where can a girl even schizpost anymore??????

i’m at work and typing this while my boss is busy, so if it suddenly cuts off, that’s why!

my friend told me a horrifying story yesterday. the gist was that a guy they had previously been seeing had gone on a podcast and told the whole online audience that he never respected, cared for, or liked my friend (without using their name). YIKES! this is my worst fear in magnified form. i am constantly convinced everyone secretly hates me, which has gotten worse since i’ve returned from my artist residency. i feel like i probably don’t have any friends anymore (except for my friends from college, who are my ride or dies). like all the people i’ve met in new york have been waiting for a chance to get rid of me. i’m great at finding shreds of evidence, like unreplied texts or weird comments. i am the master of making that a self-fulfilling prophecy by becoming needy and desperate and texting more and calling more and being generally crazy.

to cure some of my neuroses, i started posting on craigslist. this had the opposite effect, as when i would get no responses i would feel even crazier. i deleted all social media from my phone and so can’t use those platforms to be insane. where’s left? just this blog. it’s so easy to be neurotic on a blog no one reads! (if you do read this… lol sorry) i also started sending myself messages on signal because they disappear eventually. i feel completely unhinged, basically. most normal people would keep a journal, but i hate writing things down.

i was also asked to produce a short film. this is great except i have never done that before. today i storyboarded it. i am not an artist. i also don’t know how i can network, seeing as i am verifiably insane and off-putting to talk to, but we’ll see how it goes!

okay. boss is coming back. bye!

THERE IS NO TIME IN CYBERSPACE

THERE IS NO TIME IN CYBERSPACE.

or, how multiple years sucked into the world’s worst forums caused a total split from reality

Becoming a self-imposed exile was far easier than it should have been. There were only two structures imposed on my life at the time: work, a constant, seizing my time for six-to-fourteen hours a day, and the demands of cyberspace. The greediness of the forums was far less simply defined. It swallowed all time like a black hole, causing hours to pass like minutes, allowing the sun to rise and set without me ever taking a step out of my bedroom, which resembled a nuclear fallout shelter more closely than it did a sanctuary of sleep. Considering I didn’t sleep, not for days at a time, this was apt.

I could trace my obsession back to the seventh grade. It started on the school bus. My assigned “bus buddy” was a boy named Emmanuel, who I had a hopeless crush on. He spent most of his bus rides watching Pewdiepie, listening to Eminem, or showing me the most grotesque things he had found on the Internet as of late. The first time he spoke to me, I was sitting quietly, book in my hands, trying not to peek at his phone. He noticed my wandering eye and asked, “Wanna watch?” Wordlessly, I nodded, carefully accepting his offer of an earbud. We stared into the glowing abyss, and what stared back at us was news footage: specifically, footage of the beheading of a journalist by ISIS. I was enraptured. Breathlessly, I asked him, “Where did you find this?” His disaffected answer shocked me: “YouTube.”

Before Emmanuel, I had never seen a YouTube video. My Internet browsing consisted entirely of going to the Wikipedia pages of horror films I was too afraid to watch and printing them out so I could read their synopses whenever I wanted. I had no personal phone, and my family shared one computer, kept in the living room so our Internet access would be monitored at all times. I knew this would not be the place to start hunting down videos like the ones Emmanuel showed me. We made a pact: every day after school, while waiting for the bus, we would go to the library together and share one school-owned computer. It was there that Emmanuel opened my eyes to a whole new world: not just news footage and accidental captures of accidents, but forums such as rotten.com, bestgore.net, and the like, where we gleefully watched cartel killings, freak accidents, and, once, a deliberate act of murder. 

Soon after our ritual began, I was given my very own electronic device: an IPod Touch. I was thrilled. Now I could scour the depths of the Internet in total privacy, with nobody looking over my shoulder to try and catch me in the act of transgression. This would end up becoming a necessity, as Emmanuel and I were banned from the school library after our librarian caught us watching another beheading on the school computer. The IPod was not allowed to come with me to school, which made it more special, in a sense. I found myself spending countless sleepless nights locked into the mystical beam of the screen’s light, under my covers, trying to avoid being caught by my parents, who were growing aware of my early-onset addiction and frequently entered my room in hopes of catching me awake and online. I consumed endless amounts of fanfiction, began roleplaying online, and, of course, remained devoted to my gore fetish. 

I began to shape my offline life around my online one far later in life. Tired of hiding my desperate compulsions, I started to seek out the transgressive in every other form I could: through literature, through film, through music, and through works of art. This was an accepted quirk by society at large. My friends endearingly referred to my sick taste, largely because they knew very little of what was going on in whatever I was reading, watching, or listening to, but could tell it was violent and disturbing and therefore something to be avoided. I was proud of my taste, and flaunted it openly. That is, all except for the very real content I sought out. Nobody knew that I watched real violence, real death, and was in fact even addicted to it. Nobody knew how much time I spent on 4chan, in the dregs of /x/ and /b/, trying to uncover the darkest truths about the world I could find. Nobody knew that I had started to fear I was losing my grasp on reality.

The dreams had started in high school. I was a junior, and I had not yet fully developed into the somewhat depraved person I would later become. Most of my Internet usage at the time revolved around an obsessive roleplaying habit, which I fostered on Tumblr and then flourished into on Discord. It was relatively harmless, all surrounding damaged OCs who spent a lot of time having sex. I thought, at the time, that I was cured. When the dreams began, I realized I had simply sublimated my urges to a degree where they could only be expressed in cryptic visions and scattered memories. The dreams began to creep into my head during waking life: in class, at parties, while I was doing my homework. I panicked. I begged my parents to let me talk to a psychologist. They reluctantly agreed, but she blamed my intrusive thoughts on stress. I found this rational line of thought ludicrous: I was hardly stressed, and not at all enough to be suffering the nightmarish visions I was having. 

As I retreated further into the womb of the Internet’s underbelly, my loose grasp on reality began to slip completely. I experienced a total break from reality, my own conceptions of life and death shaped entirely by a nebulous online void in which it was acceptable and even encouraged to become a voyeur of the spectacle of violent death. In this world, there were no laws beyond not being a pussy and following the rigid code for engagement within the forums. If you failed to commune with your fellow travellers properly, you would be doxxed and banned. SWATing was rampant, as were elaborate hoaxes surrounding would-be murderers. When this became my reality, my real life slipped away from me. I failed to interact with actual human beings, preferring the alienation provided by my online peers. I had no conception of what normal conversation consisted of. I became haunted by the specters of the crimes I had witnessed. I began to fear that I, too, was capable of unspeakable horrors.

i completed my first artist residency!

well! i did it! my very first residency is on the books. i spent two weeks in the village of agios ioannis in crete at mudhouse residency, working on a dance performance that i’m very proud of. it was definitely full of ups and downs. i switched projects three times, cried a lot, and was both over and underfed. i wasn’t sure what to expect going into it, so here were my takeaways.

1. i am very ready to start my masters lol. i LOVE research. i spent a lot of time doing research and whatnot instead of working on art. i’ve become very interested in broken britain horror films… so that was a large part of my work there, which i did not share, because it was not artistic.

2. i am very sick in the head. received lots of questions about why i was so fascinated by: snuff films (no i have not ever actually watched one)/snuff aesthetics, violence in media and literature, the dark web, etc. i could not really answer these questions, but i did try. answers ranged from “i’m severely depressed and it stimulates serotonin in my body” to “i don’t know i’ve always been fucked up and sought out fucked up things”. this will require more introspection and thought in the future.

3. spending time only with other artists is actually very cool! i maybe dreaded this part the most? i wasn’t sure what the vibes would be… ended up making some very close friends i’d like to go visit in the future (whether that be in estonia, montreal, or london) and some who live very close to me as it stands (new york city baby!). they are full of advice and interesting philosophical ideas and are also very funny. this ended up being my favorite part: late nights on the roof and early mornings on the beach with some of the closest friendships i’d ever made in such a short period of time.

4. I AM A HOMEBODY. oh lord. hated this realization coming back to me once again. i just LOVE my creature comforts… i love my family and my friends and my loved ones in general… it was very hard to be so far away for so long!!! i thought i would have grown out of this but i haven’t yet.

5. having unlimited time to make art makes it really hard to make art. i felt less focused than i thought i would be with all that free time. maybe having a job is a good thing sometimes?

overall very glad to have done it! i’m sharing my performance here as well. i did not write during this residency really… i’ll post what i wrote during a free writing session we had, which i didn’t think was very good but sure is proof that i keep returning to the same themes over and over. now that i’m back in the united states with wifi, i shall return to blogging again!

a very mundane monday

I’m at work right now and technically I should be working but my job is just to make sure everything runs smoothly and nothing is running because there are no customers and no orders and no vendors that need to be called and nobody that needs to get paid so instead I’m writing this. Yesterday instead of doing anything productive I submitted to an online literary mag and started a new song in Ableton Live that I probably won’t finish (but maybe I will because I finally got Necter and so my vocals will sound passably decent). The music in here is too upbeat but if I change it my coworker will say it’s “not really the restaurant’s vibe” (although he wouldn’t say this because he doesn’t use the word vibe, English isn’t his first language and I think this slang term is slightly out of his grasp of understanding at the moment). Everything has been very hazy lately and the days just kind of blend into one another. Even when events happen they don’t really happen. Two nights ago I saw a friend play a show at Banc but I was too high and I had to leave and it all felt really unreal. I like writing down these feelings because they ground them more in reality. Someone told me everything was in our souls and not really perceivable in the real world and it really freaked me out. I don’t really think things are objectively real either but thinking about it too hard makes me feel sick. There are two books I need to have read by tomorrow and Wednesday but instead I’ve been devouring The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis which is very unlike me. Normally I hate Bret but this is working on me in unexpected ways. Maybe it’s more earnest than other things. I really believe him now. All the detachment is revealed to be phony as usual but he really cares about it and that makes me care about him too. My hands won’t stop shaking and I don’t really know why. I think I’m permanently in a heightened state of anxiety nowadays. Too much parapolitics and too much caffeine and not enough sleep. The normal things that I’d like to be more special than they are. That’s the story of my life probably: wanting everything to be more meaningful than it actually is. Assigning them meaning just makes them frightening, though. A lose-lose situation. All of my friends are leaving the city and I’m very alone all of a sudden. Technically there are bigger social circles I’m a part of but the people I spend all my personal time with, who really love me, are disappearing one by one and I guess I haven’t worked out how I feel about that yet. I wish I did something interesting last week so I could talk about it but I didn’t. My stomach hurts all the time. Summer is coming but it feels weird this year. I guess I’m used to living on the beach all summer in that weird liminal space between employee and guest and now I’m somewhere with no water and no sun. Strange. The point of writing all this down was no point except to put it somewhere. I should probably start doing my job now.

i will cast abominable filth at you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle

He spent the summer crawling on all fours like some sort of animal. He refused to walk any other way besides on his hands and feet, always with each extremity firmly planted against the ground. You could hear him coming from a mile away: his bare soles dragged against the desert earth as if they were trying to scrape every last bit of matter out of the soil, and you could always track him by the trail of blood he left behind, a Pollack-like pattern framing his every moment. It made the girls nervous, but they’d just giggle and say, “Well, that’s Jack.” and leave it at that.

In hindsight, it was easy to blame the angel’s trumpet. Yes, they’d all drank the tea they’d brewed out of the flower, but it was only Jack who’d scooped out the guts and eaten it whole. He’d always been a dumpster for drugs, or at least that’s how Dayton told it. The night was frenzied and feverish, fragmented by scattershot bursts of color and light, but everyone could recall Jack taking off into the desert like a beast unchained, yipping and yowling, racing out into the unknown as if it were the only home he’d ever known. He was gone for a week. They assumed he’d died out there of thirst or starvation or the like, but he came crawling back like a babe returning to the nest. He just didn’t stop crawling. 

∞

He was not blind. When he ran, it was because his nostrils caught the scent of something acrid and sour, a scent specific to the night itself, the starless sky, the all-consuming darkness, the red dawn beginning to swallow everything whole. He followed the scent like a bloodhound, tracking it down to the center of the desert, desperate to get to the source.

Pulsing at the center was a crater. A deep womb at the heart of the barren tract of existence, hot and wet and alive. A slit in the center of the earth. He skidded to the edge, peering over with wild eyes, taking a deep breath in through his nose. The smell was fetid, heavy with iron and rot and something else that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. When he pressed a hand inside the inner wall of the cavern, it came away slick. He dipped his finger inside his mouth and sucked. The sky broke apart, and out tumbled God, heaven, hell, things holy and unholy alike, things he couldn’t comprehend. He felt his mind begin to melt. All he could do was crawl inside. Crawl back into the mother womb of the ancient earth.

∞

Hot weather had always turned him into an animal in heat, prowling around the streets of the city like some feral thing, hunting for prey that never took the bait. He sweat through thin white tanks and low waisted jeans, everything sticking to his skin until he shed it all, lurking around corners in nothing but his underwear. It used to make the girls laugh to see him like that. “Crazy Jack,” they’d chant, “shedding his skin!” He’d hiss and scowl until he’d scare them all away; once, he pulled a bowie knife on Natty and that was enough of that.

They all worked the corners, of course, but Jack was a master of it, and the girls had theories as to why. “You’re an empty space.” Dara Jo told him. “People just want to fill you up.” Jack had just stared at her blankly that time. They’d both been high out of their minds, their gazes wide and open, seeing so much they saw nothing at all, and it was all nonsense, scrambled back in his brain until it read like morse code. “Sure.” He drawled, nodding his head and polishing his gun. Janie said it much more simply: “You’re like a black hole.” Jack never put much stock in any of their explanations. He didn’t care why it worked. All that mattered was that it worked.

His last corner deal, before the angel’s trumpet deal, had gone wrong in ways that nobody could’ve predicted. Jack had had close calls before. Everyone knew he wasn’t the stablest individual, wasn’t the guy you could count on for level headed decisions, but he was good on the corners because he got the deals done and he got people in. Something in this man’s eyes, he said afterwards, was “all Satan”. That was the only way he could explain. “It was the Black Arts working through him.” Nobody could accept that, not really, but nobody could argue with him either.

It was one of the hottest days on record that summer, nearly 110 degrees, and they were all going a bit insane in that heat. Jack had been stalking his corner like a caged thing, haunches up, eyes narrowed, teeth gnashing. He’d had three Budweisers and some DMT. His pupils swallowed his irises whole. He’d shredded his shirt to pieces, and the tattered pieces were fluttering down the alleyway, getting stuck in chainlink fencing and along brick walls. Later, they asked the girls if anybody noticed something different that day, but really, it was the same old Jack. He was just wired that way.

The man who approached him - a boy, really, a skinny kid of sixteen or so - had matted blond hair and patches of acne spurting up across his chin and forehead. Nobody heard their conversation. It was quiet. Jack’s voice was a low rumble, and the boy’s was warbly, shaky and a little bit metallic at the edges. “I’m telling you all, it was the Son of Satan standing before me. No question about it.” Whoever it was, Jack gutted him like a fish. His entrails dangled halfway down the street. The girls didn’t even worry about the mess. They just got the fuck out of there. 

They kept asking if Jack thought he was CIA, FBI, whatever: some reasonable explanation, maybe, even if the level of violence most certainly was not a logical response. But Jack shook his head. It was the Antichrist, plain and simple. 

∞

In the canyon of the earth, he found him. 

The kid was exactly as he had left him. His eyes were all the way white, streaked through with blood vessels popping a violent red, seeing nothing. His stomach was sheared open, exposing the hanging guts, giving him the look of a squid, something gigantic and monstrous from the sea, far older than Jack could comprehend. He was gray all over, and his limbs dangled precariously from the corpus of his body, hanging too loose. The boy smiled, and Jack shrunk.

“So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth.”

The boy opened his mouth wider and began to howl. The sound was legion. Thousands upon millions of howls, endless howling, the cries of all the beasts of the earth, of the sea, of the sky, eternal and immortal, poured out from the boy. Ear-piercing. Blood began to leak from Jack’s ears. He was frozen, staring in horror at what he had created, at what he knew came from deep inside him, or perhaps he was borne from. Something incarnate. Eternity begets eternity. The cavern began to shrink. A womb, only for Jack, backwards and rotten, something horrible, decomposing him within itself. He curled up and let it envelop him. There was nothing but darkness.

“I will cast abominable filth upon you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle.”

∞

He came back crawling, and he never stopped crawling. The colony was in pieces, disorganized and putrefying. People were beginning to break. Jack was not one of them. He crawled out for their food and returned with bounties. He fixed the things that were broken: the faucets that leaked, the homes that were crumbling, the toilets that backed up. He made sure the vans had gas and the girls stayed armed.

He didn’t speak, and he didn’t go out to the corners, and he didn’t touch the drugs. He didn’t write, and he didn’t read. They found him staring at the sky. Frequently, he was caught digging holes.

When he opened his mouth, they found a short stub where his tongue used to be.

a white horse standing in the center of my bedroom

It started with the party, or maybe, it started with an absence.

She had been complaining about the howling void that opened up in the pit of her stomach and screamed for sentience, threatening to consume her entirely, leaving her numb and paralyzed and blind, for nearly a year. When he got sick of it, he invited her to the party.

It was a place where everybody knew everybody and everyone was “networking”. A strange place, one she was alien to due to a profoundly antisocial nature and a deep shyness that nobody believed she possessed except her. Shouting and music and laughter which she remained outside of, observing all that went by her in a sort of fugue state. She was very drunk and trying to hide it. Everybody was talking and only she was listening, but she could only catch snatches of conversation.

“He just sold it for $20 mil…”

“Calvin Klein?”

“It’s a totally radical reclaiming -”

“Have you had the dream too?”

This final snippet forced the world into a singular pinpoint of focus. When she turned to face the speaker, she was met with nothing but light.

A tall boy, very tall, too tall, tall and blond and vaguely misshapen somehow, though she couldn’t say why. Perhaps his skeleton outgrew his skin. 

“I’m sorry?”

He smiled, all teeth, a carnivore’s mouth, sharp and pointy and blindingly white. When he leaned in close, his breath smelled metallic. She recoiled instinctually, sensing something rapacious in his grin.

“The dream. I know you’ve had it.”

Maybe he was high. Everyone kept talking loudly about how many lines they’d down, how much they needed another bump, something false in their recital but desperate, too. When she didn’t answer, he kept going.

“The factory. The one outside Pittsburg. The smokestacks. Fumes from the gasoline soaking into the earth. Making you dizzy. Making you sick. The fire. The fire that consumes the factory. And in the fire, the girl. The beautiful girl with the mouthful of blood.”

Dumbfounding. Earth-shattering. She stared at him as though he were a prophet. His grin only widened.

“I’ve been sending them to you.”

And with that, he walked away. Disappeared into the endless crowd.

-

When she got home that night, she was shivering. She always shivered when she was drunk, teeth chattering so hard it created cracks in the enamel, but this shiver was primordial in nature. A deep repulsion to the predator outside the window. Watching. She got straight into bed, still dressed, and left all the lights on. Sleep did not find her.

-

She asked the man who had invited her if he knew the hunter. He laughed, told her, “He’s been my best friend since I was ten years old.” She frowned.

“He told me he was sending me dreams.”

“Yeah, he was probably trying to hit on you.”

She dropped it, but the hole in her gut grew wider. Its edges were starting to bleed.

-

That night, she dreamed. And it was exactly as he had said. She was standing in a desolate part of the country, grey and abandoned, the air crisp. In front of her, made hazy by smog, towered the smokestacks. She knew them. Used to drive out to them when she grew restless as a teenager, stand for hours before them and smoke. Now, they were dark and imposing, rising up out of the starless night like sentinels guarding the true oblivion that lay beyond.

She wrinkled her nose, prickled by gasoline. Yes. The gasoline. The gasoline that soaked into the mud, became part of it, unifying the unconscious with the real. Heat began to envelop her skin, warming her slowly at first, than ravaging her like a fever. The night lit up, blackness giving way to an apocalyptic orange, noxious and nuclear in its brightness. A burning that was not a burning at all, but rather an unmaking, or more precisely, a remaking.

From the flames came the girl.

The girl was not beautiful. This the hunter had lied about. She was simply a negative image of the dreamer, light where she was dark and dark where she was light. Staticky around the edges. When the girl opened her mouth, black blood spilled out in torrents.

-

She opened her eyes to find nothing but her familiar apartment and the gnawing void that remained.

-

On the subway, she searched for signs of psychic torment. Shadowy figures, stange flashes of light. She found nothing.

-

At work, she decided she had invented it all in search of meaning. She didn’t have the dream again.

the dead zone

i am trapped in a sensory deprivation chamber of my own making

stunned insensate by boredom

blindness

burning heat

too much and not enough all at once

sound blankets me like a quilt enveloping my whole body, 

an impromptu body bag duct-taped ‘round my bones so tight it chokes any thoughts

vitality

uniqueness

youth

creativity

etc etc etc

the world beyond is coated in a gauzy haze that obscures my vision and clouds my mind

makes me dull

insensate

useless beyond comprehension

i wander the streets like the living dead, shuffling gait hampered by stupidity and a rotted core, numb to the howling wind and the chirping birds and the dissonant sounds of a lacrosse game, coming as if i am sunk beneath a bathtub, hearing it from underwater

my flesh is pruning and my lips are blue from lack of oxygen, a phantom cosmonaut unable to return to earth, perpetually numbed to sensation. they’ve cut my line and left me floating somewhere among the stars, sucked into the dark void beyond. an empty space defined only by nothingness.

there was never anything here. there has been nothing lost. there is no tragedy to be found.

i am just a girl in her bedroom like every other girl in her bedroom except i am not

In the middle of the night, the bedroom is a space of performance.

Highly curated, museum-like in its spatial integrity: the old box TV flickering in the corner with images from Harmony Korine’s Gummo, the perfectly-made bed with rose sheets and a teddy bear placed between the pillows, and Margaret, her ankles crossed as she lies on her belly, staring vacantly at the screen, her face distorted by the VHS glow. Her hair is braided, and she wears a pair of Brandy Melville sleep shorts and an oversized baby pink crewneck, posed as though ready to be pinned on a board under the name “bedroom aesthetics”. Everything is for the viewer, though there is no audience. She is always performing. She has fully inhabited the role she plays, to the point where she is unsure of who she was before the performance began.

The sound is dull and tinny in her ears, and she can barely decipher what the characters are saying to each other. The TV is too old. She will never switch to her laptop - except when she does, inhabiting a different twist on this role, Spring Breakers mere inches from her face, still in that exact same position on the perfectly-made bed.

That will be tomorrow night’s performance. Tonight, she envisions herself a rural teenager, bored with Midwestern mediocrity, Tia Blake’s sweet voice spinning out from her record player. Everything is analog not by choice but out of necessity. In the early mornings, her chickens will wake her - one of their own has been murdered by a roaming fox.

Or would chickens react with grief to such a sight? Would they wail?

She takes out her phone, Googles, “how do chickens react to corpses”. Results are boring: chickens show signs of post-traumatic stress, blah blah blah. She thinks of Clarice Starling and the screaming lambs, a much more poetic image, but since Jonathan Landis conjured it before she ever could, she resorts to posting, “dead chicken in hen coop. bloody and vile. survivors hid in rafters. felt too real.”

Once it’s been posted, the performance ends. She switches off the TV, wipes her nose on her sleeve, rolls onto her back, and shuts her eyes.

She is not in the Midwest. She is not in the city. She is not in some far-off Eastern European country. As real as the performances may seem, she is simply in ordinary suburbia, and her mom has just texted her to tell her to turn the TV down, please, Johnny is trying to sleep.

She could smother Johnny with a pillow. But that’s just another aspect of performance. Playing at Lisa Rowe-style sociopathy, bleached blonde with no eyebrows and a constant DUI stare, seeing through everything and reacting with casual cruelty that would overwhelm most others. That’s not who she feels playing tonight.

She goes to her window, slides it open and inhales the fresh air. Even this she imagines as a movie scene: a teen girl at her window, late at night, moonlight just barely illuminating her pale features. Cut to: the wide empty lawn, so green and healthy, blanketed by a dark forest.

Of course, there is no forest, and there is barely a yard. Just the sight of the next housing development.

So profoundly boring. So easy to perform more elaborate kinds of boredom.

…

She lies on her bedsheets and falls into her favorite fantasy.

She is either twelve or sixteen, but it’s unclear in the vision of herself in a gingham dress, walking down a dark woodland path, a wicker basket clutched in both hands. She is trembling for an unexplained reason. Her eyes are too big in her face, wide-set and round, round, round, all-consuming orifices from which every imaginable fluid has leaked. Inexplicably, her hair is always blond in the daydream, falling down to her lower back. Golden and shining in the sickle-cell moonlight slowly poisoning her psyche. 

Her footsteps crunch over twigs and dead leaves. There is frost hanging in the air, forewarning a coming chill. Bad for crops. So she has been sent scavenging, to forage in the dark forest that surrounds her tiny village, though why she has been set to this task so late at night is unclear. A low hum surrounds her, quiet at first, but the deeper she wanders, the louder it gets, building to a crescendo of a late-night woodland orchestra: the flapping of wings, the buzzing of near-dead things, the low moans of injured beasts. She shrinks.

There is no clear path, and she has lost her way completely. It was suicide to come here alone. Or maybe it was a sacrifice. 

Eventually, she reaches the shambles of a wooden cabin, chewed up by forest things and rotting into the damp earth. At first, it seems empty. The closer she gets, the warmer it appears. The scent of smoke in the air. A faint red haze surrounding it.

She cannot resist. She crosses the threshold. 

…

The fantasy always falls apart here. Becomes too cliche and trite for her to stomach. A mysterious older woman, blankets of dark hair covering her face, beckons her inside. Invites her to try a delicious red apple, positively dripping with sweetness, bleeding red when she takes the first bite. Once she’s swallowed it core and all, she chokes. There are razorblades within the apple. Her throat is torn to pieces from the inside out. The enchantress kisses the blood from her lips and encases her in wax, then seals her in a glass coffin like all the other beautiful girls.

Or a brooding figure lurks in the corner, lanky and all-bones, crouched like an animal, hungry eyes gleaming in the dark. He licks his lips. She is trapped. 

Or nothing is there. Nothing but the consuming blackness of night and a perfectly-placed mirror. It holds no reflection.

---