The Deep and Dark

In the dark forest behind the house where she grew-up there was a place no one went. All of the other kids in the neighborhood were scared of this deepest darkest part of the already dark forest. That is the place where she would go to sit in silence and dream of a future outside this godforsaken town and its equally forsaken inhabitants. She would sit in the dark hollowed out oak tree and imagine herself in exotic places doing exotic things. She was a voracious reader and she knew that the world beyond this hellish town was real and magical all at once. She imagined that once this town had been a better place but it had lost all of its magic long ago. She knew this but no one else did, so they feared this forest and its darkness while she tasted of its secrets. When word got out that she was venturing into the darkness her mother beat her with a wooden spoon leaving welts that took weeks to fade. Her classmates shunned her and called her evil names. But she did not care. They had no magic in their veins anymore and she was pretty sure that most could not read and would never understand the beauty of the forest or the world beyond. She had falsely promised her mother that she would not venture into the deep dark forest again, but once the welts faded so did the memory of that promise and she went back into the forest. That trip into the dark would change her life for ever. As she followed the path deeper and deeper into the forest she did not hear the sirens that warned of a tornado coming, the forest blocked the noise of those sirens like it would block the wind from that tornado. The forest would protect her that day as the tornado would ripe through her town destroying everything in it path including the house she lived in. When she would emerge from the deep and dark of the forest and survey the ruin of her town and home, she would only shed a tear for the books she had lost, but nothing else.

When the state legislature passed the bill that would allow for a mall to be built where that forest stood, one woman wept at her computer in a city across the ocean. Wept for the deepest darkest part of that forest.