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by Erin ORiordan
Fantasy, 8 pages.
Originally Published in Down In the Dirt, 2007
(1) Rate this Story It was early in the morning when the boy woke his sister up.
“I want to go exploring in the woods,” he said. “Do you want to come with me?”
“Go away,” she said. She yawned. “But don’t go in those woods, you idiot. You’ll get lost.”
“I won’t get lost,” her brother said defiantly. “I’m going to mark my path as I go.”
She laughed. Without even lifting her head off her pillow, she said, “With what, bread crumbs? You always want to do dumb things like that, like things you’ve read in fairy tales. You just graduated from high school, for crying out loud. Grow up.”
“Not bread crumbs,” he said. “I’m eighteen, not eight. And I can handle it. Now, are you going to come exploring with me, or are you going to stay in bed all day?”
She pulled the blanket up over her head. “I’m going to stay in bed all day.”
“Fine,” her brother said. “You know where to find me if you change your mind. All you’ll have to do is follow my trail.”
He closed the door behind himself, but it sounded to the boy as if his sister was laughing at him.
He went into the kitchen, opened the cupboard, and found a white paper bag. He looked inside; it was full of red, orange, yellow and green jelly candies in the shape of fish. No birds would eat these, he reasoned. He ate a few of them himself. Then he pulled on his warm jacket and headed for the woods.
He walked deep into the woods, leaving a trail of candy fish behind him. He walked until the white paper bag was empty. It then occurred to him that he was very hungry. He turned around to follow his path back out of the woods, so that he could go home and have some brunch.
The bright fish were easy to spot among the gray and brown of the dirt and decayed leaves. Here he saw a green fish. There a yellow one. Another yellow. And here a red one.
After a time, the candies were fewer, and farther in between. He spotted a yellow fish, and then no more.
He looked around in all four directions, but he could not figure out which way to go. He began to panic. This only made it more difficult for him to find his way. Soon he was thoroughly lost.
He ran this way and that, frantically, searching for any sign that he was near the edge of the woods. He hadn’t planned on this, so he hadn’t brought any food or water with him. By the time he looked up and saw that the sun had begun to set, hunger and exhaustion claimed him. He sank to his knees.
Just then, he caught a glimpse of something red out of the corner of his eye.
It was one of his fish. And there was another.
Somehow he managed to struggle to his feet. He began walking, slowly, in the direction of the second fish. A few yards ahead, there was another yellow one. A green one lay beyond that. Relieved, he followed the trail with confidence.
Before too long, he was finding them two at a time. Then they were in small piles.
“There must have been a hole in the bag,” he said. Just to see, he pulled the crumpled-up white paper bag from his jacket pocket. He unjumbled it, but couldn’t find a hole. Very strange, he thought.
As he followed the trail further, the piles grew bigger. He’d found far more candy than he’d started out with. Soon it appeared that the path was paved with jelly candies in the shape of fish.
Just when he was beginning to think that something was terribly wrong with this, he saw a house. He’d never known that there was a house in these woods. As he came closer, he smelled many sweet smells. The most prominent of these was the odor of gingerbread. In fact, it seemed that the house was made of gingerbread, trimmed with pink icing and covered in candies.
“This is a hallucination,” he said. “I’ve smoked too much pot, and now I’m having a hallucination.”
The boy’s stomach grumbled, telling him to keep moving in the direction of the house, whether it was a hallucination or not. He was desperately hungry. He began to break small pieces off the gingerbread house. They tasted real enough. He began to grab handfuls of gingerbread, lemon drops, hot cinnamon candies, peppermints, and blobs of pink icing.
The door opened. “What are you doing?” a woman’s voice said. The boy was so startled, he dropped his handful of sweets.
“Who is it?” a second woman’s voice asked, from inside the house.
The first woman, sticking her head out through the door, was a rather pretty little thing. She was thin and blonde, with large blue eyes. “It’s a teenage boy,” she called inside to the other woman. “A plump little thing, with curly hair. And he’s eating up our house.”
The other woman appeared in the doorway. They must have been sisters, for their faces were the same. The second sister had dark hair and large brown eyes. As the boy stared dumbly at them, they came nearer.
“He’s pretty,” the blonde sister said.
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