Writer's Block Magazine

Fight between a Tiger and a Buffalo, by Henri Rousseau

Report to be circulated among sergeants, staff-sergeants, and first-lieutenants of the Root-513 Subcommittee. 

It is generally believed to have started somewhere a little west of Cincinnati. Several researchers have gone on the record stating it emanated from a diner called ‘Barleycorn’s Cold Spring Restaurant’ located on Industrial Road 1073, but most analysts point to the general Cold Spring-area as the point of origin. Locals of varying ages were heard speaking of the book in the early afternoon of the 3rd of April. A woman, now labeled Subject 9, walked in front of a blue Toyota Camry attempting to tell the driver about the book. The driver’s identity remains unknown as their body was lost in Cleansing 16, the ashes were distributed over several dump sites before records began to be kept. The car hit Subject 9, whereupon the driver exited the vehicle and knelt by the woman. An onlooker heard her say the first recorded instance of the book’s title being spoken aloud:

There Are Three Rules for Walking Through the Woods

The woman died from her trauma before two police vehicles and an ambulance arrived. She spoke adamantly up to her passing, repeating the book title and speaking about the surrounding forests in antiquated English. Two sources recalled Subject 9 muttering “the brazen timber wallows uncurled to the heavens, languid and lonesome in their loft”, while others heard entirely different sentences.

A wondrous pattern emerged within the community: Subjects present at the initial car-crash, presently labeled Incident A9, would speak to acquaintances about a childhood memory involving a parent reading them There Are Three Rules for Walking Through the Woods in preparation for a camping trip or extended hike. It is unknown what caused the condition to move from one Subject to another. As the affliction worsened, the subjects’ English became increasingly confused and antiquated. Within five days of Incident A9 the entirety of Cold Springs distinctly remembered their father or a doting, amorous parental figure reading them the book. Around this time extended searches of local libraries began, perpetrated by affected Subjects hoping to locate Three Rules. An attendant of the Northern Kentucky University was assaulted after exclaiming the book did not exist, something now proven to be true. The attendant’s identity was lost in Cleansing 8, that blazen epoch. Within two weeks of Incident A9 extended passages from the book were being carved into living-room floors and high-school walls. Large swaths of text were lost in fire-bombings, Cleansings, but the segments that survived detail camping related advice, the virtues of a return to nature, and recipes for dishes made entirely of forageable foods such as blueberries. Most notable about these ingredient-lists were that they all include at least one poisonous substance, such as white baneberry or the azure folds of monkshood.

The condition, presently labeled Root-513, after the Cincinnati area code, continued to spread, like ancient stems trampling thus the fertile and naked minds. Cincinnati thoroughfares were soon brimming with graffiti detailing passages from the survival-guide book, or lengthy and eruditely rolling descriptions of the ensuing camping trip. Even those who had been raised as orphans began remembering their fathers reading the book to them. A diary describing this memory was recovered from an abode on Huntington Avenue: “the verdant faced beholder read to me the truth, his weathered face broiled as basked sun, bright as dawn”.

Within two months of Incident A9 large numbers of individuals began walking into the woods west of Cincinnati. Records of both the size of the groups and the following Incidents are nebulous. Most notably, fourteen were found dead underneath skybound pine-trees, seemingly having fallen off a cliffside thirty feet north of where their bodies were located. The Subjects had crawled to their final resting place with broken legs and spines before bleeding out on the hallowed and furled grounds of the Rylan Heights woods. The national guard was beckoned on the twelfth of May after the governor of Ohio, cowardly malingerer, announced a state of emergency. We are currently aware of forty-seven Privates, eighteen harrowed Privates First-Class, and two Staff Sergeants who went missing in the forty-eight hour period after crowning, guttural deployment. Twenty-five bodies were found with seemingly self-inflicted gunshot wounds; cavernous, vast and gaped. Several had carved camping instructions and recipes into rocks and tree-bark. Forty-two soldiers were never located. Swallowed by thunderous thicket, jade of eternities, scape-hounds of green. The fire-bombing started after Root-513, our unbound begetter, ravaged Burlington and Devon. General McMillan hoped this would slow our sacred mind-destroying condition’s spread. Cleansing 1, everdamned inferno, is now known to have slain 147 individuals unaffected by our verdant faced beholder. Yet they fathom not: nothing can stop our sweltering increase.

I was present at Cleansing 22, where they flattened Kenton Vale, but I had felt the affliction mangle my mind well before that. 750-pound Mark-77 bombs were air-dropped from growling, covetous Hornet-aircrafts on the primeval target-area. I remember I was surprised by how orange the blast was, first an overpowering white, then long and rounded curls of orange. I remember my sergeant pleaded for the mercy of God, his gaze upturned to the scalded sky, sanguine with fire and the blood of our morning. Families and lovers absolved of flesh in an instant. I remember There Are Three Rules for Walking Through the Woods. I remember the verdant faced beholder reading to me the truth, his weathered face broiled as basked sun, bright as dawn. Eat of monkshood, woven threads of ocean-light, of oleander and foxglove, the meandering sepulchers of rectitude that shall disenthrall naught but the strong. I remember he spoke, with song soft as spring, of how the brazen timber wallows uncurled to the heavens, languid and lonesome in their loft. He, whose eyes have the depth of petioles without end, whose mouth opens beyond percipience, whose body is the earth and whose earth is his body.