The Park Ranger's Sister

"The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window.” Emily’s voice was wavering as she read, stumbling over syllables she’d struggled with in her younger years. All eyes were on her as she sounded out the words from her crumpled Monster’s Inc-inspired notebook. The single eye on the cover glimmered in the licking light of the flames: a slow deep oscillation like the dying currents of Diamond Lake, green and wanting.

“Original,” mocked a burly man, zipping up his Carhart and winking at her. “We gotter Peter Pan coming down through the trees too or what?”

She’d never seen him before but she knew from her brother that what he had twirling between his greasy fingers was a joint the size of a snickers bar. The citrusy odor wrapped itself around the necks and clothes of everyone in the circle.

The fire was crackling and groups were scattered beneath the leaves of redwoods hundreds of years old. There were guitars being strummed, bags being tossed, and cans filling the receptacle bins her sister had set out. Their family had run this campground on Diamond Lake as long as she could remember, which to her wasn’t very long. She had almost drowned in that lake years past. All she could recall was the cold that crawled into every bit of her and nested there.

It was still with her: the cold. It’s why she always placed herself by a fire. Its breath was dancing around the campers like a flight of orange butterflies. Emily was so nervous that she’d stutter again tonight like all the nights before. She tried focusing on the sparks the way she did in the fields behind their home growing up. Monarchs, swallowtails, metalmarks: they performed for her in her very own private corn stalk stadium: a venue that grew as she did, admitting all the faces of her past, all of her flaws, her insecurities. It was a Kingdom and she was the Queen. She used to escape there so often that she swore the green arms of the corn husks could feel her sadness. They would lay down for her as she approached, carving a perfect lounge for the light ballet show, starring the butterflies. The sounds of the wings beating was so silent that it used to bounce off the surrounding crop and shade her from the screaming. Screaming that came from a white house with a white fence and flowers in the yard. She still didn’t understand how something could be so beautiful on the outside when it was full of darkness and decay beneath the floorboards and behind the walls. She spent so much time out there in her fortress of corn hiding that she developed a swaying in her walking, a rustling in her talking. Her voice hid inside her the way she did in the swaths of green.

Kara was walking back up from the cabin, a handle of citron vodka clanking awkwardly against her belt buckle with each stride. “Yur kiddin right? What are you, forty or sumthin? Screwing with a little girl, really?”

“Give me a swig and I’ll be okay, darlin. Screw with you instead if ya’d like.”

“There’s been quite a few animal attacks up here lately. I’d hate for you to disappear as you’re pissing in the dark later… I’d know. I have to report the bodies I find. Or what’s left of them.

“He’s not alone ma’am. I’m his brother. We work for our Pap at Taits Tackle. We be fine wit any critters we cummin ercross,” he smiled as he pulled the handle of a handgun from his back pocket.

“So you go to the bathroom together?” piped up Emily.

This sort of thing always happened around Emily. She felt horrible that Kara continuously had to deal with men like this that continued showing up to this particular campground. Criminals, vagabonds with records, and creepy men that would look through the windows of our cabin at night. It seemed men like them charged on misery. They ate it in the morning, wore it during the day, and used it as a pillow to rest their egos on at night.

Kara chucked an empty can just right so that it cut the side of the first man’s face. She was always protecting Emily. She supposed it should make her feel better: having a big sister that cared. The problem was that she was older now. If Kara actually cared she wouldn’t have run away all those years ago. She wouldn’t have dragged her to a cabin in the woods after her accident, working as a forest ranger, of all things, and in the middle of nowhere!

Suddenly the wind changed and the fire was pointing its blue-auburn wings towards Emily, giving her warmth and making her strong enough to breathe.

“Go on then, little shit,” said the creepy guy, wiping his face and flipping Kara off, his hand finding a worn leather holster on his belt.

The letters were shaking on the page now. The vibrations seemed to crawl up her arms like spiders and plant themselves sharply in the lobes of her ears. She scratched at her skin, nervously. They were all staring at her, their eyes growing too large for their skulls. Then they were laughing. The cruelness of it shattered her into millions of little pieces.

She couldn’t hear anything but buzzing, the rhythm of it shaking beneath her skin turning her inside out. Those eyes were staring at her, frozen in place. The music stopped too and all the other groups went still. She was no longer there.

The campsite was fading at the edges, the campers’ bodies leaking like putrid pudding into beehive-like holes in the ground. Rabbits came from the holes, clinking iron silverware with hands that were entirely human. They walked like their legs were broken: a collection of shattered dioramas glued together by a child.

She couldn’t move. Her nails curved back on themselves and started to crawl up her fingers, slicing the skin from the bone. Ribbons of it fell into the dirt, swirling like a stew. More black rabbits came with picnic baskets full of salts and spices, passing around plates with a starving fervor.

“Oh the agony,” one screamed.

“This Darkness. Deeper than the night!” yelled another. “More sugar over here!”

They piled out of submerged dirt hives like ants, crawling over one another with incredible agility and supernatural strength. A group of them congregated around a rather large black puddle sipping from tea cups and talking excitedly with their hands, making no noise at all.

Then they began to panic, crying out in pain from a malady that could not be seen. They paced in zig zag lines, and then in circles. They sat up and straightened their backs, they shimmied their tails and adjusted their napkins. They bent in half and ripped in half and then haphazardly placed the wrong halves on the wrong rabbits. Until finally one of them was so tired of fiddling and burning beneath his skin that he ran headlong into the nearest tree trunk, smiling with the impact.

She wanted to die.

“Oh you, Miss? Die? Not you.” Said a rather well-put-together rabbit.

“Not me, what? Are you talking to me, sir? How is this so? Or is this happening all inside my head?”

“Chance is the name, Ma’am, at your service.

“A very nice name indeed!”

“And bright lady, not to be rude, but you don’t have much of a head at the moment, so nothing could be happening in there. I find that things are a bit more real when I step outside of mine for a while. Wouldn't you say?”

She held up her hand (or what she thought was her hand) and it was light, pure, and bright. Suddenly, the shaking stopped. She stood and walked (what she thought was walking) amongst her dinner guests, her ambiance sharpening the gruesome scene of despair.

A few of the rabbits looking over the dessert options were taking turns sniffing Carhart-guy’s hair. One rather round fella with one ear falling off sprinkled a strand into his picnic basket bowl, which was trailing sludge all over the campfire circle. Then he cupped both of his hands, dunked them deep into the purple blackness, pulled them up, and twirled the basket slowly like her grandma used to do with wine. He then motioned to one of his companions to hop on over, to which he wafted the scent into his connoisseur friend’s button nose.

“Disgusting,” he screamed. “Just brutal. An awful excuse for a person. Bad is nice and terrible is gross. I can’t drink this.”

The smallest rabbit came forward shaking his head at the round one.

“Sorry about him.”

She looked up at her with beautiful magenta eyes and Emily saw that she had the most peculiar get-up, with boots covering her ears and mittens sewed to a belt so they hung just above her bottom.

“Aren’t you a funny one? What’s your name?”

“Grace, Miss Bright Lady, Ma’am. The name is Grace.”

“Well, that’s just beautiful. Isn’t that beautiful, Chance?” She asked. “Now if only we could get you to dress above the ground, that way you’d know your boots belonged on your feet.”

“Well, actually ma’am if you don’t mind me saying. I tire less with them on my ears, my feet go much much surer along when I listen.”

“You’re an odd one, Grace, but I must say I enjoy your company. Won’t you sit up here with me? I can tell you a story. I was just reading it to these folks when they just about turned into statues. Would you all care to join us?”

A bunch of the rabbits started whispering in excitement, gathering together around the fire and the paused humans, stepping over the leftovers of Emily’s bones. Some even gathered them to chisel down for toothpicks and prized utensils.

Grace bounded elegantly onto the rock beside Emily and tucked her tiny human hands snuggly beneath her bottom and into the mittens.

Emily shot the other rabbits a look and to her utter disbelief, they all sat down and tucked their hands under their rear ends as well, their ears standing up tall and at attention.

“You lot are insane. Shall I even ask?”

“A bright one can ask as much as they want why others do the things they do, but answering by speaking often blurs the truth. Wait, and the way will shine its light through you.”

The lot of them were now bouncing up and down. They were so excited for her to continue her story. Emily couldn’t believe it. This handwriting wasn’t even hers. She had no hands to hold the paper any longer. She had no mouth to speak. No ears to listen. Did she write this?

They were moving closer to the humans, picking up their utensils and sharpening them on each other’s teeth. She closed what she felt were her eyes and to her surprise, remembered the words from the page like she had read them for hundreds of years.

The strokes of ink were like tortured screams on the page in her mind’s eye. With a deep breath, everything went dark again.

***

Kara was older now, her hands wrinkled and her back weak from the years of dragging half-eaten bodies to the lake’s edge, watching as the water swallowed what was left of her sister’s victims. “Breaks” is what the doctors used to call them, back when Emily was still alive, thought to be brought on by childhood trauma and years of untreated anxiety.

The day her sister drowned wasn’t the worst day of her life. The worst day of her life was the first time her ghost showed up in their family’s cabin, peeling at the bones, and asking to read from her journal. That was the night their mother died.

Kara tried her best to hide the campers for over fifty years until she just couldn’t anymore.

Reading the paper in the small AirStream, Cindy’s Diner, she knew that soon the police would have questions for the ranger that worked in that Forest all her life. Questions she still didn’t have answers to herself.

She just hoped that people would stop taking down her signs on the path to the campgrounds. BEWARE. TURN BACK. Everyone always knew better, until they were dead.