The Dead Girl In My Yard | CreepCast

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Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

Welcome back to Creepcast.

Today we are reading a story called The Dead Girl in My Yard Was the Best Friend I Ever Had by the author Dopa Bean, which you'll remember from a previous story not too long ago of the what was it called again?

The painting?

No, I cleaned a hoarder hoarder house.

Yes, I cleaned hoarder houses for a living.

Yeah, yeah.

So we loved we came across love that story.

Dare I say

I recommend it a lot.

It's you know what?

No, go ahead.

Why am I talking?

Sorry, i was just gonna say it's one i would say go ahead one of our one of our most recent

recent stories that do very good i would say that we were very stoked on

okay

all right i'm better um

yeah so this story actually got recommended to us a lot uh and the title is intriguing so it was on the docket and when we go to look at it we're like oh this is the same author who did that last one we really liked and if you'll remember we liked that story and i liked it a lot more as the story went on A cool title we were already going to read and an author that we know now is also cool.

Why not, right?

Yeah.

No, I mean, I'm all for it.

I love reading, like, I love whenever we touch back with authors.

It's interesting that it's so soon because we just read that other story.

But I'm curious if we fall into the same kind of pit of.

you know, is the beginning going to be kind of slow?

Are we going to get into a spot where the beginning is like, I don't know about this?

And then is it just going to explode?

Or is it going to just be grabbing us right from the beginning?

I love that kind of that dance whenever you come back with authors.

Like, do you, do you see that a lot in like, do you see the reoccurrences in their work whenever you read new stuff?

But before we start, a couple of announcements.

One,

we are doing last year, we did a live tour.

We did a, I think we did four or five shows across the United States.

This year, we are just doing one show.

on Halloween Day in Chicago, Creepaid.

We're going to be donating the money to charity, split to our charity of choices,

and we are doing it.

And

the link is live.

You can go and get tickets now.

We had our patrons get first dibs.

So

there are tickets still available.

But if you want to join us in this fun Halloween night extravaganza for something good, be sure to check the link in the description of this video.

And we'll probably do a nice pin in the comments if we can.

I don't know.

A pin in the comments to the link to go and sign up and get your tickets so you can come and join us.

Also,

you can do costumes.

You just can't obscure your face.

Can't obscure your head in any way.

So we want people to dress up, have a good time, make it a fun night Halloween thing for a good cause.

And yeah.

I think it'll be a great time.

I think it's really cool that we can now do a show like this.

We can have fun with you guys.

And it can also.

uh all be for a good cause as a matter of fact in in uh you know

towards that good cause hunter has announced that he will be donating his entire year's salary.

Is that right, Hunter?

Is that what you said?

Yeah, I have talked to the IRS.

I think that's what I said.

I think he said all of his money was the point.

Yeah, I don't know how that's going to work, but that is what I said.

Last year we did the tour.

It was a lot going through.

I think that this year we're just stoked to do.

At least for me personally, Isaiah had a great time going across, but I was just in shambles, stressed out.

All right.

So this is a nice balance where this time, giving back, doing the charity show.

We appreciate you guys checking it out.

Also, just want to say thank you to all the audio listeners here who are listening to this right now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

We appreciate you.

If you haven't done that, go over there and give us a nice rating.

We appreciate it.

And to our wonderful patrons who do support the channel and get all that juicy extra content.

So this is a nice three-part series.

So yeah.

Without further ado, Isaiah, are you ready to jump into the dead girl my yard was the best friend I ever had?

I'm ready to jump right into it.

As always, thank you all for the support you've shown on audio platforms, means the world, and of course, our Patreon supporters who, for some reason, think that this show is worth their time and money.

And

I definitely don't deserve that, but Hunter feels entitled to it for some reason.

So you can take that up with him.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Well, with that, let's get started with The Dead Girl in My Yard was the best friend I ever had.

My mother loved fairy tales.

She taught me to love them too.

I never outgrew them.

If anything, the older I got, the more I needed them.

In fairy tales, you find happy endings, lessons, morals, comfort and triumph, and magic.

But you will find no sadness.

That's why I needed them, because I was sad and angry.

I was sad and angry because my mother was dying.

There was nothing I could do but watch.

I watched as as every part of her withered except her stomach.

It grew hard and distended, almost engorged as if she were pregnant.

I guess she was, except the thing she carried wasn't life, but her death.

I watched as she mastered the wide, glimmering smile she wore whenever she went out in public, which was less and less as time wore on.

I watched as she told a fairy tale of her own.

I'll be better soon.

I watched as she cried and held my brother, Noah.

He He was only three years old, but already doomed.

Fragile, sick, slow, no hope of a normal life or even a long one.

So I watched him too.

Dad gone and mom rotting from the inside out.

I was the only one who could.

God damn.

Over the years,

is that not a heavy startup?

Well, you know what, you know what it reminds me of?

I mean, yeah, it's very heavy.

It's

a beautiful, but exactly.

It reminds me of, it reminds me exactly of that.

Also, again, not to immediately talk about how cool the author is, but just some of the wording in there, like she was pregnant with something.

What she carried wasn't life.

Just good writing, once again.

Over the years, I've heard wonderful, inspirational stories, modern fairy tales, you could say, of siblings who come together in the face of tragedy, who forge unbreakable bonds and take care of each other no matter what.

I was not that brother.

Noah was the bane of my existence, frail, stubborn, and impossible to care for, yet in need of more care than anyone.

I hated every minute I spent with him.

I hated that mom loved him most.

I hated doing everything, for him and for her, only to be shunted into the background at every turn.

As days grew into weeks and months, that hatred sank deep.

Every time I scrubbed my mother's vomit or threw her soiled sheets into the washer, every time Noah threw a tantrum, every time I watched mom gaze at him like he was the second coming of Christ, every time I had to give everything I had, only to find that it wasn't enough, the hatred grew.

I buried it under fresh layers of poisoned stoicism and molten resentment that hardened over time, cooling into core.

I could practically see it, jagged mineral the color of storm clouds, slowly but surely replacing me.

Hate wasn't the only thing I felt, but it was the easiest thing to feel.

So I hated everything.

I hated being with my mother.

I hated the sight of my brother.

I hated being the oldest.

I hated school.

I hated the doctors.

I hated my father for leaving after Noah was born.

I hated myself for wishing I could leave too.

The only thing I didn't hate was my home.

It had a steep, sloped roof that made the house look like it was brooding.

Inside was dark.

Cavern with large rooms, few windows, and clusters of dusty shadows that always seemed to move.

Spiders lived everywhere.

A witch's house or a cursed castle with occupants in desperate need of a hero.

The land around it was a rural wonderland, golden hills that stretched as far as the eye could see.

There were mountains on the horizon and the shadowy green smear of a forest in the distance.

I never climbed those mountains nor entered that forest, but it was enough that they were there.

I could look out the window, see them, and believe that something wonderful, something magical, was out there.

To me, it was paradise.

To my mom, it was hell, a monument to her misery.

She had moved in just after dad left.

She could barely afford the place and struggled to make ends meet.

The stresses of insolvency, abandonment, and a desperately sick child nearly killed her.

She lost too much weight.

Her skin faded into a papery, translucent coating that stretched dangerously thin over her skull.

I used to have nightmares that the flesh would split apart, feeling the glistening bone beneath.

She got home from work one night, looking particularly ill.

She turned to me, probably to ask if I'd take care of dinner.

As soon as she opened her mouth, she threw up.

Black, red, and foul yellow splashed across the floor like blood-streaked poison.

She kept crying that it burned.

I called 911, which made her cry harder.

Gosh, dude, I'm just.

Yeah.

Which bit pre-recorded to this like happy and like haha funny jokes.

Okay, let's get into the story.

Now I'm just gonna tell you, I, this is, this is really fun character dynamic stuff.

I mean, first off, I think it's great that it's uh really great use

of like a basically like representing resentment, like resentment and insecurity through family dynamics, all

lashing out from like not being able to deal with like a very serious tragedy that's like and like unfolding right in front of somebody so it's like because i think everybody has that has had those kind of like insecure feelings with like family members of like feeling like somebody likes they like somebody else more than you and then in a way of venting out frustration you bottle it up and you just have all this hatred and stuff because you don't know how to output these feelings that you have uh with like watching your mother basically die and like in such revolting detail and it's you could tell that this person desperately cares but they just have like they've built up this giant wall it's just really good i mean it's just it's brutal man very it's good riding it's very good riding thus far

because she didn't have money for an ambulance

the very next morning we learned that she was dying

she kept her job as long as she could when she quit that was the end She had no money for hospital stays or medicine.

That was why the burden of her care and Noah's fell me.

I didn't mind at first.

I loved my mom more than anything, and her illness, terrible as it was, made it easy to be close to her.

But as she deteriorated, she required exponentially more care.

Care I wasn't remotely capable of providing.

There's no room in the equation for capability.

I went to school less and less until I stopped altogether.

No one even noticed.

It was like they'd forgotten me already.

Mom didn't like it, but she didn't stop me.

How could she?

Some days she couldn't even go to the bathroom on her own.

The effort it took to simply stay alive trained her.

She usually fell asleep before nightfall, always with her TV on.

Noah did too, since he slept in her bed.

That left me by myself every night, alone in a cavernous house with only the echo of their TV to keep me company.

Just three sad, forgotten people, waiting for everything to finish falling apart.

Three people in a cursed house, desperately waiting for a hero to rescue them.

I was supposed to stay inside because the hills weren't safe after dark, but I spent most nights outside anyway.

Oak trees dotted the hills, great tangles of mistletoe festooned the branches.

Raccoons and deer passed through constantly.

Crows roosted everywhere, even on the car, and cawed fiercely whenever I tried to shoe them off.

Woodpeckers buried acorns in the walls of the house.

Owls called to each other, bats swooped like scraps of living enchantment against the night sky, and coyotes slinked through the golden grass.

Rafts of miner's lettuce exploded along our property line, so thick and soft you could sleep in it.

Sometimes I did.

On warm golden evenings, and sometimes on cold gray nights, I went to the miner's lettuce.

Sometimes I read.

Sometimes I read.

Usually I rested.

drifting off to the song of night insects and the low, oceanic rush of wind through the leaves.

Those nights were the closest thing I had to a fairy tale.

Although every last one of those days was awful in its own way, one unseasonably hot September afternoon was the worst.

The day was rotten from the start.

Mom insisted on making breakfast, which gave me a stirring of hope.

Maybe this would be one of her good days.

That hope was brutally crushed when it became apparent that she didn't have enough strength to hold the skillet.

She dropped it, cracking several tiles and denting the skillet in the process.

She cried while I scrambled eggs and wiped tears from my face.

Noah decided it was my fault that mom was sad, which made him angry.

That rage built up until he launched himself at me as I served breakfast.

I lost my grip and spilled half the eggs on the floor.

An hour later, mom threw up everywhere.

Blood and bile and small curls of undigested eggs.

It smelled foul and sticky, clinging inside my nose, leaking down and coating my throat as I scrubbed away.

Mom started to cry again as I cleaned up, which infuriated Noah anew.

He didn't have the vocabulary to express himself, so he just kept screaming.

Stop it!

Stop it!

Stop it!

Stop it!

Stop it!

Stop it!

I pretended to ignore him, gritting my teeth so hard they ached.

Suddenly, he lunged for me.

I dodged, but he knocked over the bucket instead, sending a flood of bloody, sudsy water across the floor.

I saw red.

Mom, Noah, the furniture, furniture, the foul cascade of blood, bile, soap, and egg, all of it red, lined in golden autumn sunlight.

Noah stomped in front of me and screamed, STOP IT!

I struck him.

The crack was cataclysmic, the beginning of the end of the world.

His eyes went wide as he fell down and began to cry.

My mother shouted at me, or tried to.

Her weak voice was barely a whisper, but I caught the gist anyway.

She was trying to send me to my room.

After everything I'd done, she was punishing me.

I spun around and stormed outside, slamming the door with such force the house quaked.

I blinked, momentarily blinded by the bright sun.

The day was warm.

The trees in the garden were lush.

Birds sang.

Crows called to each other.

In the distance, coyotes yipped.

I marched to the backyard, biting my lips as my face crumbled.

I focused on the miners let us out near the property line.

I reached it right as the tears began to fall.

I flopped down and curled up.

The scent of greenness and cold, dark earth swept over me, inside me, cleansing my lungs of the stench of my mother's slow death while the birds sang and the wind rushed through the leaves.

I dreamed of crows, coyotes, and a brooding castle in which a paper-skinned princess, who looked like my mother, leaned out the window, screaming words that transformed into ribbons of foamy, bile-laced blood.

What are you doing?

The princess evaporated.

I opened my eyes and found myself face to face with a Halloween mask half hidden in the miner's lettuce.

I'm awfully late for an afternoon nap.

What a weird nightmare, I thought, staggering to my feet.

Crushed lettuce left wet, dewy streaks on my skin.

Felt real, not like a dream at all.

Who are you?

The mask lurched forward, followed by a strange, terribly skinny body clothed in a mud-cake dress.

It took a long, disorienting moment to realize the body was emerging from a burrow in the miner's lettuce.

She drew herself up into a sitting position and crossed her arms.

They looked wrong.

Those arms, emaciated and draped in dry folds of wrinkled flesh the color of buttermilk.

My name is Wendy.

She smiled, and I realized her mask, a ravaged, moon-colored mess of scars, dark holes, and nets of wrinkles around bright, flat eyes like coins, was not a mask, but her her face.

Dude.

Okay.

Okay.

This is.

Okay.

From the line when he says he's mad at his brother and he says, I struck him, and that was it.

It was cataclysmic.

It was the beginning of the end of the world.

Like, that was the step.

I was like, man, this story knows when to put its weight on.

It knows how to dress itself, how to build up to moments like that.

It feels so good.

And now this, what he initially thinks is a Halloween mask, it's the face of like the drawn skin, its flat eyes, and it calls out, it's late for a nap, but like its arms are bent wrong.

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When I spoke, my voice issued in a panicky rush.

You can't be here.

You're trespassing.

No, you're trespassing.

She rose to her feet in a single boneless movement and picked her way through the miner's lettuce in a wormy, twitchy march that made my skin crawl.

She halted several feet away.

This is your property line.

Everything behind it is yours.

Everything on this side is not.

I watched helplessly.

This was no nightmare.

This was real.

And maybe it was a fairy tale.

But not mine, because I was the oldest brother.

Fairy tales, the oldest always fails, leaving the youngest behind to save the kingdom.

And I, the stupid eldest, had just failed by trespassing in a monster's territory.

I'm sorry.

She flounced towards me, dry hair rippling behind her.

Something on her neck bounced in time with her steps, broken and stained, an old animal bone strung upon dirty twine.

Why are you sorry?

My brothers like sleeping here, too.

Brothers?

This thing, this hideous, wintry monster with eyes like cloud-shrouded moons, had brothers?

Are your brothers here?

Are they in your burrow, too?

Are they watching?

Do you want to know where they are?

Would this appease the monster?

Would listening save my life?

Yes.

She looked up, a dying light reflected in her eyes.

Her skin looked so sick, somehow thick and papery at once.

I hid them in the trees.

Then she stepped past me.

I watched, frightened and confused, as she drifted through the golden grass and faded into the night.

Once darkness swallowed her entirely, my paralysis broke and I bolted.

By the time I reached the house, Noah and Mom were asleep.

I ran to her room without thinking, jealousy and resentment forgotten.

I just wanted my mom.

She would keep me safe from the horrors in the hills.

But how?

asked a mean, broken, and terribly small voice in the back of my head.

She can barely even stand.

Why do you think she cries?

Because she knows she can't protect you.

And because she knows, you know too.

I stopped inches from her door, struggling as fear, jealousy, guilt, anger, and love fought for dominance.

Anchor won.

I retreated to the living room and locked the doors.

After a long time, I fell asleep, straight into another nightmare.

The princess who looked like my mother lay bleeding in a field of miner's lettuce.

A white mountain lion prowled, murky, silver eyes cutting dim swaths through the darkness.

Nearby, a half-eaten coyote with golden eyes whimpered as it bled to death.

Wind roared through the leaves, bats swooped overhead, nestling in pendulous clusters of mistletoe that pulsed like hearts.

The mountain lion came closer.

Green juice from the crushed miner's lettuce stained its snowy coat.

I couldn't run.

I tried to close my eyes, but I couldn't do that either.

I watched, unable to move or even scream, until it crept past me, slinking toward the princess.

My paralysis broke as tears dripped from the coyote's golden eyes.

Please come back.

It said in Wendy's voice.

I woke up nauseous and drenched in sweat.

It was morning, but barely.

For reasons I didn't dare fathom, I went outside.

It was windy and shockingly cold.

The big patch of miner's lettuce looked dark and deep in the thin light, like a half hidden lake.

I took a deep breath and began to walk.

When I reached the miners' lettuce I stopped and scanned the patch as my heart pounded.

But of course there was no coyote, no blood, certainly no white mountain lion, only the spot where I liked to nap.

Beside it was the half-hidden burrow, and inside, shining like yellow lens flares,

what are you doing here?

Looking for you.

She blinked.

Then she crawled out of the burrow.

Her bone necklace, caked with mud and stringy white roots, swung back and forth.

She looked even worse in the morning light.

Eyes, one of which was wider than the other and clouded, were murky yellow.

Her skin was the worst, fragile and dry, twisted with thick scars and and pocked with deep holes like insect burrows.

What are you?

Why?

Are you afraid?

For a moment, I couldn't breathe.

What did the monster need to hear?

Affirmation of her own magnificent fearsomeness?

Or something else?

My mind worked fast.

She was terrifying to behold, but she hadn't hurt me.

If anything, she'd been a little bit silly.

What kind of monster acted like a regular kid?

No.

Wendy smiled.

Good.

Then she took my hand and pulled me through the carpet of miner's lettuce and into the hills.

I didn't resist, because even if she seemed kind, she was still a monster.

I was the oldest brother.

Oh.

Oh.

Oh, gosh.

Oh.

Oh.

Oh, it's like the oh, it's like the dream he had and now recognizing like if I don't do anything,

like my family's going to suffer.

Even if I'm mad at them, I have to be the oldest brother.

It's like relating it to a fairy tale.

And like, this is the monster, but also the monster spoke through the voice of the coyote.

That, oh, man,

he has to conquer this.

It has to be less to him because there's greater evils, the mountain lion out there and stuff.

Ah,

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Whatever they're cooking smells good.

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The sun rose, and the day brightened as we walked.

After some time, the forest evolved from a shadowy green smear to a spectacular wall of trees.

I eyed it with frightened excitement.

I never ventured inside myself.

Forest had always been too far away, but now I was here.

Not only would I finally explore it, I would do so with a monster beside me.

But to my disappointment, Wendy veered sharply, avoiding the trees entirely.

Why aren't we going in?

Because I hate it.

Oh,

where are we going?

Right.

Over.

there.

She dropped my hand and sprinted off into the long grass.

I followed, but I was cautious, scanning the ground for rattlesnakes and tarantulas before each step.

When I caught up with her, she was standing at the base of a particularly grand valley oak.

Do you like this tree?

I looked up at it, non-plussed.

The huge canopy threw an impressive radius of dappled shadows.

Crows roosted in the branches, peering down at me with bright eyes.

Sure.

So do I.

It's the only tree I like.

I used to climb it with my brothers, but only at night.

Do your brothers come out at night?

No.

I I watched her, equal parts repulsed and captivated.

They're dead.

The monster got them a long time ago.

I couldn't muster an answer.

I tell everyone who comes here about the monster.

Not just you, I...

I have to.

I'm the only one who knows it's here.

Everyone else forgot.

Despite my fear, I was fascinated.

Eager, even.

Gripped by the dark, obsessive enchantment unique to childhood.

This was it.

It had happened.

Somehow, in the middle of tragedy and in my own backyard, I'd stumbled on a fairy tale.

She looked up at the branches, the web-like pattern reflected in her eyes.

I don't want to talk about them anymore.

So we did not.

Instead, we talked about worms and bats, bumblebees and bobcats, acorns and moths.

Wendy taught me that the wild chamomile growing in my yard could be harvested for tea, that miners' lettuce could be eaten, and that raccoons washed their food.

She said the crows had been in this valley since the world's first days, which was why they lived everywhere, settling trees the way people settle neighborhoods, and that the reason coyotes loved the long yellow grass was because it camouflaged their fur.

Mom would love to hear this, I thought.

And just like that, Wendy's spell was broken.

Reality came crashing down.

I jumped up as images of my mother filled my head.

I have to go.

Where?

Wendy stood eagerly, turning her bone pendant between her fingers.

Home.

Her face fell.

Oh,

you can come.

I offered, even as my heart sank.

She gave a smile that made her skin crinkle like a big dry leaf.

Thank you, but I can't.

Well, then I'll come see you tomorrow.

Her smile slipped.

Or tonight?

She hitched it back up.

Good.

There's magic here.

That thought buoyed me for the rest of the day.

When Noah screamed at me, I just smiled.

When mom gave me anxious looks, I kissed the top of her head, impervious for once to the scent of spoilage that clung to her like bad perfume.

Okay, this is reminding me so much of like

what's that move where the wild things are, right?

There's another one I'm thinking of where it's like a kid's going through a tragedy and he goes into his backyard and has this adventure.

I feel like it's a kid movie, but it's

such an interesting,

I guess, allegory of a kid who just wants to get away from how awful life is right now, how terrible the world has been to him, and he walks into this magical world, right?

It's almost like an escape, as terrible as it is, it's something different, right?

Yeah, I can't tell if I'm, I mean, we're still reading it, so I'm

trying to piece together because it's very interesting.

To me, it's reading like a kid who is personifying and understanding the idea of like sickness and like death, whatever.

Like this, this Wendy character is the personification of death in a weird way.

And it's like somebody being able to wrap their head around it and understand it and come to terms with it.

There's like a lot of like parallels with death and dying, obviously.

Like even the house is kind of like old and decrepit the same way that the mom is.

And it's like just building these things to where it feels like the one thing that makes sense is this character coming face to face with

basically this death kind of sickness character and being able to understand it.

And then, like, being like, I don't know, there's a lot going.

There's, there's just a lot of great parallel stuff.

Like, even like one thing while we're taking time is I really like that section that felt like it was just like a fun little criticism of like the healthcare system of whenever it's talking about deserted and feeling forgotten and that kind of idea it feels like it was just like a little poignated I mean at least to me it was just like a little section that was like

mother couldn't work couldn't afford the shit ended up dying or and then now is on hospice or can't even afford hospice and all that stuff it's just like a real fun way of being able to say something or at least to me it felt like that and then how immediately everyone forgot about him it's just immediately yeah well fuck it.

They're not there anymore.

You know?

Yeah, three forgotten people waiting for a hero to save them.

And now we change the script and saying, I'm the big brother.

I have to be the hero of this story.

No hero is going to come and save us.

It has to be me.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, I think that befriending this person so far, I mean, like I said, we're still, we're still pretty early into it, but it feels like befriending this person is like character development.

for this character and it's like allowing them to

i don't know

like find some kind of purpose in themselves like being the older brother in this in this sense being able to turn the cheek to these things and like you know i'm curious i'm curious to see where it goes why why do you think windy spelled with an eye

i don't know i've never seen it spelled with an eye

no i mean obviously it's spelled like the word like it's windy outside right uh but i've never seen the name spelled that way

once they'd gone to bed I slipped out the back door, heading for the miner's lettuce.

Insects drifted in the dying light like scraps of gold.

I didn't see Wendy anywhere.

When I looked in the burrow, there was only darkness.

Disappointment settled over me, surprisingly bitter.

Then, two bony legs with cracked white skin fell in front of my face.

I stumbled back, screaming.

Overhead, someone burst out laughing.

I looked up and saw Wendy dangling from a branch.

She dropped to the ground, laughing so hard that her wrinkled face resembled a very happy and slightly rotten pumpkin.

Before I knew it, I was laughing too.

By the time we stopped, it was almost dark.

As I stood, bats swooped in front of my face.

I wheeled back and fell again.

This sent us both into another hysterical fit of laughter.

This time we laughed until long past dark.

Chronicles of Narnia, that's what I was trying.

Not wait, no, I already said that.

Glad to be

dead.

Bridge to Terabithia.

Oh,

there you go.

That's why I did that.

That makes sense.

You know what's kind of fucked up is I keep picturing, if we're just going off other FPs, it feels like a Guillermo Dotoro film, like Pan's Labyrinth or something.

Very grimdark kind of fairy tale thing.

It's just cool.

For the first time in years, I felt like a child, a hero on an adventure.

Oh, there's that hero motif now applying to him again.

A happy ending waiting on the horizon.

Joy, not fear, permeated reality.

And it was all because of Wendy.

As we ventured into the nighttime hills, she continued the morning's lecture, instructing me on the habits of bats, how to calm a frightened deer, and how to handle rattlesnakes.

As we skirted the forest, she looked at it wistfully.

There used to be a beautiful pond there, deep in the trees.

Well, it would have been beautiful if it weren't covered in scum.

The moon was high when we once again reached the enormous oak, standing like an alien sentinel in the darkness.

Come on, let's climb.

My heart plummeted.

The oak loomed over me, impossibly tall.

Branches cut the night sky into starry fractals.

I can't.

I have something to show you.

She disappeared up the trunk like a squirrel.

It was the last thing I wanted to do, but if a hero can't conquer his fear, then he is no hero at all.

So I followed.

Finding a grip on the tree was hard.

Shimmying up was even harder.

The bark scraped my hands and knees, and I knocked my head against the branches.

Wendy?

Far overhead, the leaves rustled.

I'm here.

What's taking you so long?

I kept climbing.

She was waiting near the top, balancing on a precariously thin branch.

Hurry.

I'm me.

I eyed the branch nervously, but there was nothing to do.

I hauled myself up, grimly ignoring my throbbing, bloody hands, and settled beside her.

She pointed to a branch thick with leaves and mistletoe.

Look.

I squinted, wondering what I was supposed to see.

The leaves?

They were thicker here.

So thick they blocked the stars entirely.

But so what?

Did she really drag me all the way to the top to show me big leaves?

I opened my mouth to ask her, but before I could speak, one of the leaves took flight.

Bats.

Their small bodies hung from the branches, swaying and quivering.

They were everywhere.

The old tree was a roost.

Panic overtook me.

My heart slammed against my ribs as I twisted and tried to climb down.

Wendy caught my shoulder.

Look.

She held out her other hand, which looked as thin and delicate as the bats themselves.

I watched, astonished, as three bats shivered open and swung, latching onto her fingers.

They crawled along her arm with quick, twitchy movements.

More followed.

One, two, three, six, ten, twelve.

Wendy laughed merrily and tipped her hand against my shoulder.

It tickles.

Here, you try.

The bats surged across her in a jerky flood and crawled onto me.

I covered my eyes as the first of many tiny claws tugged my shirt.

Velvet bellies and warm wings inched across my skin, one after the other.

It did tickle.

After a long time, I opened my eyes.

Bats covered me from waist to shoulder.

clinging tightly as a gust of wind moaned through the canopy.

Branch swayed dangerously.

I grasped the trunk in a panic.

The bats took flight, rising in clouds.

Moonlight shone through their membranous wings, throwing their bones into sharp relief.

Something roiled in my chest and bubbled up my throat.

I thought it was a scream.

But when I opened my mouth, laughter exploded.

Wendy joined me as the bats swooped around us.

Wind moaned through the branches.

Leaves roared like the tide.

In the distance, coyotes howled.

Wendy threw her arms around me and together we kept laughing.

I visited Wendy every evening.

Each night I discovered that I needed to sleep a little less.

By November, I didn't need to sleep at all.

And thank God, sleep would have forced me to miss out on our adventures.

We climbed oak trees, crawled through the bracken with its tangles of thorns and late season wildflowers, raced each other through the hills and napped in the miner's lettuce.

And then there were the animals.

Every animal in the hills obeyed Wendy's commands.

Hawks alighted on our hands, talons nicking soft skin.

Deer crept through the tall grass and touched their soft noses to ours, large eyes so wide they reflected the entire landscape.

We pet black bears, became roost for bats, ran with coyotes, rooted the dark earth with wild hogs, and cuddled every feral cat that crossed our path.

In my memory, those days are warm and golden and the nights are cold and clear, with blast of icy wind that woke me in a way nothing has before or since.

Like everything to do with Wendy, it made me feel alive.

I was happy and utterly, completely myself, untethered to the quiet, bitter tragedy of my mother and brother.

I had a magical wildness that transcended freedom itself, a state I could only enter when I was exploring hills, trees, and mountains with Wendy.

The only place we did not explore was the forest.

It seems insane in hindsight, but everything was insane.

Not just Wendy herself, although she was plenty insane on her own, but the way wild animals came to us, tamer than dogs, or my metamorphosis into an odd lost boy who didn't need sleep.

My mother's illness was insane too.

That she had to be alive while rotting from the inside out wasn't just insane, it was monstrous.

So was Noah's prognosis.

The fact that I would be an orphan at 12, that my disabled brother and I would be placed into different foster homes, perhaps never to see each other again, was insane.

And the reality that my mother would be dead before my 13th birthday, less than half a year, was insane.

The fact, the truth, that nobody cared, that no one would remember us, that my mother, my brother, and I were already forgotten was the most insane thing of all.

Compared to that, Wendy's forest didn't even register.

But did they say what Noah's prognosis was?

I'm not sure.

I just think it's some, I mean, obviously some mental disability, I'm pretty sure.

Well, they said earlier caring for a dying son, right?

So does he have some kind of like chronic condition that will eventually lead to death?

Like maybe some kind of nerve disorder or something?

Oh, I, oh, I thought, maybe.

I thought that it was a mental disability.

I guess not.

I mean, it could be both.

I mean, like, you know, there's a lot of mental conditions that are like body and vice versa.

But just making sure I hadn't missed it.

On a frigid evening when the sky was clear and bright and snow crowned the moonlit mountains, I prepared to go see Wendy as usual.

But on my way out, I felt a tug on my coat.

I looked down and saw Noah.

Go back to bed.

He shook his head.

Anger stirred but quickly died.

Noah would be an orphan too.

At four, not twelve.

You might not even remember mom.

What would be worse?

To remember an ache for her until he died or to forget her altogether?

What if he forgot me?

What if he ended up in a bad foster home?

What if it ended up being hell?

And what if he never remembered anything else?

For the first time in weeks, a lump formed in my throat as reality came to roost, and with it a bitter truth.

If anyone needed a fairy tale, it wasn't me.

It was Noah.

Okay, let's get your coat.

We went out into the frosty night.

Dead bracken crunched under our feet.

The moon shone high and cold, drenching the darkness in a film of silver.

Bats flew overhead, throwing thin, unsettling shadows.

I have a really bad,

I have a really bad feeling.

Well, first off, can I just interject real quick?

Yeah.

I have to, I feel, the

Noah does seem like he has a prognosis that he is going to die, like you were saying.

It feels like Wendy is a like is death or something.

Like, it feels like Wendy is the monster or whatever.

It seems like Wendy is like...

an act of nature that can't be controlled or something that like it feels

like

yeah go ahead sorry Sorry.

No, it's okay.

I was just going to say, the

I'm the reason I wanted to say this is that my toes are curling because I'm nervous that since Noah is like

dying, that Wendy is going to take him or is going to attack him or something, that it's like the inevitability of death and nate, you know, just like that kind of thing.

These animals coming up and even like paying, like, almost paying respect at its whim or whatever.

It's like this, it's this powerful nature that Wendy has.

I don't know.

And I was just sitting there, and as soon as I was like, oh, fuck, he's going to take his brother out there.

It's the same thing where I wouldn't, you know, wouldn't be curious if Wendy ends up taking the mom too or something.

Well, it's like

if it is a representation of death, and it's kind of like our character is safe, right?

Our narrator.

Well, that's what I'm saying.

He's befriending the healthy.

But he who's marked for death, his younger brother, maybe won't be as lucky, You know, he may be a target.

Also, something I like is that in the first description, Wendy is given such an imposing form.

I'm imagining her as like several feet long, this like giant, lanky thing

with these massive eyes, like a horrifying, you know, creature.

But he's made peace with her, but something that could just as easily become violent and a killer if it wanted to, right?

A monster.

It's uncanny for sure, like a surrealist kind of thing, for sure.

Yeah.

Not to meme it

uh because it's kind of been like an overdone image but like you remember the old momo statue that went around the internet yeah kind of similar on the skin and hair but like a more pulled apart face darker eyes you know something like that yeah well i'm very curious to see the people

that are listening to this i'm so curious to see like to to hear what they think this because it's it it gives us it gives us a description but i feel like everybody's going to have a slightly different version of what they are are envisioning, you know, which is pretty fun.

Well, let's see if Noah gets absolutely blasted by this giant demonstration.

I hope not.

If it happens, it's your fault now.

I knelt down by the burrow.

Noah looked at me curiously, then followed suit.

Wendy, are you awake?

Silence.

Then two golden lens flares blinked to life.

Oh,

Noah whispered.

The light reflected off his face as he reached out to touch them.

Then long fingers, thin, cracked, bright as the moon, slid out of the burrow and took his hand.

Who is this?

My brother.

Inside the burrow, something curved and pale glinted under her lens flare eyes.

A crescent.

A smile.

Noah froze as Wendy slid out and unfolded before him.

His gaze tracked upward along her arm to her shoulder, finally settling on her face.

His eyes widened, reflecting the nightscape.

Then he spoke his first full sentence.

What is that?

Noah!

He shook his head and tried to pull back, but Wendy didn't let go.

Oh, no.

No, Hunter.

No.

Hunter.

No.

I know.

I fucking.

Hunter.

What did you do, Hunter?

What did you do, Hunter?

No.

No.

Noah!

No!

It echoed through the night, so maddeningly shrill that the coyotes yipped in response.

Then he bit me.

His teeth felt sharp and electric, somehow rotten.

I let go.

And he ran.

Okay, all right.

Wendy didn't kill him.

That's a good thing.

That's something I thought that you just pushed on us in the story, but you didn't.

So that's good.

He

probably make our protagonist should have taken into account this giant demon monster vision dragon lady uh who's also dead probably not the best thing to show a three-year-old with like a developmental disorder he's changing too our our protagonist is fundamentally changing i mean he he hasn't slept he doesn't sleep anymore you know he is that's true in all in all you know i mean like everything is pointing to him

being i mean mentally going mentally insane not like saying that he's psychotic but i just mean that like it's become so normal that of course he'd be like oh yeah let's just go see my friend you know oh you want to go see wendy wendy's cool like he doesn't even register what he's doing yeah exactly

yeah i chased him for what felt like hours screaming at him to come back that just spurred him on small legs carrying him faster than even i could hope to run he moved farther and farther ahead a dark shape glossed in silver speeding towards the forest edge I watched, helpless, as he finally disappeared among the trees.

The forest loomed before me, a monstrous tangle of shadow and starlight in thick, menacing darkness.

I hesitated, craning my neck as I listened for Noah, but I heard nothing.

So I plunged in, because a hero who can't clean up his own mess is no hero at all.

As soon as I ducked under the canopy, the world changed.

Stars bled through the dying leaves, pale mists curled through the branches, a delicate sheen of silver covered the entire forest.

I thought of my old nightmare, the pale cougar with silver eyes, eating the coyote that spoke in Wendy's voice.

I shivered and kept walking.

I wondered vaguely where I might find Wendy's scum-blanketed pond.

On the heels of that came thoughts of Wendy's monster.

I wondered whether it had silver eyes like the cougar.

Fear suddenly took root and exploded upward.

I was too old to believe in monsters, but I was in a dark forest on an enchanted night.

How could I believe in anything else?

Okay, all right, all right.

Okay,

I want to apologize because in the previous story that we read by Dopa Bean, I had some crit, we had some criticisms, but I had criticisms in the beginning about

some of the events happening too fast or the characters being like they were speaking in the real world about their job and stuff or doing things that I thought were too unrealistic or too quick.

I want to apologize because I was not familiar with your game.

These, this is not

like trying to be as

hyper-specific with, like, oh, well, a person would say this, a person would do this.

And I feel like the reason Dopabine doesn't care is because it's not as interesting.

What is interesting is like making these narratives, these fairy tales out of it.

And these, like, the references that keep going back are hitting so well.

It being a childhood, almost like a dream this kid's having each night.

But it's being described with things like,

I was in the dark forest on an enchanted night.

How could I believe in anything but monsters?

Stuff like that is just hitting so hard.

Dopabine doesn't need to hyper-fixate on writing all the characters to be hyper-realistic when they can just write a story this good, when it's this fun, it's this engaging.

They are cooking.

I have looked into the kitchen.

I can confirm it is delicious.

So anyway, yeah, need to get that out of the way.

Leaves and twigs crunched underfoot.

Patterns of broken moonlight danced over my skin.

I sidestepped roots and rocks, silently reassuring myself, there are no monsters.

They aren't real.

There are no monsters.

They aren't real.

There are no monsters.

I hopped over an upraised root, but instead of touching the ground, my foot went down and down and down, spilling me to the forest floor.

Disintegrated leaves and fine, silky dust exploded in a cold cloud.

It tasted old and rich, a combination of oak, sage, filth, and dirty fir that melted into mud on my tongue.

I set up gagging and turned.

Behind me I saw an earthen ledge that formed a high, lopsided step snake through with roots.

I spat out the mud and stood up.

There, in the trees behind the tree root stare, were eyes like murky starlight.

There are no monsters.

Something shifted.

They aren't real.

Something bony and broken and long, long as a tree, a fallen, bug-infested tree exploding with rot.

There are no monsters, they aren't real, but that thing was very real.

I ran.

Behind me, leaves crackled and twigs snapped under rapid footfalls.

There are no monsters, no monsters, no monsters, no monsters, no monsters, no monsters.

A low roar bored into my ribcage and thumbed, so shockingly powerful it paralyzed me.

I was sure my bones would disintegrate.

I would collapse, a puddle of flesh and clothes and powdered bone.

Someday a tree would grow from my bone mill and I would be a part of the forest, part of the monster, forgotten by the world as I grew web-like branches and sprouted leaves that would host pendulums of mistletoe.

Then the roar cut off.

So did my transfiguration.

I was no longer a tree, just a boy.

A frightened boy, running from the monster in the deep dark woods.

I ran until I heard birdsong underscored by the hoarse commentary of crows.

A cat darted across my path, fur shining in the sunlight.

I sobbed and glanced over my shoulder before I lost my nerve.

A doe stared back, half hidden in the trees.

What are you doing here?

I spun around in a panic.

It was windy.

Come on, we have to get off the trees.

I hate them.

The sun shafted weakly through the forest canopy, throwing patterns of light and shadow that moved over our skin as we ran.

I glanced uneasily at the trees, branches like great drooping webs spread overhead, bleeding dusty beams of sunlight.

Finally, in the distance, I spied the shaded patch of miner's lettuce.

On the hill behind it stood my house.

When we crossed the tree line, reality crashed over the world, dismantling the dark spell of the forest and its silver-eyed monster.

Before I could even draw a breath, Wendy turned on me.

How could you go in there?

I had to.

Dread exploded as I remembered why I'd gone to the woods in the first place.

What kind of hero abandons a sick little boy to the the mercy of a monster?

No hero at all.

I turned back.

As the shadows of the trees fell across me, I felt their pull, like fishing lines reeling me in.

My brother.

She grabbed me and spun around, slamming me to the ground with such force I could barely comprehend it.

No!

I told you!

I tried to stand, but my limbs wouldn't obey.

I can't let him.

I told you there was a monster!

But my brother's in there!

I couldn't leave him!

You didn't leave me!

Her face crumbled.

She looked uglier than ever.

Too ugly to be real.

Yes,

it's bad to abandon your brothers.

She wiped her eyes, pushing up folds of loose, dry skin.

I need to show you something.

But Noah is safe.

I made sure I always take care of my brothers.

Follow me.

Interesting.

The other thing this reminds me since this episode just become me going, wow, this is cool.

And the naming an IP that I also think is cool.

It also reminds me of Coraline a lot.

Going down

the well to the Beldoms world.

It's the same thing, but Switch and all that.

Then she got down on all fours and crawled into her burrow.

I looked up at my house, then down at the burrow.

Wendy or home?

Despite my fear and the marrow, deep exhaustion weighing me down, the choice was surprisingly easy.

I dropped to my belly and slid in after her.

The burrow was wet and cold.

Mud squished under my fingers.

Pale roots dangled like the legs of ghostly spiders.

A large earthworm glistened briefly before diving into the earth.

Then darkness engulfed me.

I saw nothing at all.

I crawled blindly.

The hiss of Wendy's bony form sliding ahead was the only thing that kept panic at bay.

By the time I emerged into the sunlight, my bones ached with cold.

Every inch of skin was numb.

My clothes were muddy.

Those thin, pale roots tangled around my fingers like waterlogged hair.

I closed my eyes against the light.

It felt painfully bright, but I knew it wasn't.

I sensed the gloomy, muted quality of the sun and knew that we were back among the trees.

I frowned.

Why did Wendy, who hated the forest, have a home that spilled directly into its heart?

Open your eyes.

I did.

Directly before me, perched an inch or two off the dark earth, was a discolored bulb shot through with cracks and two large, dark holes-like eyes.

Only when I noticed the jaw beneath, small, malformed, with less than a dozen teeth, did I understand what I was seeing?

My head felt light, my chest pressurized, as though a rapidly inflating balloon had replaced my heart.

I looked around.

There were so many.

They carpeted the earth, sprouting from the dead leaves like obscene flowers, small and large, dark and pale, some whole, some broken, some with smashed-in faces, some little more than lopsided jaws or jagged skull caps.

These are my brothers.

No one remembers them, but the monster who killed them.

The balloon in my chest inflated sharply, pressing painfully against my ribs and throat.

Eyes like dirty silver pools filled my head.

Monsters aren't real.

This one is.

It lives in the trees.

You have to listen, or you'll end up like them.

I'm not your brother.

Her face was changing, fading, bleeding away like light bleeds from the evening sky.

I couldn't look at her for long.

When you forget a monster, you allow it to thrive.

To take over?

Why didn't you tell me you had a brother, too?

I shrugged defensively.

Tell me about him.

Of course, you wanted to know about Noah.

All anyone cared about was Noah.

Why would Wendy be any different?

He's sick.

With what?

Something he was born with.

He's retarded.

He won't live very long because his organs aren't growing right.

He can't form memories very well, and when mom dies, he might not even remember her.

Tears stung my eyes.

Suddenly, it was hard to breathe.

Poor me.

I'll have to go to a special foster home.

I won't be able to come.

He'll think we left him.

Why does he have to go?

Why can't he stay here with you and your mother?

How amazing, I thought.

How bitterly, selfishly amazing that I hadn't yet told Wendy of Noah or my mother.

Everything came out of me.

I could almost see it flooding the forest, an infected pool rising around the garden of skulls.

It's like mom and Noah existed for nothing.

No one cares that they're here, and no one will care when they're gone.

No one will even remember them.

They don't matter to anyone.

And I can't change that.

Nothing I do is enough.

Wendy sat, motionless in my periphery.

She looked terrifying in silhouette.

Absolutely, gut-wrenchingly, incomprehensibly horrifying.

But when she spoke, she sounded gentle.

So very, very gentle.

Why didn't you tell me?

Because

I didn't want to think about it.

You didn't want to remember?

I shook my head and continued to cry.

Silence followed, broken only by the wind and the steps of tiny animals picking picking through the dead leaves.

Then Wendy spoke.

I expected her to tell me about her brothers, but even though the skulls of a hundred dead boys surrounded us, she told me about crows and red ants and condors, all of which eat dead things.

Once the scavengers have their fill, the carcasses of the dead animals rot into the soil to be drawn up through the roots of jealous, hungry trees and eaten.

I remembered the dust in my mouth, how it tasted of oak and rot.

My gorge rose.

Living things are alive because they eat dead things.

Wendy turned her bone pendant over and over in her hands.

That is the only way living things can live.

She looked up at the sprawling web of branches.

Especially the trees.

They are more alive than any of us know.

I finally looked at her.

Her skin was thinner and older than I'd ever seen it.

Her eyes looked flat yet endless, with dim, cloudy spots under the surface, like dead things drifting under murky water.

If you could be like me, would you?

Yes.

A thousand years of cold, clear nights filled with bats and deer and laughter would be a dream come true.

No worries, no sickness, no future, only magic.

What if it meant you had to eat something that was alive?

Would you still do it?

She's gonna have him eat his fucking brother, dude.

Wait a minute.

She's gonna have him, she's gonna have him eat his mom and brother.

You know what something else

from the buds, specifically, like well, not a specific Northwest, like Northern Forest.

That if you eat another

human, you become

the wendigo like a what yeah like a wendigo whatever yeah the wendigo and what's her name

wendy

she's a wendigo that makes sense to me i think that's what it is because with uh with that mythology you eat if you if you give in to this like the temptation the you know gluttony of cannibalism a spirit possesses you and you become these twisted amalgams that makes so much sense the big yellow eyes the broken movements, it's like the traditional depictions of the Wendigo.

And like in early Native American culture before, like, you know, Stephen King's influence of Deer's Skull and stuff like that.

Right.

Is this story like a completely because normally the Wendigo is like either like a haunting spirit in the woods or like a hyper-violent cannibalistic monster, right?

Is this like a, it's a Temptress in the woods kind of thing?

Is that what it's saying?

Because if so, that's super cool.

Not to diminish, not to diminish like all the different themes and stuff the story has by just describing it as super cool, but that notion alone gets me hyped.

Dude, this is.

I stepped into the kitchen.

Not only is it good, but they made it just for me.

This is my order.

Let's go.

Oh, man.

It was made for me.

It's calling to me.

This is my way to go narrative.

It was made for me.

Oh, man.

Gosh, I hope, dude.

What if you?

All of this buildup, all this like perfect, majestic world.

I was so curious where it was going, where the horde comes in.

And then that, do you want to be like me?

What if you had to eat something that's alive?

It's like it's been seducing him for months at this point.

Ah, oh,

oh,

oh,

I'm gonna punch something.

I'm fired up right now, okay?

This is wrong, whispered a small voice in the back of my head.

All of it was wrong.

Her way with animals, how she made them behave even when their bodies quivered and their eyes rolled, her cold burrow, her skeletal thinness, her wormy movements, the broken desiccation of her skin, and her eyes, her clouded, dead eyes.

I shot to my feet.

I have to go.

I know.

I walked as fast as I could without running, shuddering when I passed her burrow.

I didn't dare go through it again.

The thought of being trapped, of being chased by a skeletal girl monster whose dry body rasped against the walls nearly sent me into a panic.

The forest surrounded me.

All dusty green and golden gloom, I thought of monsters, warped in human bodies blending with the twisted branches, spidery hands stretching out of the shadows, mottled skin camouflaged in the dappled light.

I took a deep breath.

There are no monsters.

Wendy's cracked, dead face filled my mind's eye.

They aren't real.

The trees finally thinned.

The brittle sunlight grew brighter, and green glimmered through the trees.

The miners led us.

Boundary between my world and Wendy's, and behind it, my house.

I broke into a run and didn't stop until I burst through the door.

My mother was waiting, waiting, emaciated face twisted in fury.

Noah, who was napping on the love seat, didn't stir.

Oh, cool.

Noah made it.

Okay, Noah's alive.

He's okay.

What?

What?

Were you thinking?

Her words crushed me, so I crushed her.

That would be good to get him out of here and away from you for a little while.

He doesn't have to die just because you are.

Oh!

Oh!

Oh!

Oh!

Oh!

Oh!

Oh!

Oh!

oh.

Excuse me, young man.

What was that?

No.

The words hung in the air, echoing, reverberating until they broke what was left of my world, like magic words spoken by a monster instead of the hero.

I regretted them instantly, but it didn't help.

Nothing I did, or could do, or would ever do, could help.

I looked at Noah.

His hands were scraped raw.

His little little palms looked filleted, coated in papery scabs and raw flesh.

I thought of the forest.

Its hungry roots and jagged rocks had withered.

Mom, go.

She looked a hundred years old, papery skin stretched over a skull, eagerly anticipating the day it would escape her.

Just go.

I looked at my brother again, flopped bonelessly over the cushions.

Only the rise and fall of his chest gave any indication that he was alive.

Wendy's voice echoed in my ear.

Living things are alive because they eat dead things.

An image exploded in my head, my mother arranging freshly butchered pieces of my little brother on the kitchen table as she prepared to eat him while his eyes, flat and discolored, with cloudy pale things flickering in their depths, bored into mine.

I burst into tears.

That night, for the first time in months, I slept.

There's so much more to tell of Wendy, what she was and what she did, but I am so tired.

Far too tired to remember any more monsters tonight.

End of part one.

What a banger, man.

Kind of like that it's going over multiple days because each one of these, uh, like part two and part three, they're each labeled something different.

It kind of reminds me of the uh voodoo store, just the way it's like recollections of these different uh memories or experiences he had versus it being just like a

just straight linear thing.

Which I'm sure it will be linear, but I do like how each one is just pieced.

Like part two is the dead, the dead girl in my yard told me the most awful stories.

But it just seems like, you know, like I wait, I like the way that ends.

I had a couple questions for you.

Juan,

the motifs, the continuous motifs of gold and silver, what do you think that has to do?

i want to apologize for any negative comment ever made to dopa bean if as what negative comment what are you talking about you can have my car keys

i have them here it's you it's not it's a toyota

what bad what what you didn't say anything because in the last in the last part at the beginning of the last part i was like oh you know what's up with this stuff i feel like the setup's a little quick and stuff like that i just i i was out of my depths i apologize in the other story

look I'm just saying, Dopabine can have my car if they want it.

Anyway.

Are you talking about the other story?

Yes.

I think this criticisms are still, it doesn't take away from the story.

I mean, it's like

valid criticisms.

You know what?

I can agree with that.

At the same time, you can have my car.

That's all I'm saying.

That's fine.

Okay, the gold and silver thing.

So now that this is a Wendigo story, or it always has been since I've realized it, silver is used in a lot of early traditions around like Wendigo hunting and stuff like that.

Uh, because wendigos are seen as like an unclean spirit, right?

So, a lot of like the settlers that would windigo hunt, like uh, what was his name, Jack something, the one-igo hunter.

They're like, there was stuff about using silver bullets or stabbing it with silver, keeping silver near you.

And similar to vampires, the idea is it's like silver is a pure material, and the thing you're going up against is an unpure spirit, so purity scares it off.

So it could be referenced to that.

It could also just be that like, you know, she has the golden eyes, you know, gold's a sign of wealth.

It's temptation, right?

It's like a similar, like, think of like Midas mythos, right?

Like gold is good.

You want to give in to it, but it can be too good.

It can be too much.

And silver is kind of like a purifying color.

I don't know what the mountain lion is yet.

what the mountain lion might be in the dream because in the dream the coyote was windy right it's that's what no

no.

I think, I think the coyote is supposed to be the mom.

I think the mom was the princess.

The mom was the princess.

Oh, the princess, I see.

Whoa, wait.

And then it says that Wendy spoke through the coyote.

Wendy's voice said, Please come back.

And the silver-eyed mountain lion stepped between them.

And as he's running through the woods, he's thinking of the silver eyes of the mountain lion.

And very specifically, Wendy has gold eyes.

The mountain lion or the cougar or whatever

having silver eyes.

i always at least could be a way to go

i totally i totally could be wrong but i thought it was the protagonist in the dream i think that it's supposed to it's supposed to represent them that's certainly is kind of it's kind of what i was thinking i i because i pictured the half because even the princess i understand the mom that it looks like the mom but even the coyote is represent i mean like it's just this half I mean, it's like half a carcass.

It's a dying thing.

So it just associated that with the mom as well.

It's just this kind of just the imagery of death and the decay.

It's all, I mean, you're right.

It is supposed to be Wendy, but I also just saw it as like the mom, then even the brother, you know?

And then now Wendy is this like tempting voice that is speaking through it, being like, come back.

And she's trying to basically

create another friend or create another like Wendigo or Wendigo.

I keep wanting to say Wendigoon.

Wendigo.

that

she can hang out with, you know?

But it's going to have to be, you have to,

there's just a lot of stuff.

Like, it seems like the motifs here, the gold, silver, that kind of thing, the tempting nature of that, and then also forgetfulness, or like, you know, the, the, the continuous thing of, you know, people forget about these things to where it almost seems like

once someone dies, it's, it's almost like the way that

I mean, I'm, I'm just reaching, right?

So take all this with a grain of salt, whatever, but it seems like through death and all this thing and like through tragedy, the best way to move on from it is to forget it or to not

face it.

So it seems like basically there's just these the motif of forgetting things

The forgetful nature gold and silver.

I just it's interesting how those kind of bounce back and forth not in like an egregious way, but like every time we saw something in the forest, there was a golden light on the fur.

You know, the eyes glistened with gold, which at first, when we were talking about death and stuff, I was like, oh, I wonder if that's supposed to be, because it was always very specified on gold on the eyes, and I kept thinking of the coins you put on people's eyes.

You know what I mean?

The rivers to cross the river sticks.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I kept thinking about that,

which I don't know how, you know, there was just, there's so much you can take away with it.

Very strong first part.

Really love the setup.

Love, that's one thing that Dopabine even did in the last story, too, which is leading leading us on, getting us well established with these characters.

And then there's just like one little moment that I think is just great.

And I love that thing of, do you want to be like me?

And then it just immediately, it's just a switch to where you're like, oh, this is threatening.

Like, now I'm afraid of winning.

Would you do it if you have to eat something alive?

What a great.

Yeah.

What, what, how?

One line.

What a stellar way to completely.

turn turn heel the entire story's direction in a sentence.

By her saying that it it recontextualized everything and it changes the direction.

It makes our character immediately and the reader afraid at once.

Like, what if you had to eat something that's alive?

And it made so many things click about the imagery and stuff.

Also, okay, I thought of this while you were talking.

So, for one, to go back to the dream, the phrasing it uses is it says a white mountain lion proud, murky silver eyes cutting dim swasts through the darkness nearby.

A half-eaten coyote with golden eyes whimpered as it bled to death.

So,

coyote is is Wendy, and then the silver is the mountain lion.

The thing I said about gold

being like a, you know, greed, it's like, oh, well, you can, you know, people want to give, people want to have money, but they lose themselves to it.

King Midas, blah, blah, blah.

But

what

I think is especially interesting is like when you think of gold as like the vessel of greed, right?

Like, you know, all the gold in the world, that's what people want.

What greed is there more than immortality at the cost of a life?

Right.

Like, I want to live forever.

I never want to die.

Someone surrounded by death being tempted with the idea of never dying, but all he has to do is take a life that's already on its way out the door, a life he already can't stand.

And maybe he can have that for his mom as well.

It's like that temptation.

It's like the, it's, you were talking early about Wendy being like a vessel of sickness or death.

It's almost like, again, with the golden eyes, it's greed or it's like the gluttony of staying alive being presented to him, like this offering, a lust almost for immortality.

And he just has to hurt someone forever to do it.

Yeah.

No, I mean,

I think you're right.

I mean, I think that makes total sense.

Also, too, death always, you know, that's the three fucking

death always gets its due.

You know what I mean?

It always takes.

Like, there's no way to avoid it.

And I think that pair, like that, that kind of correspondence you're saying with the gold is just, it feels feels like it fits really well i think that um

i'm curious to see how this temptation is going to roll out and if wendy keeps this composure i think is going to be really interesting as we go into act two part two

the dead girl in my yard told the most awful stories after i left wendy in the forest i slept for the first time in weeks My dreams were filled with headless boys, crippled princesses with flesh so thin it split across their cheekbones, and a pale cougar eating a golden-eyed little girl whose blood flooded an endless field of miner's lettuce.

The mountain lion snapped the child's bones in its blood-stained jaws with a rhythmic crack, crack, crack that jerked me out of the nightmare.

The cracking sound followed me out of my dream.

Only it wasn't cracking of bones or of anything else.

It was tapping.

I shot up and faced my window.

Sure enough, I saw a pale hand wrapping the glass and behind it, a small, star-silvered silhouette.

Anger overtook my fear.

I stalked to the window and threw it open.

What do you want?

The monster saw you.

It's going to come for you and your brother.

Her eyes glimmered dimly.

Our brother.

My heart fell down to my feet.

Fear bloomed in its place.

To hide it, I snarled at her.

How would you know?

Her eyes looked dim, yet terribly bright, like cloud-shrouded moons.

I know everything the monster thinks.

The flower in my chest continued to bloom, thick black petals unfurling one by one.

No, you don't.

I know because the monster is the forest.

And I used to love the forest more than anything.

Even more than I loved my brothers.

That's how I know.

She reached for my hand.

Her skin was cracked and dry and so terribly thin.

Moonlight filtered through it, revealing the mummified musculature and delicate bones beneath.

Come with me.

I recoiled.

No.

Her eyes blazed for an instant, pearlescent moon yellow flaring to gold.

Then she relaxed and folded her hands on the sill.

I don't want you to, I almost spat.

What kind of hero would that make me?

No hero at all, of course.

Only a resentful brat who made his mother cry, who hated helping his family, who abandoned his baby brother to the beast in the deep dark woods.

Would I also chase away my best friend, my only companion, my fairy tale, for the crime of simply trying to help me?

How foolish would that be?

I knew she wasn't human, so that made her something else.

Maybe an elf or fairy or a creature no one had ever even heard of.

And what if she needed my help?

What if she was cursed?

For all I knew, she was some kind of princess.

But no matter what she was, I loved her, didn't I?

Yes.

And I must have loved her for a reason.

Surely my instincts weren't wrong.

She was scary, but she was good.

She had to be.

Okay,

what do you want?

To tell you about my first brother.

Curiosity surged.

What about him?

She smiled, frog-like mouth opening over small, fine teeth.

The important things.

She looked down.

Spidery lashes shaded her moon-yellow eyes.

He was literal than me.

He loved cats.

Petting cats and going fishing were his favorite things in the world.

He got a fish hook stuck in his hand once, and it left a big, lumpy scar like an earthworm.

That didn't put him off from fishing.

He sure did love fishing.

A single tear rolled down her cheek.

I waited.

He wanted to build a little house by a river.

A river that froze in winter time and shone like glass.

Catch fish in the river every day and cook the fish in his fireplace.

The cats would eat first because he loved them so much.

He was going to plant an apple tree so he could pick the apples and teach wild deer to eat them out of his hand.

What was his name?

Wendy's eyes darkened.

I don't remember.

The moon rose behind her.

Obscured by the twisted branches of the valley oaks, crickets and night insects sang a peculiar orchestra that pulsed through the night.

After a while, Wendy continued.

That's why it was so easy for the monster to catch him.

Because he didn't believe in it.

He loved the monster and didn't believe anything he loved could be evil.

Not when the monster hurt him, not when it pulled his arms and legs off, not even when it tore his head away.

The monster pulled so hard that that parts of my brother's spine came out.

I saw it.

It looked like a root.

I don't want to hear anymore.

The monster took my brother's arms and his legs and his body, but it left his head behind.

So when the monster left, I took my brother's head out into the forest.

The spine was sharp and slippery.

I cut my hands.

She held her hands out.

Small pale scars glinted all over her fingers.

Stop.

I got lost.

It was a nightmare.

My brother's little cat followed me and cried and cried like a kitten who lost its mother.

I cried with it while the owls watched.

I was so scared it would swoop down and carry it away and pull its head off and eat it.

Like the monster did to my brother.

She paused, sniffling.

I got lost.

I finally found a pond.

It's dried up now, but wasn't back then.

There was scum on it, and no fish inside.

But there was water.

I dug a little hole in the shore and put my brother's head in it.

I covered his spine root with dirt and leaves, and left his head above the ground.

Then I scooped up the pond water and watered him.

The scum caught in his eyes.

Stop it!

I stayed with him for days.

So did his cat.

I ate acorns and drink from the pond, and I watered his head every morning and evening, but it didn't grow back.

He just rotted.

His eyes turned gray and sank into his head.

His hair fell out.

His skin turned bad colors and swelled and split and slowed away.

I didn't want to live without him, so I went home and waited for the monster to kill me.

But he didn't kill me.

Instead, he gave me food.

A delicious stew with thick brown gravy and corn and meat.

I was so hungry, I ate it all.

Except the last bite.

I didn't eat that last bite.

Because when I scooped it up with my spoon and the gravy drained off, I saw it was a soggy piece of skin with a big lumpy scar on it.

Just like an earthworm.

Shut up!

No,

I have to tell you about the monster because I can't fight him alone.

Stepped away from the windowsill.

Go to sleep now.

Man.

Brutal.

Oh, God.

I love how it really does feel like a fairy tale, doesn't it?

Like, it feels like a witch would do that.

Or it feels like a Hanson Gretel kind of thing.

Yeah, it feels like a Grimm's fairy tale.

Like, the two kids ventured out in the woods.

So I'm guessing at that time, Wendy was a human, right?

And this was the event that turned her into a Wendigo.

or what she is now.

The monster killed her, but ripped him to pieces, pulled his spine out, and then the monster comes and gives her stew, and then she gets the last bite, and it's the scar her brother got from the fish hook, right?

So she realizes she's eaten her brother, and that's what made her into what she is now, yeah.

I bet.

Um, man, that is haunting.

So,

but now Wendy's saying we can fight the monster, I need your help to fight the monster.

So

maybe, maybe she's not necessarily evil, you know, maybe it's like a vampire thing, right?

Like, I became a vampire, now I resent it.

Um,

and maybe you can help me fight it, or we can be together forever if you eat of something that's alive.

Like, there's kind of this regretfulness to Wendy's position.

Yeah, I don't know.

I feel, I mean, I think that she's insane.

I think that

the forest she feels is playing tricks on her.

To me, that story read like she killed her brother.

She regretted it, and in her madness, she ate it.

Oh,

Oh, yeah.

I didn't really think about that.

Yeah, it could just be.

Because she just says the monster is the forest.

Yeah.

And

it tore him limb from limb.

It pulled his spine apart.

But that could just be referring to like decomposition or animals tearing him apart or something like that.

Interesting.

Yeah, that could be a good point.

It's either that, which I like your idea more now that I think about it.

The other idea I had was maybe it's like, again, with vampires.

There is like one vampire that makes like offspring, you know, like it bites other people, they become followers.

And it's one of those things where it's like, well, you have to kill the leader of the vampires, whatever.

I think,

I'm not sure about the Wendigo specifically, or

it would normally be that there was someone like possessed by a spirit in a lot of like the Native American legends.

But I don't think there was, I mean, it was a core spirit.

It was like the spirit of it that would possess you, but I don't think it was like one person got infected and then it would infect others, but they could be adapting that for the story.

But honestly, I like your idea better that it's the force that's the monster that killed her brother and then she ate her brother, you know?

It's hard to say right now.

It's still so cryptic, like in nature of how she's talking about everything.

Also, she's the only visible monster we've seen yet, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah, I want to trust her, but I can't.

It's hard.

It's hard.

Yeah.

She went away.

I lay awake and thought of her brother's head rotting away under the silver moon, dead eyes forever locked on a stagnant pond while bugs crawled up his spine root and ate him from the inside out.

The next morning my mother asked me to spend the day with her and Noah.

I wanted to more than anything.

The idea of placing my head, filled as it was with Wendy's nightmares, beside her and Noah made me sick.

What if the nightmares sloshed out of my head and into theirs?

What if I contaminated them?

gave my dying mother bad dreams for the remainder of her painful life.

Instead, I stayed in my room with the blinds shut and the curtains down, emerging only to cook meals and clean when my mother vomited up her lunch.

When night fell, I locked every door, turned on every light, piled my bed with every blanket I could find.

I lay awake, petrified and suffocating, until morning came.

Only then did I drift into an exhausted sleep.

Wendy didn't come the next night, or the one after that, or even the night after that.

I just began to convince myself that she was some kind of bizarre, recurring nightmare, a delusion brought on by my inability to cope with my own grief and fear, when a loud tap startled me from a twilight sleep.

I curled up immediately and covered my ears.

It did nothing to muffle the sound of Wendy's withered fingertips.

I gripped my teeth.

One tap, two taps, three taps, four, five, six, ten, twenty, thirty-five, fifty-one.

Finally, I shot up.

Go away!

The tapping ceased.

I sat there, breathing heavily and waiting for the glass to shatter, for Wendy to crawl in like a giant broken spider and pull my head off before I could even scream.

I had read that heads were conscious for up to a minute following decapitation.

Would I be conscious?

What would it be like to scream without a body?

Then her ragged voice emanated from the corner.

Why are you so mean to me now?

See, it's so frustrating because she presents herself as like a young girl who like this happened to a victim of the forest.

and I want to feel bad for her, but I don't know that I can trust her, you know.

No, I mean, so much changed with that one sentence in the last

part.

The what if you had to eat something alive?

Ah, man.

I reared back as her bony shadow unfolded from the shadows.

It took several seconds to draw enough breath to speak.

How did you get in here?

There are the trees.

She stayed in the corner, as indistinct as the pale things floating in her eyes.

There aren't trees in here.

Trees grow under your house.

Little ones, sick and small, and fighting with mushrooms.

But they're there, and they're enough.

Why are you here?

To my immense shame, my voice thickened and broke.

I'm no hero, I thought miserably.

No hero at all.

You scare me!

The monster should scare you.

She drifted out of the shadows and halted at the foot of my bed.

I'll tell you about him soon.

But first,

I'm going to tell you about my second brother.

I covered my ears and began to hum.

She struck like a viper, smacking my hands away.

Her skin was extraordinarily hot.

I yelped and flinched.

He was older than me.

How can your second brother be older than your first brother?

I snapped, rubbing my hands as blisters began to rise.

He was an orphan who lived in the forest by himself.

He didn't believe in monsters either.

He loved everything.

No matter what happened to him, he saw the best in the world.

He taught me to climb the oaks and cut the mistletoe away.

He loved to be in the trees, and I loved to be there with him.

He would climb the oaks and stay in the branches all night, singing to the bats and watching the moon.

He taught me about chamomile tea and acorn paste and bobcats and coyotes.

He made friends with raccoons and gave them presents, shiny bits of metal that he sanded smooth so the raccoons wouldn't cut their hands.

He made friends with the crows too.

He fed them even when he was starving.

Skin, meat, and bones.

They loved bones the best.

When he taught them to speak, the first word they learned was bone.

They knew how to count to nine.

They knew hello, and yes, and no, and please, they even knew his name.

Her eyes flashed cold, dull, yellow.

But I don't.

Not anymore.

I don't remember it.

I realized I wasn't breathing, took the deepest, quietest breath I could manage.

My eldest brother said monsters aren't real.

Monsters are evil, he told me.

The timber of her voice became deep, fast and silly, the voice of a sweet fool.

I could almost see him, tall and painfully thin, dirty hair and an earnest, homely face.

Her voice broke.

She uttered a soft sob and angrily wiped her murky eyes.

I thought of the forest, of the preternatural silence and those molten eyes burning in the gloom.

Monsters didn't exist.

I knew that.

That thing did.

If it wasn't a monster, what was it?

The monster didn't want to be called scared or stupid or confused or hurt.

It wanted to be powerful.

And

it was.

To prove it, the monster slaughtered all of my brother's friends.

The crows, the raccoons, the woodpeckers, and the squirrels.

It brought them to my brother.

Fur and feathers and all.

My brother screamed, and I've never heard such a scream.

It should have split the world apart.

Then the monster broke my brother's arms and legs and threw them in the well and left them there for days.

My poor brother begged for food.

The monster ignored him until one morning he grabbed one of my brother's dead friends, a little raccoon.

with maggots in its eyes.

And it threw the raccoon down to my brother.

My brother pounced on it like a starving rat, and he screamed again.

Wendy's voice broke.

The monster left and threw all the animals into the well.

Some of them hit the stones and

split in half.

Others exploded when they hit the bottom.

My brother lay there, broken and dying, screaming as the corpses of the things he loved best buried him in fur and wet, stinking rot.

I saw it all.

The smell is still in my mouth, and it hides under my tongue and clings inside my nose and feels my lungs, reminding me, always reminding me.

I waited, both hands over my mouth, because I was afraid of what would come out.

Useless words, childish sobs, endless screams, or laughter.

The monster left my brother to rot in the well.

And I went to him one night.

It was the kind of night my brother liked most.

Clear and cold, full of beds and bright with moonlight.

The smell.

Oh, the smell.

I wanted to go down and see him and all of his friends.

They were my friends too, and I loved them.

But there was no way down into the well.

So instead, I ran into the forest.

And even though it was night and the petals were all furled, I picked up every flower I could find.

An armload.

So many they kept slipping away and left a trail behind me.

I carried the flowers back to the well and dropped them in.

And even though it was night, even though they were picked and dead, they blossomed as they fell.

In the morning, that old dry well was overgrown.

Vines and wildflowers exploded out like a fountain, covering every last stone.

I loved those flowers so much.

I sat by them often, especially on the cold, clear nights when bats swooped low.

On those nights, I would look into the flowers and see eyes.

The bright, curious eyes of raccoons and the small, dark star eyes of crows.

Even though I searched, I never saw the eyes of my brothers.

She wiped her face again.

Where's the well?

Under the house.

I couldn't move.

I couldn't breathe.

Couldn't even think.

I went to the well every night.

When they started to build this house, I got scared.

I thought of my brother and his friends, trapped in an old well under a house in the dark, forever forgotten.

So I ate them.

All the vines, all the flowers, all the thorns, all the rise.

Then I crawled down into the well and pulled up the roots.

There were so many.

Some went deep.

Some went shallow.

Some were big and some were small.

Every last one of them looked like backbones.

I meant to eat them, but I couldn't.

Any more than I could have eaten my first brother's backbone, so I pulled them out of the well and carried them into the forest.

The monster ruled the forest by then, but I could think of nothing else to do.

I wandered the trees with roots until I found a place I knew.

The pond was dry, but the rest was the same.

My brother's head was there, attached to a stock of polished bone.

His eyes were fused shut, and his head had grown enormous.

He was flat on one end and just like a pumpkin that's grown on its side.

But he smiled when I knelt beside him.

He smiled even wider as I dug a hundred holes for roots of my second brother and all of his friends.

My brother didn't say anything.

He couldn't.

Because he was just a heady, but he smiled.

Because he remembered me.

Covered her eyes.

I don't even remember his name.

She began to cry.

I watched her helplessly.

Each sob sent a pulse of overwhelming sorrow through my own body, waves of grief on a shore of flesh and bone.

You were a good sister.

I know it.

No.

Nothing I did was good enough.

She turned away, pale form melting into the shadows.

Wendy, don't go, don't!

A single soft sob emanated from the corner, and all was silent.

I lay awake for a long time, thinking of the forgotten well filled with the bones of slaughtered animals, of the boy who screamed so loudly the world should have split apart.

As I finally drifted off to sleep, I heard the echo of a terrible, heart-rending wail echoing from under my bedroom floor.

The next morning, I ventured out in search for Wendy.

When I couldn't find her, I retreated to the patch of miner's lettuce and waited for hours.

In the distance, the forest drew my eyes like a magnet, a smear of gold and green, magical, monstrous.

At some point, I thought I saw bright eyes burning through the trees.

I swallowed the lump in my throat and went home.

My brother and all the things he loved were down there and I ate it all.

I couldn't eat the bones.

I put them in the forest.

The boy's scream should have split the room.

Oh, gosh.

Oh, gosh.

This is just so heat.

It's so good.

Okay.

Man.

This is right up my alley.

Like the fairy tale and like how it's almost like in another world.

It's almost like Wendy is both the monster and the victim.

Like, it's like the spirit that has possessed her is the monster she's afraid of, and she carries it with her where she goes.

So, she wants to do these good things, but it always results in her, like, eating the people, her brothers, because we know anyone that comes to the forest is considered her brother.

Because earlier, when talking about Noah, she says, your brother, our brother.

So, it's like that, that's her, that's what a brother means to her, someone that comes to the forest.

So, it's like everyone that steps in the forest falls victim to her and the spirit within her, but she's remorseful of it almost.

She can't remember their names, but she wants to.

Yeah, well, I mean, there's a parallel with, and

I was thinking at first, I was like, oh, I wonder if our protagonist is actually her brother.

He just doesn't know if it's like a forgotten thing.

But if not, even Noah is representative of her younger brother, and now our protagonist is representative of her older brother.

Yeah.

is is just a very interesting thing.

And for the house to be built on this well is uh

I think it's going to be something where we're going to get like a big reveal at the end and it's just going to like really pop

yeah yeah

oh man okay

eight nights later i'd given up reality had already swept wendy half away my mother was sicker closer to death than ever no one must have sensed it he was so wild his behavior barely qualified as human and it took everything i had to handle him Still wasn't enough.

Even hours passed dark.

He regularly burst into miserable, screechy wailing.

What kept me awake?

I was happy that I didn't have to deal with it.

That was one good thing about my mother lavishing all of her attention on him.

At least I didn't have to soothe his night terrors.

I stayed up, listening in case you needed help, but everything remained quiet.

After a while, I drifted.

A familiar tap-tap-tapping roused me.

Before I was even fully awake, I rose and stumbled to the window.

Frozen air gusted in, smelling of snow and dark earth.

Wendy stood there, looking dead.

Deader than she had the day I saw the skull of her brothers.

A shambling monument to old dry rot.

Why are you here?

She slung a withered, spidery leg over my sill and climbed into my room.

Her bone pendant swung back and forth, dirty and jagged as ever.

I've come to tell you about my third brother.

Her sparse, dry hair caught the moonlight, blazing warm silver that glanced off her crumbling flesh and threw her ruined features into sharp relief.

I could see the dim suggestion of bones within her desiccated limbs.

It reminded me of the bats, how the moon had shone through their wings, making the bones look so beautiful and fine.

He was the youngest of all.

Barely more than a baby.

Sick, frail, and slow.

Just like your brother.

Very slow, but smart enough to listen to me.

She lurched forward with a series of soft clicks, exposed bones of her feet tapping the floor.

He never went into the forest.

He never tempted the monster.

He did exactly what I told him.

My heart ached for this tiny, slow boy.

Of course he had listened to Wendy.

This ancient shambling horror whispering dire warnings of monsters and dead brothers and eyes and flowers grown from carnage.

What could a tiny boy do, but listen?

I saved him from the monsters.

She rasped.

Dull yellow eyes glinted in her face.

From my monster.

But my brother had its own monster.

This monster tried to starve him.

So I fed him.

Berries, acorn paste.

He didn't like it.

But he was so hungry that he ate it anyway.

Came a meal tea, roasted mice.

But when my brother didn't die, this monster dashed his head against the wall and hid him under the house.

He was cold when I found him.

Cold and dead.

Brains leaking from his broken head.

I couldn't leave him there.

Not by the well.

Not forgotten in the dark until the end of time.

So I ate him.

I opened my mouth.

Like this.

Her jaw clicked, stretched, stretched stretched contortion I could barely comprehend.

I covered my eyes

his arms his legs his guts his bones But I didn't eat his head or his spine

I took those into the forest.

I found the dried-up pond.

I found the dried-up pond.

It was not a pond anymore, but a green pit filled with eyes and flowers.

My first brother smiled at my approach and he was enormous by then, the size of a cottage with a mouth like a cave.

His head was so smashed, so flat,

that one of his eyes had bumped into the other.

They bulged now, displaced and scarred with old infections.

Looking at them made me cry.

How stupid I'd been.

How very stupid.

Planting him with such a small root.

I would not make that mistake again.

I planted my third brother in a deep hole with his entire spine so he might grow properly.

Big and strong, with a healthy body and mouth that can speak.

Instead of filling the hole with earth, I vomited up his body,

the skin, the muscle, the bones, and I packed a layer of dirt over it and kissed his ruined head.

Did he grow?

Yes.

Didn't you see him?

I thought of the skulls.

So many boys.

So many tragedies.

All of them forgotten.

I began to cry.

She came closer.

I steeled myself for a mummified horror.

But no, it was only Wendy.

Dear, wrinkly, lovely Wendy.

Do you want to meet him?

Do you want to meet them, my brothers?

I felt like a deer trapped in the headlights of an on-rushing monster truck.

She took my hand.

Her skin felt dry and scratchy and burning hot.

Please.

I know they'll love you.

Real heroes do difficult things, terrifying things.

And it's easy, because in fairy tales, everything turns out right in the end.

So I climbed out the window and followed Wendy into the night.

Oh shit, here we go.

End of part two.

All right.

One more part left.

Part three, Wendy's taking him into the forest by the pond, I missing to meet this in giant amalgamation.

I'm wondering if she's going to lead him into a cave and all these things are representative of the brothers that have grown, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah, like all the they're probably the trees.

Because there's the mention of like, uh, there's trees under your house.

They fight the mushrooms.

It's like she's a spirit of the trees almost, right?

Yeah.

Which it's like, because she said, I can appear here because there's trees under your house.

So maybe she can be wherever the trees is.

And maybe, you know, the spirit inside of her, that's where the monster came from.

It's something of the trees.

That's why she's afraid of the forest.

Man, all right.

You ready?

Yep.

This is so good.

This is so good, man.

Oh.

Part three.

The dead girl in my yard wanted me to be a hero.

Owls watched as we trekked through the yard.

A bat dived and landed on my shoulder, squeaking affectionately before taking taking off again.

Raccoons lumbered through the grass, dark eyes shining.

Wendy and I reached the miner's lettuce, dropped to our bellies, and crawled through the burrow.

It was even colder now.

Delicate layers of ice covered the mud and crunched under my weight.

The walls felt dangerously narrow around my shoulders.

With a panicky pang, I realized I would soon be too big, too old for the burrow.

Oh, that's interesting.

Only the young, only like kids can slip through it.

It's very neverland right like you know i mean very fairy tale for sure yeah very fairytale wendy's stiff wrinkled dress rasp oh she's wearing a dress i didn't realize she was wearing clothes yeah he's talking about

like her her skin okay wendy's stiff wrinkled dress rasped against the walls until it grew sodden with mud and half melted frost when it began to squelch

I preferred it to the dry hiss because the dry hiss reminded me of long, rotten limbs unfolding in the winter forest.

After a timeless span that could have been 10 minutes or 10 years, we emerged into the clearing of brothers.

I crawled out with a relieved sigh.

The night was cold, but warmer than the tunnel had been.

I rubbed my arms and looked around for Wendy.

A great rumble sounded behind me.

I spun around with a shriek, expecting to see the silver eyes and sleek white form of a cougar.

It was a head.

An incomprehensibly gigantic head.

Oh,

oh brother.

Oh, this is so cool.

Squashed on one side, the eyes had merged into a great lumpy orb covered by thin flesh.

An infection split the eyelid, revealing dim, murky light the color of lamp-lit pus.

Its mouth, thin, frog-like, ugly, tragic, split apart, widening until it was the size of a cave.

A thin, moon-pale form slid down the side, whooping happily, and hit the ground in a puff of dead leaves and dirt.

Wendy, of course.

She stood up, dusting herself off, and spread her arms.

Meet my brothers.

There were so many.

Heads, mostly, but bodies too, varying states of wholeness.

Some were little more than face and throat.

Some had their shoulders, some had entire torsos, and some had arms, all sprouting from the leaf-strewn earth.

Many looked rotten, a few fleshless.

One had a twisted spine, a strongly muscled torso, and a small head that had been smashed in.

Nevertheless, his eyes shone with joy.

Those that did not have eyes had wet sockets that glistened and cracked lips that opened in wide, happy smiles.

Their heads twisted excitedly, jaws clicked.

Behind them, in a great pit sploding with vines and flowers, I saw something else.

Long and horrifically thin, covered in what looked like a thousand eyes.

They're always so happy to see me.

I love them so much.

Dread and horror were eating me alive.

How are they living?

Wendy's face fell.

Because I feed them things that are alive.

I don't want to, but I have to.

I feed the mice, the squirrels, the birds, and the animals that live in the forest.

It's alright,

because those things are all a part of the forest.

And the forest is the monster.

It isn't enough to grow them, especially not now, since I have no more pond to water them with.

But it keeps them alive.

And one day, when the monster is finally dead, I'll cut them up and feed a piece to each of them.

And that will make them all whole again.

Her brothers sent up what cheers they could from the rumbling roar of the great head to the chattering of baby teeth and fleshless tiny jaws.

How many brothers did you have, Wendy?

I don't remember.

But they're all here now.

I looked around the clearing, tears stinging my eyes.

There were so many.

So very, very many.

Did the monster kill all of them?

Not all.

I killed some.

Sometimes to feed my brother brothers, but only if they weren't going to be alive for long anyway.

And then I planted them here, so they wouldn't really die.

Sometimes I killed them to keep them from being swallowed up into the hungry trees and becoming the monster.

Their chatter grew louder, swelling into a deafening crescendo.

Now sit down and listen, because I'm going to tell you about the monster now.

Boy, boy.

Boy.

That thing I said about like, maybe there's one spirit or like the vampire example, maybe it's like she is the offspring of some greater entity it was the other way around she's the entity she's the thing that like i mean is bringing these boys in killing them and now they're like the subjects of her her brother i thought that it was going to be that she was going to like want a friend and she was going to be like you should eat your brother but now i just realize that she is getting her his trust to where i think she's going to eat him

She's he's going to be one of these many brothers.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's going to join the garden.

All at once, her brothers fell silent.

I felt their eyes, the bright ones, the rotten ones, the gray, decayed, jellied ones, the empty sockets, fixed on me.

I wanted to run, but if a hero is to succeed, he must learn everything he can, even from someone who might be a monster.

So I lowered myself to the ground.

Starlight streamed through the trees, bathing me in a net of shadow and dim silver.

Wendy sat to fold into the ground like a monstrous insect.

He was my father.

I watched, paralyzed as a single tear slid from the infected slit in the eye of the great head.

Everyone knew what my father was, but they didn't care because he was so powerful.

Too powerful for anything but awe and adoration.

So they let him do what he wanted.

Even to me and my brother.

They did not care about us because we were not powerful.

We were only tainted.

Blood of the monster, but with none of the monster's power.

But they were wrong.

She wiped her eyes.

I was tainted, yes.

But my brother wasn't.

He was good.

He was perfect.

And I did everything I could to protect him.

But it wasn't enough.

It's never enough.

You did everything you could.

My words sounded like dead leaves stirring.

That was enough.

While I was away at the pond, planting my brother's spine in the earth, my father cleaned his carcass and polished his bones.

And after I ate the stew, he grabbed my brother's ribs and stabbed me.

It slid all the way through me and came up the other end.

It hurt.

I didn't feel like I was dying.

Even as my blood spilled over me and flooded my lungs, drowning me, I didn't feel weak.

I felt strong.

I hid my face as shudder after shudder crawled down my spine.

I went to the pile of clean bones and found one of my brother's stripped fingers.

Her hand crept to her chest with the bony pendant hanging there.

It was smaller than I expected and sharper.

And I put it through my father's eye.

Then I dragged him into the forest, pulled the rib out of my chest, and put it into his other eye.

Then I went home.

I killed him.

I said to everyone I killed the monster.

I told him of my brother and how I saved his life by planting his head in the earth, but instead of welcoming me, they cut my stomach.

All of my guts slid out, hot and raking.

They steamed in the night, under the cold moon.

Then the people dragged me to the forest, leaving me in the snow to die.

I put my hands inside my stomach, where my guts had been kept warm.

But it didn't keep me warm.

Not even a little.

I remember what it felt like when my fingers froze.

When I tried to uncurl my hand, they cracked and broke.

I lay there in the snow, frozen and gutted, staring at the stars, and I was so angry, so very angry.

Why did they do that to you?

Because I was unclean, a desecrator of corpses, murderer of my own blood, a monster to them.

People had known my father, who had known what he was.

I was the monster.

She looked down at her cracked, fragile hands.

I lay there,

Tears coursed down my face.

My heart ached.

Even though they loved him enough to kill me for defeating him,

they forgot him.

Murky eyes flared to blinding gold.

She began to cry.

They forgot him and left him.

His body stayed in the forest and fed the scavengers, building the bones and meat for their young.

His hair lined burrows and filled nests.

Flies fed on his rot and spawned.

Maggots hatched on the guts in his eyes.

I know.

I saw.

I stood right there and watched it all.

Crows took flight.

Startled cries filled the night and their glossy wings blocked the cold stars.

I watched his bones crumble into soil.

I was so fairy, very satisfied that he had rotted.

But that was because I didn't understand.

I didn't understand that he hadn't rotted away.

He had only changed.

Changed into something else.

Into everything else.

Now the trees grow out of him.

He gets to be in the trees.

My trees.

He is dead and forgotten and beautiful.

With more power than he ever had in life.

I am dead and hated and ugly.

Weaker than I've ever been.

I'm forgotten.

And so was he.

Now I'm the only one who knows.

I'm the only one who remembers.

But I know now.

He always kills my brothers.

Soon I'll have to have more heads to plant beside the pond.

Tell someone.

Make them burn the force down.

Tell everyone.

No one will listen.

No one will care.

No one ever has.

I have.

I can't even fight him because I'm trapped.

She spread her desiccated arms, slender and delicate as the bones of bats.

I'm cursed.

He cursed me.

I was never strong, never.

But every year I grow weaker.

Every season there's less of me.

Soon I will crumble and fade and be drawn up through the roots of the trees.

He will eat me, and I will die.

And he will live on.

He will win.

There it was.

My redemption.

My quest.

My chance to be a hero.

I won't let him.

I'll fight him.

Wendy's fingers spread, revealing a single eye, bright and deep and golden.

We can fight him together.

In that moment, it was the only thing I wanted.

To live for untold centuries, ageless and immortal.

Years of golden days and cold, clear nights, in which to befriend bats and raccoons and crows.

No school, no sick mother, no Noah, no unbearable, soul-crushing fear of what would become of him.

No more fear of days, nights, and seasons, and years of an entire lifetime without the people I loved most.

Instead, I would have untold lifetimes with new people to love at every turn.

People I could help, people I could save, people I could be a hero for.

I could finally be enough.

No,

haven't you been listening to be with me, to be like me?

You have to eat.

She told me miserably.

You have to eat something alive.

My stomach churned, but I grit my teeth and resolved to do it.

Because a hero always does what needs to be done.

I would eat birds, bats, coyotes, mice, worms, owls, beetles, or anything else because I had to.

And I didn't even have to be sad because all of those things were part of the forest, which meant they were part of the monster.

I will.

I'll eat eat anything.

You don't have to eat anything.

Just one thing.

What?

She wiped her eyes.

No one can fight me unless they're bound to me.

How can I do that?

Can't tell you.

Not unless you promise to do it first.

You have to promise.

No matter what.

It's the only way I can tell you.

It's the only way to break the curse.

The only way to help me.

I promise.

I mean, whatever it takes to help you, I promise I'll do it.

She finally lowered her hands.

Her eyes were so bright, so golden, molten, full of tears.

Promise me.

I promise.

How do I do it?

By feeding yourself to us.

I frowned.

Sure, I'd misheard her.

What do you mean?

Wendy grabbed my hand and pulled.

Ah, man.

Wendy grabbed my hand and pulled me across the clearing to the grass-choked pit that had been a pond so long ago and pointed.

I looked carefully, frowning.

Shadows, thick and impenetrable, but some of the shadows looked thicker than the others.

Substantial somehow.

As I watched, the darkness coalesced, solidifying into something I recognized.

Someone.

Noah was in the pit, sleeping fitfully.

His breathing was irregular and wet, as if he'd been crying.

It felt like my heart had stopped.

Why is he here, Wendy?

I'm keeping him safe.

I told you I always keep my brother safe.

No,

I won't.

You promised.

My father will kill you anyway.

He kills everything my brothers love best.

I I wish it could be you.

But you don't want to fight.

You want to run away.

You want to forget your brother.

My brothers don't forget each other.

We won't forget you.

Neither will I.

I promise.

Comprehension dawned.

Tears flooded my eyes as all my jealousy, all my anger, all my resentment flooded my heart.

Scorching, all-consuming, a flood of golden lava burning me alive.

I shook my head.

She nodded, all silver moonlight and rich darkness and eyes like suns.

You are my brother.

And you are his brother.

You alone can bind us.

My eternity of moon-silvered nights and velvety bats, of gloom-golden mornings and shattering crows, of dark burrows and oaks with canopies like giant spider webs, of people who needed me, people I could help, people I'd been enough for, fell away.

Noah would have that life, that eternity of animals and trees and magic.

Noah, who was my mother's favorite, Noah, who got everything she could give, even though he did nothing, nothing, even though I did nothing.

Noah was enough.

I wasn't enough.

I was only the oldest, paving the way for the youngest.

You look so angry.

So

very,

very angry.

Just like me.

She reached out and stroked my face.

Her finger was papery and hot, like ashes.

It has to be this way.

You'll still be the hero.

You'll die to make sure we we can kill the monster.

And then you'll rest.

No sadness to drown you.

No hate to eat you.

No future to frighten you.

Only a long,

dark wait.

But it won't last forever.

Because I'll follow one day.

After I've taught our brother everything he needs to know.

Then we'll be together.

Maybe we'll come back here again.

But for joy, not for anger.

We won't have to be angry, because no one will remember.

No.

I stepped back.

Wendy slipped forward.

An undulating nightmare brought a night.

My father will kill you anyway.

And then where will your brother be?

When your mother dies, he'll linger in the house for days, crying and cuddling her wet, rotting body.

Pulling her eyes open each morning until they sink like wet jelly in her sockets.

Stuffing food into her yawning mouth until all the food is is gone.

Then I'll die too.

Alone, starved, frightened, without even the brains to comprehend that she's dead.

Wondering why you've left him.

Is that what you want?

Or do you want him to live?

To see the moon rise and the sunrise more times than he could ever count, and years of snow and wind and sun?

Do you want him to climb trees and sing to the moon?

To befriend the bats and speak the language of the crows?

I want that!

The words echoed, rolling back at me like dying waves.

I want that.

I want.

I, I, I.

Wendy's golden eyes burned.

I know.

She looked down at Noah, sleeping peacefully in her dead arms.

But there's only one way.

Tears streamed down my face.

The wind gusted, stinging my raw cheeks.

If you won't do it, then he has to.

And he could.

You're not wrong.

He could bind us.

Then you will have everything you want.

Felt like I've been hit by a train.

I stared up at her, praying I'd misunderstood as her eyes blazed pits of golden fire.

And his life will have meant something.

You're the monster, Wendy.

The pain in her face, the grief and rage, cut me to my core.

The pain twisted her into something else, and her face split apart, bearing teeth.

Some broken, some perfect, all overgrown and sharp like the fangs of a mountain lion.

Monsters eat for eating's sake.

I eat to live.

I live to remember so that one day

I can kill the monster forever.

What would you eat for?

She shook her monstrous head, then spat.

You would eat to forget.

What was she, really, this withered, horrific nightmare before me?

A ghost, a demon, a trapped spirit so hell-bent on vengeance she drove herself insane?

Was she a liar all along?

Or was she broken?

Had her own hatred, her own misery, warped her into something beyond comprehension.

Had her father, her monster, bled into her over untold centuries, corrupting her, possessing her?

Was she old and lonely and sick, and just too hurt, too angry, too sad to die?

Or was she right?

I was so weak.

A child broken and helpless.

All I had was love.

When the monster took that from me, all I had was anger.

Until I found love again.

When he took that, my anger grew.

Again and again, ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times.

No matter what I did for my brothers, no matter what I did to the monster, all my love and all my anger wasn't enough.

It was

never enough.

Glanced at Noah, nestled in her arms.

He was enough.

He was always enough.

I'm trapped.

And my brothers, all of them are trapped.

I'm the keeper.

In more ways than one.

I tend them, yes, but I keep them here too.

They're as trapped as me.

Trapped by me, even.

You'll be trapped too.

And you will have to trap yourself.

But only until I'm free.

And when I'm free, I will rest.

Rest until I'm strong again.

Then I will burn the forest.

I will salt the earth.

I will slaughter the animals.

I will drown the burrows.

I will crush their nest.

And I will tear every root out of the earth.

And at the end of it all, I will find you and lead you into the hot summer sunlight.

Together we will burn, and everything that's in will die.

But I can only do that if I'm free.

I can only be free if there's something left behind to remember.

This is how you will remember.

You promised.

You promised me.

I didn't promise to eat my baby brother.

Then he will eat you.

What if you must eat with me?

I thought of bones, cursed human heads grown to the size of houses, scarred and infected and unable to speak.

I thought of broken babies, dashed to death by cruel parents.

I thought of sad, sweet orphans cast down dry wells to die and rot.

I thought of rotting mothers and forgotten brothers, of monsters that could be fought and monsters that always won.

And I thought of flesh and hair and burrows and bones, bones in the well, bones in the ground, bones in eyes.

I met Wendy's gaze.

I promised I'd do whatever it took to help you.

Her golden eyes narrowed.

Her face was a white, warped, mummified horror of human and lion.

Yes.

You did.

Okay.

I'll keep my promise.

Her face, white and warped, a whore of human and lion.

Yep, she was she was both the monster and the victim.

She is both the mountain lion and the coyote.

Yep.

She held my brother out.

He whimpered and curled.

I looked at him.

My heart ached for him, for her, for her brothers, my mother, and for me.

My mind ached.

Everything ached.

Everything would always ache.

This was not fair.

Nothing was fair.

Nothing was ever enough.

And this would be no different.

I looked up at Wendy and raised my hands.

Before she could tip my brother into my arms, I ripped the pendant from her dry, bony neck and plunged it into her eye.

It bulged and exploded, spewing boily yellow icher all over my face.

The pain was exquisite, overwhelming, volcanic.

The smell of burnt fat and frying meat filled my nostrils.

Wendy's eyes darkened as golden blood slid down her crumbling face.

Somewhere, far away from the pain and the terror, and now, my baby brother began to cry.

Wendy folded down to the earth.

Shadows exploded out of her, each one full of a thousand blinking eyes, round and pale, bright, small, and dark, wide and light, rich, golden, bright, hot silver.

Darkness roiled, receded, turned pale and snapped back into the form of a dead, wrinkled girl.

Wendy seized once, just once.

A dim yellow glimmer flickered in her eye sockets, like faraway stars.

Don't forget.

And then her eyes went out.

Oh, I promised I would do whatever it took to help you.

And he had the realization that Wendy is trapped by her hatred.

Yeah.

That she's she's, she's never leaving this forest as long as she hates.

And the thing she hates is

it's the forest.

It's nature.

It's like, I'm going to, what?

Would that solve it if she burned everything to the ground?

No.

It's just going to be a bigger and bigger body count until she feels satisfaction.

So in that moment, for the first time in the story, our narrator becomes the hero.

He's like, if I'm going to save her and I'm going gonna save my brother, and I have to keep everyone safe, I've got to release her.

I have to take her from this hatred.

So, she uses

the same pendant she used to kill her father to kill her.

And in it, like, the brother was never even there, Noah was never even there.

He awakes far away.

It was just the representation, like a lot of the stuff with the story, there's the spiritual and the physical.

Um, but he kills Wendy, and in her final words, she says, Don't forget

he became the hero.

Yeah, I mean,

the the forest is

almost like the forest is Wendy, too.

The forest is everything she loves.

It's like there's such a great parallel there with Wendy is alive and dead.

There's such a great parallel with the protagonist and Wendy, because at the beginning of the story, the protagonist clearly does not, he hates himself, he hates the situation he's in, all this stuff.

Wendy is the direct result of never being able to move on or let go from the tragedy of loss.

Um, yeah, and I think that, like,

it's just kind of interesting.

I mean, like, even

the protagonist, it's just kind of interesting.

Like, Wendy is, it's like whenever people die, and through these like natural tragedies and stuff, or like sickness and everything, you yourself die.

Like, you kind of lose a bit of yourself every time, too.

So, to her being representative of being like half dead and half alive, and kind of just like existing purely through hatred is uh really interesting it's also just kind of it's like a direct parallel of like that is what the protagonist is supposed to become but he sees like he kind of like

i don't know sees it and is able to reconcile that like this is like no way to live like the best thing that could have happened for wendy is to slip away like let go kind of thing

Yeah, if he's going to save the princess and he's going to slay the monster, he has to do both at once.

I woke in the morning.

Frost tacked me into the ground, and it was so cold my bones ached.

Tried to fall asleep again, but no one was crying.

Then screamy wails that echoed as though from a distance.

I grimaced then sat up.

I saw him wandering through the yellow grass.

My heart jolted.

I shot up and stumbled back, falling.

Wendy lay there, empty and pale, and so very, very dead.

Her bone pendant jutted from her socket.

I touched her stiff, dry hair nervously.

Gone.

Forgotten, along with her brothers and the monster who had destroyed them.

I stared at her for a long time as the sun crept high, Noah continued to cry.

Noah, facing a life without his family, left in a broken system and lost.

Forgotten.

I wondered about myself.

As the sun strengthened and filled Wendy's dry, empty sockets with light again, I realized I didn't know myself.

I knew about myself.

I knew I was hurt, angry, prone to resentment and drowned in fear.

I knew I would become angrier and sadder and meaner as the years wore on.

I would become less and less and less until I didn't even remember the meaning of enough.

Until the desire to be enough, to be a hero, was forgotten.

I wondered about my mother, mom who cried for hours each day because nothing she did would be enough to protect Noah and because she was too sick to be a mother.

Forced to exist as a living corpse, rotting away her last days while her doomed toddler giggled beside her.

One of millions, just another poor, careworn, dying mother, forgotten by everyone but her children, who would be forgotten too.

I wondered about Wendy, what she was, what she'd want.

If what she wanted was good or right, or if it mattered at all.

And I wondered about her curse, her binding.

If brother could bind sister and father or sister to brother, could sister bind brother to brother?

And could brother bind mother to son?

I spent the morning chasing Noah.

It was hard.

My burned, blistered face terrified him, but I managed to catch him and take him to the house.

My mother wasn't awake yet, so I sang him to sleep.

and left him on the sofa.

Then I returned to Wendy and her patch of miner's lettuce and pulled her limbs off.

It was easy.

They were dry and light, like termite-eaten planks left in the sun.

I wrenched her head off and snapped her papery torso into pieces.

She smelled foul and rich and terribly old, like oak and sage and dirty fur and rotten bones left to dry in the sun.

I made a stew of her.

Oh no.

Oh no.

Oh.

He's like, now that she's gone, maybe, maybe sister can bind brother to brother, mother to son.

Oh, no.

I made a stew of her.

All our pots were small, so I could only use her fingers.

I've broken her apart for nothing.

My eyes stung.

Tears tripped into the pot before I could wipe them away.

Wendy's stew was foul, a gray sludge that reeked of ash, bad meat, and roadkill.

Noah screamed and flailed when he tasted it.

When I pretended it was good.

So delicious.

It's healthy.

It'll make you big and strong.

Noah, it'll make mom happy.

He acquiesced.

Though he gagged and choked, he drank it all and didn't throw up.

Then, momentarily grateful the pot was so small, I took a cleaver and, with an earth-shattering scream, chopped two of my fingers off.

The pain was awful, almost too great for me to comprehend.

But compared to the wildfire burning of Wendy's eyes, it was nothing.

My head was clear as I bandaged the stumps and then proceeded to make a stew of myself.

I made Noah drink half.

He ate it gratefully.

I suppose because it was far less disgusting than Wendy's stew.

Then carried the remainder to my mother's room.

I had no idea how to make her eat it.

I'd have to force her.

She'd think I was insane.

She'd think I'd hated her.

But that was alright, because even though she didn't know it, This would save her.

This would finally be enough.

She would have her eternity of crows and bats, of battling monsters and befriending feral cats.

She would protect my brother until the end of time.

I pushed open her door.

Odor erupted like a jack in the box, blood and bile, vomit and urine and feces.

I set the bowl on the floor and tried to shake her awake.

She was thin, a flesh-covered skeleton.

bones as fine as bat wings and cold.

As cold as Wendy was warm.

The room tilted.

Sunlight bled through the curtains, murky and golden.

I tried to pick her up.

My fingers sank into cold, congealed vomit, and I let go.

Her face was dark and purple where she'd lain on her side.

Her lips, nose, and eyes were flattened, just like a pumpkin's that had grown on its side.

I wrapped my arms around her and snuggled down beside her.

Blood and shit smeared my clothes, my arms, my face.

I didn't care.

I only hurt.

When Owah finally wandered in, wailing and crying so hard he was gagging, I came to my senses and forced him out.

Then I picked up the bowl of finger stew and dribbled it into my mother's mouth.

Came right back out again.

So I propped her up and tilted her head back, shuddering when another cloud of stench burst out of me.

I poured the soup in carefully, watching as mouthful after mouthful drained as slowly as a clogged bathtub.

The meat would not go down, so I reached in.

The inside of her mouth mouth was cold, slimy, and puffy.

The sensation made me gag, but I pushed until every speck of meat and bone had disappeared down her throat.

Then I closed her mouth and laid her back, pulling the soiled blankets to her chin.

I leaned in and kissed her forehead.

A faint taste came away on my lips.

Something that reminded me of ashes, dirty fur, sage, and cold, clear nights.

Then I left her room and closed the door behind me.

Saying Noah to sleep in his own room, I went back to the miner's lettuce with a garbage bag.

It was unceremonious, but I intended to gather Wendy's remains and drag them to the other end of her burrow.

I wanted to lay her to rest with her brothers, and if she rotted, if her bones crumbled, if the hungry trees took her up through the roots, so be it.

If she became part of the forest, perhaps she could finally take her trees back from the monster.

But when I got there, she was gone.

Terror and joy rised in my chest.

I dropped to my knees to peer into her burrow, praying to see her yellow lens flare eyes, but her burrow was empty.

It was madness, but I crawled in anyway.

The walls felt smaller than ever, and I knew in my heart that this was the last time I would ever pass through it.

After an eternity in the dead, claustrophobic dark, I found the clearing.

I drew a sharp breath and dragged myself out.

Something glistened.

my periphery.

A skull, of course.

Old, discolored, heartbreakingly small, supported by a single vertebra protruding from the ground.

Grass and wildflowers grew around it.

Next to it was a jagged, gleaming stake.

Not a stake, a spinal column, topped by a broken skull, fragile, shattered, leaving only a jaw and the right cheekbone.

Beyond them, spreading through the glade, were too many skulls to count, but no heads.

Certainly no bodies.

Why have you come back?

I shot up with a scream, expecting to see eyes, which would be worse, silver eyes or or gold?

I saw neither.

Before me was another monster I'd already seen, tall and horrifically thin, with enormous glossy wings like a crow.

Feathers and fur coated his narrow body.

Black feathers, thick golden fur, and among them, glistening through the strands, eyes.

Too many eyes to count.

Is Wendy here?

Our sister's with you.

Isn't she?

No.

Behind me something rumbled.

I spun around.

It was a giant head, but it wasn't smiling anymore.

Its mouth, thin, frog-like, ugly, tragic,

split apart and began to cry silently.

The world shuddered.

When it became still again, the spinal column had transformed into the twisted torso of a man.

Attached was the head of a baby.

The back was smashed in, blood and brain glimmered at the edges.

He looked at me dimly, distrustfully, fearfully.

My lip trembled.

She wanted to eat me.

Did she?

No, I ate her.

We ate her.

The great lopsided head opened its mouth in another silent well.

All of her?

I shook my head.

And our sisters in the trees.

The feathered monstrosity said.

Will the monster eat her?

It looked at me with its countless eyes, the round, curious eyes of raccoons, the bright black orbs of ground squirrels, the dark, star-eyed of crows.

Our sister will eat you if she finds you.

No, no, she won't.

She loves me.

Yes.

She's angry.

So very, very angry.

And she should be.

For an instant, I saw something out of the corner of my eye, elongated and twisted, with teeth exploding from a long, broken jaw and papery flesh the color of buttermilk.

She knows you're here.

Another multitude of eyes blinked open, gleaming among the fur and feathers.

Run.

Instead, I began to cry.

I sat down, covered my eyes with my free hand, only dimly aware of the raw blisters under my fingers, and waited, and waited, and waited.

When I opened my eyes, her brothers were gone.

All that remained were the skulls, with a thicket of flowers in the center.

I knew then that Wendy was too angry to kill me, too angry to plant me in her field of brothers, too angry to keep me with her forever.

Though I waited the whole night, the skulls did not come alive again.

I left as dawn filtered through the trees, bathing the clearing in dim, shadowed gold.

I walked through the forest, making as much noise as I could, trying to attract the monster with silver eyes, but it didn't come for me.

When I got home again, Noah was gone.

I understood somehow.

He had been deemed suitable for the field of brothers.

Of course he was.

He was the youngest.

He was enough.

He was always enough.

I ran back to the burrow, so sad and so very, very angry, angry enough to demand my place beside my brother, no matter the cost.

If Wendy killed me for it, that would be fine.

My blood would water the ground and help our brothers grow.

But the burrow was gone.

I curled up in the miner's lettuce and cried.

I hoped that a bat or a crow or a raccoon or perhaps a sad little cat would join me.

None did.

No one ever did.

I returned to the house, sobbing and screaming so loudly the earth should have broken apart because I was no hero.

I was only the oldest brother, arrogant and selfish and unforgivably foolish.

The door to my mother's bedroom was open.

I thought of Noah, crawling into bed with her and trying to wake her and feed her just as I had, and wept harder.

I would crawl into bed with her, I decided, crawl in and hug her, just as Wendy said Noah would do, and hold her until her eyes turned to jelly and her skin turned to foul liquid that drenched the bed.

Maybe I would die too.

When I entered, her bed was empty.

I checked the floor.

Then, with fear jumping in my guts, under the bed and inside her closet, nothing but clothes that were far too big for her now, and makeup she would never wear again.

Then I went to Noah's room, half expecting to see that Noah had dragged her there.

That he wasn't in Wendy's field of brothers after all, just holding our mother in his room and crying.

But neither of them were there either.

Seized with an instinct I did not understand or analyze, I bolted out of the house and out the back door.

I scanned the yard, its sparse trees, its familiar rocks, its rolling slope, all the way down to the miner's lettuce.

There in the deep golden twilight, half hidden among the growing shadows, was my mother.

Next to her was Noah, tiny as ever and rubbing his eyes.

Relief flooded me, so overwhelming I nearly sank to my knees, but I couldn't.

If I did, I would never get up in time to catch them.

So I kept going, dipping so low I almost fell and lumbering toward them.

It was like running in a dream.

No matter how hard I tried, each step took an eternity.

Then something long and thin unfolded in the miner's lettuce, rising in a single boneless movement.

A terribly skinny girl with buttermilk skin and dry, stiff hair.

My mother and Noah looked at her, and up the slope at me.

Their eyes had changed.

They were bright and strange now, shining in the falling dark like golden lens flares.

I took another shambling step forward, but Wendy turned to face me and shook her head.

Then she took my mother by the hand and led her away, out of the miner's lettuce and into the rolling hills beyond to their first cold, clear night of eternity.

I stayed behind because I was the oldest brother, because my purpose was to pave the way, and because this was not my fairy tale.

Oh,

oh, dude.

Oh,

oh,

oh.

It's a fun transitional movie, too, of like people passing away and like saying, like, you know what I mean?

Yeah, like the whole story, I mean, the, the fairy tale motifs come up and he's kind of been earlier like, I want this to be my story.

This was supposed to be my success.

And it's like, at the end, he doesn't want, he's like, maybe this can bind them together, but he only wants that if he's a part of it.

And it worked.

He made his brother and his mother into the same entity.

His mother, who it seems was dead, he came to his mother's body and like force-fed it.

And it made them into the entity that Wendy was.

And now they get to live that out, but it's without him.

He was just a piece in the story.

It was never his story.

Yeah, and it's like it goes to speak of like his own personal greed and the greed of like the spirit of the window go being the nature of gluttony and greed and like all-consuming and stuff.

And he had that spirit, but it got away from him.

He gave it to someone else.

He wanted, he gave someone else the gift that he was so desperate to have that slipped through his fingers because he squeezed too tight.

Yeah, I almost see it too as like him realizing that

these people dying isn't about him.

you know, like it's like it's

for them.

It's not

their story.

Like their passing is their story.

It isn't him.

Like I think like I think he kind of understands, I guess, how selfish he was by thinking how much this is affecting himself and all this stuff and how resentful he felt versus,

I guess, just trying to be helpful or supportive in that time for their transitional stage, you know, for their story.

Yeah, it's like because he's so resentful.

He almost doesn't hate his mother, but he like almost resents her for being so sick.

What was that thing he made?

He was like, you're going to die anyway, or just because you're dying doesn't mean he has to, or something like that.

Like, he, he resents the position he's in, but he hates his brother.

He hates that his brother gets all the attention.

He hates that his brother doesn't understand things.

He refused to, he refers to his brother derogatory when describing his mental illness, something his brother can't help.

And like his brother dying is his problem.

It's not his brother's problem, you know?

Yeah.

Well, I think it's just another thing, too, that like if you look at there's this selfishness.

Yeah.

If you look at it too, it feels like his brother even gets to share this illness thing with his mother, like even connected to that way.

And even Wendy talks about her curse, you know, being like,

I was cursed and stuff.

My father cursed me.

Wendy is very representative of Noah as well, of

like a sick father passing down something to that.

It almost feels like the curse is representative of like illness or like, I don't know, some like genetic thing.

It's almost like whenever it's like my mother died, I'm more, I'm more prone to getting like heart disease or

all this other stuff that your family passes down, this like kind of hereditary thing.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's like

it's representative of, you know, they're all suffering, but at least the two of them get to share something.

It's like he was almost jealous of his brother's condition because that's what led to his attention.

That's what led to his mother coddling him all the time.

It's like he wanted so, it's like there was never an appreciation for what they're going through.

It was only how it affected him.

And in his inability to see that,

the gift he wanted slipped to them.

It passed on to them instead of him.

He was never the hero of the story.

Many years later, long after I'd grown, I returned to the house.

It had fallen into disrepair and was up for auction for the third time.

My squat, brooding castle now had a ruined roof haphazardly patched by cascades of dead leaves and abandoned bird nest, and holes in the walls large enough to accommodate small cars.

Inside, cascades of dead leaves covered the floor.

Crows lived in the kitchen, and a family of raccoons had taken up residence in my old room.

That's also cool, how there was like, there's trees under...

your house and now the house has returned to the same forest that scene like with the raccoons and the animals and stuff

Yeah.

The window in my mother's room was shattered.

Dirty glass glittered on the floor, shining dully like stars on a misty night.

There was no furniture, only a faded spray of graffiti across one wall.

Noah's room was empty.

It smelled like smoke.

I wondered outside as twilight bled over the hills.

The miner's lettuce was there, green and lush as always.

The burrow was not, but I didn't expect it to be.

I sat down in the place it had been.

The touch of the cool, damp green was so beautifully familiar that I cried.

Even though it was windy and painfully cold, I fell asleep to the oceanic rush of the wind through the dying leaves.

I woke long after nightfall, on a cold, clear night with blasts of icy wind that shook the trees.

When I opened my eyes, I found myself staring at a deep, dark hole.

Wendy's burrow.

My breath caught, and I pulled myself to a sitting position.

There was no mistaking it.

Rich darkness broken only by the ghostly whiteness of pale roots, its entrance half hidden in the miner's lettuce.

It was smaller than I remembered, half my size, maybe even less.

A bat dived low, wings brushing my face as it darted past.

I reeled back, heart pounding.

When I straightened up, something blinked to life in the burrow, pale yellow lens flares, the color of summer moonlight.

Something pale and small drifted out.

A tiny, delicate hand so thin the moonlight poured through it, illuminating the fine bones and dried tissue within.

Smaller than Wendy's hand had ever been.

So much smaller.

I took it, though it looked cold and dead.

It burned as though with fever.

Underneath the lens flare eyes, something glimmered dimly, a crescent of small teeth exposed in a smile.

The hand let go and withdrew into the burrow.

The eyes blinked once, twice, and were gone.

Aching deeply, wanting to laugh and scream and burst into tears all at the same time,

I'd lay down again and slept.

Once upon a time, I was this.

Okay.

Once upon a time, I was a sad, angry boy who loved fairy tales.

Now I am a sad, tired man who can no longer bear to read them, but I remember them.

When I touch my face and feel my scarred cheeks, I remember.

When I wake with the taste of boiled ashes on my tongue, I remember.

When I think of my mother's cold, bird-thin body in my arms, I remember.

When I see Noah's face in my mind's eye and recall the fear I had for him, fear so deep and crushing that I pretended it was hate.

I remember.

When I look in the mirror and catch a hint of murky gold in my eyes, I remember.

When I dream of trees, crows, raccoons, and bats, and a smiling little boy and his yellow-eyed mother on cold, clear nights when bats swoop low and the moon bathes the hills in warm silver, I remember, and I smile.

And that is the end.

What a great story, man.

Bro, when it dropped the once upon a time, dude, just

you got a real giddy there, huh?

Dude, dude.

But it's going in the rafters.

It's going up.

It's up there with mother horse eyes.

It's in whatever else we've thrown up there.

Pin pal stuff.

Dude.

All right.

Dopa bean, I also have.

A deed to a house.

You can have that one too with the car.

You can have my wife's car too she'll be mad but you can take it man

bro just just it being what a okay so i i still

i think wendy is i i think it's wendigo imagery what a unique take on the wendigo mythos where it's like

it's this entity that is possessed with itself like it's so given to greed and hatred that it becomes its own monster and it's like oh well the enemy's the forest i have to destroy it and i have to fight and fight forever and when i burn it all, it'll be okay.

And it doesn't matter how many people I have to kill to do it.

And then

our protagonist, who wants to be the hero so bad, realizes he has to release Wendy, but he doesn't realize he has to let go himself too.

The same golden glimmer that possessed Wendy possesses him.

He still, at the end of the story, sees the glimmer in his eyes.

That same greed that possessed her, the hate is in him.

So while he successfully realizes it in her and kills her, he can't let go of it himself.

And he tries to give it to his brother and his mother so that he can be with them forever because he can't let go.

He had, like I said earlier, what gluttony is there more than immortality?

He can't let it go.

And because of that, they slip through his fingers.

And now he's just a man who remembers.

He can't read fairy tales anymore, but he remembers them.

Just like Wendy asked him to do.

It passed on.

He didn't eat the flesh, but the spirit of what Wendy was now possesses him.

It just didn't take effect.

He didn't get what he wanted out of it, only the ugly parts.

Right.

The story.

I definitely feel like I like this story more than the hoarder story.

Feels very precise.

Very, like,

very thorough.

I do think at the end, how gruesomely detailed and how disgusting it is finding the dead mom's body.

Yeah.

I think that that was like

visceral and, I mean, like grotesque.

Almost wonder, like, there's a couple, like, a couple thoughts I have is: wish there was more interaction between the protagonist and his mom a little bit.

That was really gut-punchy.

Really hard to have that weird back and forth.

And I feel like, which I do think that, like, the idea is that he says that horrible thing, and then he doesn't really, we don't see him interact with his mom until she's dead.

So it's kind of like the last thing you kind of say is that horrible thing.

I still think it would have been fun to kind of talk with the mom and play with that a bit.

But I think like

even just that disgusting imagery, we saw a little bit of that in the hoarders thing with the tripophobia kind of vibe and, you know, like the fucking like wormy snake in his heel.

Really gross.

Dopenban has a really great way of like just hitting you across the face with like some very like

just.

I mean, like gut turning.

Like I was pretty fucking, I mean, like my stomach was turning whenever he was talking, like sitting next to his mom and, like, obviously, dead bombs and stuff.

It was,

it was, you know, it's brutal.

I think I would have liked to see more of that too, of like, just that decay, I guess, with the mom and feeling more of that.

But really, all in all, it's just such a beautiful,

beautiful story about dealing with loss, dealing with loss, sickness, and death, and stuff, and like, kind of the idea of things passing.

You know, while we were reading this, it made me think about like

my grandfather who died back in like

god

seven years ago now uh

it's weird because sometimes it's fucked up that you like you have these memories of them you know and you're like all these good these good memories but it's weird like it's it's like sometimes i like almost forget what my grandpa's voice sounds like and i like i know that i like have an idea of what it is in my head but i think about that sometimes of like i really miss like when I would call my grandpa just the way that he would say hello on the phone and stuff and it's like just

just kind of fucking tears your heart out a bit.

You know what I mean?

Like it's like just a very,

very

easy thing.

Like it's something that you would be like, I'll never forget that because it's so important, but it's so easy to let your mind circulate or like just that your mind goes through and that while you're bringing in new memories, the other ones get pushed out.

So I don't know.

There was that, that to me was

probably the most concept of memories.

coming back and forth was cool.

Like, I'm afraid of being forgotten.

It's like, it's like, it's like the spirit of what Wendy is is carried on through memory.

Like, well, if I eat you, I'll remember you.

It's like, well, when my brothers died, I had to eat them or else I'd forget them.

You know?

And it's also so interesting how, like,

the entire time Wendy was grooming the protagonist to this situation where he would eat his brother, even at the end, where it's like, well, your brother eats you.

And he's like, that's not fair.

I want to be the one that's powerful.

She's like, or you could eat him.

And it almost works, but then he has that realization that stabs Wendy and she has to be released.

But it ultimately does like play out because he he feeds her and himself to his brother and mother to make sure they eat of something alive.

So it's like the entire story was her trying to convince him to give it to like misery loves company, right?

She wants to pull him into her hatred so that she's stuck there.

She's just like him.

And then ultimately, that is what happens to his mother and brother.

He pushes that hate onto them or that immortality.

uh and but doesn't get himself it's the curse he wanted to have he didn't mean for it to go somewhere else yeah the uh uh

that would have been that would have been fun too in the story i think that was like another thing i was thinking about was that proposition

that scared the shit out of me that proposition uh

is very interesting i would have loved to see him mole that over i think for a while

just like like have that kind of

final argument he doesn't that final argument where it's yeah but i think it needs to be something that's what it takes yeah i mean i think it's it's i think i would have liked more i think of that i I could think of like leave, like, let you leave with that.

And then it's like, kind of like, well, I return back to my space.

And now I'm like looking at everything differently.

And I'm like looking at my brother in a different light.

Just that kind of selfish nature to where I think he has to work through it more and earn that kind of like selfless, uh,

selfless take, you know, which once again, this is just, you know.

food for thought hindsight after reading things or whatever, but that would have been fun.

There's, there's just a lot of great things about this.

And I think that like, it's always fun to,

you know, with these character pieces, this is also two

great stories with a lot of great characters.

Just being able to like, we lived with these characters for so long that you just kind of like

just want more of them, you know?

It's like a kind of a similar theme we have in a lot of our episodes.

It's like with these good stories is just wanting more.

from some of the stuff just to kind of exist in the world with those characters for a bit longer.

But this was awesome.

I mean, this was a great one.

Dopabeam, I think, really

has, I mean, also, too, Dopa Beam writes so much.

I don't know if you have you noticed that.

Yeah, I have an announcement I just discovered about that in a second, but I have one more question about the story before we get to that.

What did you think of the feathered man at the end with the eyes, the thousands of eyes?

I think it's representative of the forest, what she thinks her father is, like a greater spirit in it.

Because it's very, it's clear to me that a lot of what's happening is in the spiritual realm.

Because sometimes he looks at the skulls and they're just skulls.

Sometimes he looks and they're the grown heads, right?

Yeah.

So it's like there's like almost a limbo between the real world and the spiritual.

So I think he's like the essence of the forest, the monster she was afraid of, but he's not really a monster.

He's more of a keeper that she has pinned her fear, her horrors on.

He's there one minute.

I pictured it more as her brother.

I think that in the head.

What I thought was the thousands of eyes in the forest.

Yeah, that tracks.

With her, with her, all of his buddies.

But to me, what was interesting is that we only ever get to interact with him in this peaceful way whenever she's not there to where I think even her siblings understand that she is lost a bit.

Like, I don't, I don't think that they fully, at least to me, I don't think that they fully buy in to what she's selling or whatever.

And I think like that's also why they like say run.

I think that they're a product of her selfishness, I think is the big thing.

Yeah.

That would track.

I could see that.

And that's also why at the end, whenever they leave or whatever, whenever his family leaves, I don't know if it's, I don't know how good of an ending, like, I don't know, I guess I mean, like, I don't know how much of a positive ending it is versus like if he would have let them just slip on, would they have like, because now they exist in there.

Like now Wendy is there,

like revealing herself again.

She shakes her head and like they go in there.

And now even when he goes back years later, Noah is smiling and he like reaches for him before he slips back into the forest.

Like it's a thing where I don't, I don't know how I don't know how positive I'm supposed to feel about it, I guess.

I'm curious what people think, but it's one of those things where

Would it have been better just to let them go naturally, you know, versus this whole this other thing

of trying to find a way to save them.

Kind of like a pet cemetery meme or whatever.

Yeah, sometimes dead's better.

That kind of

that is what a lot of it felt like: pet cemetery, or like the reference I made earlier, Coreline, how like the kids go down the well, and then the Belden mother keeps a collection of them and treats everyone like, oh, you're my favorite, you're the first, but it's just to add to the collection.

It's very similar to that.

Um,

man, this was so good.

Okay, so

I, while looking it up, I should have done this on the previous story.

My apologies for not doing it now.

So, Dopa Bean's actual name is RC Bowman,

and she is a published writer with a ton of stories.

So, if you go on, we'll leave a link to it in the description.

If you go on Amazon, she has a ton of like paperbacks you can buy.

It seems like there is one that is an entire book about the

short story we read about cleaning hoarder houses.

it's called Hoarder House, a horror novella.

But there's other ones called The Monsters We Forgot,

The Monsters We Love, or What Monsters Do for Love, Wondrous Blood, Pearly Gates, The Wish Doctor, a bunch of stuff.

So we'll leave that linked in the description.

But yeah, R.C.

Bowman, true name for Dopabine.

I've been blown away, especially by this work, but two incredible works.

And they write a ton.

So you will be seeing more of them in the future.

And please support them.

They certainly deserve it.

Yeah, if you've enjoyed this, these past two stories, please support the author and go on Amazon and pick up some stories to read for yourself.

And, you know, anything like that, I think always just supports the author in a great way and just shows that our community cares and that we support these people and the kind of creative work that they're doing.

Just want to, as always, give a shout out to the audio listeners over on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and anywhere where you're listening to it.

Thank you so much for listening to us and giving us a nice review over there.

Also to our patrons who support this channel and some of the other ventures that we're doing right now.

And as always, too, be sure to check out the X1 entertainment link that we have below for the tour for the Halloween charity show.

If you want to support that, feel free

and have a fun Halloween with us and get to support some charity, some donation stuff.

So, otherwise than that, guys, thank you so much for hanging out with us.

We will see you next week.

Bye-bye.

Yeah, that's just really good.

So,

yeah,

thank you for watching.

Bye.

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