SORROW WOODS, page 2
full of the taste of metal. Blood.
“Elodie, stop!”
She just laughs and carries on running. I stop and turn back around. This is the farthest we’ve
been from home in years. It’ll take us hours to get back to our house now.
“Elodie,” I call again, “I’m not playing anymore.”
She squeals, the sound echoing all around me, but she still doesn’t stop. She just runs as if it
takes no effort at all. I can run, but I’m sure she could run a marathon and not even be out of breath.
I sigh, roll my eyes, and run after her again.
After about ten minutes she starts to slow, and I finally have the chance to jump on her. We
tumble to the ground together, laughing and hugging in the dirt. “You run like a cheetah,” I pant.
She sticks her tongue out at me and says, “You run like a hippo.”
I tap her nose. “You’re a cheeky monkey.”
She giggles and stands up, brushing the dust and dirt from off her tiny shorts. I stare up into
her bright blue eyes that are surrounded by deeply tanned skin, not unlike my own. Her long, black hair falls to the bottom of her spine and is nearly as long as mine.
I have bright green eyes, she has blue. My hair is blonde, while hers is black. She’s short but
lean, while I’m tall and have lots more muscle than she does. I look down past my breasts that are covered in a black crop top and look at my bare midriff and the muscles that ripple across my
stomach. My muscular thighs stick out from the bottom of my black shorts.
My skin is the deepest brown I have ever seen, much deeper than Elodie’s. Mother says that
Elodie will grow into her muscles and that her skin colour will deepen until it’s as dark as mine.
“When do you think Mamma is going to be back?” she asks.
I twirl a twig around in my fingers and shrug. “She’s gone to get supplies so she’ll be gone
three weeks like normal.”
“We can’t live that far away from the city, can we?”
I shrug. I’ve been thinking that for years now, but my Mother never gives me a straight
answer. She used to leave me when I was younger, but she’d only be gone for a few days. She’d
come back with food in the back of her truck and scratches and bruises all over her body. She always refused to tell me what caused those injuries, and the fact that she wouldn’t tell me caused me to worry about her even more. She would always just unpack the truck, give me a hug, and then spend
the next few days in bed.
Lately, it’s become more than just a few days away, and the days she spends in bed
afterwards often stretch to more than a week. She also comes back with even more bruises and
scratches than she used to. I’d never questioned it when I was younger, but now that I am sixteen my thoughts lead to deeper, darker things. I hope I am wrong.
“What are you thinking about?”
I snap out of my thoughts and smile at Elodie. “Just how long it’s gonna take for us to walk
back home.”
She rolls her eyes. “You’re always talking about having to go back home. Why don’t we just
stay out here?”
I shake my head and stand up. “The woods are too dangerous for us at night, Elodie. You
know that.”
She sighs. “Let’s go then. I’m getting hungry.”
I throw my arm around her neck and pull her into me. Just as we take the first steps back
towards home, a loud, ear-popping snap splits through the trees. We freeze. Elodie gasps, her eyes widening as she looks up at me. My chest is rising and falling faster than it was when I was running.
I feel like all of my blood has frozen in my veins. My legs won’t work. My body won’t push me
forward. I can feel sweat dripping all over my body from the heat and the exertion of running, but I’m dithering. I feel cold inside. That noise was the loudest thing I’ve ever heard in my life and it’s still ringing through my ears. I shiver.
“Serena,” she whispers, “what was that noise?”
My brain suddenly starts to work again. The noise of the birds panicking in the sky above me
makes me look up, and when I do, I see a cloud of smoke floating over the tops of the trees. I don’t know what that noise was, but I know that it could be good or else the birds wouldn’t be screeching through the sky like that. We need to go.
“Run,” I say, “and don’t stop until we get home.”
The panic in her face transfers to her arms and legs as she lunges forward through the trees.
I follow her, matching her pace for pace.
“Hurry,” I call out to her. I can hear the panic in my voice. I’ve never heard it before and I
don’t like the sound of it.
We’ve run for all of two minutes when she suddenly skids to a stop. We’re running so fast
that I don’t have time to stop myself before I crash into the back of her.
“What are you doing?” I huff. “Get going. I told you not to stop.”
She turns her head slowly around and points to the right of her with a shaking arm. The fear
in her wide, frightened eyes makes me hesitate for a split second. When my eyes follow her finger, they snap onto a boy. I instinctively reach out and haul Elodie behind me without taking my eyes off him.
The first thing I notice about the boy is that he’s wearing faded blue denim jeans and a white
t-shirt that stretches tightly across the tops of his arms. He has short but messy black hair and deep brown eyes that sit wide in his head. In his hand, he holds a gun. I’m not sure what type it is, but I know it’s a gun because it looks like the pictures of guns that I’ve seen in my books at home.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he demands, stepping towards us. “You shouldn’t be
here. Go away.”
He’s talking to us. Another person is actually here, in our woods, and he’s talking to us. I
push Elodie back and step away from him. “Who are you and what are you doing here?”
He frowns and starts to stride towards us.
“Stay back!” I order, pushing Elodie further back.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he says, looking confused. His eyes are roaming all over me. I
can see him looking at my face and then down my body, where his eyes rest for a long time on my
legs. He frowns again, making his face wrinkle up.
As my own eyes look over him, I soon realise that he’s just like the boys that I read about in
my books. I ignore the gun for now and stare at his strong jaw line and perfectly clear face. My eyes search his features, whilst my brain registers how different he is from us. I notice his Adam’s apple. I notice the way his broad shoulders meet his thick arms. I notice the way his jeans hang low on his hips that don’t curve in like mine.
“Who are you?” I ask again.
“My name is Kaiden, but everyone calls me Kai.”
“Kai?” I repeat, listening to the way my mouth says his name. I’ve never heard of the name
Kaiden and never read a book that has a Kaiden in it either.
He rubs his face with his hand. “You need to leave,” he snaps.
I glance back at Elodie, who is staring with her mouth wide open in awe at the boy. I don’t
know what to do. He said he wasn’t going to hurt us, but it must have been his gun that made that horrible sound. What was he shooting at if he wasn’t shooting at us?
I shake my head at him, whilst my heart pumps furiously in my chest. “These are our woods.
It’s you that’s gonna have to leave.”
He snorts. “How did you even get here?” His accent is not the same as ours. His words are
clipped and sharp, where as ours are more rounded and lazy.
“We live here,” says Elodie. “How did you get here?”
“You live here, in these woods?”
I look back at him and those eyes that remind me of the colour of chocolate and nod.
“Where?”
Mamma said we should never talk to anyone else. She said we would probably never see
anyone else in the woods, but if we did, we were to run away and not talk to them. “I don’t need to tell you that.”
He smiles. His teeth are white and clean. “No, I guess you don’t.” He steps even closer to us
and I watch a frown take over his forehead when his eyes lock on to my face. Why is he looking at me like that?
“Let’s go, Elodie,” I say, pushing her back with my hand.
“You could at least tell me your name,” he says smoothly. “It would be rude not to, really.”
Rude? Is it really rude to not talk to him? I don’t know. I don’t know what to do, but it
doesn’t feel right to just ignore him and walk away. We’ve always wondered about other people in
the world and he might be our only chance to find out anything. I swallow and say, “I’m Serena and this is Elodie.”
He nods once. “Nice to meet you.” His eyes fall back onto my face and a look or an emotion
that I’ve never come across before washes over him. “How long have you lived in these woods,
Serena?”
It’s just talking. He’s not gonna shoot us or hurt us. He just wants to have a conversation
with us. I’m sure Mamma wouldn’t mind if we just talked to him. Would she? I don’t know. He looks as interested in us as we are in him. “I’ve lived here since I was two and Elodie has been here since she was born.”
He nods and takes another step towards us. I push Elodie back but she hits a tree. There’s
nowhere for us to go now. He has us trapped.
“You’re bleeding,” he says, nodding at me, “on your head.”
I reach up with my hand and feel the warm blood skim over my fingertips. “It’s just from the
trees. We were running.”
“Why were you running?” he asks.
“We were playing a game. We run all the time.”
He smiles, stepping closer to us again. He’s so close that I can smell him. He doesn’t smell
like the wind, rain, or trees, like we do. He smells like salt and something that I’ve never smelt before. It reminds me of flowers, but not the sweet type of flowers. He smells musky and dirty, yet clean and fresh at the same time.
“Why do you have a gun?” I ask, curious.
He looks down at the weapon in his right hand and lifts it up high. He turns it around, making
the sun gleam off the shiny metal. “I was shooting animals before you pair got in the way.”
Elodie whimpers behind me. “Why would you do that? Animals are our friends!”
He blinks at us. “I’ve always hunted animals, mainly birds,” he says with a shrug.
“Birds?!” she screeches. “What have the birds ever done to you? Why are you hurting them?
You might be taking a mother away from its babies!”
He makes a face and scratches the back of his neck. “They’re just birds.”
“They’re not just birds! They have families and they live in the trees. How would you like it if
the birds shot at you?”
I turn to see that Elodie’s face has turned bright red with anger. I place my hand on her
shoulder, warning her to calm down.
“This is bizarre,” he laughs. “What school do you go to if you live all the way out here?”
“We don’t go to school,” says Elodie, almost crying. “And we don’t shoot birds.”
His eyes widen in his head. “You don’t go to school?”
We shake our heads.
“Then how do you know stuff? How do you know this is a gun?” He holds it up to us again.
“We read lots of books that have pictures and our Mother teaches us.”
“Elodie,” I hiss, “stop telling him things.”
She blinks. “Why? Do you think he’s gonna shoot us?”
“I won’t hurt you,” he says seriously. “I just want to talk to you.”
The sun breaks through the trees and bathes him in a pale yellow glow. He looks like an
angel and all I want to do is to touch him to make sure he’s real. As my eyes scan over him, I notice for the first time that he has some type of multi-coloured ink all over his left arm. Why would he draw on himself like that? Maybe they’re maps. Maybe he doesn’t know the woods like we do and
needs to be able to find his way out.
“What are those drawings on your arm?” I hear myself ask.
He rolls his eyes. “They’re tattoos, not drawings.”
I’ve heard of tattoos. I know that they’re pictures or writing that are put onto the skin with a
needle. I don’t think you can get them off once you have them on. Some of the boys in the books
that I read have tattoos. They’re usually not very nice people. I turn to Elodie and grab her hand.
“We need to go.”
“Don’t go,” he says. He’s moved from the light and he’s now so close that I can see his long,
black lashes moving up and down when he blinks. “Let’s just talk some more.”
“I don’t think we should be talking to you at all.”
“Why not?”
“Mother says we shouldn’t talk to strangers,” I tell him.
“I’m not a stranger anymore, am I? You know my name and I know yours.”
I shake my head.
“We’ve never seen another person before,” admits Elodie. “We’re not supposed to talk to
anyone else.”
He bursts out laughing and looks down at Elodie who frowns at him. “Are you being
serious?”
She nods. “It’s just us and our Mamma.”
“Always?”
We nod.
He sighs and sits down on a fallen tree trunk, looking confused. He also looks like he has
thousands of questions and doesn’t know what to do with them. “How old are you?”
“I’m sixteen,” I say, “and Elodie is six.”
“When were you sixteen?”
“A while ago. I’m nearly seventeen.”
He shakes his head. “When are you seventeen? What day is your birthday?”
“May the fifth.”
“May?” he repeats. “The fifth of May.”
“When is your birthday, Kaiden-the-bird-shooter?” Elodie asks, stepping out from behind
me.
He looks up at her and frowns. “Christmas Day.”
Elodie seems to forget that he’s upset her and smiles at him. “That’s cool.”
He shrugs. “I don’t get double the presents though.”
“We don’t get presents at all,” she says.
He looks up and blinks. “That’s too bad.”
I shrug. We’ve never had presents at Christmas. Mamma always says that Father Christmas
can’t find our little house out here and we don’t need presents anyway because we have the Earth.
Both Elodie and I still would have liked to wake up on Christmas morning to a room full of presents like we’ve read about over the years. Elodie even has a picture pinned to her wall near her bed that she ripped from a picture book when she was three years old, showing what a room looks like on
Christmas morning.
“Haven’t you ever been anywhere else other than these woods?” he asks.
“Sure,” I say, “we’ve been to the Lake after the rains, and we go up the mountains almost
every single day.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t mean that.”
Oh. Why doesn’t he just say what he really means then?
“I mean, haven’t you ever been to the city?”
I shake my head. “We’ve never been in the truck. Mamma always goes to the city.”
“What does she do in the city?”
Elodie steps forward and sits on the ground opposite him, crossing her legs. I stay where I
am. “She gets supplies.”
“What sort of supplies?”
“Water, food, and sometimes books, newspapers, and clothes.” I shrug. “Those sorts of
things really.”
He nods.
I’m about to ask him more. I want to know where in the woods he lives but we hear another
ear-splitting bang. Elodie jumps.
“Home,” I order.
Neither of us says anything more to the boy. We just turn and run home and this time we
don’t stop, not even when Kaiden shouts for us to wait. We run until our legs and lungs feel like they’re gonna give up on us, and don’t stop until we get back to the house.
