CreepCast - The Dead Girl In My Yard | CreepCast

Episode Date: August 24, 2025

A boy's mother is dying. So is his brother. But, for the first time he's presented with a chance to be a hero. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Reading, playing, learning. Stellist lenses do more than just correct your child's vision. They slow down the progression of myopia. So your child can continue to discover all the world has to offer through their own eyes. Light the path to a brighter future with stellus lenses for myopia control. Learn more at SLOR.com. And ask your family eye care professional for SLR Stellist lenses at your child's next visit. 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 Ian? The painting? I clean a hoarder house. Yes. I clean hoarder houses for a living. Yeah. Yeah. So we loved,

we came across. Love that story. Dare I say. This story got recommended a lot. It's, you know what? No, go ahead.

Why am I talking? Sorry. I was just saying it's one of our, no, I would say one of our most recent, one of the most recent stories that do very good. I would say that we were very stoked on it. Oh,

okay. All right. I'm better. Yeah. So this story actually got recommended to us a lot. 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 one of 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's 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 see that a lot? 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 creepade we're going to be just donating the money to charity split to our charity of choices uh and we are doing it and we are it's the the link is live you can go and get tickets now we had our patrons get first uh we had our patrons get first dibs so there 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 i pin in the comments to uh the link to go and sign up and you know get

your tickets so you can come and join us we also we can do 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 salary is that right hunter is that what you said yeah I have talked to the IRS I think I think that's what I said I think he said all of his money was yeah i don't know how that's going to work but that is what i said we you know

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 was 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 chat? 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 all right well with that let's get started with

the dead girl in my yard was the best friend I ever had my mother love 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.

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 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 smiles 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 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 reminds me of? I mean, yeah, it's very heavy. It's fucking painful, but exactly. It reminds me, it reminds me exactly of that. Also, again, not to

immediately talk about how cool the author is, just some of the wording in there like she was pregnant with something what she carried wasn't life just good riding 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 it 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 scrub 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 poison 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 side 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 to. 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 all.

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'd moved in just after her dad left.

She could barely afford the place and struggled to make ends meet. 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. Yeah. We spent the pre-recorded to this, like, happy and like, oh, funny jokes. Okay, let's get into the story. Now I'm just, oh, I can 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 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 that 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 in 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 brutal it's good riding it's very good riding this 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 to 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 had 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 festooning the branches. Raccoons and deer passed through constantly.

Rows roosted everywhere, even on the car, and caught fiercely whenever I tried to shrew them off. Woodpeckers buried acorns in the wall. of the house. Owls called to each other. Bats swooped like scraps of living enchantment against the night sky and coyotes slink through the golden grass. Raffs, the miners let us exploded along our property line so thick and soft you could sleep in it. Sometimes I did. On warm golden evenings, but sometimes on cold gray nights, I went to the miners 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 dinting 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 coat in 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 ate. 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, the foul cascade of blood, bile, soap, and egg, all of it red, lined in golden autumn sunlight. I was 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 voiced 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. 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 sin 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 the Halloween mask half hidden in the miners' lettuce. I'm awfully late for an afternoon nap.

What a weird nightmare, I thought, staggering to my feet. Crush 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 took a long disorienting moment to realize the body was emerging from a burrow in the miners 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 wringled flesh the color of buttermilk my name is windy 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. It was not a mask, but 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 and flat eyes and it calls out. It's late for a nap, but like its arms are bent wrong. Oh, gosh, dude. Can I tell you a secret? I'm in desperate need of medical attention and care.

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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 miners' lettuce in a worm. me, 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 brother's like sleeping here too. Brothers? This thing, this hideous, wintry monster with eyes like cloud-shrouted moons, had brothers? Are your brothers here? Are they in your borough, 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. The dying light reflected in her eyes. Her skin looked so sick, somehow thick and papery at once. I hid them in the trees. Oh, my God. 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 one 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 miners lettuce a white mountline proud

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 mount lion came closer. Green juice from the crushed miners light is 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 till 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 miners 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 mount 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 poked 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. hand and pulled me through the carpet of miners 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 dreamy had to 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 related 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 be he has to conquer this it has to be less to him because there's greater evils the mount lion out there and stuff ah okay

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we would really appreciate it. Thank you all for watching the ad, and thank you to Harry's for sponsoring the show. Their link will be in the description, and we are now back to the episode. 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, nonplussed. 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. Did your brothers come out at night? No. 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 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 had stumbled on a fairy tale. A kind of monster. The worst kind.

Do your brothers know about it? They didn't believe in it. 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 camomil growing in my yard could be harvested for tea, that miners' lettuce could be eaten, and that raccoons wash 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 settled 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 flipped 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 this is reminding me so much of like um um what's that moot where the wild things are right there's another one i'm thinking of where 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 move, 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 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 windy 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 there's a lot going there's there's just a lot of great parallel stuff like even like 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 health care 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 poignant.

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 was just immediately, well, fuck it. They're not there anymore,

you know. Yeah, three forgotten people waiting for a hero to save them. And now we should 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 sense being able to turn the cheek to these things

and like you know I'm curious to see where it goes why do you think windy spelled with an eye I don't know I've never seen it spell with an eye no I mean obviously it's spelled like the word like it's windy outside Right.

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 miners' lettuce. Insects drifted in the dying light like scraps of gold. I didn't see windy anywhere. When I looked in the borough,

there was only darkness. Disappointment settled over me, surprisingly better. 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 her 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, bat 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 straight. Wait, no, I already said that. Glad to cross-in-ed-bedia. Oh, yeah, there you go. Yeah, yeah, that's why that makes sense.

You know what's kind of fucked up is I keep picturing, if we're just going off other rupees, it feels like a Gilmaro-Dot-O-Torro film, like Pan's Labyrinth or something. Very grim, dark 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. out 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 windy 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. By 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 a 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 bat 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. Belved

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 scream. But when I opened my mouth, laughter exploded. Wendy joined me as the bat 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 had 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 adventure. We climbed oak trees, crawled through the bracken with its tangles of thorns and late-seasoned wildflowers, raised each other through the hills and napped in the miners' lettuce. And then there were the animals. Every animal in the hills obeyed Wendy's commands. Hawks alighted on our hands, talons knicking 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 a 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, bitter trash.

tragedy of my mother and brother. I had a magical wildness that transcended freedom itself stayed 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 Forrest 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 windy as usual.

But on my way out, I felt to 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 feeling. Well, first off, can I just to 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 rub like is death or something like it feels like wendy is the monster or whatever it seems like windy is like an active nature that can't be controlled or something that like it feels like yeah go ahead 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 how 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 not

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. This is 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 not to meme it 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. I'm very curious to see people. People that are listening to this, I'm so curious to see, like, to hear what they think. This, because it's, it gives us, it gives us the description, but I feel like everybody's going to have a slightly different version of what they are envisioning, you know, which is pretty fun.

Well, let's see if no, it gets absolutely blasted by this giant, I hope not. If it happens, it's your fault now. I knelt down by the burrow. Noah looked at me curiously and 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. The long fingers. Then, cracked, cried 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 smile noah froze as wendy slid out and unfolded before him his gauge tracked upward along her arm to her shoulder finally settling on her face his eyes widened reflecting the night scape then he spoke his first full sentence but is that noah he shook his head and tried to pull back But Wendy didn't let go. Oh, no.

No. No. I know. I fuck. Hunter. What did you do, Hunter? What did you do, Hunter? No.

No. No. No. It echoed through the night. So maddingly shrilled 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 our protagonist should have taken into account this giant demon monster vision dragon lady 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 protagonist is fundamentally changing. I mean, he hasn't slept. He doesn't sleep anymore. You know, he is. That's true. 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 go. 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. Wendy is, 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, monstrous tangle of shadow and starlight and 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 mist curled through the branches, a delicate sheen of silver covered the entire forest. I thought of my old nightmare, pale cougar with silver eyes, eating the coyote that spoke in Wendy's voice. I shivered and kept walking.

I wondered vaguely where I had, might find Wendy's scum-blanketed pawn. 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 Dopamine, I had some, 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. This is not like trying to be as hyper-specific with like,

oh, well, a person would say this, the purpose would do this. And I feel like the reason dopamine 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 a, 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.

Dope bean 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, you need to get that out of the way. Leaves and twigs crunched underfoot.

Patterns of broken moonlight danced over my skin. I sidesteped 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 route, 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 fur 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 sped out the mud and stood up. There, in the trees behind the tree root stair, 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 twig snapped under rapid footfalls there are no monsters no monsters no monsters no monsters no monsters no monsters no monsters a low roar bored into my rib cage 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 bird song

underscored by the hoarse commentary of crows. A cat darted across my path, fur shining in the sun light. 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 into 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 miners' 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 breath when he turned on me. How could you go in there? I had to. Dredd 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 mercy of a monster? No hero at all. I turned back. As the shadows of the trees fell across me, I felt their pool, 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 since this episode has become me going wow, this is cool and the name in an IP

that I also think is cool. It also reminds me of Coraline a lot. Going down the well to the Beldom's

world, but the same thing with switched and all that. Then she got down on all fours and crawled into her borough.

I looked up at my house, then down at the borough. Windy or home. Despite my fear in the 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, 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 holes, 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, or 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 she wanted to know about no 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 my mom dies, he might not even remember her. Tears stung my eyes. Suddenly, it was hard to breathe.

For me, we'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 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 he 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 but 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 wind to go. Like a what, yeah, like a windigo, whatever? Yeah, the windigo. And what's her name? Wendy. She's a windigo.

That makes sense to me. I think that's what it is. With that mythology, you eat, if you give in to this, like, the temptation, the, you know, gluttony of cannibalism, a spirit possesses you, and you become these twisted amalgus forms. That makes so much sense. The big yellow eyes, the broken movements, it's like the traditional depictions of the windigo. And like, in early, like, Native American culture before, like, you know, Stephen King's influence of deer skull and stuff like that. Right.

is this story like a completely because normally the wind goes like either like a haunting spirit in the woods or like a hyper violent cannibalistic monster right is this like 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's super cool cool, but that notion alone gets me high. 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 Winneco narrative. It was made for me. Oh, man. Gosh, I hope, dude. What if you, all of this

build up 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 oh oh oh oh i'm gonna punch something i'm i'm fired up right now okay uh 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 hand stretching out of the shadows, modeled skin camouflaged in the dappled light. I took a deep breath. There are no monsters. Wendy's cracked, dead face filled my face. mine's eye, they aren't real. The trees finally thinned. The brittle sunlight grew brighter,

and green glimmered through the trees. The miners let 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, emaciated face, twisted in fury. Noah, who was napping on the love seat, didn't stir. Oh, cool. Noah made it. Okay, that was 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 oh oh oh oh excuse me young man what was that No. The words hung in the air, echoing, reverberated 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 whatever do could help. I looked at Noah. His hands were scraped raw. His little palms look flayed, coated in papery scabs and raw flesh. I thought of the forest, its hungry roots and jagged rocks and 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 pelthings 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

reminds me of the voodoo store just the way it's like recollections of these different uh memories or experiences he had versus it being just like a uh you just straight linear thing um which i'm sure it will be linear but i do like how each one is just piece like part two is the dead the dead the dead girl in my yard told me the most awful stories uh but it just seems like you know like 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 for any negative comment ever made to dopamine if as what negative comment what are you talking about you can have my car keys I have

them here it's it's not it's a Toyota what reliable what bad what you didn't say anything in the last in the last part at the beginning of the last part I was like oh this stuff this stuff I feel like the setups a little quick and stuff like that I just I was out of my depths I apologize the other story did you look I'm just saying dope being can have my car if they want it. Anyway, are you talking about the other story? Yes. I think this criticism is still doesn't take away from the story. I mean, it's like, I think they're valid criticisms. I know what? I can agree with that. At the same time, you can have my car. That's all I'm saying.

That's, um, okay, the gold and silver thing. So now that this is a wind ago story, or it always has been since I've realized it. Silver is used. Silver is used. in a lot of early traditions around like when to go hunting and stuff like that because when do you goes are seen as like an unclean spirit right so a lot of like the settlers who'd want to go hunt like what's his name Jack

something the one to go hunter there 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's 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, uh, 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.

That silver's kind of like a purifying color. Uh, I don't know what the mount lion is yet. What the mount line might be in the dream? Because in the dream, the coyote was windy, right? It's, that's what no, no, no. No, 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. 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 mountline.

And very specifically, Wendy has gold eyes. The mountain lion or the cougar, whatever, uh, having silver eyes. I always, at least be a wind to go hunter. 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 him. That certainly could be. It's kind of what I was thinking.

I, because I picture the half, because even the princess, I understand the mom that it looks like the mom, but even the coyote is represented. 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 windy but i also just saw it as like the mom and even the brother you know um and then now windy is this like tempting voice that is speaking through it being like come back and she's trying to basically uh create another

friend or create another like wind again windigo keeps you want to say windigo windigo that uh she can hang out with you know but it's going to have to be you have to uh 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 uh 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 glist glisten 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, they, there's 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 dopamine even did in the last story too, which is 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 when.

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 if we contextualized everything and it changes the direction

it makes our character immediately and the reader afraid at once like what have 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 line proud murky silver eyes cutting dim swath through the darkness nearby a half-eating coyote with golden eyes whimpered as it bled to death So Coyote is windy, and then the silver is the mountline. 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 is like the vessel of greed, right? Like, you know, all the gold in the world, that's what people want. what breed is there more than immortality at the cost of a life right like i want to live forever i never want to die someone was 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 old it's you were talking early about windy 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 glutty 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 i think i think you're right i mean i i think that makes total sense also too death always you know that's the three fucking uh that's that 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 that parent like that that that kind of correspondence you're saying with the gold is just it 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 windy 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 windy 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 miners' lettuce. The mount lion snapped the child's bones in its blood-stained jaws with a rhythmic crack, crack, crack that jerked me out of the nightmare. 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 plumbed. place. To hide it, I snarled at her. How would you know?

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

reach 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, relescent moon yellow flaring to gold. Then she relaxed and folded her hands on the sill. All right. I'll stay with you instead. I don't want you to, I almost spat.

but 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 but 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-y yellow eyes. He was literally 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 left a big, lumpy scar like an earthworm. But I didn't put him off from fishing. She sure did love fishing. Single tear rolled down her cheek. I waited.

He wanted to build a little house by a river. A river that froze in wintertime and shone like glass. He'd fish in the river every day. He cooked the fish in his fireplace. The cats would eat first because he loved him 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, peculiar orchestra that pulsed through the night. After a while, Wendy continued. My brother didn't believe in monsters. It'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 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. in his body, but 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.

Her 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 they would swoop down and catered away and pull its head off and eat it like the monster did to my brother. She paused, sniffling. I got lost, but 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 on 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 cut in his eyes. Stop it! I stayed with him for days. So did his cat.

I ate acorns and drank 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 was so hungry I ate at all, except the last bite, I didn't eat that last bite. 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. He stepped away from the window sill. Go to sleep now.

Man. Brutal. I love how it really does feel like a fair. fairy tale, doesn't it? Like, it feels like a witch would do that or like it feels like a Huntson 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 windigo or what she is now. The monster killed her, but ripped him to pieces, pulled a 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 haunted 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 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. 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, uh, 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, I think about the other idea I had was maybe it's like, again,

with vampires. There is like one vampire and that makes like offspring, you know, like it bites other people and they become followers. And it's one of those things where it's like, well, you have to kill the leader of the vampire. or whatever. I think

I'm not sure about the Wendigo specifically or it would normally be that there was someone like possessed by spirit and 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. 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

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 blind 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. When it 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! Taping ceased.

I sat there, breathing heavily and waiting for the glass to shatter for wanting to crawl in like a giant broken spider and pull my head off before I could have been scream. I had read that heads were conned. 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 in the first part, the what if you had to eat something alive? 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? Through 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 mushroom. But they're there, and there enough. Why are you here? To my amid 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 he 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 camomile tea, an 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. No more. I don't remember it. I realized I wasn't breathing, took the deepest, quietest breath I could manage. My oldest brother said monsters aren't real. Monsters are evil, he told me.

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 earnest, homely face. Nobody's really evil. deadly. Sometimes they're scared or stupid or confused or hurt. Sometimes I guess they're bad, but no one is evil. So no one can be a monster. 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. But that thing did. And 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. I've never heard such a scream. I 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. 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 laughed And threw all the animals into the will Some of them hit the stones and split 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 rod and I saw it all. The smell is still in my mouth and it hides under my tongue and clings inside my nose and fills 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 sobbed, 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 bats and bright with moonlight. The smell, all 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 arm load. So many they kept slipping away and left the 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 wild flowers 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 bed 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. And they started to build this house. I got scared. I thought of my brother and his friends. Traped 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 their eyes. 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. It was flat on one inn 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 head. He smiled because he remembered me. He covered her eyes. I don't even remember his name. She began to cry. I watched her helplessly. Each sobs in a pulse of overwhelming sorrow through my own body. Waves of grief on a sure 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! Single soft sob emanated from the corner.

Then 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. heart. As I finally drifted off to sleep, I heard the echo of a terrible heart-rending whale echoing from under my bedroom floor. The next morning, I ventured out in search for Wendy. And I couldn't find her. I retreated to the patch of miners' 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. Swallowed the lump of my throat and went home. My brother and all the things he loved were down there and I ate it. I ate it all. I couldn't eat the bones. I put them in the forest. The boys screamed should have split them.

Gosh. man this is right at my alley like the fairy tale and like how it's almost like in another world it's almost like windy 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 or 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 i mean 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 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 windy half away my mother was sick closer to death than ever. Noah 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 past dark, he regularly burst into miserable, screechy wailing. But 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 tears. I stayed up.

I wasn't in case you needed help, but everything remained quiet. After a while, I drifted. A familiar tap, 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.

Shambling monument to old dry rot. 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 jacket 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 and 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 her wings, making the bones look so beautiful and fine. It 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. She 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 His 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 hate him. I opened my mouth like this. Her jaw clicked, stretched, stretched, stretched, contortion, I could barely comprehend. I covered my eyes. I ate his arms. arms, his legs, his guts, his bones, but I didn't need his head, were a 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 had 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. thick and strong, with a healthy body and mouth that can speak. Instead of feeling the hole with earth, I vomited up his body.

The skin, the muscle, the bones, and it 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 windy Deer, wrinkly, lovely windy 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 onrushing 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 I 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 pawn Agnesian to meet this giant amalgamation I'm wondering if she's going to, like, lead him into, like, a cave and, like, all these things are representative of, like, the brothers that have grown, you know? Yeah. Yeah, like all the, they're probably the trees, because there's a mention of, like, there's trees under your house.

They fight the mushrooms. It's like she's a spirit of the trees almost, right? Yeah. 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. It's why she's afraid of the forest. huh man all right you ready yep this is so good this is so good man uh part three

the dead girl in my yard wanted me to be a hero owls watched as we trek through the yard a bat dived and landed on my shoulder squeaking affectionately before taking off again raccoons lumbered through the grass dark eyes shining Wendy and I reached the miners, let us, 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 the panicky pang, I realized I would soon be too big, too old for the borough.

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, I was like for sure. Yeah, very fair to tell. Wendy's stiff, wrinkled dress, rass. Oh, she's wearing a dress?

I didn't realize she was wearing clothes. Yeah, she's talking about, like, her skin. Okay. Wendy stiff, wrinkled dress rasped against the walls until it grew sodden with mud and half-melted frost and 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 relief 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. Squashed. Oh, brother. 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 lamplip pus. Its mouth thin, frog-like, ugly, tragic, split apart, widening until it was the size of a cave.

A thin, moon-pail 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, the 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 glisten and crack lips that opened in wide happy smiles their heads twisted excitedly jaws clicked behind them in a great pit exploding with 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 were 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 all right. 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 war 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 other brothers, but only if they weren't going to be alive for long anyway. And then I play with 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. is the offsering 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 realized that she's getting her his trust to where i think she's going to eat him she's going to be one of these many brothers yeah yeah he's going to join the 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, you 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 dimmed silver. Wendy set two, folded 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 all in adoration. So they let him do what he wanted, even to me and my brother. They didn't 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 word sounded like dead leave stirring that was enough While I was away at the pond Plending my brother's spine in the earth My father cleaned his carcass and polished his bones And after ate the stew

He grabbed my brother's ribs and stabbed me He slid all the way through me And came out 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 had my face a shudder after shut or crawled down my spine. I went to the pile of clean bones and found one of my brother's strip fingers. Her hand crept to her chest with the bony pendant hanging there. He 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 reeking

they steamed in the night under the cold moon then the people tracked 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 curl 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 murder of my own blood a monster to them the people had known my father

who had known what he was I was the monster she looked down under cracked fragile hands. I lay there, rotting all through the winter, until I became a pale, broken, bloodless. Tears course 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 scaven. villagers, building the bones and meat for their young. His hair lined burrows and filled nest, flies fed on his rot, and spawned. Maggots hatched on the guts in his eyes. I know. I saw.

He stood right there and watched it all. Crows took flight. Stardle cries filled the night and their glossy wings blocked the cold stars. I watched his bones crumble into soil. I was so very, very sad. He was 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's 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 is 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 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 as 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 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 when his fingers spread

feeling 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 wrecks 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 gripped 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 eat anything you don't have to eat anything just one thing what she wiped her eyes when the monster fed my brother to me we cursed us both and bound us no one can fight me with

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 my hand Oh man

Wendy grabbed my hand And pulled me across the clearing To the grass choked pit That had been upon so long ago and pointed I looked carefully frowning Shadows thick and impenetrable but some of the shadows look thicker than the others substantial somehow as I watched the darkness coalesced solidifying into something I recognized somewhat 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 him

Keep my brother safe. No. I won't. You promised. My father will kill you anyway. He kills everything. My brothers love best. 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 home. 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 spiderwebs, 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, 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 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 Noah will remember no I stepped back Wendy slid forward an undulating nightmare of rot in 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 holding 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 gone they don't 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 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 eye, 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'll 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 mount lion. Monsters eat for eating 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'd 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.

At 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. 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 was 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. is 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 him 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 and eyes I met Wendy's gaze I promised I do whatever it took to help you golden eyes narrowed face was a wide white warped, mummified horror of human and lion.

Yes, you did. Okay, I'll keep my promise. Her face white and warped, a horror of human and lion. Yep, she was, she was both the monster and the victim. She is both the mountain lion and the coyote. She held my brother out. He whimpered and curled. I looked at him.

My heart ate for him, for her, for her brothers, my mother, and for me. My mind ached. Everything ate. 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 that exploded, spewing boyley yellow Iker all over my face. The pain was exquisite, overwhelming, vulgar. mechanic. 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 tear, 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, received. seated, 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. And 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 know what, 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, I, if I'm going to save her and I'm going to 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 he uses the same pendant she used to kill her father to kill her and in it like the brother was never even there no 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 the spiritual and the physical but he kills windy and in her final word she says don't forget he became the hero yeah I mean

the forest is it's almost like the forest is windy too the forest is everything she loves it's like there's such a great parallel there with windy is alive and dead there's such a great parallel with the protagonist in windy 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 windy is the direct result of never being able to move on or let go from the tragedy of loss yeah and i think that like that like like, it's just kind of interesting.

I mean, like, even, 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 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 windy 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 cross attacked me to the ground and it was so cold my bones ached. I tried to fall asleep again, but Noah was crying. Then, screaming whales that echoed as though from a distance, I grimaced and 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 a sun strengthened and filled windy's dry empty sockets with light again i realized i didn't know myself under 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 ciggled beside her. One of millions, just another poor, careworn, dying mother, forgotten by everyone but her children who would be forgotten to. 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, binding. If brother could bind sister and father

Or sister to brother But sister bind brother to brother And could brother bind mother to son I spent the morning chasing Noah It was hard My burn 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 minor 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 no 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 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 a big it'll make you big and strong. Noah, it'll make mom happy. He acquiesced. So 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. 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 banned. ditch the stumps, and then proceeded to make a stew of myself. I made noa drink half. He ate it gratefully.

I suppose because it was far less disgusting than windy 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 all right, 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 windy was warm. The room tilted. and light 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.

It was like a pumpkin 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 Noah finally wandered in, and wailing and crying so hard he was gagging, I came to my senses and forced him out. Then I picked up the bowl of fingers 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 his 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 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.

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 her door. behind me. Saying Noah to sleep in his own room, went back to the miners 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 borough. 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 steak not a stake 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 shut up with a scream, expecting to see eyes, which would be worse, silver eyes 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 is with you. Isn't she?

No Behind me Something rumbled I spun around It was the 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 dimmed dismally, 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? Looked at me with its countless eyes, the round, curious eyes of raccoons, the bright black orbs of crown 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 kill. too angry to keep me with her forever. While I waited the whole night, the skulls did not come alive again. I left as dawn filtered through the trees, bathing the clearing and 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. It was always enough. I ran back to the borough, 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 borough was gone. I curled up in the miners, let us, and cried. I hope 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 to

trench the bed. Maybe I would die to. 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 dragged her there, that he wasn't in Wendy's field of brothers after all, just holding our mother in his room and crying, and 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, it sparse trees, it's familiar rocks, its rolling slope, all the way down to the miners' lettuce. There, in the deep golden twilight, half hidden among the growing

shadows, was my mother. Next to her was Noah, tiny as ever in 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 miners' 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 took another shambling step forward but windy turned to face me and shook her head then she took my mother by the hand and led her away out of the miners led us 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. Oh. It's fun transitional mode, too, of like people passing away and like saying like, you know what I mean?

Yeah, like the whole story. I mean, 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 once 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 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 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. He's like him realizing that these people dying isn't about him. You know, like it's like it's, it's for them. It's not his tragedy. It's 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 resentfully 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, he 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 asked you or something like that. Like he resents a 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 a whole thing too that like if you look at it too.

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 yeah yeah and even wendy talks about her curse you know being like i i was cursed and stuff my father cursed me windy is very representative of noa as well of uh 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 like it's representative of, you know, they're all suffering, but at least the two of them get a share or 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 and had fallen into disrepair and was up for auction for the third time. My squat, brooding castle, now had a ruin 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's seen 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 smelled like smoke i wandered outside as twilight bled over the hills the miners lettuce was there green and lush as always the borough was not but i didn't expect it to be sat down in the place it had been the touch of the cool damp greenish and 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 a blast 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 miners let us. 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 of 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 we're 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 just... 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 Zion 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 baths the hills and 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. And now that 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 size. It's in whatever else we've thrown up there, pin pal stuff. Dude. All right. Dopamine.

I also have. a deed to a house you can have that one too with the car you have my wife's car too she'll be mad but you can take it man bro just just it being what okay so I

still I think Wendy is I think it's Windigo imagery what a unique take on the Windigo 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 enemies 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 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 windy 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 the story more than the hoarder story feels very concise

very like yeah 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 about that in the hoarder's thing with the tripophobia kind of vibe. And, you know, like the little fucking like wormy snake in his heel, really gross. Doba 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 the dead mom is rough 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 and all 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 what while we were reading this it made me think about like my grandfather who died back in like uh god seven years ago now uh it's weird because sometimes it's fucked up that like 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 like sometimes i like almost forget what my grandpa's voice sounds like when i like 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 the concept of memories coming back and forth was cool. Like I'm afraid of being forgotten. And 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 then stabs Wendy and she has to be released. But it ultimately does like play out because 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, but doesn't get himself. It's the curse he wanted to have. He didn't mean for it to go somewhere else. Yeah, 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 of me, that proposition is very interesting. I would have loved to see him mole that over, I think, for a while. just like have that kind of decision He does in that final argument He does in that final argument Where it's like I want it It's like I'll do what it takes Yeah I mean I think it's

I think it's I think I would have liked more I think of that 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 um two great stories with a lot of great characters uh 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 kind of a similar thing we have in a lot of episodes it's like with these good stories is just wanting more from some of the uh 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 dopa bean i think really has i mean also too dopa being right so much i don't know have you have you noticed that yeah i 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.

Hmm. Um, I think it's representative of the forest of 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 in there, the grown heads, right?

Yeah. Um, so it's like there's, it's like the almost a limbo between the real world and the, 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 whores on. He's there one minute gone the next. I pictured it

more as her brother. I think that in the head. What I thought was interesting. The thousands of eyes and the forest. Yeah, that tracks. With her, with all of his buddies. But to me, what was interesting is that we only ever get to interact with them 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 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 I 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, 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 mind that.

That is what a lot of it felt like pet cemetery or like the reference I had earlier core line how like the kids go down the well and then the bell and mother like 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 is very similar to that 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 dope a bean's actual name is R.C. Bowman and she is a published writer with a ton of stories. Nice. 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 reread 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 link to the description. But yeah, R.C. Bowman, true name for Dopa Bean. I've been blown away, especially by this work, but two incredible works and they write a ton. So you will be seen more

of them in the future. And please support them. They certainly deserve it. Yeah. If you enjoyed 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, you know, that we support. these people and the kind of creative work that they're doing um just want to as always give a shout out to the audio listeners over on spotify and apple podcast and anywhere the way 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 um 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, this is just really good. Yeah. Thank you for watching. Bye.

You know, I'm going to be. I'm going to be. Thank you. I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I think

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