The Woods Are Always Watching by Stephanie Perkins

Author:Stephanie Perkins [Perkins, Stephanie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780525426028
Google: _mvaDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0525426027
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2021-08-29T23:00:00+00:00

APART

JOSIE

THE LEAVES WERE still clinging, hopeful and green. They didn’t realize that their time was almost up. That soon they would yellow and wither and brown, and fall to the forest floor. Their skeletons would grow brittle and crumble. Rubbery worms would swallow them up and shit them out. Their bodily remains would enrich the soil, feeding and fortifying new life, but their true forms would never be seen again. They would be ghosts.

With her glasses askew, Josie’s world had split. Her depth perception was gone, and neither eye could see in perfect focus. The leaves above were an Impressionistic blur. The sky seemed weak and anemic, and the storm had left behind wisps of streaky clouds.

Among all of her meticulously rationalized disaster scenarios, she had never imagined breaking her bones and being left alone. Being left behind. But how fitting that it was her—not Neena—trapped in the middle of the woods. It would have been downright poetic if it weren’t so goddamn typical. What kind of hapless loser fell into a hole? It was like a cartoon, if Bugs Bunny had ever been stupid enough to be tricked by one of Elmer Fudd’s traps.

Too deep to have been dug by hand and too remote to have been dug by machine, Josie had concluded that it must be a sinkhole. It was roundish in shape, all earth and roots, apart from a skinny rhododendron that grew out from the side near the top. Branches poked underneath her body, too. They had probably been covering the hole and had come down with her in the fall. This was the most comforting narrative—that she hadn’t noticed the hole because nature had hidden it. It wasn’t her fault.

Sinkholes were common around here, but the only one she’d ever seen was in the parking lot of a vacant building on Merrimon Avenue last year. She and Neena had taken a special trip just to peer down into the newly ruptured asphalt. At the time, she had been unimpressed. The darkness had been vague and bottomless.

Josie cried softly. The pain was as lonely as it was agonizing. Hovering gnats whined around her face. When she waved them away, they pestered double. Her skin was pink and warm. A warm body temperature was good, though, right? At least her breathing had stabilized. And her blisters weren’t bothering her anymore. Ha.

Having never broken a bone before, she hadn’t expected it to be so revoltingly auditory. That snap. How many months had it taken for Win’s arm to heal after he had attempted to slide over the hood of their dad’s sedan like a cool detective in a B-movie? “Action cop,” he’d called the move. He’d had that dumb bowl haircut back then, and her little-kid, chicken-scratch signature had taken up most of the space on his cast. He’d gotten so mad at her for that.

A few years later, her father’s car was the scene of a second accident when a refrigerator slipped from the back of a pickup truck driving in front of him on I-240.

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