I am going to try something new.
From a young age, I’ve been fascinated by fairy stories and folk tales. I devoured myths and legends from a wide variety of cultures (although recently I’ve realised how many we were fed at school from distant lands and how few I know from my own country - something I’ve been working on balancing out lately), and became interested in how we, as a species, use storytelling to share the essential beliefs, hopes and fears of our communities. Stories last longer than facts; they are passed down through the centuries, and we can hear the whispers of our ancestors in the words we share.
Strangely, we feed these stories to our children, even though they contain dark and disturbing content that we would normally keep far away from little ears. These days they’re usually packaged up in sanitised Disney versions (I was devastated when I learned what happened to my beloved Little Mermaid in the original story), but something about them still makes us a little uneasy. They’re not comfortable, they speak to the most basic and brutal elements of our nature, and the structures of our society that often swallow the heroes and heroines (let’s be honest, more often the heroines) whole.
Of late, I’ve found myself wanting to create my own folk tales. Stories that speak to a different part of our elemental nature, that offer alternative structures, but that follow that ancient tradition of exploring who we are through nature, by taking us on a quest of exploration, testing our limits. So here I’m beginning my own series of stories - I’ve called them Full Moon Tales, because, to me, these are stories that should be read under the light of a full moon (or thereabouts), when the light is piercing the darkness, showing us a little of what is usually hidden.
I imagine a group of people gathered around a fire in a forest, the moon illuminating the sky above them, the fire warming their faces and casting shadows behind their little circle. They sit together, and they listen. Won’t you join us?
Escaping the Wasteland
The woman moves her head. It feels stiff; her neck aches. Her vision blurs and then focuses again. An expanse of grey-beige sand stretches out in all directions around her - she doesn’t remember whether she has seen it before, but she knows that she’s not surprised to see it now. How long has she been here? She isn’t sure, but she has a vague sense that she wasn’t always here. She shuffles her feet forward, slowly, feeling grit inside her boots. It is hard to move forward, her body can’t seem to gain momentum, and when she looks down she realises that there is rope wrapped around her from the elbow to the knee, pinning her arms to her body.
She looks around her again and spots other women in the distance. They are all too far away from one another to speak, but they are all shuffling along with the same restricted gait, or standing still looking around them in a dazed manner. She wants to go to them, but it is so hard to move. Somehow she feels that, if she could just get to them, they could tell her something, they could talk to her about how they all came to be here, they could tell her whether they have always been here. They could tell her that she’s right, that they haven’t always been here.
She shuffles her feet, her body growing hot with the effort; and another heat, red and glowing, building in her gut, which she can’t name but that begins to spread up into her throat, making her want to scream out as she struggles to make her body do what she wants, to reach her goal. Her boots are filling with sand and stones as she drags them through the dirt. It feels as though the inside of her throat has somehow been scratched by thorns. She remembers the idea of thorns and brambles, although she can’t place the memory, but she sees them in her mind’s eye amongst lush shades of green, with a bird perched overhead. The thought of it makes her desperate to reach the other women, and she tries to run. Her feet are unsteady with the restricted movement, and, as she stumbles over a rock, she falls to the ground. With her hands held back, she cannot catch herself, and she lands heavily on her shoulder. The shock knocks the breath from her lungs and pain shoots through her arm. She wants to cry.
But, before the tears come, she realises that the ropes have come loose. That they weren’t tied tightly in the first place. As she wriggles, she finds she can take hold of one end and pull them away quite easily. She jumps to her feet, fizzing with the understanding that she is free. There is a sensation of lightness spreading all through her body, as though she could float away. She begins to run. She doesn’t know where is going, she just wants to run, for the sheer joy of moving. She wants to move as fast as she can. She wants to fly.
As she thinks this, a bird passes over her head. That image floats through her mind again, of a bird perched on a tree surrounded by green, and she runs after the bird, imagining that she is flying with it. She runs and runs until her legs burn, she never wants to stop running. The bird leads her, swooping from side to side on invisible currents, and she mimics its shifting movements on the ground, until that ground begins to turn from beige to red and then to brown. The dirt under her feet becomes softer, stickier, as if it is pulling her to it. And suddenly she sees them.
Trees. They are lined up in front of her like a row of friends come to greet her. Her legs are sore and her chest feels heavy, but she runs faster now until she can reach out and touch the rough brown trunks. She steps under their branches onto green grass. As she passes trees and bushes, stretching out a hand to greet each one, she finds herself in front of a lake. She understands the scratching in her throat now, and she bends to scoop up the water that sparkles in the sun and is so cold it stings her hand. She drinks and drinks, feeling the icy fingers spread through her body, making her tingle. She looks up and sees a stream leading from the lake, winding deeper into the forest.
The others don’t remember this, she realises, and she knows she must go back to tell the women. She sets off back to the edge of the forest and, hesitating a little with a hand on one of the final trees, she forces her feet to trek back across the desert. After a while, she spots a woman, standing still, with rope wrapped around her, staring blankly at the ground. She runs over to the woman, who looks up with a face filled with panic. She tries to tell the woman about the forest, not far from this spot, but the woman backs away from her in fear. She reaches for the woman’s ropes, but the woman screams out and tries to run away but trips and falls into the dirt. Some other women who were shuffling past them stop to look towards the noise. She calls to them about the forest, but they look at her as if they see right through her. She runs from one to another, trying to pull their ropes away for them, but they scream out in terror and fight to get away. Some kick out at her, others shriek and yell at her. Eventually, defeated, she runs back to the forest alone.
She walks back to the lake, and sits on a rock, watching birds fly overhead and the sun shimmer on the water. She sees berries, glinting like dark purple jewels, in a bush nearby, and she realises she is hungry. She collects berries, and finds leaves that seem to call to her, inviting her to eat. She builds a shelter using the fallen branches of trees, and she sits in front of it, watching the sky turn a soft pink as the sun dips below the canopy. She can see a few golden rays poking through leaves and branches, and she soaks up the feeling of them warming her face as she listens to the creatures of the forest settling down for the evening.
The sound of a twig snapping jolts her from her reverie. Her head whips towards the sound, and she reaches for a large stick nearby in case she needs to defend herself. But out from the shadows of the trees, into the fading light, steps a woman.
The two women regard each other nervously for a few moments, then the newcomer holds out a flower she has picked as an offering. She stands up from her shelter, smiles, and rushes to embrace her friend.
Over the days, and weeks, and years that follow, the women go out often into the desert. They try to talk to the women they find, try to tell them about the forest, try to show them how to take off their bonds. Many of the women back away from them in fear, they scream or kick dust into their faces. But each evening, a few women - sometimes one, sometimes several - creep timidly into the forest to find them, following their path through the dust. Their numbers grow, they build more shelters, they learn to grow more food, and more of them head back to the desert to tell the others.
At night, they make a fire, and they sit around it to share what they know of their stories, and to tell tales of a future world where all women are free.
I hope you enjoyed this story. I have a crazy idea to share - I’m considering creating handmade tales like this one, handwritten on decorated scrolls, and offering them for sale. An ideal gift for the story lover in your life, or maybe just a beautiful story for you to gift yourself. What do you think? Would you buy something like that? I’d love to get some opinions before I go off down this random tangent for no reason. :)
Other than that, let me know what you thought of the story in the comments, and do feel free to share if you think others would enjoy it too.
The way you’ve written here, and in one of your notes, about women, matriarchs, healers, witches, is so...breathtaking.
I’d love to talk to you about buying this short story, and any other short stories of a similar theme, to use in the mothers circles I hope to facilitate in the New Year ❤️