White Rabbit Chapter 1

1.

“Delores! Delores!” the shrill voice of an aging woman cried from outside the thicket and into the green parcel of wood. The sound of her voice reverberated off the huddled pines, in the hollow fallen logs, and bounced off the ferns and saplings as though they were made for such optimum acoustics as a frantic mother. Birds escaped just before their heads exploded with another round of Deloreses. Deer and rabbits stood still, their hearts palpitating rapidly, on high-alert figuring that these deathly shrieks had to be the sound they always heard they would hear last. These were the sounds, they reasoned with confidence, of shotguns or possibly assault rifles. Delores heard her mother calling and although the calls were faintly heard, they only served to increase her haste and determination to get away. She ran down a path that began to twist erratically and that failed to adjust to her speed, through ferns, around thickets of snarling thorns and over the fallen corpses of trees, limbs and rocks carpeted with eager moss. The sunlight sneaked through the tree tops making conspicuous shadows of the towering giants that leaned over the path as though interested in the kerfuffle of a runaway girl. Delores couldn’t remember a time she ran so fast, but she all she could think of was escaping from her parents who had made up their minds that evening, seemingly that evening, over three plates of beef stroganoff and three red wines to move to Europe where her father would accept a job in Denmark for some prestigious bank. She knew there was trouble when they let her drink a second glass of wine. Delores didn’t give a damn for Denmark, or banks.  She wanted to stay in Maine at her school and with her friends, but now she was merely an animal escaping from the fatality of buck shot.

“Delores! Delores!” they faded. Her mother was frightened of the woods having always said they were haunted and her father was inside getting his lanterns and his deep-wood clothes on before he would dare tread out after her being a man that was always insistent upon being properly attired. At the moment her mother was screaming he was spraying himself with insect spray and calling for their dog, Butter, a yellow lab, to assist him. Butter was sleeping. The animals in the wood dismissed Delores’s mother’s cries as some other strange animal that had gone insane. Delores could barely hear them but she didn’t slow down until she came to a particular fallen tree she had named Ferry Junction when she was little and where she would sit for hours with a butterfly net and mason jars hoping to catch ferries like Tinkerbelle. But even when she was five she was quite convinced that ferries were probably much uglier than Tinkerbelle so she had always prepared herself for the ugliest thing she could imagine. But she never doubted their existence. 

Delores was ill-outfitted to run but she wouldn’t let such a measly impediment slow her up. She wore knee boots and a gray cottony dress and her long auburn hair fell to the middle of her back in slight curls. Thankfully, she had her inhaler in the pocket of her dress which she sucked in as she stopped desperate for a few breaths. Everything in her told her to go and she was listening at last to only herself. Years of “yes, mother,” and, “if you please, father,” raised prim and proper the way her parents were in boarding schools, were over. She had long-since adopted the motto of New Hampshire as her own, especially when there was talk of changing it. “Live free or die!” She rallied herself. She had futilely used it in arguments against her parent’s tyranny for many years but always before it was only in words. Now she could slap that license plate on her backside, personalized: LIVIN IT.  She wasn’t simply rebelling by talking to naughty boys in internet chatrooms, or looking over risqué websites masturbating in bed when her parents slept or trusted her alone in her room, she was in full-fledged revolt.  The tea was in the Atlantic and Jefferson wrote his letter and put it in the mailbox, like it or not, or rather, regret or not. She needed the fortitude of General Washington, a Valley Forge, a Bunker Hill, a Gadsden Flag unfurled over a readied league of strong minutemen, and the help of the French.

So there at the tree, Ferry Junction, she looked right the way she always would go—the way she went a thousand times. It was the obvious, the bright, clear path, exactly where her parents would expect her to go. Then she looked left. Left, dreadful left was dark and eerie looking. It was where she thought Hell began when she was younger, or where the Salem witches retired and lived, or at least, where things would certainly die suffocated in the vacuum of its mere appearance—a black, frightening, angry hole.  Although foreboding, it was seemingly open. She picked up a rock and through it and didn’t hear it hit anything. She didn’t hear a bear bellow or a witch cackle. She looked at it again trying to paint it up prettier in her mind. But it was like the mouth of some giant blood-curling beast and even the flies she saw around the entrance (an entrance that was adorned appropriately in briars and dead skeletal trees), flew warily around it and zipped away quickly every now and then at something from inside. It looked more like a cave than a path and never in eleven years of walking out this far had she dared to get any closer than she stood in the moment and even though she was sixteen, she may as well have been five again. But she rallied that fortitude and gave herself a small stirring speech; perhaps like one Washington might have given before any number of battles. She told herself there could be a bus station at the other end or maybe it was a path to another better path.

“Well, Robert Frost.” she said nervously out loud. “Let’s see how this road-not- taken-thing goes.” She remembered reading his poem last semester at school and she tried to recite the lines but she forgot all but one or two. And after a few moments to catch her breath, a few more puffs of her pink inhaler, she clinched her fists and closed here eyes. “I took the one less traveled by.” She said confidently, lastly. They seemed like good last words and with them she walked into the mouth of the unknown beast.