Haven’t written a flash fiction in a while, thought it might be good to get my hand back in!
Paul was an only child. He was also small for age, a little sickly, and blond. None of this, however, was important. What was important was that the was an only child, a lonely only child, but that it had not always been this way.
Because Paul could remember a time when he had had brothers, and a sister. He could remember a time when he had had cousins who came to visit for the summer, and a best friend who lived two doors down. Paul remembered when there had been a school, instead of a quiet, empty building which was called whatever you called a school without children in it. The adults didn’t seem to notice, and if they did then none of them would talk about it. It was as if every other child Paul had ever met was some elaborate imaginary friend, a complex delusion that seemed more real to him than the possibility that there were no other children in the village, and that there never had been.
What convinced Paul more than anything else though, was the forest. Just as all the other the children had disappeared from the village, so the forest seemed to have crept undoubtedly closer. Vast, dark, and teeming with un-quiet and malevolent life, Paul was sure that the forest had somehow swallowed up the intervening fields that had once sat between it and the village, that it had crept somehow closer while no-one was looking. He would go it, sometimes, when the adults were busy doing whatever they did that preoccupied them enough that they could ignore the fact that their children were vanishing. He would creep along its outer edge, where the grass in the fields turned dry and brown and papery, where the gnarled roots of the ancient trees twisted up around each other like snakes grasping for Paul’s ankles. He wondered how trees so impossibly old could have moved, or sprouted here where once there had been only open, grassy fields. He would listen to the strange noises that emanated from within; the popping of branches, the crunch of leaves, the rasping whispers of wind squeezing between the densely backed trunks. He would listen in the hope that there might be an answer in there somewhere, that somewhere in the deep dark bowels of the forest that he dared not penetrate, might be the reason that the children and vanished and that he was so utterly alone.
It was a nondescript day in August when the forest finally answered.
The sun was high overhead, and it was one of the days when Paul found moments in which he could enjoy his isolation and forget for a moment that he was the only child in the village, the only child in his whole world. He was laying on his back in the long grass, a light breeze running low across the ground and turning the tiny patch of field that remained between the forest and the village into a bright green sea. He dreamt of being a pirate on the high seas, but had long since forgotten the faces of the other children that would have crewed his mighty pirate ship. They were nothing but blurs now, thick limbed creatures of his imagination with faces made of formless pink sponge.
He was boarding a French trading ship when he became of the eyes in the forest, the eyes that were watching him. He caught a glimpse of them from the corner of his eye at first, freezing him where he lay. His pirate ship, and his sponge-faced crew, vanished in an instance. Captain Paul the Terrible was once again Paul the boy, and he was at the edge of the forest that took children.
And it was looking at him.
Painfully slowly, Paul stood up. He didn’t turn his back on the forest for a moment, keeping his eyes on the patch of tangled roots a few feet below where the eyes were. The eyes did not waver, and did not blink. They just stared, two silver almond shaped eyes, staring out of the woods. Eventually, Paul lifted his gaze and looked directly into those strange eyes, those eyes that were right there and yet so very far away. Eyes from inside, looking outside, eyes from wherever it was the wood came from. Eyes that were fixed on Paul and did not move.
Paul swallowed, mustering his courage. “Well,” he said, his voice never more that of a lonely, little boy than in that moment, “Are you going to take me too?”
Without an answer, the eyes blinked, and were gone. No arms encircled Paul, no trees moved to grasp at him with their rough, wooden boughs. The earth did not open up, there were no thorny vines whipping out from the darkness to take him. There was nothing at all.
Just a boy, and a forest. A forest that didn’t like sickly, lonely boys. A forest that liked a challenge.















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