woods

In spring, 1937, of course, families still rode the rails because of the Depression, which everyone said was already in the history books as the worst ever. The jobs still couldn__ be found, at least for most people. Everett itself__he smaller, poorer, little brother lying north of Seattle__ched with the unemployed and the hopeless. The labor union tensions in the woods still festered and got bloody at times. But Skybillings__nd the railroad logging shows of the Cascade Mountains__elt like they were, inch-by-inch, rebuilding America.

We are not on our fours, howling in the woods, only because guilt saves us.

The early dew-falls that did a pristine coating,over the woods with its finest transparency,glazed as like its wet white-glassy earrings that hung on the ears of wild flowers__nlatched my fancy.

Much as I admired the elegance of physical theories, which at that time geology wholly lacked, I preferred a life in the woods to one in the laboratory.

sometimes falling raincarries memories of betrayalthere in the woodswhere she was not meant to betoo young she believesin her right to be freein her bodyfree from harmbelieving naturea wilderness she can enterbe solacedbelieving the powerthat there be sacred placethat there can be atonement nowshe returns with no fearfacing the pastready to riskknowing these woods nowhold beauty and danger

Oh, but you must travel through those woods again and again... said a shadow at the window... and you must be lucky to avoid the wolf every time...But the wolf... the wolf only needs enough luck to find you once.

I was in a copse of pine trees, and the pine was overpowering my scent. The pheromones of the big cat mingled with the pine and I spun around. I was smelling and looking for the flash of white, but I couldn__ see it. I grew angry and I pawed at the earth. The aroma of the soil cleansed my nose as I leaned down and sniffed deeply. I slowly closed and opened my eyes. As I looked ahead I saw something. There, further on, I had another glimpse of the large white cat. She was stopped and her hindquarters were in the air. I stared, trying to figure out what she was doing. Her forepaws and head were on the ground, but her hind was wiggling. She was next to a tree, marking it, so I slowly paced in a zigzag pattern as I walked close to her. I was being cautious because poachers had been known to employ shifters to entice real animals in the wild. She turned her head and growled at me. I took it as an invite to come closer. I ran up to her and started circling. She was an albino panther as I thought. I paced closer, breathing deep. I was in the middle of Ohio, outside of a lost cougar and a few bobcats there were no big cats here, at least not counting lycanthropes, and this creature didn__ smell like one of those. Her rump almost wagged in anticipation, and I felt my tiger body respond. I circled her, taking a swipe in her direction to see if she was going to respond negatively to me. The pink eyes followed me and she growled. I walked up to her, sniffed her face and neckline. I didn__ smell any other male on her, and I walked to her raised rump. Burying my nose in her groin I smelled deeper, and she shifted her body. I felt it before I could see it. She was shifting, changing from albino panther to human. I sat on my hindquarters as I watched. Her white fur seemed to melt from her, sliding upwards, starting with her back legs. The flesh and fur on her feet slid forward, leaving human feet and calves. It was fully fleshed, unlike some lycanthrope changes when they__e younger. The calves of her legs appeared, and slowly slid up. The panther flesh was sliding forward, slowly and methodically. Across her ass and groin, now lower back and stomach. The pheromones I smelled earlier were coming from her, the human form. I stood and started pacing behind her, and her panther head shook in a very human gesture. I stopped, fighting the desire to lean forward and lick her wetness with my large tongue. The flesh was sliding forward and as her teats turned into breasts, I growled in need. Next were her shoulders and arms, then her head and hands. As the transformation ended, there was a pile of fur and flesh lying in front of her. Her human form was beautiful; a full figured woman with long white hair, that was perfectly natural. She looked to be in her early forties, but didn__ have a line on her face that she didn__ want. In the corners of her eyes were small, but beautiful, crow__ feet, laugh lines surrounded her mouth. She laid out with her former form under her, laying on it, propped up by her elbows. She smiled with the confidence of someone who was used to being in charge. Her long hair flowed around her shoulders, framing her body. She reminded me of someone, but I couldn__ figure out who.

When her mother combed Harriet's hair, she said that the woods were disgustingly muddy and mosquito-ridden. During her history unit on pioneers, her father bashfully admitted that he couldn't pitch a tent, barbeque, or fight off bears in a forest. They both agreed that such a place was unsafe. Hotels were better.

A sense of desolation settled within me: a cold, slimy stone lodged under my lungs. There was nothing happy about the woods, I thought, especially at night.

A cold wind raced across the surrounding fields of wild grass, turning the land into a heaving dark-green ocean. It sighed up through the branches of cherry trees and rattled the thick leaves. Sometimes a cherry would break loose, tumble in the gale, fall and split, filling the night with its fragrance. The air was iron and loam and growth. He walked and tried to pull these things into his lungs, the silence and coolness of them.But someone was screaming, deep inside him. Someone was talking. ("Hunger")

I made a conscious effort to name my needs and desires. To carefully listen to and accurately identify what I felt. Hunger, exhaustion, cold, lower-back ache, thirst. The ephemeral pangs: wistfulness and loneliness. Rest fixed most things. Sleep was my sweet reward. I treated bedtime as both incentive and sacrament.

The night Junior stayed, my right to myself was taken from me in a way that had felt more final than ever before. Then the school had denied my rape__y word. The subsequent silencing and exile__isplaced shame__ere the catalysts for me to finally break free of my mother's grasp and my voicelessness and do what I truly wanted, alone. I wished to prove myself as independent and valid and strong__o my mother, and to the world. I'd believed I had needed something huge and external that no one could deny was impressive, so I could show my family I was able__o they could finally know that I was strong.Instead I had shown myself.And it felt wonderful.

But the truth was stranger than an aimless road, it always was.

I had stripped naked in front of men. Drunk. In morning__ somber brightness I tried to remember why I had done it. Total exposure had seemed like the only way to be seen more clearly, heard, but now it seemed the opposite: a wild act that would define me.

In the aftermath of destruction, a silence settles _ the stillness of fresh loss. People__ cheerful chatter is fainter, the blue color of sky dimmer; now that horror is undeniable and feels inescapable, the value of life seems lessened.

I'd have to be impolite, an inconvenience, and sometimes awkward. But if I could commit, all that discomfort would add up to zap predatory threads like a Taser gun. I'd stun them. They'd bow to me. I'd let my no echo against the mountains.And better to feel bad for a moment saying no__nd stop it__han to get harmed.I would take better care.That small word, no. I'd see its deity.

I couldn__ yet piece together the disconnected clues to understand the origin of these lights. To explain away strange magic, I__ convinced myself there was an unseen road cutting across the boundless desert floor like a scar. I imagined its different possible courses. The mystery intrigued me. I couldn__ think of the real destination this road would have been built to lead to, but I accepted I couldn__ see, and I accepted it was there, strange but _ from where I stood _ a beautiful vision.

The uncertainty wore on him. The conditions in jail--the handcuffs, the noise, the filth, the crowding--mangled his senses. It's likely that, if one must be incarcerated in the United States, a jail in central Maine would be among the more tolerable spots, but to Knight it was torture. "Bedlam" is how he referred to the place. It never got dark in jail; at eleven p.m., the lights merely became a little duller. "I suspect," he noted, "more damage has been done to my sanity in jail, in months; than years, decades, in the woods.