#8 Meta-Fiction (Liz)

Here’s a story: it’s about a little girl in the woods. She’s got a stick. She’s got a machete. Right now in this story she is nine, she is stuck in the story, or she is made in it, and now there are many options –

There is a lot of green – it smells like wood-mold, like this girl’s childhood, and it is a pleasant smell to her – background. Wet ground – mud between her toes. The girl brushes aside huckleberry bushes and ferns – green, green, sturdy stick in her hand, machete flapping on her leg – the stream makes little sounds ahead, water on rocks, brown sand – break in the green. The girl is heading for the bridge above the stream; she turns before the stream, grabs an upturned root with her free hand – the bridge is a downed tree and it’s enormous, 15 feet above the stream and the root structure now upturned and functioning as ladder to this small, feral girl, the root structure, it is two stories high, as if it were a building, and to the girl these structures are buildings. There is a porch – one of the roots is horizontal and wide, and it is this girl’s porch. On other days she sits there and eats huckleberries.

Today she climbs over the roots and onto the log itself, the bridge, she calls it the highway –

This little girl she has darting eyes, like an animal. Scanning from the high ground. Looking for – anything, dark things, kindred things. All around, bird song. Calls.

She leaves the stick against the ladder-mess of roots.

The little girl runs along the log although it is high and the surface is uneven but her feet have felt this bark thousands of times and her bare feet so long out of shoes grip like hands. Her mother, what does her mother think? I know, I know. I want children someday but I think of this girl’s mother and this girl and I am frightened. I don’t know what to do with this creature, with the fact of this creature, except hold her away, and change her –

Halfway along the highway the log beneath her feet touches up against a log still growing, upright, maple tree, living branches almost at her face, and now this girl stops short because there is an owl. And an owl for this girl is a reverent thing. She – halts, sudden, grips her toes harder, clenching bark. Her toes slide a little on wet moss, and her arms go out, like wings, to balance, her eyes go wide, eyes on the owl, eyes locked on the owl –

The girl looks at the owl’s eyes even though the owl has a mouse, even though it might make more sense to look at the mouse – but then the mouse moves. Squirming, in the beak - going to die.

The girl, she sees this and her eyes move but she doesn’t move. She watches the owl, her heart hammers and she sees the wild thing, a thrill and a discomfort, and black thing she doesn’t want to see inside because she sees the owl and in this black unnamed way without words she sees the ways that she does not belong here, in this forest, but worse and further down she sees the ways that she does.

And she is still, and she is quiet, and her machete lays still as the little girl observes.

This is what she should have done.