NEW BRIGHTON

The Black Beginning

            The young woman ran blindly into the cold, dark forest.   Still wet and shivering from swimming across the muddy river, she climbed higher onto the mountains, feeling her way in the inky darkness of a moonless night.  She stumbled and slid in the dirt, scraping and scratching her already tender skin.  Brambles and briars seemed to spring from the ground to catch her tattered dress, clawing at her bare legs and arms.  Her feet were bruised and bleeding from climbing through the forest unprotected. Exhausted, she finally sagged to the ground atop a rocky hillside.  She knelt there panting from her exertion, head down and hands limp at her sides, laying against the cool ground.  Her matted and tangled hair hung in clumps across her scarred face.

            After what seemed like a very long time, she lifted her head, turning her body so she could look back the way she had come. The skyline glowed a dull red above the blackness of the forest across the river.  She could hear the water below her, rushing along as though the world were normal. It hissed at her in the dark as if it were a living thing.  She sat on the ground, hugging her knees to her thin chest, slowly rocking as tears streaked through the dirt and soot on her young, distorted face.

            Fog and smoke swirled and hovered through the trees, enveloping her in their misty shroud.  She shuddered, although from cold, fear, pain or exhaustion, it was hard to tell, for they all fought within her tortured mind and body.  She let herself drop to the ground in a heap, fighting for sanity, stuffing a fist into her mouth to keep from screaming aloud, wracking sobs becoming occasional hiccups, then quieting to the even breaths of the sleep she feared, yet succumbing to its healing rest, at last.

            A full moon finally escaped the clouds and smoke shining eerily behind the fog, lighting patches of forest, then hiding again.  A stray, white beam of moonlight finally settled on the young girl as she lay huddled in a ball upon the rocky ground, in fitful sleep, her once raven-colored hair laying in ebony and dirty-white matted strands across her face and neck.  

            Hours later she awoke to a steamy, misty morning.  Gray light filtered through heavy clouds as she watched grotesque shapes become trees and bushes, rocks and sticks.  At last she sat up, propping herself on one arm.  A chipmunk scurried past her, then stopped, tail raised and flitting.  He darted closer to her, then behind a rock, onto the rock, and up the narrow trunk of a sapling. There he peered at her for a moment before darting off again.  She smiled thinly, her eyes dull.

            As the sun rose higher in the sky, it burned off the fog revealing the damage left by the raging forest fires.  Rachel looked at the landscape below her, across the river where all was blackened.  She shuddered involuntarily.  The Witch had always worn black, even her blood had looked black in the moonlight.  Now, the world had turned black too, it seemed.

            Rachel slowly brought her hands up and examined them.  No, all the black blood had been washed away as she swam in the river.  She stared at the trees, seeing nothing.  It’s like being baptized all over, she thought.  All the old is washed away.  Now, I’m a new person.   She looked once again at her right hand and arm.  Were the scars going away, too?  Gingerly, she felt her neck and face with her hands.  Her right ear was a knob protruding out of her head.  Ridges and seams of injured flesh felt like great hills and gullies.  Tears sprang to her good, left eye as she felt the scarred flesh on the right side of her face and head. Her right eye still protruded far out beyond its injured lid.   Her hair, once raven black and luxurious, now grew in white clumps between scars on the right side of her head, although the left side was still as fine as it ever was.  If she covered her left eye, all she could see was shadow from her damaged right one.  The scars were not going away. “I’m not new!”  She wailed into the peace of a sunlit morning.  Her voice quavered and squeaked.  Then she whimpered into her drawn-up knees.  “