She came to at the sound of footsteps on dirt, a guiding light in front of her, and the surrounding night air prickling at her skin with the force of irate feathers. That's strange, She thought, I was playing poker with Birdie and Sam just a few minutes ago. She pondered this for a bit, and came to the conclusion that she must have drank a little bit too much and gone for a late night walk. It wasn't the first time it had happened, and it wasn't the strangest place she had ended up, so she just shrugged her shoulders and decided to have an adventure.
She came up to an old blue truck with a trailer attached to it. That's my truck! She tittered with glee. Things were starting to make sense; she must have parked it here in the forest with Birdie and Sam. A few of Birdie's brown feathers were under the front wheels. Oh, silly Birdie and Sam. They want me to find them. What a fun game, she would find them, and she would return Sam's liver when they were done. She was always borrowing it, and cursed herself when she realized it was still sitting in the back of the truck.
She knew that Sam and Birdie would have left a clue. Sam usually left drawings when they did scavenger hunts, but they never said what he wanted them to say. Sam was a pathological liar. She treated him as though he were perpetually on opposite day, even though that usually made him even harder to understand. She was fine with gibberish though. You don't have to understand someone to trust that they'll lend you their liver once in a while. Sam's a good friend, she thought fondly.
She circled the truck with an expectant grin on her face, shining the light on every surface of the Vehicle. Finding nothing there, she went and did the same to the trailer, letting out intermittent giggles. On the back grill, she finally spotted white against the dark surface, and almost squealed with glee.
She ripped the note off, and shone the flashlight on it, leaving her isolated with only the picture in sight. Barely containing her anticipation(for there was always a prize at the end, usually a dead cat or an old light bulb courtesy of Birdie) she bore her eyes into the drawing, sucking it in. She licked it vigorously; Birdie was good at leaving all the five senses on a clue. Unless Sam did this one, in which case it would be a trick. It tasted like chemicals, and she threw up quietly on the ground beside her.
She looked back to the drawing after wiping her mouth. It was crudely done, jagged lines making up the words which read Leave me alone. There were pine trees, and one very slender long-armed man staring back at her without eyes. Well, She reasoned. If Sam left this, that means he wants me to find him! But if Birdie left it, that probably just means she's in one of her moods. She had once seen Birdie in one of her moods. There were so many crying parents at the end of that day.
She continued on through the dark, letting the flashlight guide her way. She hummed as she went along, looking crossly at all the identical trees. It made her angry, how similar they were. They mocked her with their perfection, not even containing the modesty to clothe themselves, or apologize for the sight they were making. She decided she would light a marvellously large fire when the game was over.
To take her mind off the damn trees, she upped her humming to beat boxing. beat boxing took much more effort and it also made Sam and Birdie reciprocate involuntarily. She was a magic beat boxer. All she had to do was wait until she heard the other two's pitiable beat boxing and she would win the game instead of having to look for the notes. But, she conceded, I do enjoy scavenger hunts. After a minute, there were still no answering melodies to compliment her own, and she became even more determined to play the game.
She came up to a large over-ground sewage pipe, creating a short tunnel to absolutely nowhere. Knocking erratically on the draft metal walls, she burst with laughter at the booming echoes it produced which reverberated over and over through the pipe. She tried beat boxing and it sounded like there were five of her in the tunnel. This was just getting better and better. She shone her light to the other end of the tunnel and spotting something, kept the beam there for closer inspection.
There was a man there, facing towards her. A very slender man. Inhumanly slender in fact, with arms that went past a normal length down towards his knees. This was the man she had seen on the note that Sam and Birdie had left! Surely he didn't want to be alone in this big dark forest; what could he possibly do for fun? Taking another look at his deranged features and featureless face, she felt bad for the poor man. He was probably made fun of in school with such an utterly freakish appearance. What a freak. No, she thought, I will be nice to him, and maybe he will teach me how to do a p-p-p-p-p-p-p-p-poker face. Where did that tic come from? Anyways...
She waved towards him with a large grin on her face, showing all five of her greening teeth, and the man pitch forward towards her eagerly. In response, she took a few dancing steps towards him. It felt like some sort of courtship ritual. As their distance decreased, her vision started to blur with something akin to radio static. She bent down to rub her eyes, yelling a muffled One sec! to the man. This was not the time for 50 greatest pop hits. It was never the time for that, in fact.
Shielding her eyes with her arm in front, she called out to him, "Have you seen Birdie or Sam? I'm pretty sure they left me here! I have to return a liver, so I can't stay long." No answer. Well, it was true that he didn't have a mouth.
She looked up, and there, directly in front of her, was a face as white as Birdie's protruding bones, with no nose, mouth, or eyes to convey an expression. Shedidn't feel scared, though. He probably just wanted a kiss. I would come out the winner in that anyway, she thought, I have terribly bad breath. She wondered what he may have in his head to say, locked behind that white partition. Understanding slapped her like an angry nun. He's the one who left notes! Of course.
Smiling impossibly wider now as the man continued to "stare" at her motionless, she bent down slightly and tenderly seized the man's right hand in her left. "You don't have to be alone, Slender man." She promised the slender man, "You can come live with Sam and Birdie and I; we play poker and Sam has many organs of varying use to offer! I suggest trying out the brain before Birdie gets to it, she's a greedy one, that." She said this last part hushed into the man's earless head as though it were a very lucrative piece of information.
"Come on, let's go see-" Her sentence was cut off by her own surprising scream. The radio static had returned deafeningly loud and clouded her vision to the point of blindness. She doubled over smacking her free hand on her head as if she were a broken TV. Pop songs always did have a way of getting in your head, like a virus.
She painlessly felt the man's hand tighten over hers until he had shrunk the extremity down to pea size. He dutifully shrunk down the rest of her until she was the size of an obese inch worm, and only then did the static stop its merciless berating on her head.
She was not amused. Before she could scold him though, he picked her back up and settled her into his breast pocket and again she screamed. She started to panic, and punched her hands ineffectually into the soft cotton of the inside of the pouch. Where did he get cotton? All I wear is epidermis! More serious thoughts hit her as she realized the severity of her situation.
How would she return Sam's liver? When would she get a chance to light this whole goddamn tidy and pretentious forest to ash? And most importantly, where could she get a pint-sized cake tagged "eat me" to reverse this newly acquired dwarfing syndrome?
As quick as the fear came, it relented, seeping away from her slowly to leave her limbs and body sagging with fatigue. The Slender man's pocket was just so comfy and warm, she decided she'd have a little doze. Curling into a ball, she closed her eyes to the sound of gentle footsteps and quiet radio static.
She woke up in a way that told her she had been lying in a bed. Not in the way she had came to the previous night, already in motion. Head still misted with sleep, she looked around lazily at the old, wooden, one-roomed shack that she shared with Birdie and Sam. Birdie and Sam? She looked around with sharper focus and spotted them in the far corner.
"Birdie!" She yelled in histrionic enthusiasm, "Sam! I looked for you all over yesterday; all through the forest and found your note and I met this poor, slender man." They didn't respond. They both had their eyes closed.
"Guys?" She prompted, slightly worried. She got up from her bed which was actually a pile of pine needles, and walked slowly over towards the pair.
She poked birdie, and the old sparrow skeleton, affixed with decaying patches of skin, tumbled over onto its side. That was strange. She thought. Birdie must be in one of her other moods. She decided to leave Birdie alone to process the angst she must be feeling. Birdie was often filled to the brim with such gloomy feelings that it gurgled out as poetry. Terrible, repulsive, nonsensical poetry. She tried to be out of the house when this happened.
She was turning to Sam when she realized she didn't have his liver! He wouldn't be happy one bit. Well, she decided, she would have to face his wrath now instead of later. He could trust her though, she made sure to keep it cool.
She turned fully to him. Sam just lay there, as he usually did, but did not berate her or even acknowledge her. She noticed the cut on his right side that the liver had come from. His whole body was mottled with deep slashes where she had borrowed his various organs. She loved Sam's generosity; he never asked for one thing in return.
His skin had taken on a gray color in the last couple of days, and he wasn't nearly as prone to talking, well, lying, as he had been before she had started borrowing. She sighed at Sam's unresponsiveness; he could be such an infuriating child at times. Both of them were being childish in fact.
A wonderful and sure-fire idea came to her: beat boxing! She was magic, after all. As soon as she started on her groovy tunes, they would have to react; they were defenceless against her wry charms.
She started her beat boxing, but something was distinctly different. All that came out was static, grainy and rough. She stopped abruptly in horror. Had the Slender man done this to her? Surely he wasn't cruel enough to take away her greatest gift.
Birdie and Sam still weren't moving, so she resigned herself to sitting back down on the pine needle mound, head in her hands. They were playing poker just last night, and now they wouldn't even talk to her! It couldn't be her fault, no, it had to be that strange distorted man that had shrunk her down. It was all his fault.
She hurriedly put on her shoes, caked with the dirt that proved her expedition of the previous night. With a menacing snarl akin to that of a purring cat, she jumped up from the heap, grabbed her favorite pair of scissors (large metal ones) and rushed out of the rickety shack. She only paused to grab Sam's sopping heart a few feet away from the shack; It would give her courage for the epic task before her and a snack if she got hungry.
Stomping into the woods with a feral energy, she pursued hand drawn notes written in their spidery scrawl. She would make Birdie and Sam her friends again and they would play poker until the day of reckoning. She hoped fervently as she hunted to make it back for dinner time, it was a special treat tonight: Sam's kidney. He had two, he could share. He was nice that way, Birdie was witty, and she had her (temporarily impaired) beat boxing skills. Nothing could stop the trio from seizing the day the way they wanted to. She trudged on with a bloodlust for the slender man, and disappeared into the infuriatingly even woods leaving a light trail of blood as her breadcrumbs.