Here's a scrapped opening to my current project, To Chase a Rabbit. You might compare the weirdness of this version to the still-weird-but-more-coherent version I posted earlier.
"If you, dear reader, have the pleasure to accompany a child at any point in your life, he may turn to you one day and ask the most important question to ever linger on thirsty lips. It will dangle at the edge of his mouth just as he dangles at your pant leg, tugging for your waning attention. When you finally turn to him and inquire what could possibly demand a chunk of your dwindling time (you are dying; after all, tick tock, tick tock), the child will breathe these words:
“Where have all monsters gone?”
Do not let your ignorance strangle your answer, for the amount of truth in your response may save the child his throat. When the child says monsters, he does not mean rapists, murderers or unfair employers who dock pay wages for messy uniforms. When the child says monsters, he means monsters. As in, where are the vampires, who drink from bleeding hearts? Where are the werewolves, who scream in the moonlight? Where are the kelpies, who drown gullible children? Where are the giant beasts? Where are the fairies? Where are the hags, the ghouls, the boogymen?
They mean: where have all the monsters, beasts, and ghouls from fairy tales gone?
You may present the child with any number of vague, philosophical answers, or perhaps you are even adorably naive and tell the child that such things have never existed (I assume you also say the same for rapists, murders and unfair employers). Perhaps you will explain all possible geographical locations, including maps and other physical aids, where these creatures might have fled to over hundreds of years. Perhaps you have your own theories, which may or may not involve extraterrestrials, the holy trinity or the government.
Someone’s mother once said that ‘the simplest answer is the best one’, and as an adult you may pile thousands of counter examples to defy mother’s wisdom, but in this case the answer with the shortest syllables and the closest accuracy is one in the same. The answer is: Silvereye Forest.
If you are the map user from above, you could explain that Silvereye Forest is a small patch of woods roughly a mile from a bustling town filled with old people and snotty teenagers. It’s flanked by suburban houses created in a similar fashion to those little plastic toys in coin machines. Compared to the sweeping stretches of wilderness shown on television, Silvereye is a miniscule blotch of shabby trees and bramble patches that probably holds little economic value except for people who catch feral kittens and sell them to pet stores.
I don’t like map users. They never see anything properly.
For one, there are not many sweeping stretches of wilderness shown on television that have ancient stone walls coiling around them. Slabs and slivers of grey stone, slotted together like a crude jigsaw puzzle, shepherd the creeping vines and trees into a sloppy oval. It cut deep into the earth, for no wind could ever topple it, but rose only three feet above the dirt. Cracked with age and speckled with soft, green moss, the wall resembled the spine of an enormous, abandoned skeleton.
No historian could explain who built the wall. They considered natives, vandals, artisans, farmers, extraterrestrials, the holy trinity and the government, but since no one could come to a consensus it was the voted opinion that no one cared who built the wall, and why should anyone ever ask anyway?
The only person who knew anything at all about Silvereye was a widow named Hannah Feverfew, who lived in a field on the western shadow of the forest besides. Hannah was an old, willowy woman and was always engulfed in a mountain of shabby clothes. Coats atop coats consumed her body until she looked quite like a ragdoll without any stuffing, and while she never wore shoes, her feet and legs were swallowed up by socks that dangled well over the tip of her toes. Her hands were covered by sleeves, and her ears by a wild nest of graying hair. In the rare instance where bare flesh lay exposed, it would be etched in spidery, blue veins. Over her face, she wore a mask in the shape of a cat. No one in the town had ever seen beneath it.
Hannah’s home was little more than a shambled hut.
Most parents in the suburbs told their children to stay clear from the field, for Hannah was reckoned a witch or a hag and none of them wanted their darlings turned into toads. Only one mother never cautioned her boy to the snaky mannerisms of such women, and she only did it because she often forgot that he existed. Her name was not important, but during the day our story begins, her boy was wandering outside Hannah’s kitchen window with his hands in his pockets and a thoughtful frown on his face. He trailed a red kite through the soggy jungle of untrimmed weeds and grasses.
This boy’s name was Will Brier."
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