by Ronald Malfi
When she awoke in the morning, the window was shut.
She called for Simple Simon on her first day back at the woods. He responded almost immediately.
“You came to my room,” she said, “and pulled my window open, didn’t you?”
—Where have you been? It’s lonely here. He was avoiding the question.
“I’ve been home sick because you let the window open.”
—Are you mad?
Half-grinning, she shook her head. “No,” she said. “I’m sorry you get lonely. I do too, sometimes. A lot.”
—I’m not lonely now.
“Me, neither,” she said. Crossing the clearing beside the now-frozen brook, she curled up on her throne—a pile of rocks covered with cushions from her mother’s patio furniture she’d constructed the previous summer. After some consideration, she said, “I almost saw you one night. When you came to my window. You were almost there.”
—I can feel it, Simple Simon said.
“I think I’m ready to see you now.”
—Can you do it? It’ll be more difficult than seeing that stone…
“Don’t make me nervous!” she joked. Closed her eyes. She thought: Simple Simon met a Pie Man going to the fair…
She thought of a boy—of a handsome, friendly, happy boy who liked to smile and play games and…and live in the woods. A perfect boy, just like in fairy tales. And yet she found it impossible to summon the image of an original boy; instead, her mind became cluttered with images of boys from television programs and magazines and books…from the few boys she recognized (and secretly admired) from town…
—That won’t do.
“I’m trying.”
Unsatisfied, she erased the images of those boys and started from scratch. Simplicity was the key—a nose, a mouth, two eyes, two ears. It was different with the stone; she hadn’t thought about it hardly at all. In fact, when it had appeared in her hand, she was almost as surprised as the ugly pug-faced girl who caught it in the shin. But now, this was something different, something much more difficult. She didn’t even know what to think about, what to focus her attention on…if it would even work…
She opened her eyes, exhausted, and realized that the sun had shifted position.
From the corner of her eye, and moments before it faded, she caught a reflection in the frozen brook water of a spindly male form standing at the bank. Like the impression of a waning shadow, it made itself visible only with the most rudimentary of details, and dispersed into nothingness moments after she saw it.
She felt a chill pass through her body. “Oh my God,” she whispered. “You’re…” She looked up in the direction of the wooded embankment beside the brook. “You’re standing right there…” She felt a giggle build up inside her. “Simple Simon the Pie Man.”
—Stop that. I don’t like that.
“How come you didn’t stay? How come I can’t see you?”
“Because you’re not trying hard enough.” There was a slight irritation to his voice…and for the first time, Kelly realized she was actually hearing this imaginary boy speak, not just thinking the words inside her own head. She could hear him.
“Talk,” she said.
“Talk,” he repeated.
To her astonishment, she watched as a billow of white vapor materialized from nothing and dispersed in the air. Breath, she heard a tiny voice whisper at the back of her head. That was breath. Simple Simon is breathing.
She noticed that milky shadow fall back across the ice again, slowly shifting in form and solidity. Any distinct features the reflection might have had undulated beneath the formation of its body—its face, head, arms and legs.
Beside the reflection, a hazy shadow fell across the grass. Shimmered. Faded. Held.
“There…” she breathed, suddenly aware of her heart beating in her throat. “There…”
Like a ghost before her eyes, the creation that was Simple Simon—her creation—took form and held against the light of day. He wasn’t quite there—depending on how she looked at him, the reliability of his physical body either increased or diminished—but at least now she could see him.
She slid off her throne and slowly circled around the boy, catching him from every possible angle. He looked watery, translucent. Yet at times when his skin held solid, she could see that it was a pasty white color. His body professed no discernible sex (Kelly was too immature to consider such things when thinking of the boy), like the torso of a plastic doll. His head was hairless—she’d forgotten to imagine hair too—and two black orbs had collected in the center. Simple black eyes, no pupils, no lids nor lashes. Perhaps these were simple details a trained artist would have remembered to include, but they had never crossed Kelly’s mind.
“Can you see me now?” His voice wavered, as if he were speaking under water.
“You’re real,” she said. It was all she could say. Again, she felt the earth begin to shift, to spin around with her at the center. A blast of pain ruptured inside her abdomen and she collapsed to the ground, curled like a shrimp plucked from the riverbed. Carried along with the pain was the faint sensation of nostalgia, and she suddenly realized that she had to urinate, that the pain wasn’t in her belly at all but between her legs. Just like that day she stood unflinchingly in the icy water of the brook.
A shadow moved across her as she lay on the ground, moaning.
“Turn away,” she sobbed.
“Why?”
“Don’t watch me.” She pressed her eyes shut and fumbled with the snaps on her jeans. A cramp tightened inside her right thigh, sending shooting pain through the length of her leg. She struggled with her jeans and, after several drawn-out seconds, managed to yank them down around her ankles. Unable to move hardly at all, she could only roll onto her back, her eyes still clenched shut, and relieve herself. Around her, she could feel Simple Simon’s presence again—stronger this time—as if he were not only a figment of her imagination, but a thing of nature as well.
Something nudged her arm and she opened her eyes. The boy stood above her, still hazy and crude as a sketch, looking down with those solid black eyes. The boy’s bare foot was pressed against her arm. There were no toes, per se; five small lumps, more like the suggestion of toes. With one hand, Kelly managed to pull her jeans back up, buttoned them. Then she reached out and pushed two fingers against the skin of the boy’s foot. It felt pliable and cold to the touch. Like touching gelatin, she thought.
The boy watched her as she backed away from him, still on the ground, and righted herself against a tree.
“Did you do that?” she asked.
“What?” His voice seemed to come from everywhere at once.
“You know. Did you just make me…feel like that? Like I had to pee. Like that day in the brook.”
“I’m not real,” he said. “I’m in your head. You did it to yourself.”
And didn’t that make sense? In fact, over the passage of time, it seemed Simple Simon began making more and more sense. Imaginary or not, he’d become her friend. She spent the following summer in this imaginary Never-Never Land with Simple Simon. She read aloud to him and he told her things about people in the neighborhood, specifically the young boys and girls with whom she’d never dared become friends.
“How do you know all these things?” she asked him once.
Simple Simon was crouched beneath a tree, his pale legs bent up to his chest. By summer, his eyes had grown real—pupils, sclera, even lids and lashes—and he watched her now as she sat, eating an apple beneath one of the giant fir trees.
“I see them,” he said.
“But how?”
“I don’t sit in these woods all the time. Like I told you, I sometimes get lonely. I need to go places and do things.”
“Sure.” Kelly laughed. “If you’re so bored, I can bring you games, books or something…”
“I keep busy enough,” he told her. He looked away, at the rumbling brook. He never touched the water. “I’ve built a house.
”
The notion struck her as impossible. “A house?”
“A small one. Hidden.”
“Where is it?”
“Behind you,” he said. “Down the path.”
She craned her head around but could see only dense foliage. “Liar.”
“I’m not,” he said.
“What does it look like?”
Simple Simon rolled his pale shoulders.
Kelly’s eyes lit up. “Can I see it?”
“Fine,” he said, standing up. His image flickered briefly in front of her eyes, like a poor electrical connection. “Come on.”
She stood and skipped after him down the path, deeper into the woods. The boy didn’t necessarily walk; rather, he seemed to simply appear ahead of her, materializing at certain points along the path. Not once did he look back at her. And Kelly, herself, was lost in this secret wonderland. She thought of the kids from Spires, the kids who played football and attended regular school and had friends sleep over their houses on the weekends. A year ago, such ruminations would have saddened her. Thinking about them now, however, caused her to actually pity them all—unfortunate that they would never know the wonder and appreciation of living in a fairy tale world, where football and school and sleepovers didn’t matter. Where nothing could get you. Where you were safe.
“What do you think it will look like?” Simple Simon called back to her only once.
Kelly didn’t answer out loud. Instead, she summoned an image of the imaginary boy’s house: a tiny gingerbread cottage with sugarcane windows and cookie shingles and candy canes laid in Xs above the front door. The doorknob itself would be a giant gumdrop…the flowers with candy petals…
She laughed out loud.
“Here,” said Simple Simon, and stopped walking. The boy faced a clearing in the woods, the floor bedded with orange pine needles and dead, crispy leaves. There was no house here, Kelly saw, and thought it was a joke at first…but then there it was, right in front of her eyes, and just as she had imagined it. She stood there, staring at it like a child discovering her presents beneath the tree on Christmas morning, her heart pounding dramatically in her chest. It was there, all there, all real. How in the world could it possibly exist?
“Oh,” was all she was able to force out. Her breath had abandoned her.
It was a small, square, one-level house tucked within a crook of trees. Its siding and roof were indeed made of gingerbread, enough to feed all of Spires for months; the roof itself was shingled in ginger snaps and had been whitewashed in icing, now hardened, and sprinkled with lemon drops and peppermints; two enormous candy canes, perhaps six feet high and five inches thick, stood like sentries on either side of the front door; and the front door itself was constructed of what appeared to be a million square crackers all joined together by icing and sprinkled with cinnamon.
“Oh,” she repeated. Slowly, Kelly moved around the house, the extent of her astonishment apparent in her lethargy. “How did you make this?”
“You made it,” he said. “You thought it.”
“Is it…real?”
He told her to touch it and she did. It was solid. Some icing came away on her fingertip and she brought it to her mouth, sucked it off. It was sweet and warm. Before she knew it, a tremulous giggle had broken through her throat, and she began running circles around the squat little house. It was real. Glenda had been wrong: places in fairy tales really did exist.
She paused at the front of the house and scurried up the walk. (The walk was a collage of enormous chocolate chip cookies, assembled to suggest cobblestones.) “What does it look like inside?” she said, grabbing the gummy doorknob and pulling open the gingerbread house’s front door.
She stopped, her smile fading.
There was nothing inside the house. Not even a back wall. Through the open door, she could see straight out into the trees on the other side. For a few confused moments, she watched the cool summer breeze rattle the leaves.
“You haven’t thought up the inside yet,” Simple Simon said from somewhere behind her.
Dream it, she thought. Dream it.
“We can make this place wonderful,” she told him.
“We can,” he said. “But I want something first.”
“What?”
“Look at me.”
She turned. Simple Simon was standing behind a waist-high hedgerow, his skin white and sickly in the light of midday. “What?” she asked again.
He didn’t answer; instead, he rolled his tongue and spat a gob of green snot onto the ground.
“Disgusting,” Kelly said.
“That’s never happened before,” he told her. “It started today.”
“What?” She didn’t understand. “It’s spit. Spit and boogers.”
“From where?” Then: “From me.”
“So what do you want from me? Kleenex?”
“No,” he said. “Food.”
“You’re hungry?”
“No, I don’t think so. I just want to know what it’s like to eat. I want to eat.”
“Let’s have a tea party—”
“Damn it, no!” His outburst startled her. She could see veins throbbing in his temples, his bald scalp riddled with them. “I want real food. I’m tired of make-believe, Kelly.” He paused, then added, “Kellerella.”
“Kellerella,” she said. “Like Cinderella.”
“Food,” he told her.
“Okay,” she said, and following dinner that evening, she packed some meat loaf into a plastic container and slipped it into the pocket of her coat. Outside, the night had cooled the summer atmosphere considerably. Guided by the light of a full moon, Kelly carefully downed the hillside and disappeared beneath the cover of trees and into the valley below.
The woods were impossibly dark, the moon blotted out by the trees, and she crept as far along the wooded path as she felt comfortable, jumping at every shadow. Several times she heard things bounding through the underbrush behind her and she froze, petrified by a wave of fear, and considering the worst. After all, who knew what sort of things lived in the woods? Who knew what things came out at night? It’s too dark, she thought. I should keep a light down here.
At one point she half-shouted, half-whispered for Simple Simon, but he did not appear. She tried to summon him in her mind, as she’d always been able to do in the past, but it was a futile attempt. And instead of recreating him in her mind, she found she was now only recalling memories of him—Simple Simon standing by the brook; Simple Simon standing by the gingerbread house; Simple Simon spitting on the ground, becoming angry, the veins throbbing at the sides of his head. And it then occurred to her, innocently enough: How come he has veins? He shouldn’t have veins, should he?
The hoot of an owl nearly caused her to scream out. For fear she’d suffer a heart attack if she dawdled around much longer, she left the container of meat loaf on top of her rock-throne beside the running brook and began the climb back to the house.
“You certainly are spending a lot of time out of the house this summer,” Glenda said one morning over breakfast. “What’s so fascinating about that forest, anyway?”
“Not much.”
“A lot of other kids play in there?”
“Yeah,” she lied.
“Well, you just be careful. It’s a big forest. Don’t wander off too far, you might get lost.”
The notion struck Kelly as bizarre. Watching Glenda’s back as the woman washed a plate at the sink, Kelly asked if anyone had ever gotten lost there. Without turning around, Glenda said, “My, yes. A long time ago. I was just a little girl. A brother and sister had gone off playing in the forest and had gotten lost.”
“Hansel and Gretel,” Kelly marveled.
“Very much so,” Glenda said, turning her head and half-smiling at Kelly. “That may have even been their names.”
“Did they leave a trail of bread crumbs to find their way home?”
“No,” Glenda said. “They never found their way home.�
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Kelly was shocked into silence. She was still considering Glenda’s story when her mother came storming into the kitchen, a sour expression on her face. She slammed something down on the kitchen table hard enough to make Kelly jump. She heard Glenda drop a plate in the sink.
“Do you see this?” her mother demanded, brandishing what appeared to be one of her father’s stripped socks.
“Yes.”
“Do you know what it is?”
“A sock,” she said.
Her mother only stared, the expression on her face one of mounting fury. “Your father’s sock, Kelly. It belongs to your father.” Her mother threw the sock at her face and Kelly flinched. “Do you know where I found it?”
Now scared, Kelly shook her head.
“Take a guess, missy.”
“I don’t know.”
“In your room.” She emphasized each word, as if they were code for something else, something much more important than socks. “I found it in your room, on the floor by the window. Now,” she went on, bringing up her other hand and slamming that one down on the table, “do you know what this is?”
It was a second sock, different than the first.
Daddy’s sock, she wanted to say, knew the answer, but suddenly couldn’t speak. Her eyes refused to leave her mother’s face, which was growing hotter and redder with each passing second. Large creases had appeared across her forehead, and her teeth were pressed together so tight Kelly thought they might shatter at any second.
“Another sock,” explained her mother. “I saw this one after I found the one in your room. Do you know how I found it? Have any idea? I happened to glance out your window and saw it hanging from the roof.” She threw the second sock at her daughter. This time she didn’t flinch, didn’t even notice. “What in the world are you doing? Are you throwing goddamn socks out the window? For what purpose? Huh? Can you tell me? Go on—tell me.”
She shook her head, the arrival of tears blurring her vision.