us, taking her face in my hands. With an unexpectedly feeble dose of reluctance, she softens. Her irises shift from Martian bedrock to molten chocolate. “You could never, ever be a burden to me.”

“I can take care of myself,” she insists, her resolve solid but her voice like air.

“I know, but you don’t have to. Not always.”

Time loosens. We stay like this for hours, minutes, milliseconds.

We stare at one another through an entire autumn, for a single breath, and in a fractured stream of eternities.

It’s only us. It’s us and the cold breeze leaving bite marks on the back of my neck.

It’s us and the trees, watching with millions of eyes obscured by shadow.

It’s us and the ghostly howl of the wind whipping the clouds above into dollops of cream.

Stolen situations like this have never failed to get me in trouble.

My mother’s voice echoes through my ears, telling me to keep my distance and maintain it like a vegetable garden.

My father’s pursed lips flash across my vision, his expression wrought with concern and disapproval.

I wish there was more of him in my memories than Mother, though.

He was never concerned with duty, only with safety.

He didn’t care about the world, only our world.

I wish Clara could be a part of it—our world. My world.

A feeling like fingertips brushes the exposed sliver of skin between my pant leg and my poorly tied sneaker. Something’s grabbed my ankle.

Our infinity ends, the loop sliced in half. By the time I get my gaze to the ground, there is nothing but weeds at my feet.

“It wasn’t the pills,” Clara says, breathless.

“What was it?” I ask, equally so.

A horrible creaking noise crawls toward us, the sound of a limb swinging out of place. In the distance, a scraggly tree moves like a boxer rolling out their shoulder. A loosened branch plummets, then falls among the moss and mushrooms to rot.

“Jade,” she whispers. “I thought I’d be okay spending this much time with her, and I thought it might actually help us get through the weekend, but all I see when I look at her is a girl who lost her parents because I needed to go to some ridiculous recital.”

“Clara, it wasn’t your fault.”

“Yes, it was, Grayson. You don’t understand.”

“You were a kid. You didn’t know any better.”

“I should have, though. I should have known better. I should have been better. Now they’re gone, it’s all my fault, and Jade hates me.

You want to know what’s worse? I’m upset with her for it.

Forgiveness is the last thing I deserve, but here I am, with the audacity to wish things could go back to the way they were.

” Her chin drops to her chest. “So yesterday, I . . . I took a walk. I thought it would help clear my head, but it only made things worse.”

I pull her into a hug, and her small frame practically disappears in my arms. From over the crown of her head, I spot more movement in the brush.

“It’s okay. Hey, it’s okay. Everything is going to work out.

Jade’s a puzzle, that’s for sure—but trust me, the pieces that love you more than anything are still there.

” I sigh, rubbing circles into her back.

“Please don’t be so hard on yourself. You’re human, Clara.

You’re allowed to have feelings, and they aren’t all supposed to make sense.

There are some things that just . . . never will.

Let me know if you need time away to sort things out, but please don’t go far.

I don’t want you to get lost. I don’t know what I’d do if I . . . if I lost you.”

She tips her head back, gazing at me through a succession of blinks, lashes like torn dragonfly wings. A dishonest smile pulls her lips into a crescent, but she can’t throw a trench over all her self-deprecation. “Why are you always so kind to me?”

“Clara . . .” I am as sincere as a handwritten valentine and as serious as the plague. “You are more to me than I’ll ever be able to explain.”

Thunder rumbles through the sky. It growls, a wolf in the clouds with its teeth bared and its gums covered with foam.

There is a darkening. Every patch of blue shudders with evanescent existential horror as a tower of gunmetal gray looms on the horizon.

Within it, emaciated arms of plasma lacerate it.

Each comes closer to contact with the ground than the last.

The air is in rigor mortis, yet the same weed reaches for my ankle, moving without muscle, unwavering without bone.