Constantine
In the forest stark and grim live unspeakable things.
My mother had never been one for bedtime stories. Never one for articulating much at all. Mostly she cleaned her tiny house—I never thought of it as mine or ours—with the fierceness of a woman who knew civilization danced on a razor’s edge and a single misfolded towel or an undusted mote was enough to send it toppling.
To hold that eventuality at bay, she worked. Constantly. Touching up the bright-white paint. Washing the blue and purple floral linens. Tearing away the spiky fragrant bushes around the edges, chopping down the single shade tree in the yard. She gave it to a neighbor with a fireplace for nothing, a moment of largesse that made him trust our odd family even less.
Then she lay down rough green grass that came in rolls like toilet paper and was not to be walked on.
During the day, the house smelled pleasantly of cinnamon or chocolate and less pleasantly of ammonia.
There was a blue, onion-patterned curtain that shielded the window above the kitchen sink. It was always closed, except on laundry days, when the window opened onto a range of mountains, faraway and tree-covered.
Sometimes my mother would forget that the curtain wasn’t there. Then the faucet ran and the food burned until my father came home and turned everything off and put the curtain back on its brass rod and pulled his wife away from the window.
Those were the evenings when she told me, her only child, stories, cautionary tales about people who wandered into the woods, losing their way, their lives, their souls.
They all started the same way.
“In the forest dark and grim live unspeakable things.”
One Christmas, when I was still very young—six, maybe seven?—I heard a noise downstairs in the kitchen. Convinced it was Santa eating the brownies my mother had made, I crept down the steps. I did not find Santa noshing on rich squares of chocolate and walnuts. Instead, I found my mother staring empty-eyed through the kitchen window toward the snow-dusted forests, bloody butcher paper on the counter.
Gnawing absently on raw beef tongue.
In the forest dark and grim live unspeakable things.