by J. S. Volpe
* * *
John Grommet stopped in the middle of the dark woods and looked around. He was lost, but he didn’t see how that was possible. He’d been heading due west, making straight for the river, which wasn’t any more than half a mile through the woods from Moe’s Tavern. And though he’d been running, and then walking, and then hobbling after he tripped over a tree root and twisted his ankle, for well over an hour, he still hadn’t come to the river’s edge. What the hell was going on?
Even if he had deviated from his intended path, he should have come to the river by now. Unless, of course, he was going straight north or south, parallel to the river through the woods. But if that’s what had happened (and he didn’t think he could have gotten so totally turned around, but you never knew for sure, not on a dark, cloudy night like this, and not with the hot emotions that had been rushing through his veins earlier and still did every time he thought of poor Rosabelle bleeding out her life onto the dusty street and of his poor mother withered and dying alone in her bed), given the amount of time that had elapsed, he should have come to either Spooky Swamp, if he’d turned south, or the spot where the woods ended at Tusker’s Hill just west of what passed for Bangle’s downtown, if he’d turned north. But he had come to neither of those locations, and he hadn’t come to the river either, and he hadn’t wound up back on the road that ran past Moe’s tavern. There were only woods, woods, woods, as far as he could see—night-dim trees and bushes stretching on and on in every direction.
Could he be going in circles? He supposed it was theoretically possible, but there seemed to be no way for him to be going in a circle tight enough to avoid the river, Tusker’s Hill, the road, and the swamp without his noticing that he was going in circles. He seemed to have entered some twilight no-man’s world here in the woods, where logic and physics held no sway.
Why was this happening to him? It was so unfair. He was only trying to help his dear old mother, who had never done anyone any harm. He was trying to do a good deed, so why was everything going so horribly wrong? First Rosabelle, now the impossible, illogical woods where there were no landmarks, only countless trees and bushes that all looked the same in the dark.
He hadn’t even heard the river. Not once. What kind of sense did that make? Even if he was going around and around in circles, he should be passing close enough to the river to hear the hiss of the water as it rushed toward the swamp. But the only sounds he heard were the leaves in the trees whispering in the wind and the rough in-and-out of his harsh, labored breathing and the thump of his old, worn leather boots as he stumbled along.
“What the hell is going on?” he wailed as a tear rolled down his cheek.
A few yards away a small animal, startled by his cry, scuttled away through the underbrush.
“I’m just trying to help my mother!” he howled, raising his face to the sky as if to ask the clouds above. “Why can’t I help her? Why? Whyyyyy?!”
Lightning flashed and thunder boomed, and rain fell in a blinding downpour that drenched John to the bone in seconds.
“Why?” he said again in a tiny, whiny voice, and then wept. His tears mixed with the rain cascading down his cheeks.
