Relics of a Bygone Society

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window.

For fifty years the aged cabin had not been lit, had not been occupied. Just a relic of a bygone society, or so had been thought by those who knew its secrets. The dilapidated structure saw weeds and vines encroach on its walls and windows after decades of being forgotten. The old path through the thick woods had all but vanished with time, and the creatures of the night had once again come to occupy the property and its surroundings in the absence of the lost souls who once kept them away with their hushed cries and hurried hikes along the passageway.

Many had hoped, many had naively come to believe, that the place would stay a forgotten relic, just a piece of history that most people shuddered to remember.

The world was not so fortunate.

And neither was Eve.

The path was lit only by the stars, and bright as they were that night, Eve also used the flashlight on her smartphone to keep her from tripping along the trek. She needed the extra help. Her nerves were making her clumsy, causing her to stumble. It was a warm night and yet her whole body shook and shivered. Her legs felt feeble as she walked as if one strong breeze may very well be enough to knock her to her knees. It took everything inside her to continue putting one foot in front of the other. The beam of light emanating from her phone emphasized her unsteadiness as it shook back and forth with every twitch of her clammy hands.

Eve couldn’t believe she was doing this, risking everything to go to the cabin in the woods that people were only ever brave enough to whisper about. There was a sinisterness about these woods, a finality within its borders. You only came here if you were out of options, out of hope. You only came here if you absolutely had to. And she did.

Eve had always been a good girl, or so she’d been told growing up. She listened to her parents. She was polite, even to the strangers, and even worse, the not-so-strangers who sought to take advantage of her. She followed the rules. She stayed in school. She ate well. She exercised. She checked in on her friends. She was good at her job. She had her whole life ahead of her. But none of that mattered anymore, not in this situation. She wasn’t following the rules anymore. She couldn’t. And for that, despite her track record thus far, she would be persecuted. Because it didn’t matter who you were. To them, everyone who dared go to this place was the same. Anyone who would dare go to this place was damned.

Hot tears streamed down her cheeks and blurred her vision at the thought of her current reality. As the trail in front of her became obscured by her tears, Eve stumbled and hit the ground forcibly, face-first, with a loud thud and the crunching of dead leaves underneath her. She had tripped over a fallen tree branch on the path. Hot pain filled her senses. It was coming from her left forearm, which had taken the brunt of the fall on another fallen tree branch and torn right through her skin. She had dropped her phone in the midst of the fall, and without its light, her eyes struggled to adjust to the shadows. She lifted her throbbing arm to get a better look. It was bleeding but the wound seemed superficial. Her blood looked black in this darkness. It oozed slowly out of her and drip…drip…dripped on the ground. Something about leaving any part of herself behind on this trail sent a cold chill down her spine. Nobody can ever know I was here. She quickly sat up, gathered the dead leaves around her and piled them over the spot where her blood was quickly drying. But her arm was still dripping. If she kept walking like this, she would leave a blood trail that would lead anyone who found it straight to the cabin. She had to stop the bleeding. With a renewed sense of urgency, she took off one of her tennis shoes, pulled the sock off her sweating foot, slipped her foot back into the shoe, and pressed the sock to her bleeding forearm. It definitely wasn’t the most sanitary solution, but an infection was the least of her worries right now.

Just as Eve was about to begin searching for her phone in the undergrowth, she heard a nearby rustling in the brush to her left. Her head snapped in the direction of the noise, her eyes widened, and her breath caught. She didn’t move. She didn’t make a sound, not even to breathe. She heard the rustling again, closer this time. Her body was frozen to the spot. Her feet were like lead. She began to think of anyone and everyone who might’ve known she was coming here tonight. The list was short: the woman at the drugstore who had seen her shopping and had undoubtedly noticed how puffy her eyes were from crying, who had then walked up to her and discreetly handed her a small scrap of paper with only a phone number on it before whispering “Call if you need help that you won’t find in a doctor’s office” to her before briskly walking away; the person the phone number belonged to who could be leading her into a trap at this very moment; or maybe even the cashier at the drugstore who could have noticed her strange interaction with the older woman and figured out what she was up to. But who knew how many people the people on that list could have told, or how many others had witnessed that brief interaction between Eve and the mystery drugstore woman?

The rustling came again, closer still. As it became louder and more frequent, Eve begged her legs to run, move, anything. She didn’t know if it was her brain trying to take her away from the stress of the present situation, but she suddenly thought of how she had always heard as a kid that if you see a bear in the woods, you should never run from it. You should avoid eye contact, back away slowly, that kind of thing. And yet, she still couldn’t bring herself to move a single muscle in her body.

All of a sudden, the rustling was directly to her left and out leapt a creature from the black shadows cast by the trees. The creature ran in front of her, just inches from plowing her over, and disappeared into the thick lay of trees and brush to her right. Eve gasped for air as her lungs finally managed to work again. A deer. It was only a deer. No one followed me here. She repeated it to herself over and over again until she could focus long enough to find her phone.

She found her phone with the flashlight still on, took a deep breath to calm herself, and continued on her way.

Surely, she had to be getting close, she thought. She had been walking for nearly an hour. Just as she began to think she had been tricked, Eve saw it: the candle burning in the window. About 20 yards off was the cabin. If it weren’t for the candle being lit, she would have thought the place was completely abandoned. She took in her surroundings cautiously, looking for anything suspicious, anything out of place. The silence was deafening. She seemed to be completely alone out here. She cleared the distance between herself and the cabin as fast as she could manage until finally, she stood at the foot of the front door.

She lifted her fist to the old, wooden door and knocked twice quickly, then three times pausing between each, then twice quickly again, the exact pattern she had been told over the phone would grant her entrance to the forbidden place. Then, she waited. One minute, then another passed. With every passing second the beating of her heart sped up, and the consistent wave of blood that beating pushed along rushed through her ears louder and louder.

There was a click like the sound of a lock turning, and the doorknob began to move. The door creaked open slowly, at first only revealing a dark sliver of the inside of the cabin. As it opened the rest of the way, an old woman stood in the entryway holding a lit candle which offered the only light in the cabin as far as Eve could tell. The old woman didn’t smile or greet her but stared at her with piercing, dark eyes as if she could see down into her soul. Finally, she spoke.

“What is your name?”

Eve struggled to find her voice for a moment.

“Eve.”

“What is your purpose here, Eve?”

Eve recalled the words she had obsessively committed to memory.

“To take my choice into my own hands.”

The woman nodded and stepped aside, motioning for Eve to enter the cabin.

The inside of the cabin was not what Eve had expected. While she understood why, by necessity, the cabin would need to look abandoned on the outside, she had thought the inside would be taken care of, up to date even. Instead, it was just as dilapidated as the outside. The knot grew in Eve’s stomach. What if this was a trap all along?

The old woman led her to what must have previously been a living room, now lost in time to dust. Everything was covered with it: an old couch, the lamps, the fireplace. Everything looked like it had been undisturbed for decades, except a retro orange rug covering the floor. The old woman lifted the rug to reveal a hidden door with a metal handle. She knocked on the secret door using the same knock Eve had used on the front door, and it lifted open from the inside. A younger woman, probably only a few years older than Eve, peered out and gave her a sweet smile. She reached out for Eve’s hand.

“I’ll take you from here.”

Eve took the young woman’s hand and followed her down a rickety staircase into the basement. The basement was a completely different world from the rest of the cabin. It was fully lit with real lights, not just candles, and everything looked clean and updated. Eve was led over to a small desk in the corner and the young woman looked down at some sort of book. It was opened to a page in the middle, but it looked like all the pages before the current one had been torn out.

“Your name is Eve, is that right?” the young woman asked in her sweet sing-song voice.

“Yes. What’s yours?”

The woman gave her another small smile.

“Those of us who work here don’t use names. Too dangerous. You understand, yes?”

Eve nodded.

“Good. Do you have the required provisions with you?”

Eve reached into her pocket and pulled a crumpled wad of bills out before handing it to the woman. She counted for a moment, straightening out each bill as she went, before unlocking the safe behind her and carefully placing the money inside.

“Follow me.”

The woman led her through yet another door.

A doctor in a white coat awaited Eve on the other side, and the young woman who had brought her there left the two of them alone.

SIX MONTHS LATER

Eve plopped down on the couch in her one-bedroom apartment and turned on the T.V. She pulled the Chinese takeout from the to-go bag she had been given and laid it out on the coffee table as the night’s news stories ran. She used chopsticks to eat the orange chicken and rice straight out of the paper cartons. It had been a long day, and cooking dinner hadn’t made its way onto her priority list. She focused her attention onto the T.V. as she ate.

Short news stories flicked by on the screen followed by commercials for laundry detergent, pizza, and the newest and coolest vacuum. Suddenly, the “Breaking News” banner popped up. Eve stopped chewing and froze as she saw the image on the screen. She grabbed the remote and turned the volume up. The anchor began speaking.

“Breaking news tonight: an underground abortion clinic has been discovered deep in the forest off Southeast 14th Street. Three doctors found working there have been apprehended along with at least four other employees working at the illegal facility. There were also two patients at the site at the time of the raid, allegedly undergoing procedures to end their pregnancies. So far, the doctors and the patients have been charged with first-degree murder. We are still waiting to hear what charges will be brought against the other four employees discovered…”

The anchor droned on as Eve stared with wide eyes at the image of the cabin in the woods with the candle burning in the window. Tears welled in her eyes, and she was filled with anger and sadness.

She thought back to that night in the cabin, to that complicated relief she felt after the procedure was complete. She thought back to the kind doctor who had walked her through it all step by step, and the woman she had seen on her way out, who looked just as frightened as Eve imagined she had just a short while before when she had first entered the secret clinic.

She thought of all the people who had not been as lucky as she was that day in the drugstore -when that strange woman had handed her that small scrap of paper that changed everything - all the people who had tried other, more dangerous methods to try and change their situations, with horrifying results.

She didn’t know when, and she didn’t know how, but at some point, the world as she and too many others knew it had begun spinning in reverse.

Eve absentmindedly rubbed the scar on her forearm as she wondered with a heavy and fearful heart when this waking nightmare would end.

*If you would like to learn more about the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, or would like to find links to abortion resources, please read the article below written by Vocal Media: