Author: juliette

Nature Sketches

Maria S. Picone

As a child, I loved to pinch the suckers from the tomatoes out underneath the terracotta sun. They grew in between the branches, signaling a riot or a disorder too deep to be named, other than Nature. In my own garden slept a forest of herbs and wildflowers—blue delphinium, purple Johnny-jump-ups, catnip, and spearmint. I made tea, potpourri, and magical concoctions from this bounty. To me, bliss could be nothing other than a summer day on the deck, drinking a lemonade and watching my cat, Elizabeth, frolic like a kitten in the  grass, or exploring the woods across the street with my friends, hiking to the mysterious wooden bench where we sat to discuss middle-school secrets, wishes, and dreams with no witnesses but tall patient oaks and each other.

*

My parents grew eggplants, cucumbers, zucchini, and tomatoes to stock my grandmother’s fridge. If we didn’t have them for her, chances were that her brother would bring them by. He kept a plot the size of a house’s foundation out underneath the pine trees bordering his land. My grandmother cooked until she fell for the umpteenth time, entering a nursing home to give her time to heal.

We paved over the garden so my grandmother could come home; the slope created a driveway, solving the problem of too many stairs for her wheelchair. It was the first time my parents killed something I loved. But I knew about death. Once, I overwatered an African violet. The fuzzy leaves reminded me of a cat’s tongue, their shape the spades in her deck of cards. It burgeoned with good health before it dropped, wilting and half-rotted, its leaves coated in gray dust.

*

My grandmother’s room at the nursing home faced the nursing home garden and the woods, and she had a large window. In every season, her brother and his wife would decorate it with window clings to brighten the room where she spent her last ten years.

Coming back from college for her ceremony, I ran to the woods when it got too much to be in the house, the darkness. It was a damp March and the slush of the forest floor gave way to rotten leaves. The bench remained, a little grayer than before. I took off my glove and stroked the battered wood with my bare hand. Content in what did and never changed.

I saved the roses, dramatic and dark, from her funeral. Their stems had sharp thorns like a cat’s claws.

*

My senior year of college, my great-uncle and aunt emailed to tell me that my grandmother’s Christmas cactus, a sickly old plant that had languished with her in the nursing home, had bloomed. “I know it sounds crazy but I’m convinced it’s a message from Gus for Maria’s graduation,” they wrote. I could see in those fertile green leaves, the sharp edges, the red holiday cheer of my childhood home, living on with my cat in the afterlife.

The last time I visited her headstone, we planted geraniums. Someone had left a pot of petunias, the potting soil black with rain. I looked at the slick granite that bore our name, Picone. We pulled a pile of weeds to put in the plastic bag, an offering of clover, bluegrass, and dandelions. The cemetery, like a sacred grove, is wrapped in forest. Neither the sky nor my eyes were clear, but a bliss lingered in me nonetheless as I swept away the browned pine needles blown down from the trees.

Maria S. Picone

One Night I Walked into the Woods

Christie Megill

The forest raised me, like it did so many others, with dirt-caked jeans, untamed eyes, and imaginations that could be barely be contained inside a single mind.

I was brought up by the towering trees, the woodland animals that delighted in frightening me by skittering under leaves and rustling thick bushes, the breeze that made branches sing and my own skin flush.

The shadows. The ghosts. Their whispers.

I grew up in the woods, where farmers once settled, where crumbling stone walls marked property lines and cow paths. Woodland advanced upon every angle of my house, surrounding us like a decaying castle in an old story. My mother could never get a garden to thrive in the rocky soil, yet the forest flourished.

Back then, I didn’t know the extent of what could be hiding in the woods. Never mind the fairy tales I devoured, ripe with the threat of wolves and witches. Wolves did not roam in Connecticut. Witches always seemed misunderstood

And so I believed I was safe. But now I know what is there, watching and waiting, sliding into the gloom and traveling on the backs of songbirds and foxes. Still, I continue to return to these woods. I return home and I peer into the thicket.

One night, I walked into the woods. I was grown by then, nothing like the little girl who once stalked that property. Or, I was exactly like that girl, but with a woman’s skin and a more battered soul. My children slumbered soundly in the bedroom where I’d slept when I was young. They did not fear the forest the way they should, either. I told myself they would learn. But then, had I?

The moon, engorged and luminous, hung in the unhindered sky like a lantern, though it could not possibly illuminate all that was obscured by inky tree trunks and stirring ferns. Even in the light of day, nightmares can haunt the mind. We like to believe if we shed light on the shadows, we will realize there is nothing there, nothing to be afraid of after all. We turn on closet lights and shine lamps under the bed, certain that the monsters were manufactured.

I walked into the woods in rubber boots and a woolen coat, my hair loose and the wind on my neck. The woods were a landscape teeming with flora and fauna. They were nature and beauty. Still, my body tingled and my stomach cramped as I left the protection of a grassy yard, walking into the wild.

Since that night, I’ve learned to trust myself more expertly. Intuition, as throbbing as a full moon, is not a hysterical reaction to a normal circumstance. It is the truth, sighing through the body and shocking the brain.

Shadows slipped past, hiding in faraway corners beyond my sight. Charcoal tree trunks blended into the unending night, black against black. Moonlight slipped through to the ground so that I could almost make out my feet against the chilled earth. A spiderweb grazed my face, sticking to strands of hair, and I brushed away its fine threads.

The air tasted sweet and melancholy, crisp and alert.

When I was young, the forest spoke to me. I see that now. And I better understand what it was trying to communicate in its imprecise, ancient way.

There were no apparitions or disembodied voices, no tangible monsters that materialized before me or secret books I uncovered in the dirt. Though I did leave many messages, I remember. On lined paper torn from my school notebooks, I scribbled snippets of prose and desperate wishes, burying them under the earth. Perhaps I’ll never know, or recall, the contents of those notes, but the forest does. The memory of trees is long and unhurried, unlike a brook or a cloud. Trees soak in our stories through their roots, like so much water, and keep them stored in their hidden grooves. The trees knew me, and they will know me until I am no longer here.

Small mammals stirred in the undergrowth and the hallmark call of owls echoed eerily through the branches. I walked down the familiar path of my youth, dry and dusty, though then it was narrower than before. Soon enough, the forest would devour it and the next generation of girls would not find it there, under the vines and thorns that time would grow. They would take knives, or bats, or their bare hands to clear away the trail. But for me, it was still there. A ghost of what it had been.

My foot caught on an exposed root and I stumbled, though I did not fall. When I came to the clearing, I did not need moonlight nor markers to know of my arrival.

The quiet told me.

This spot was the farthest into my forest I would venture when I was a child. It was a gate and a barrier, and even then, in my daydreamy ignorance, I knew not to cross it.

When a wood hushes, it’s not merely the sound that vanishes. The air lightens and the shapes sharpen. The body changes, becoming acutely aware of every twig on the ground, stone blocking the way, and bird sitting silently atop a tree, staring but not flying away.

When the forest speaks, it makes sure you have no choice but to listen.

Under the moon and the shadow canopy, time stopped as my muscles tensed. My ears grew larger, waiting for the inevitable and ethereal call to retreat as quickly as my rubber boots would take me. Hairs stood on my neck while under my wool coat and thin pink pajama top, goosebumps dotted my arms.

In my youth, I was frequently consumed by this sensation. It was the faint murmur of a change in the surroundings, a shift in safety, a breath of clarity. I would often write outside, a notebook propped on my skinny, bug-bitten thighs. A stone fence still stands over a vanishing stream, and it was my outdoor office before I knew it was what I needed, and what I would eternally return to.

As a young girl, I was sitting on the fence one summer day, deep in thought about a story that ached inside me. Then, it happened. My surroundings were suddenly altered and I knew, in the well of my instinctual awareness, that I had to leave that place immediately. I closed my notebook, swung my legs off the fence, and ran up my driveway. I ran.

That night in the woods, the same feeling passed through me. The shadows darkened and the crackling leaves overhead blocked out the moon’s comforting glow. Patches of stars were visible until wind-battered boughs blotted out the only spots of light. Cool air pressed upon me.

Again, I sped through the woods toward shelter and warmth. The forest wanted me to listen. No wolves were following my trail, but as for monsters, I did not know. I thought I was safe because I had become the witch.

When I glanced in a mirror at home, I gasped at the sallow image reflecting back. Silver moon spots dappled my face, along with a fresh scratch from a stray branch in the woods. A thin, elegant strip of blood ran down my cheek.

The forest promised no safety. It cut and bruised, leaving marks etched into my skin and my soul, no matter how wise I thought myself to be. Still, I knew I would return again.

Christie Megill

Lake Oswego

Colin Lubner

The road went on longer than prior adventures dictated it should. Disappearing required predictable space and time, they’d found: the last street lamp on a wooded road announced an immediate narrowing. A half-mile more and asphalt turned to sand. Farther—another two minutes, max—and the path would grow unpassable. Potholes and puddles and fallen trees would bar the way. Joking to conceal their relief, they would turn the car around. They would return.

***

South Jersey’s Pine Barrens spanned over one million acres of cranberry bogs and disused furnaces. From the late 1700s to the middle of the following century, its forges had shipped bog iron (notable for both its high quantity and its low quality) to markets in Philadelphia and New York City. Towns had grown and thrived and died in a decade. Other towns—like Southampton, Shamong—had endured.

The boys did not know this history, not that night: all they knew was of the absence that had come after. Mobsters had buried mobsters. Devils had multiplied and terrorized before returning to the ground once more. These and other legends: ghost towns whose populations had pulled Roanokes of their own. Backwoods cabins whose respective owners lived on in their respective cellars’ womblike darks. Colonies of incestuous racists. These they knew. These were the Pine Barrens, wherein weirdness and mystery abounded. And on this night, as they had spent so many nights before, the boys were on a quest for a story of their own.

***

But the road did not end. Not for mile after mile. Until, at last, they saw light up ahead. A golden glow pooled among the ruts in the sand. The eyes of some small nocturnal mammal—opossum, raccoon—blinked in and out of the headlights’ beams. They sensed the sudden openness to the night, the man-made space. The boy driving did not want to stop, but the other three in the car wanted him to stop. So he stopped.

Research facility. Or some shit. A prison.

One of you fuckers want to check Google Maps?

I’m not getting service.

Fuck.

That’s barbed wire.

We’re in the asshole of fucking nowhere.

I’m pretty sure there’s a mental hospital—

Shut up.

I’m serious!

Why the fuck—

I don’t know, dude. I’m as lost as you.

***

The boy driving did not say this: Hey, guys. I’m tired. It’s late. Why are we out here in the first place? Let’s go home. Smoke. I don’t know. Play some Skyrim. I don’t know.

Instead, he turned off the car. He joined them outside. He did not lock the doors behind him. He did not know if this was a mistake; slasher flicks presented compelling cases both ways.

One of the other boys was approaching the fence. The boy who drove wanted to warn him not to touch the wire, that there was a chance it was electrified. It was not.

After a moment, he joined the other boys. He wrapped his fingers around the cool, rusted links. He strained his eyes.

***

It’s like a lab or some shit.

You see The Thing?

Shut up.

Sounds like something the Thing would say.

Shut up.

I’m just saying—

AWWHOOOOOO—

Dude, what—

Don’t howl—

Stop it—

There might be, like, a guard, or—

AWWHOOOOOO—

***

There was a moon, of course. A great golden rotten fruit tossed with disgust into the sky. But it was not full, and the Thing was not a werewolf; it was unclear what joke, if any, the boy who’d howled was trying to make. But they laughed as they stepped back from the fence and piled back into the car. The lab/prison/asylum had stayed silent and still. Nothing had moved among its low white buildings. A light had not even blinked.

***

They drove on. The boy drove on. Lake Oswego lay ahead—a blue hole, according to one of the other boys. One of the Pine Barrens’  abandoned mines. And/or a portal to Hell. And/or a summer camp. Earlier, they’d remained undecided. All they’d been certain of inside Arnold’s Diner was that there was a gap in the map marked Lake Oswego, that it was only some ten miles away. Down a long, lonely road. And also this: that it was the summer before their senior year. They had nowhere else to go, nothing else to do, no one else to be. The boy who had driven them there would drive them again. He would protest, knowing full well he would do it, that part of him even wanted to, that there was no other choice.

***

A minute later, they came to water. Perhaps twenty yards of it. Of unknowable depth. In the headlights, it shone a radioactive yellow-green. The boy braked. The boy swore.

What?

I’m not driving through that.

It’s a fucking puddle.

And this is a fucking 2007 Honda CRV.

Perhaps the protests continued. Later, looking back, the boy would not remember them. All he would recall was the relief he felt upon regaining asphalt. Then, soon after, passing again the first streetlight. Spotify kicking back in soon after that, and another of the boys asking him to turn it up. Which, gladly, he did.

***

No one followed them back from the facility. Lab. Asylum. Whatever it was. The car did not break down. All of them made it home safe.

***

The next day one of them re-Googled Lake Oswego, retraced their route. The facility was Rutgers University’s Blueberry and Cranberry Research Center. No joke. Dead serious. The others were furious with him for disclosing this fact.

***

Later, much later, one of the boys, the boy who howled at the not-full moon, would seek treatment for schizophrenia. They would not hear from him for a while, and when they did it was not the same. One of the other boys would try to kill himself. He would fail—thank God—and, in the aftermath, he would get better. Then worse. Then better again. Epiphanies are not clean. Transformations are always incomplete.

One of them would go to Rutgers. This was New Jersey, after all. It was inevitable that one of them would go to Rutgers.

The last of them, the boy who drove, would not change. Or at least not much. He would continue to search for stories to tell. Not to live one—no. Not even to have lived one. Just to be able to tell of it.

***

Everyone doesn’t want to be someone. What they want is to have been someone. To look back and say, yes, that night, those woods, those boys—that was us. That was me.

That night, looking for Lake Oswego, for whatever was or was not there, four boys pushed out. They came as close to the darkness as they could before turning back. They would only visit the lake once more, the next summer, the summer before their first years away, and the boy would not drive. They would spend an hour on the edge of an ordinary body of water—weedy, fetid—and wonder what they had ever feared. Hell—they could swim to the other side if they wanted to. They did not.

Colin Lubner