ONCE UPON A TIME, THERE LIVED A GIRL WHO WANTED TO DIE

ONCE UPON A TIME, THERE LIVED A GIRL WHO WANTED TO DIE

SHORT STORY

TRIGGER WARNING This piece contains references to suicide and depression which some readers may wish to avoid.

The girl tells her mother she’s going to the cabin to work on her novel, she tells her friends she’s going to clear her head, but the girl is really going because she knows what happens in cabins. Cabins in the woods, at night, when it rains. Cabins alone, no-one around for miles, just sounds in the woods. She knows people die in the cabins, people are butchered. And that’s precisely why she goes.

She goes in January, when she has suffered through the winter blues. The snow has mainly turned to slush and her car grinds up the path. The sun is falling. She looks up at the cabin through the wind-screen and rubs her hands together. She nestles in her long, baggy scarf and coat, her brown hair curling over her ears. She gets out of the car and lugs her bag from the passenger seat. Walking to the cabin she remembers the summers she spent there as a child. Good times, she thinks, well, maybe. She goes inside.

The cabin is wooden. A staircase climbs up to another level, shielded only by a plank of wood – she remembers how she used to sneak out of her downstairs bedroom to get some water and would hear her parents having sex – the bed rattling, the soft moans. She looks up at her parent’s room with no emotion. She looks down – three doors around her – her bedroom, bathroom and back door. She moves over to her bedroom and throws her bag inside, pulling out a few objects. She hasn’t brought any clothes; she knows there’s no need. All that is laid on the bed is her journal – the ninth and final volume, a bottle of gin, her iPod with its docking station – music is needed – a battered copy of Alice in Wonderland, a golden necklace that her father bought her for her eighteenth birthday and her purse.

She spreads the objects on the bed and peers one more time into the bag to see a few towels and toiletries – just in case she wants a shower. Then she moves into the living room, ponders over the sofa and, with the gin in her hand, plants it on the table in the kitchen. It’s nearly seven. She pours herself a drink. She walks over to the window and looks out – it’s dark now. The lake and trees are disgustingly beautiful but sinister and that’s what she likes, or more what she needs. She sips the gin, and moves away from the window.

It’s nearly eight and she’s thinking about Dylan. He’s seeing someone. Happy. Gone. She doesn’t want him back. Looking at his photo in her journal doesn’t make her heart ache it reminds her of all the time she wasted, it fills her with anger. She’s angry because she wasted her time opening herself up to a man who would fall in love with somebody else. She’s angry because she foolishly believed that he was ‘the one’, her Romeo – that all the pain was for something because they were truly in love, they had the kind of love that people dreamed of having. And she’s angry because she became that girl – the girl that couldn’t get out of bed in the morning, the girl that felt sick when she saw him or heard his name, she was that girl. She sips the gin and closes the journal. Save it for another day, she thinks. Just not my other day.

She pulls out the Ouija board from the cupboard in the cellar. As she climbs through the darkness, she throws the board on the coffee table and drinks her gin. She remembers being a girl and messing around with the board, alone, at night. But nothing worked because she didn’t have time to fully use it. Her mother had yelled, snatched it from her, sent her to bed. Now, she’s ready to raise some demons.

She puts her finger on the pointer and waits for it to move. She thinks about the demons that could possess her – make her back break, her fingers crack. She thinks about the demons that will bewitch her, break apart everything she thought was reality. Suddenly, the pointer moves, edging between an N and an O. Her heart pounds but nothing happens, not for the whole night. She thinks that maybe she wanted it to happen so bad that it was her that pushed it. No demons come. No Devil. Just her.

She thinks about Alice. Alice had it right. She wonders where her Wonderland is. She knows her parents – the well-to-do literature professors – named her Alice because of their love of the book, it was a choice between that, Daisy and April. They chose right, she thinks. She wishes, in a naive way, that she had a Wonderland to visit. She knows it’s a cliché – the tragic girl wanting to run away – but she needs that thought, if it weren’t for that thought she truly wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning.

She thinks of the last conversation she had with Dylan. Sitting in the bar, his girl waiting at home, dressed in his stupid suit. She sat on the other side of the table, looking at him. You’re not mine anymore, she thought. You’re no longer the man I loved but I can’t stop loving you. He was busy on his phone, he always looked busy, too busy for her. He never loved books. We didn’t have much in common, she thought, so why do I love you?

After seven gins she let it out. “I don’t know why we didn’t work, Dylan. I do blame myself, but I don’t think I should. You’re the one who fell in love with someone else, not me. But you told me that I wasn’t who I was when we were together. Not my Alice, you said. I hate that I gave myself to you – all of myself – and now I feel...broken.” And in that moment, she knew she should leave. “Can’t go, can’t stay, no damn use to anyone,” she said.

She left, and two weeks later she ended up at the cabin.

She walks through the woods, at night, expecting noise. She only hears her own footsteps. At first anyway. She walks past shadows and gloomy lit bushes. She ventures over mud-paths and cobbled lanes, littered with leaves. She looks around, only her phone for protection, hoping to see a figure – or not, maybe it would climb up behind her. She sees nothing. She thinks about girls in the woods – running, scared, broken bra straps, unknown blood on their face, falling over flat ground, the man chasing them. Where’s my man with a machete? she thinks. Where’s my coven?

She walks for an hour, thinking about Dylan and demons and death. But none come. She goes back to the cabin.

She pours herself another gin and hears the wind outside, rattling the door. Tap that chamber door, she thinks. She starts to pace around, thinking maybe she should write but then she hears a knock, a loud dunk dunk dunk. She goes forward, excitement and adrenaline wrapped in one, she considers saying “who’s there?” but doesn’t, instead she walks forward, gently, and opens the door.

Nobody is outside. She closes it and her heart pants with excitement. This is it, she thinks.

She looks around at the windows, tries to see someone skulking in the shadows, a man with an axe, a ghost woman, but she sees nothing. She sits in the middle of the room, vulnerable, for an hour but there is no knock at the door, no other noises, just the sound of her own breath.

She staggers from the living room to the bathroom and looks at herself in the mirror. She sees her pale face and thinks about hacking it with a piece of glass like that film she watched a few months ago. She thinks that maybe it would be easy if she did drive the shard of glass into her heart or slash her throat or do anything to die, maybe the dream of it happening was foolish, she thinks. She looks through drunken eyes and sees herself – fragile, a fly with broken wings – and doesn’t know what to do. The sun is coming, the night is almost over. And, when the first strands of sunlight come through the window she walks around the cabin and stands outside. It’s cold. Snow still curls up near her car. She stands on the patio, blinking into the morning and walks near the trees. She looks at them, doesn’t go inside, unsure if she will die the way she expected.

And then, she sucks in some air and screams. She falls to her knees and drops her head down by her chest. Tears come from drunken eyes. Lip trembles like a leaf. Then she looks up to the sun. “Please,” she whispers, “please make the feeling go away.”

Words by Thomas Stewart, Thomas Stewart is a welsh writer based in Edinburgh, empire of dirt, his debut poetry pamphlet, was published by Red Squirrel Press in 2019. His work has been featured at Best Scottish Poems 2019, We’ve Done Nothing Wrong, We’ve Nothing To Hide (Verve Poetry Press, 2020), The Amsterdam Quarterly, fourteen poems, The Glasgow Review of Books, among others. You can find Thomas on Twitter and Instagram or on his own website!

ONCE UPON A TIME,THERE LIVED A GIRLWHO WANTED TO DIE