"Twelve Weeks of Summer" by Winona Morris

Twelve Weeks of Summer

by Winona Morris

 

The Woods always were, and so was the Village. The town on the other side of the Woods hadn’t always been, but had grown over time.

There was a need.

The town knew about the Village, but never spoke of it. No meetings were held, no lottery drawn, no decisions actively made, but on the last day of May each year 12 families climbed aboard a small bus and drove into the Woods for their summer vacation.

These families were much the same. A young mother, a young father, an older sibling or two, and a toddler or infant. The children were always excited for their vacation. The parents might appear to an outsider to be a bit strained, but vacationing with a good sized family was always stressful.

No neighbors came to see them off. There were no hugs and no “Call me when you get there”s. No promises to send postcards.

This year Becca, a single mother clutching tightly to her infant son, was the last person to board the bus. Faced with a transport full of complete and happy families, she wondered if she wasn’t supposed to be there after all. She looked behind her as the doors slid shut, but one of the other mothers waved her forward to an empty seat, so she sat.

Soon they left the town. The Woods swallowed them whole, and spat them out in the Village.

The Village always was, but wasn’t always the same. First it was a place of leaf lined holes scraped into the ground, then a place of tents, then of huts. Now it was a place with three large cabins, one for each month of summer. There was a small general store that ran on the honor system, as nobody was around to man it. There was a large park for the children and a communal fire pit for the adults. 

The twelve families filed into the three cabins. Four families per cabin, four weeks per month, three months in the summer.

Becca and her infant went in the third cabin, because August felt right somehow.

Each night they built a huge fire in the fire pit. Hotdogs were roasted, marshmallows were burnt, and spooky stories were told while children who were never allowed to play with fire at home marveled at the sparks that rose like fireflies into the night sky. 

At the end of the first week one of the families announced, “It is a beautiful night. We’re going for a walk. They walked, hand in hand together, into the Woods 

The next morning the June cabin only had 3 families left. At the end of the second week, there were only two. At the end of the month the June cabin was empty. Becca watched the crowd getting smaller as she held her baby on her lap, but she didn’t mention it. None of the vacationing families mentioned it.

By the end of August, Becca and her child were the only ones left.

She built the fire each night, and sat in front of it alone. She pushed her son in the baby swing in the park, and sang lullabies to him about babies falling out of trees. He laughed and gripped things in his chubby little fist and made slobbery noises like babies do.

At the end of the fourth week of the third month the fire was burning low and the baby was asleep on her shoulder when she announced aloud to the embers, “It is a beautiful night. We should go for a walk.”

The Woods seemed to part in front of her as she waded in. No undergrowth snagged her ankles. No tree branches snagged at her hair. Nothing made her stumble or even so much as falter in her steps as she went where she needed to be.

The clearing she came to had a large bonfire in the center of it, larger than the Village’s fire pit. Around this huge fire stood 12 abominations. They might have been horses, except that where a horse's neck and head should be there was instead the torso of a human. Some of the torso’s were male, and some were female, but all were in the same flayed condition. Their skin was torn, their muscles shining wetly, and even in the dark of night flies crawled across the bloodied meat.

Their heads were neither human, nor horse, but an array of other animals. She saw bear and wolf, puma and deer. The creature that separated itself from the circle to approach her had the body of a female, and the skull head of a wild boar. One of her human breasts had been torn completely off of her ravaged body, and huge tusks curled up from the mouth of the skull.

The creature held its arms towards her.

“He is all I have left,” Becca whispered. There was no answer, just the creatures waiting arms.

Becca hugged her son one more time, squeezing him so tightly that he squeaked in his sleep, then handed him over to the waiting creature. The bastardized centaur took the child gently and pulled him tight to her own chest. Becca saw him snuggle close to the remaining breast, before she turned away.

“Won’t you take me too?”

Again, there was no answer. The group of twelve monsters walked into the night, as silent as they had appeared. The female carrying her son was somewhere in the center of the group, and not even she turned to look back at the lonely mother.

Soon it was just Becca, the fire, and the Woods. Then Becca, clinging to the memory of her son’s chubby cheeks, stepped into the fire. Eventually the flames burned out, and the Woods were silent once more.

The Woods always were, and so was the Village. The town wasn’t always, but had grown out of need.

The need had been met once more.