I Saw Her One Night

Winner- Second Prize in the March round of the Great Short Stories Contest

I SAW HER ONE NIGHT

         I saw her one night, alone in the woods by the river.

         I had been hiking with some friends, even though a hike through the woods on a summer evening was really not my idea of fun. As we stepped carelessly along a winding, well-worn path I glanced to my left---and there she was.

         Stopping short, I stared at her, my eyes unsure of what they were seeing. Instinctively, I shook my head and closed my eyes, attempting to shake off something which niggled at my brain but refused to be acknowledged. I felt a sort of deja vu, but as so often happens, it disappeared before I could grasp at it. Not really knowing why, I inched to my right toward a tree, purposefully taking small, careful steps.
         It was an early summer evening, around seven or so. Although it wasn’t something I could truly appreciate as I once had, I was aware that the air was still and sweet, redolent with pine and honeysuckle and life reborn. Tiny brown birds danced and sang, busy, happy little squirrels chirped and scrambled overhead and small, dry twigs crunched beneath my dirty white tennis shoes.
         Soft, honeyed light fell in ribbons through the boughs over her small form as it bent over the edge of the darkening, rushing river. This made her seem a little unreal and I wondered all at once if I was imagining her. I closed my eyes tightly and opened them again.
         She was real.
         She never looked at me but she knew I was there and she didn't seem to mind; somehow, I could feel it.
         Though I could not see her face, I felt her desperation somehow.
         Now standing half hidden by a thick, round tree about fifteen feet behind her I watched, unable to stop myself. I knew I should run ahead and catch up with my friends, but I couldn’t seem to move my feet.

         She couldn’t have been any more than seven or eight years old and I knew she shouldn’t have been there alone, but as my eyes searched the immediate area around us I saw no one. Not even my friends, anymore.
         She must be lost, I thought. Lost and scared. Why else would she be there alone, feeling what she was feeling? I could feel her pain---the kind which arose from a deep fear---more clearly now.
         It made me nauseous. Fear always had. It always went straight from my head to my stomach with no in-between.
         I knew I should probably try to help her yet something kept me behind the tree, watching. A feeling of moral weakness topped with guilt crept up to my heart from my stomach and I cringed with its power.
         There was something else. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I knew if I just stayed, I would come to know it somehow.
         Excitement blended with fear caused my stomach to roil and I took deep breaths through my mouth until I was able to swallow the saliva which had been flooding my mouth.
         I listened closely. She was counting. I could barely hear her little voice as it traveled along with the other sounds of the woods to my ears, but I could definitely hear numbers.
         “57...58...59...60...” And then her little blonde head lifted slowly, methodically even, and she searched upriver with an expectant gaze. I could see her in profile and her mouth still moved and trembled, making the sounds of her still counting mind. She swallowed hard, her chin jutting out and in again, and even from where I stood I could see the tears falling lazily over her cheek and mouth until they fell to her pink-sweatered shoulder, settling into the dark spot already there.
         I closed my eyes. It hurt to see that kind of raw pain and sadness and I wasn’t used to it. (I suppose one might call me sheltered.) The hazy pink-orange light melting over us had made it all feel unreal and at this very moment I so wished it all was.
         But when I opened my eyes again her entire head and body were bathed in this dancing light, mesmerizing me and ensuring my continued vigil over her, whether she was real or not, whether I liked it or not.
         I wanted to call out to her, but something told me to keep quiet and so I did. Heeding my instincts was a skill I had been honing that summer---my sixteenth year---and I felt the need for it very strongly on that particular night.

         Suddenly she moved her right hand out and to her side. She was clutching tightly to something. I couldn’t tell what it was at first, but as my eyes adjusted to the ever-changing light playing over and around us, I could see a stick with a string tied to one end of it. At the end of the string was something fuzzy and pink which I knew had once had a purpose but which now seemed to dangle uselessly and sadly in her tiny hand.
         Oh no, I thought. No... Could it be? If it was, what could I do? Why was I even there?
         And just where were her parents? Did anyone even know she was here? Anyone, but me?
         Something deep within told me to speak to her finally and so I did, leaning out from behind my safety zone in order to be heard through the growing sounds of a summer evening in the woods.
         “She’s not back---yet...?” I didn’t even know what made me say those words and I recoiled behind the tree, my face pressed against the rough bark and my eyes shut tightly against something inside me, but she responded after a moment.

         “No... and I really think it’s been longer than they said...” She sighed and looked down at the rushing river again.

         I stood still, not knowing what to say, frozen and feeling the past come rushing up to me... and then receding again, leaving me even more confused.

         “They said she’d come back around... in an hour (hic)... the river flows in a circle," (hic) she said to no one in particular.

         “Who are ‘they’?” I asked, somehow knowing who ‘they’ were even as I asked the question.

         “The boys... they said she’d come back... they told me (hic)... they knew... I didn’t know, but they knew. But I think they were... (hic) wrong... because she didn’t come back.” (hic)

         The sound of her hiccups reverberated inside me.
         Her sobbing little voice trailed off on the wisps of soft summer air winding all around us. I found myself trying hard to believe that nothing wrong, nothing bad, could happen on a night such as this.
         I glanced around, noticing that I was again becoming aware of all that touched my senses about this summer night, all that surrounded me in those woods; it took me in lovingly and yet it stabbed at me with an oddly familiar sting I couldn’t quite understand, couldn’t quite grasp...
         I stood stunned, mouth agape, eyes wide, and heart thumping like a dangerous animal within my shaking form. I was losing it there in the woods! Alone and losing it! All thoughts of my everyday world left me as I tried to make sense of what was happening to me, both within and without, and my head snapped around again to where the girl sat.
         There she was. And here I was... And something wrong---and bad---was most definitely happening.
         Or had already happened...
         Her hiccups had stopped.

         Something hit me. Hit me hard. Not on the outside, but on the inside. It tried to leap up into my mind, but I was able to push it back down into the oblivion below and keep my sanity, or at least what was left of my composure.
         Unable to move, yet able to speak in a tiny, weak voice, I spoke again. “Who... who is ‘she’?”

         I knew what she’d say and she said it.

         “My kitten. Bluebell... her eyes are so blue... She went down the river... they said she’d come back around again---I think they lied, though. They said an hour. It’s been more than an hour. I know it... I know it. I keep waiting and she’s just not here.

         “She was here... and now she’s not."

         “She’s so pretty. She loves me, too. She hugs me back---I know she does, even though everyone says kittens can’t hug. Well, mine can. She hugs me back... she does... I swear she does!”

         My hands were clamped tightly to the tree behind which I had been hiding; my fingertips grasped at the dried, weather-worn bark as if I could find the answers to my many questions in their texture.
         My mind juggled and ran and jumped with unearthed things; they squirmed and flitted and teased and I felt dizzy and uneasy, my knees threatening to give out my stomach knotting up again.
         A scrambling sound and the snapping of a twig from above broke through my fog and I came back to myself, to her, in an instant. She was still there, still crying. It was a soft, despondent weeping now, as if she were accepting a bad thing, knowing she couldn’t change it.

         “No!” I cried out. “Don’t give up! You’re giving up! What are you doing?!”

         I ran to her, unable to stop my movement now, and the vines and branches both above and below grabbed and scratched at me. I stumbled on an upraised root and nearly fell, but was able to stay on my feet and I ran clumsily to her, my eyes half-closed and my body on autopilot.

         But when I arrived at the spot by the side of the rambling river where she had been sitting, I found a wholly uninhabited spot.
         I looked all around---right, left, and all over in a frantic, funny state. She was nowhere to be seen and neither was the little pink cat toy she’d held so tightly in her tiny hand. I bent to the ground and touched it, feeling for the warmth I somehow still expected, but it wasn’t there. The cold was old and hadn’t been disturbed in quite awhile.

         Then I collapsed; I simply melted to the earth and stayed there, hands slack and tingly, muscles flexing and unflexing without my knowledge or permission.
         I smelled the forest, the river, the summer night again; they enveloped me. And the sounds. I heard all the sounds of the summer night: the frogs here and there, the sweet calls of the birds above, the rushing, trickling, flowing sounds of the river...

         But they weren’t the smells of this night.
         And they weren’t the sounds of this night.
         They were the smells and sounds of another night. A night half my life past. A night I had chosen to forget. A night I had been urged to forget. And a night I had obviously succeeded in forgetting. Until now.
         I was her and she was me. We were one. Now. Again.

         We had been separated by a lie, and then by more lies.
         Those nasty, mean, selfish boys had lied to me first: they had told me that Bluebell could swim and that she would come back around to where I was in an hour. They’d just wanted me to stop following them. They wanted me to leave them alone to do their ‘big boy’ things.
         And then my parents had lied to me: they had said it would be alright. The hurt would go away. I would forget. There would be other kittens I could love...

         But it hadn’t been alright. The hurt had simply traveled to someplace else within me, someplace I never visited.
         And there had never been any more kittens. I wouldn’t have it. They had tried, but I just wouldn’t have it. After a while, I didn’t even know why; I was just altogether uninterested in them.

         I had killed my Bluebell. My sweet, tiny, loving, hugging-me-back, little Bluebell. I had put her into the river so she could swim and play and roll down the river and come back around to me... But she had never come back. I’d drowned her and I hadn’t even realized it!
         And then I forgot about her. I forgot about that night. I forgot about Bluebell. I forgot about all of it. My parents had been right about that, at least, more than they had known.
         Now it was all back.

         I sat in the woods remembering, and railed with it for awhile, wailing on the inside and weeping on the outside, and then at some distant point in time I collapsed to one side with the weight of it all, my face kissing the very ground I’d sat on years ago waiting for my kitty to swim back to me.
         Something soft and furry rubbed against my arm and I started to move and sit up, fresh tears still warm and wet on my face. But something told me to stay put and I lay down again.
         The sensation departed almost as it had arrived and I opened my swollen, red-rimmed eyes to find nothing but myself alone, lying sadly in the darkening woods as the sun set predictably and beautifully over the river and the woods---and over me.
         I thought of Bluebell. I thought of her soft white fur and her big blue eyes. I thought of her trusting nature, and of my own...
         We were all just kids, I thought. We were all just babies: myself, the boys ... and Bluebell. We didn’t know what we were doing; we just did---like kids do. It was no one’s fault. Not the boys, not the river, not the summer night, and not mine.
         And my parents were also just babies, too, when it came to what I’d gone through that horrible night. They weren’t equipped to deal with what I’d done and what had made me do it---they had just wanted their happy, plucky, well-adjusted little baby back.
         And, I guess... so had I.

         I raised myself to my knees slowly, watching the flowing, unforgiving river, the sun’s warm, soft glow upon me as I did, and I forgave myself. And I forgave everyone else. I even smiled. It was alright now.
         The faint sound of laughter traveled in on the hot summer air and found its way to my again-hearing ears...
         My friends. That was them. They’d found me.
         I continued to raise myself to a standing position, brushing the dirt and tiny pebbles off my knees with my palms. After one good swipe, I noticed a puff of whiteness floating and meandering away from my right leg, dancing on the warm waves of sweet summer air, determined to fly in joy.
         I let it go without catching and examining it.
         It was free.
         And now... so was I.

         I smiled again and rejoined my friends, reveling in the sweet summer air, the aromas and sounds of it caressing me and giving me peace---and joy---once again.


Approx.2600 word count