Wood Smoked Candy

Holly had stopped breathing in, her lungs were still doing the action, but no air was reaching her. And it was strange for all she could smell was firewood and sweet timber moss. She could see him, Jonathan, feel him dissecting her with that frosty gaze from under his burlap. Yet at the same time, her vision was waning, pulsing and distorting into many hues of light. She did not feel betrayed she'd known not to open that door.

Her body exhaled the air she believed was not coming in. As she did her vision blurred strangely, did Jonathan have antlers? Holly slid into sudden unconsciousness as if defending herself from what she was to see.

A teenage Holly sat on a laid-over log at the edge of a summer evening lakeside. Watching as rocks were skipped by another teen, one right next to her that she could not see. Could not hear even as they made conversation.

"I told you, I didn't even look at him." Her own voice was terribly meek, devoid of most emotion, "I had no idea he was right there."

It was just white noise in the place of a reply. Yet she was fearful of it, turning her eyes away from the water down to her palms. They were wrapped in band-aids, nails chewed down to the edge of being dangerous, and dirty from the log they had just been on. She wiped them on her shorts, "You know I wouldn't." Her voice so small and she felt like this plea was lost on deaf ears.

Felt it even more as the person next to her grabbed her arm and pulled roughly, they were hissing in her ear more deafening silence. They were being peremptory.

Her eyes could not look any lower and it was not what she should have done. They wanted her to look up. Holly never seemed to do anything right for them. Her hair was pulled, jerking her head to the side but a tender brush of knuckles on her cheek spoke to love. Sweet lips pressed kisses to her temple and jawline. She pushed away only once and the gentleness was gone. Her head was suddenly held under the lakeside waters. Knees being scraped on the rocky lake edge. Drowning not once but thrice gasping out each time for them to stop and on the final one, "I love you! I'm sorry!" In perfected lie.

The hazed unconscious dream fell apart to the emotion of boiled-over anger, red light blurred the scene, and Holly now stood above a dark-coloured elk in the deep darker woods. The body of the creature was bloodied and had a piece of it missing from the bite of a wolf. Holly reached down and picked up a pack of unopened cigarettes off the ground, tenderly running a thumb over the glossy brand new plastic package. The air all around her smelled like smoke from the bonfire of the nearby party and sweet candy as they burned mossy logs.

When she woke, she woke without a sound. Not even a gasp. Her eyes were wide, her face full of sweat, and her body shot upright. She recalled nothing between deer-boy-doctor and regaining consciousness…