He’d been to the woods. It didn’t matter that you’d warned him against them, against the parties, the boys. What can you say to a teenage kid? It’s a bad crowd? You don’t need friends like that? It’s dangerous? A 15-year-old has an answer to everything. You’re overprotective. I can take care of myself. The woods are not so bad.
And then what? Lay down the law? Ground the kid? There aren’t any bars on the windows, you know. Any boy could shimmy down that gutter. You can’t stay up all night, every night, doing room checks to make sure he doesn’t sneak out. You’ve got a job. You’ve got to get to the hospital in the morning. At some point, every kid has to grow up and make his own decisions. You hope they’ll be the right ones. You’ve given him all the tools. That’s what all the books say. That’s what the parent groups say. That’s what the therapist says.
But no one says what to do when your boy has been sleeping past noon, and you knock on the door, and he doesn’t answer, so you quietly open it, and there he is sleeping soundly like he used to when you watched him as a baby and then as a toddler and then as a kid you carried up to bed. He’s still in his clothes. The room smells of campfire and weed. His comforter is thrown off because he’s too warm. He’s sweating. He’s got one sock on and one sock off. He keeps rubbing the bare foot with the socked one, even as he sleeps. There’s blood on the sheets. He keeps tearing the scab off the bite mark.
♤
When you were his age, they called them “tree candles,” deep gashes in the living trunks of the tall, dark pines edging the campsite, wounds that bled thick, sticky black sap. You’d put a match to the stuff and set the tree on fire, but everyone would keep an eye on it. If the flames crept too high, someone would douse it with beer. Your oldest friend, Anthony, showed you how it worked. It was like some kind of magic.
You never asked, “Isn’t it dangerous,” but you did ask, “Who gashed the trees?”
“Don’t’ know,” Anthony said. “A bear, maybe.”
But there were no bears in Wight Plains. Anthony knew that. And he knew you knew.
Anthony was a special kind of liar. He could tell an untruth straight to your face, knowing you wouldn’t believe it, and yet he’d say it so confidently, so flatly, you would never contradict him, and there you were, the two of you maintaining a lie by unspoken consent. Like when you were eight, and he told you cigarettes were made of cabbage and got you to take your first puff. Like when he slid your brother’s swim trophy back and forth across the linoleum floor and said he wouldn’t break it. Like when he told you no one would miss the bicycles you filched from an open garage, so you didn’t have to walk home late one night from a party on the other side of town.
That’s why you didn’t ask him if the tree candles were dangerous, because he would have said no, and then you would have had to pretend you believed him. Just like you had to pretend then to believe there were still bears in the woods.
You were with Anthony and Chris and Danny, deep in the woods. “Fool in the Rain” played on the boom box. They had brought you to “the secret place”—you and a quarter ounce of pot Chris bought from a guy at the Milk Maid, plus a gallon of white wine Danny snatched from the back of his parent's liquor cabinet. You had taken hits from the pipe Anthony stole from the headshop—the one shaped like the skull of a bull. You put the pot where its brain ought to be. It had little fake ruby eyes that Anthony said lit up when you took a hit, even though they never did. If anyone noticed they didn’t, he’d just say they weren’t stoned enough to see it.
Afterward, you passed around the jug of wine. It was so big, so you had to hold it with both hands unless you hooked your finger through the glass loop handle and drank like a hillbilly. Better to drink with both hands like a caveman. One by one, each of you would take a long, deep swig, and then intone in a fake British accent inspired by a commercial you’d all seen, “A richly rewarding experience!” before passing it to the next guy. The stuff was disgusting the first few go-arounds, but you got used to it.
♤
You hadn’t hung out with Anthony since he left Rosedale in fifth grade to go to Our Lady of Perpetual Regret, but one day, you met him in the woods with the other two who lived down the street from him. Danny was two years younger than you, Chris two years older. Their street, with its tiny fifties bungalows, was separated from your sixties subdivision by a quarter of a mile of paved road and about two hundred grand a year in household income.
You were walking Flash, your Irish setter, and they were sitting on the bridge over the stream at the entrance to the woods smoking a joint, and Anthony offered you a toke, and you figured, why not? You’d tried pot a couple of times that summer when your cousin visited from Montreal, so it wasn’t a big deal, and you sat down with them on the bridge and partied. That’s what they called it back then, “partying” as in “do you party?”
Anthony wanted to get Flash high, but you wouldn’t let. You had your limits. It wouldn’t be fair to the dog, who wouldn’t understand what was going on. Dogs had souls, your rabbi told you once, animal souls. That’s why you had to be kind to them. That’s why the Torah said if you see the donkey of your enemy lying under its burden, you had to help him out, because it’s not fair to the donkey. He was all about helping out, that rabbi—Tikkun Olam, repairing the world. But he had a mystical side. Sometimes, he talked like Obi-Wan.
“People have animal souls, too,” he said. “But they also have Godly souls. Use your Godly soul to look after the animal soul, like a good master.”
You hadn’t talked to him since your bar mitzvah. You didn’t have to go to Hebrew school anymore. You didn’t think about religion much. But a couple of things stuck, like that thing about helping the donkey and animal souls.
♤
So, you reconnected with Anthony, and he introduced you to Chris. You’d heard of Chris. There were stories about him. He used to go to your school. They said he once ate an old piece of gum he scraped off the floor of the school bus. They said he broke into people’s houses. They said he got thrown out of school for flashing a girl on the playground. But he was funny, made you laugh.
If he wanted something, and you weren’t giving in, he’d say, “Don’t make me hold my dick.”
The first time you heard this, you were at Nicky’s Pizzeria. You had just sat down with a couple of slices. Chris asked you to pass the garlic powder, and you told him to wait a moment because you were about to use it, and he said, “Dude, don’t make me hold my dick,” and you went about seasoning your slices, first oregano, then crushed red peppers, then the garlic, and Chris kept at you. “Jeremy,” he said. “I’m going to hold my dick.”
“Just wait a second,” you said.
And then it began.
“All right,” he said. “You did it. I’m holding my dick.” And Chris put one hand on the crotch of his jeans and the other in the air as if signaling for a taxi. “I’m holding it,” he said. I’m holding my dick.”
He said it so loudly the guy slicing pies behind the counter looked up, and Anthony and Danny started cracking up, and then you started laughing too, and you all four got thrown out of the shop, Chris all the while declaiming, “I’m holding my dick!”
♤
Opposite the tree candle, on the other side of the campfire, there was something that looked like a throne, two slabs of rock, one for the seat, one for the back, and before the throne, a third slab like a table. There was only the light of the fire and the tree candles. No one had brought flashlights, so everything was in flickering shadows, but the table seemed as though it was stained from years of spilled beer and wine.
“Who built this place?” you asked.
“Satan worshippers,” Anthony said. “They used to make sacrifices here on that stone,” and he made a low ooo-weee noise like you’d hear at the beginning of an Outer Limits episode.
And at the word “sacrifice,” Chris and Danny put their hands in the air and started chanting “sacrifice, sacrifice” like crazed cultists of some long-ago pagan sect.
“Bullshit,” you said and broke the spell, and they all started laughing.
“Actually, it was hunters,” Chris said. “And they used to hang and clean deer here and butcher them on the table.”
He took a big sip of the wine and passed it to you. “A richly rewarding experience,” he intoned.
You took your sip, said the words, and passed the wine. Hunters were more believable. There used to be deer in these woods. Danny’s older brother said he once saw one around here, but not a live one. It had been lying on its side, its stomach torn open, bowels exposed, liver devoured. He had tried to cut its head off to bring home as a trophy, but all he had was a pocketknife. Someone called animal control, and they hauled it off and told kids to stay out of the woods. Maybe it had been killed by a bear, they said.
♤
“Why do you hang out with those boys?” your own father asked. “They’re not like you.”
“You mean they’re not Jewish?”
“No, that’s not what I mean,” he said, indignant. “I mean, they’re not going anywhere.”
“Going? Where should they go?”
“College.”
“What difference does it make if they go to college?”
“The difference is they won’t make anything of themselves.”
“That seems pretty snobby,” you said.
“Jeremy,” your dad said. “You don’t know the world.”
♤
But you thought you did. You had known Anthony since kindergarten. Danny was a good kid, and Chris was unlike anyone you’d ever met. Completely irreverent. There was the night his mother walked into his room and caught you hiding a bottle of Night Train, and all the time she was lecturing you about alcoholism, Chris stood behind her, silently imitating her finger-wagging, brow-wrinkled speech as you struggled not to burst out laughing. There was the day you all went from one fast-food joint to another in his old beat-up Dodge, and he would ask for the manager and insist he hadn’t gotten a burger or a fries from an order a half hour earlier, and the manager, rather than argue, would just fork over the item. Chris showed you how to cop nickel bags from the black kids at the edge of the projects. He showed you how to water down booze in your parents’ liquor cabinet when he drank too much of it.
And he brought you and Danny and Anthony deep into the woods where even the other teenagers didn’t go, to the secret campsite where there was a stone throne and a rock-slab table, a campfire, and tree candles.
♤
“The sages,” your father said, “say, ‘He who lies down with dogs, rises with fleas.’”
“Are you calling my friends, dogs?”
“It’s a metaphor.”
“It sounds like you’re calling them dogs.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Daddy, they’re not dogs.”
♤
When the bottle was empty, Anthony laid it into the fire, and the four of you debated whether it would crack or melt. You had found melted bottles in the woods, in the campsites closer to the road. That’s where the other kids went. Nobody else came this far in.
Anthony poked a stick into the opening of the bottle and tried to lift it, and the thing cracked and burst open, and you all gave a shout. But yours was a shout of pain because one of the shards lodged in your calf. It didn’t hurt much, more of a shock than pain, but it bled when you drew it out.
And then Anthony pointed with the stick, upon which hung the mouth of the broken bottle, and said, “blood” with that same kind of Outer Limits melodrama, and then Chris said, “blood” and Danny said, “blood.” And they put their hands in the air like zombies, and one of them said, “Sacrifice,” and then the other two picked up the chant, “Sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice,” and they closed in on you.
♤
You knew it was a joke, just like you knew when Anthony was lying, but just as with pretending to believe his lies, you pretended to believe the joke and ran off into the darkness as the calls of “sacrifice, sacrifice” melted into “Jeremy, come back. We were just fucking with you.” But for some reason, you kept running, tripping over roots and recovering yourself, threading your way through trees, until all you could hear was “Jeremy.” Only it started to sound more like “Jerrremeee. Jerrremeeee. Jerrrrrremeeeeeee.” And you realized just how stoned and drunk you were and stopped to catch your breath and put your hand against a tree trunk, felt the fresh scars in the bark, and drew back your palm sticky with sap. And you struck a match and lit the tree candle.
You couldn’t hear your friends calling anymore, just rustling in the brush. The woods, of course, were full of animals. Squirrels, skunks, raccoons. Maybe a deer or two. But what you heard sounded more like a bear. But there were no bears in Wight Plains. They’d been driven out long ago by the relentless pounding of hammer and nail as one home after another sprang up on what were once open fields and apple orchards and forest. They had fled with the bobcats to Putnam County and Dutchess.
But some things didn’t give up their hold on the woods so easily. Some things stayed where humans stayed, things fast enough to catch a running deer, strong enough to slash open its stomach, and hungry enough to eat its liver, things that, in the absence of prey, slashed at pine trees in frustration.
You were wiping the sap on your jeans, trying to rid your hands of the stickiness, when you heard the breathing, saw the eyes, crazy large eyes, three sets of them reflecting the light of the tree candle.
“Guys,” you said. “Cut the shit.”
And then they were on you, pawing you, holding you down. You couldn’t see much by the light of the tree. It looked like your friends, but not your friends. Their tongues lolled past sharpened canines; their hands were covered with hair like an ape’s. You thought they were going to tear you to pieces. But they only tore one piece. From your calf.
Chris raised his head, if that was Chris, and looked at you, a chunk of your bleeding flesh in his maw. And you screamed as one of those things patted out the tree candle with its paw.
In the morning, you lay in bed. You could remember everything up until the candle went out. You reached for your leg and found your calf whole. But there was a scab, and it itched like crazy. Lay down with dogs.
♤
The next night, you snuck out of your room because it was a school night, and you met them at the secret campsite. Chris had already lit the tree candles. The three of them were sitting around sipping beers. Anthony had something in his arms. He was holding it tightly. It looked like a small dog.
“For you,” he said, and he threw it at you. The raccoon clawed your chest as you caught it, tore your shirt as you ripped it away, bled down your neck as you buried your snout into its soft belly.
♤
Some grew out of it. Some did not. Some stuck to feeding on what they could find in the woods. Some roamed the town late at night, looking for stray animals—and stray people. Chris broke into Robin DaSilva’s house and was met with silver buckshot fired by her father’s double-barreled shotgun. Your dad wouldn’t let you go to the funeral. Danny left town after that, but Anthony stuck around, found new friends, brought them to the secret campsite, and taught them about tree candles.
You went to a fancy private college upstate. You missed the guys, the woods, the tree candles. You didn’t make many friends, but you met a girl. She was your lab partner. You dissected a fetal pig together. You walked around Sunset Lake one evening and marveled at the claw marks on the pine trees.
And you were good to Abby and she to you, and when the urge was so strong you couldn’t resist it, you’d tell her you weren’t feeling well, and you’d lock yourself up in your dorm room and shimmy down the gutter, and take your car and drive the backroads until you found a farm, and there were many of them in Poughkeepsie, and you’d feed on the livers of sheep and cows.
You got married. On your honeymoon in the Adirondacks, you made love to Abby and then left her sleeping to wander the woods, and she found you in the morning, showering off the blood, and you had a long, long talk. You told her it wasn’t like what people said. You could control it. You never hurt people. It had nothing to do with the moon. And she believed you, just like you used to believe Anthony, which is to say she didn’t really, but she convinced herself she did. You both went to Syracuse, a medical school blessedly close to swamplands teeming with life, and afterward, the two of you chose a home in the suburbs. You would have preferred to remain upstate. She would have liked something in the city. You didn’t like the idea of living anywhere far from the woods, so you found yourself back in good ol’ Wight Plains.
And you were a good husband. You didn’t flirt with the nurses the way some of the surgeons did. You came home on time. You encouraged her to take time off to raise the boy. And only sometimes, when the moon was full, you’d wait for her to fall asleep and slip out to the woods. And when she found spots of blood or hair on the sheets in the morning, she’d put them in the wash without comment.
And then your son was born, and you knew it was time to give all that up. And you’d go months without venturing out. Until you did. And then, in the morning, you’d sweep the bed for hair and rub out blood spots. And sometimes, she’d notice, and sometimes she wouldn’t. And then one day, the kid was playing in the backyard and came back screaming to the house because he’d found a dead deer, its stomach torn open.
“You need to get God into your life,” Abby said, something she had never said to you before because she was not religious. Neither of you were.
“What do you mean?”
“Please,” she said. “You don’t think I know how that deer ended up in our backyard? You don’t think I see those marks on the trees everywhere?”
You thought about your son. You thought about the tree candles. You remembered what you’d been taught about the animal soul and the Godly soul. Be a good master.
There was a new synagogue in town, so you went there and met with the rabbi. You lay tefillin. You studied Kabbalah. You started “keeping Shabbos.” It helped. Mostly. You snuck off less often. You snubbed the moon. But it wasn’t easy. There were nights when you lay in bed, listening to the rustling in the backyard, when you could hear the footsteps of every fleshly creature that padded underneath your window, could scent the musky odor of deer weaving in and out of your neighbor's yards. Now that all the building had ended, and hunting was prohibited, they had come back. And you remembered the nights of running wild and free, when your teeth lengthened, and your fingernails became claws, and flesh gave way beneath them as easily as tearing open a paper bag, and, in the bag, you would find things dark and wet and sweet. Many was the night you fell asleep, dreaming the dream of rutting deep into the cavity of some warm creature.
Your life was a battle, you realized, between the animal and the Godly soul, and as you got older, the one got weaker and the other stronger. But was it faith, was it God’s grace, or was it just old age?
You taught your son what you knew without revealing what you had done. You sent him to a Chassidic school to learn the truth about who and what he was, an animal with a Godly soul. And he seemed to understand. He seemed to believe. You used to pray the long prayers, standing next to each other at shul, bumping shoulders rhythmically instead of bobbing forward like the other men did.
Until he got to that age when he questioned everything, questioned your judgment, questioned your faith, questioned your understanding of the human soul. He said you were wrong about the boys in the woods. He said they also had a Godly soul. You tried to teach him about lying down with dogs. You tried to teach him to be a good master. But his friends had taught him about tree candles, and it remained to be seen just how dangerous those candles were.
♤
December 7, 2025
