I didn't think I was going to enter the contest this month, but I had this plot idea swimming in my head for a while and realized I might be able to connect it with the theme, Sunlight and Shadows. It's a clumsy effort, but I enjoyed writing it.

It's also kind of dark... I generally don't write stuff like that, but it's how it came out. Haha. It's good to change things up, I suppose.

Anyway, thanks for reading. And if you enjoy it, you can head over to the Village Square forums to vote for it at the beginning of next month. ;)

x x x

The thing he would always remember about her most, what he longed to preserve, was the way the sunlight through the leaves left dappled light like carelessly formed paintbrush strokes, little spots of brightness that stood out against the blue-green shadow cast across her skin by the trees around them.

Rick and Karen had spent so much of their childhood in that forest, and in the beginning it felt like it was only among the trunks and branches, with her at his side, that the world could ever be good and safe.

But eventually, he learned even that might not be true.

x x x

Their parents were friends before the two of them were ever born, they'd been told.

So that was how he'd been planted so firmly in her life. It was a matter out of their control. He would've spent a lot of time with her whether he liked it or not. But it turned out, for better or worse, that he liked it quite a bit.

"Hurry it up, you cad." It was a degradation tossed haphazardly over nine-year-old Karen's shoulder, with all of the strength of childlike, goodnatured ferocity. Cad. It was one of her favorite insults, and she used it throughout the words, though as she got older, she used it more sparingly.

Rick, also nine, lagged behind not because of physical inability but because of the weight of hesitation. He wasn't so sure this was a good idea, and said so. Karen did not receive his input well.

"You're always such a baby about everything. Do you always listen to what your mother tells you?"

"It's just, she specifically said not to go anywhere near where they were building..."

"So what, we're not supposed to go to the forest anymore?" She shook a fist at the injustice, at the sky. "I don't care what anyone says! I'm going, and you're coming with me!"

The construction site was in full view now. Gotz, who'd also enlisted the help of Harris, Duke, and Basil, was in the process of putting up the new church. The frame had already been constructed, the crisscross of boards forming a wooden ribcage. At the top of the structure, a cross stood, dignified and stately.

"They've got the cross up now," Karen said, slowing to a stop. "Look."

Rick stopped beside her, and the two had a moment's silence as they gazed up at the cross.

"All right, let's keep it moving," Karen said, grabbing his hand and pulling him forward.

"Karen! Where are we going? They're going to see us!" Rick eyed the working men, none of whom had turned towards the children—yet.

"They will if you keep acting like a cad. Shh," she hushed him, skirting around the construction site with Rick still in tow. He shut his mouth and held his breath until he felt the coolness of the forest shade.

"Don't you just love it here? It's great," she said, tipping her head back, face towards the tree tops, and closing her eyes. Rick felt his anger dissipate at the sight of her relaxed expression, at the face little spots of sun imprinted against her eyelids, her mouth, her shoulders, her knees.

Then she was all motion again. She kicked her sandals off—now the sun spots hit the tops of her feet—and took off through the trees.

"Where are you going?" he asked, following her like he always did. "Maybe we should go back, I'm not sure this is a good idea—"

Like the fulfillment of a prophesy, at that exact moment Karen let out a terrifying shriek.

x x x

She'd stepped on a stray nail from the construction site, he found out when he ran to her side. They were pretty far off from where the work was being done, so no one knew how it got there, but it did, and ended up stuck in the bottom of her foot.

Rick was still amazed even now at how calm he'd been through the whole thing, finding her, then running to the clinic for the doctor, explaining what had happened. He didn't consider himself squeamish, but the image of your lovely best friend with a nail pushed deep in her skin was nauseating at any age, especially nine.

But what got him through it was the guilt. He was there, and he knew better. He should've stopped her.

x x x

From the beginning, the forest was alluring, the way places that seem like the places for secrets are. Not even a nail in a foot could deter them from going back, day after day.

It was where Rick, at thirteen-years-old, sliced a special secret of his own, right into the bark of a tree trunk. He liked the way the carving looked in the forest light, made more mysterious and important with whispering shadows. Rick and Karen, he'd written in the wood. Short and simple.

The night of the fireworks, he showed her.

"We're going to miss them," Karen complained, tromping through the underbrush behind him. "This better be good."

"Oh, quit whining. You can see them from here. We're not that far from the beach, and they're really bright, even with the trees."

Karen muttered something that sounded distinctly like cad, though he knew her annoyance was just an act. She was curious.

"Here. See it?" He'd found the tree he was looking for. She leaned in close, so that her nose almost touched the trunk.

"...What does this mean?" she asked, turning away to look at him. It was the blankest he'd ever seen her face. Her eyes were wide and clear, and her lips parted slightly.

He turned red, and she saw, and he knew it, and she knew it.

"Rick!" She punched him playfully, and that blank look was gone, replaced by a grin that was a mixture of glee and uncertainty. "Why'd you take me all the way out here to show me this for?"

"You know why..." he mumbled, embarrassment overcoming him.

Far off, a smattering of cracks and pops and booms sounded, signaling the beginning of the fireworks show, but neither one of them seemed to notice.

"I want you to tell me." She tucked her hair behind one ear and leaned in close. He wasn't sure if she finally got fed up with waiting and closed the distance, or if he'd manned up and made the first move, but in his memory he liked to remember them coming together at the same time, pushing past shadows to meet in the middle.

x x x

Rick held Karen's hair back while she vomited, stomach contents hitting tree roots with a sickening splat.

He pat her back and tried not to look.

"Oh, Goddess," Karen groaned, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand when she finally finished, when she was empty. "That was terrible."

They were sixteen, and she'd just tried alcohol for the first time. Nabbed it from a cabinet her parents had.

"Now it's my turn," Rick said with a wry smile, and she laughed and then coughed.

"Cad."

"I told you not to. You shouldn't have drank so much. Not on your first time."

"Oh, like you're the expert on it?"

The challenge was there, lurking behind the words like a stealthy wild animal. Waiting.

He folded.

"Give me the bottle."

It wasn't until he'd had his own wretched retching fit until they both swore off alcohol for the rest of their lives.

"Never doing that again," Karen said, shoving Rick playfully on the arm. She gave him a kiss on the cheek, and he called her puke breath, and she called him cad.

It was a lie. "Never doing that again"—it was a lie.

x x x

She did it without him knowing about it. By the time he found out about it, about everything, she'd developed a high tolerance. But that day, even she'd gone too far. Taken too much.

Rick found her lying underneath the trees. Her hands were folded on her stomach and her knees were drawn up. The patches of sunlight highlighted pale skin, skin that seemed paler than usual. When had that happened?

"Karen?"

She opened her eyes and turned her head towards him, smiling, but there was something wrong about it. Something very wrong about the whole scene.

"Is everything okay?" He knelt down at her side and touched her arm.

"Why? Why wouldn't it be?" Her breath wafted towards him, carrying the stench of alcohol, of wine.

"You're drunk."

"Of course I'm drunk. I'm always drunk."

"No, you're not. You said... We said we weren't going to do it anymore. Never again."

"Fuck, Rick." He cringed. He wasn't a prude, but he hated the way she spat swear words—so raw and harsh and unpleasant. "We were kids then."

"We're kids now. We're seventeen. That was only a year ago."

She lifted an arm, waved away his fretting. "Yeah, yeah. Your point?"

"What is wrong with you?" He filled suddenly with anger, the feeling expanding rapidly and frightfully in his chest.

"Not me. My dad." She laughed, a rasping, bitter sound. "Though there's plenty fucking wrong with me, let me tell you."

"Your dad? Jeff? What happened?" The anger balloon deflated instantly at her words, making room for concern.

"It's his stomach. He's got another ulcer. He needs an operation."

"Oh. Oh, shit, Karen, I'm so sorry." He looked for the right words, but his mind felt like an unalphabetized dictionary. "But they can help him, right? If he gets the operation."

"People get cancer from too many ulcers," she said, staring up at the trees above their heads, past his face. She was alone in that moment, somewhere far away from him. He could see it in the way her eyes glazed like cloudy water. "I heard my mom say that. He could get cancer if his stomach doesn't stop acting him."

"Karen..."

"She yelled at him. He might die, and she was yelling." He expected the tears, almost wanted them, because then he could wipe them away. But she didn't cry, just stared through the leaves, through the sunlight, through the shadows. "She's such a bitch. I hate her. That bitch."

He didn't know what to say, so he abandoned the damned useless scrambled up dictionary of his mind and lay down instead, close enough next to her that their shoulders touched and he could easily hold her hand. That was the best that he could do.

x x x

It wasn't cancer that killed Jeff; it was a plain old ulcer, and though Rick didn't understand the finer medical details, he heard the words blood vessel and hemorrhage and it went too fast. He didn't hear any of those from Karen, but rather from his mother, who'd talked to Sasha, Karen's mother. Sasha was crushed, understandably and unfortunately so. Rick thought about how Karen had called her a bitch every time he passed the mourning woman on the street, and it made him feel helpless and sad.

But Jeff's death didn't come until four years after he'd found her in the forest that day, and while she waited for it to happen, Karen drank. Rick decided after a year to join her.

It started with stealing from her parents' stash and meeting in the forest, but once they came of drinking age, they didn't have to do that anymore. Instead, he watched her every night at the inn's bar, as she laughed along with all of the drunken men, the some of them the same ones that had helped build the church all those years ago. He never had more than a few himself; he disliked the feeling, or lack thereof, that he got from drinking too much. But Karen lived for it.

"I wish I could drink all my troubles away," he'd hear her dreamily sigh when she thought he wasn't listening. Or maybe she knew he could hear her and she didn't care. He wouldn't have been surprised by the latter. But he hated hearing her say it for a number of reasons. For the implication of the statement—that she had troubles, plural, that were dark enough that she needed oblivion to soothe herself. That she'd turned away from him, and their days spent in the forest.

During the day, she put up a great facade of normality. But he could see it in her eyes. She was waiting for the night, for the bar to open.

And when Jeff died, the wait was over. She didn't even wait for nighttime anymore.

x x x

Somehow, a while after the funeral, a month snuck by and Rick noticed he hadn't spoken to her. It dawned on him like a sudden realization, though surely he had to have known it all along, had to have purposefully avoided the bar, the supermarket. There was nowhere safe from her intoxication any longer. Maybe it was cruel of him. Maybe he was supposed to stick around. But she'd turned into a vortex, and he feared what might happen if he stayed.

He went to the forest that day, the day that marked a month of not speaking to her. Or planned to, but as he passed the church, he saw her standing in the cemetery.

He wasn't sure how to approach her, so he did so with caution and quiet. Too quiet though, and he regretted it—she didn't seem to feel his presence. She was too wrapped up in the grave at her feet. He didn't need to check the headstone to know what name he'd find written there.

"Karen," he said softly, and she jumped anyway. Turned, looked, recognized him.

"Rick." She breathed out gently and it caught in the air. The autumn was especially chilly this year. "You surprised me."

"I'm sorry," he said, for more than just the surprise.

They both fell silent, and he wondered just how he'd let this happen. It felt like she was hidden behind a stuck door at the end of a never-ending hallway. What she said next seem to confirm it.

"I tried to hang myself the other day."

He felt the pull of the vortex then, sucking up all the air and replacing it with coldness and horror. It left him unable to speak.

"I went to the forest. I thought a tree might work..."

It made him terribly guilty, but he wished he hadn't come. He didn't want to hear any of this.

"And you know what I saw? That carving you made." She hiccuped a laugh. "How long has it been? Maybe ten years?"

"Eight," he supplied, barely above a whisper.

"Right," she said, smiling sadly, but it faded away quickly. "I saw that there, and it made me stop. I just couldn't do it."

There was a pause before she spoke again.

"Rick, I... I think there's something wrong with me."

He was failing himself again with what to say, but on the other hand, he got the feeling that no dictionary would have the right words in this case.

So instead he grabbed her and hugged her.

He could see the tree line that began just beyond the church and cemetery, and he stared at it while he held her. It was one of those cloudy days that whitewashes the sky and strips the shadows from the world, giving everything a gloomy glow.

There was no sunlight for the trees to paint with that day, no shadows to form their canvas.

She pulled away from him a little and looked up. She was crying, but she managed to speak. "Do you want to go for a walk? In the forest, like old times? I know everything's different now, but..."

He knew what she meant—it wasn't just the absence of sunlight and shadows that made the forest different. It was the fact that they now knew it could hold more than just secrets; it could hold nails and bottles and nooses.

But he had to remind himself of what she said. The carving you made. That was there, too.

They walked from the cemetery to the trees hand-in-hand. Rick wasn't sure what would come next, but he did remember watching the weather forecast that morning. Tomorrow was supposed to be sunny.

x x x