Penn's Woods

A short story about everyday life and everyday death.

Jared Lebowitz is driving around near his neighborhood, arguably too fast, and killing time. His subconscious is reckoning with his having nothing to do and no proper direction. He graduated high school a little over a year ago, and has been living at home and working as a prep cook. He hates and likes his job just exactly as much as every other job he’s had. His soul feels uneasy, and he can’t explain it. He might know the words, but when they try to leave his mouth they stop in their tracks as questions start to rise. “My life is fine, what am I complaining about?” he thinks to himself, pushing ever so slightly harder on the gas pedal as his thoughts start to outpace his car, “I can make a plan to do something, and I have. I’ve made fifty. None of them ever feel right.” Oh but Jared, you can bicker with yourself all you want, the fact is doing nothing is just as much something as everything else. 

Jared wouldn’t admit it to anyone, but he was very lonely. He was about 5’3”, pale with dark brown curly hair that he’d let get a little too long to look good. He didn’t really ever think he looked good, and this hatred of his appearance was an integral part of his personality. Not in any way that was direct, he didn’t go around describing at length the multitude of spatial reasoning issues that comes to the mind of any person unfortunate enough to be looking at, say, his nose¹. He just had developed his habits and patterns as this ugly person, and not as one of the blessed ugly people who are ugly but are too into WW2 or Space Science to care about ever having a companion. He thinks to himself that those people might prefer to fuck a telescope, or some very specific rusty antique rifle, and then laughs at the thought of someone sticking their Penis in a Telescope. Ha Ha Ha, he thinks. Those people are not normal. I am Normal. He speeds up, and the car is now going 40 in a 25.

He had wanted to continue imagining other silly items that people might stick their Penis into, but worried he might stumble upon one he liked the idea of and do something rash, which brought his thoughts back to his overwhelming loneliness.

He talked to some girls occasionally, but often stumbled over his words or said something outlandish in an attempt to be funny. More often than not, they didn’t find it funny. In general, they didn’t find him appealing in any way. Internet forums would suggest something like that could turn a man like Jared into the type of guy who swears off romance altogether, but he never grew too bitter about it. He didn’t resent the women who didn’t take an interest in him, sharply empathic in the stance that he didn't think he’d like himself either. He also had the sneaking suspicion he was a gay man, and that he had simply hoodwinked himself into liking pussy². He was informed by society at a young age that straight was the normal thing to be, the default setting; he theorizes that this caused him to start masturbating to straight sex early on, convincing his brain not necessarily that he enjoyed watching the thing on the screen, but that this was what normal people watch while attempting to make themselves cum. It occurs to Jared that he cares a lot what normal people do, and almost immediately following that it occurs to Jared he is chasing after that normal behavior, not naturally exhibiting it. Somewhere in the recesses of his mind, he knew that it wasn’t how he wanted to act. 

He had never tried to proposition a man for sex, and realized he wouldn’t know if he was a top or bottom. Figuring that out seemed like a brief but uniquely uncomfortable trial by error, and he decided against the whole thing altogether, choosing instead to just try his regular hoagie order with cucumbers this time. His stomach grumbles, and he thinks to pull over and put in an order on the deli’s app, but decides he doesn’t wanna stop driving. 

He thinks back to the start of his day. 3:00 am, he wakes up to his alarm song, Night by Bruce Springsteen. His dad was much more of a Springsteen fan than him. He picked that particular song because it's loud right away, like an alarm. If the alarm is loud not only will it wake you up, you have to be quickly alert so you can silence it before it wakes anyone else up. The walls between his room and the rooms of his parents and older sister are thin.

Jared has to be up incredibly early because of the nature of his job. At Ken’s!, the bar/restaurant he worked at, anything on the menu³ that can’t be fried, seared, tossed, or melted in 40-50 seconds is on him to prepare. Ken’s! was in a bad spot financially and could only afford to pay Jared, but this meant he was paid handsomely and often reminded how crucial he was to the restaurant. The whole service industry was in a bad spot financially, and he felt a small pride in being needed in some way. 

At this point, as it had many times before, thinking about his job had him questioning the exclamation point. It was on the sign, and he thought about it his whole first day there. “Why put an exclamation point in the name? Shouldn’t the customers apply the exclamation point themselves? Isn’t that the only ‘tip’ a restaurant owner really gets?” They had swirled through his head then, and they again started to gather like storm clouds as he drove down a narrow straightaway that led far into a section of road surrounded by his Northwest Jersey hometown’s signature Deeply Wooded Expanse. He eased up on the gas slightly.

But really, an exclamation point in the NAME of your business? He didn’t know why it made him so upset, but it seemed like the type of thing an idiot does. It made him upset to think he could be working for an idiot. Jared hadn’t thought of himself as a particularly outstanding person, but he had expected to be able to handle things better than an idiot can. He thought that maybe he was an idiot. He thought about respect for a little while, but nothing interesting came of it. He turned around.

Jared Lebowitz pulled over briefly to check his phone, see if anyone had texted him. No one had. The silence of his notifications, or perhaps the stress of his general situation, created a great ringing in his ears, which subsided after about 30 seconds. He briefly got the notion that he should perhaps kill himself, but decided that was for somewhere later in the story. He switched from the jazz station to the rock station. His heart was racing, and in some roundabout way he figured if the music matched that tempo, it would bring an end to the dissidence he felt.

His GPS app said that he was 27 minutes from home if he didn't take the highway, and 19 minutes if he did. When trying to decide which route he’d rather take, he realized he didn’t wanna go home at all. He knew exactly what was waiting for him at home. That vile, dreaded same. Sitting at a screen or, if he was especially ashamed of his usual routine, reading a book. He liked when he actually decided to sit down and read, regardless of if the motive was shame or ambition. He often asked himself why he didn’t read more, if he decidedly liked it so much. This was one of those terrible questions that gave you a headache to answer⁴, and despite having all the time that exists, he decided he simply didn’t have enough available to arrive at an answer. He chose instead to turn back around and drive further into this seemingly endless pavement course through the thick forest. At some point he thinks he will hit Northeastern PA, and nothing about this strikes him as incorrect. He keeps on driving, a little faster now. The radio is loud, but he can’t hear it because his thoughts are blaring. His heart is rhythmic and consistent in its uptempo dash, and while his thoughts run too, they are at peace with him. He feels a strange, powerful calm. It feels like control. His car is a hybrid, and makes very little noise as he whips through the late afternoon. The left window is rolled down all the way, and the right is placed just so, allowing his hair to feel the cool wind run through it without it blowing into his eyes and face. He felt a small pride in being so resourceful as to discover this perfect setting and placement, and turned the radio up in celebration.

Almost as if he were some kind of character in a short story, and plot events dictated the happenings of his daily life, the radio made fuzz and static out of his glorious tunes just as he had turned them up. He wanted to be mad that the people of whatever municipality he was in hadn’t made a righteous stink about 105.7 The Hawk not reaching their car radios, but he couldn’t feel much of anything at all. Maybe I’m Autistic, he thought. Wouldn’t that be a way out, Jared. Wouldn’t being able to put a tidy little label on your strange just make you feel so calm inside.  You know you don’t deserve that calm, and you know there's nothing that can give it to you. I wish The Hawk were back on, he thought.

A feeling in him stirred something awful. His stomach began to growl and he wanted to dismiss it as hunger but felt something sinister below it. He kept driving.

For the first time since the start of this long nothing of a day, his brain sat still. Not wanting to spoil it, he tried to continue thinking about nothing while also not trying so hard that he was thinking about not trying to think. He found it an incredibly difficult thing to maintain, so eventually he decided to fidget with the radio. Three stations came through clear: a Christian talk radio, a golden oldies station⁵, and a top 40 station. He was Jewish, and while he liked the idea of being the kind of Jewish guy to check out what those Crazy Catholics have going on, he wasn’t particularly in the mood to hear the Good Word right now. The golden oldies didn’t really appeal to him, so he settled on the top 40 station. He wondered if the hill people of this area had made a stink to get the top 40 station, and briefly gave them a mental scolding for their poor taste. The song playing was I Wanna Get Better by Bleachers. Jared had never heard the song before, and liked what he heard.

“Woke up this morning early before my family

From this dream where she was trying to show me

How a life can move from the darkness

She said to get better

So I put a bullet where I shoulda put a helmet

And I crash my car cause I wanna get carried away

That's why I'm standing on the overpass screaming at myself

‘Hey! I wanna get better!’”

As the synths rose from the bridge to meet the chorus, giving each slight curve and pothole a musical cue, Jared suddenly realized he was blowing through what little stop signs there were on this road that was truly, as far as he could tell, endless. The route was eerily unchanging, like he had seen every inch of it already a thousand times over. He wondered if he had crossed into Pennsylvania. He wondered if he was really anywhere at all, then chastised himself for trying to seem deep and profound. Of course he was somewhere. You’re always Somewhere.

The song ended and faded slowly to commercials, so he switched over to the oldies station. He listened to Otis Redding as he thought about simple, concrete things. Like dinner, for example. What would Jared have for dinner? Something with avocados, he thought to himself. Oh right, he thinks, the hoagie. With cucumbers this time, he thought, and… and avocado. Something new. He takes a small pride in trying something new, but quickly rescinds it as he realizes he hasn’t tried anything yet. He tucked that pride away for later, when the sandwich was in his stomach and when tomorrow starts to loom like a broad, towering willow over the forest floor of his consciousness. He supposes that by simply acknowledging it in the previous thought, it already had. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. 

For some reason he couldn’t quite pinpoint, his mind flashed an image of a girl. She looked to be about 25, older than Jared was. However, as the image crystallized in his head Jared Lebowitz found in her an ineffable, unending, and decidedly perfect youth. She was blonde and had pronounced features, her mouth jutting out from her protruding cheekbones, cheekbones which were complimented by her hair falling what felt like miles only to end just next to her ear in a neat bob. She had kind, green eyes. She was wearing blue jeans, the kind that aren’t made, they only exist as hand-me-downs; some kind of fabric dynasty. Her t-shirt featured a silhouette of a black cow standing in front of a large red barn with the words “The Barnyard” fashioned in white writing across the structure, the sections of each letter made to look like wooden planks nailed to the barn. Below the graphic it read “More than just awesome burgers,” and Jared wanted to know what else the barnyard had⁶. He had never seen this girl in his life, and just as she was tucking a set of cornsilk blonde strands behind her ear and opening her lips to say something, the image was gone. All that was left was the small pride in being granted the pleasure of having seen her at all. Jared snapped out of his haze to find the road was full of cars; bumper to bumper, stopped together in enduring mechanical agony, and his just the same.

How had this happened? It wasn’t even a second that he had that image of the girl in his brain, and just before he had been totally alone on the road. It gave Jared a sinister feeling that rose from his stomach to his shoulders, up his neck and to his brain. The ringing returned. He frantically searched for some, any way to turn around. This had been a stupid thing he did, driving far away for no reason; another on the tiring list of stupid things he’s done for all his life. He signaled, he threw his hazards on, he even leaned out his car window and yelled to the other drivers. Even if they had heard him, there was nowhere to turn to, no driveway to k-turn out of. Just that fathomless expanse of road, and indifferent tall ferns surrounding it for miles. A neat row of them, uniform. Jared was too stressed to notice the trees were perfectly uniform.

Gradually, as his panic turned to a light anxiety and eventually subsided to a passive worry, the cars drained from the road. They would speed up and slow down, seemingly at random, and bumper to bumper slowly became heavy traffic. The heavy traffic quickened to a normal pace as cars around Jared’s seemed to snap back to life, a worker drone suddenly receiving a destination pin from HQ. As the remaining cars left him in their smokey wake, he was once again alone. Him, and the road. The radio, which Jared hadn’t noticed had shut off, sputtered to life; it was fuzzy at first, becoming clearer with each note. He heard big band music. Jared loved big band music. As the song faded out, the voice of a young, spry black man came crackling through. Jared was grateful for his calm, baritone voice, and he sensed that somehow the man was grateful for Jared as well. He introduced himself as “The Good Doctor Leonard Jefferson,” and before he baptized the next song through the air waves he said “Y’all enjoy this new tune from Glenn Miller called Pennsylvania 6-5000, and I’m gonna enjoy this lovely French cruller that my lovely wife Trisha has so lovingly brought me.” The frantic horns pushed through the speakers, and Jared turned the radio off.

Although the mental anguish had somewhat subsided and his ears weren’t ringing, his stomach still stewed with a mighty force and momentum. It was like there was a very small bowling ball that, were Jared a woman, he could give birth to⁷. It was as if his body were physically manifesting his strife into some shadowy, toxic orb; an orb he had no way to pass, no means of relief. He felt sore. Why are you so sore, Jared? “I don’t know,” he said out loud, to no one at all. He didn’t know why he had said it, but, somewhat unwittingly, it didn’t bother him. He started to do what he always had done. When his parents fought so loud they’d make the paintings on the walls swing slightly from side to side, or screamed at him for doing something wrong. When he found the blades in his sister’s drawer next to all those long sleeve sweaters, a crusty dried-out crimson on each edge. When the kids in elementary school would push him, and call him “J. Kykeowitz.⁸” All the times he had come off to strangers, acquaintances or friends as awkward, small, careless, weak, clumsy, boring, obnoxious, fretful, anxious and yes, even stingy, causing him to loathe who he is that much more acutely and profoundly. All those awful happenings, strung miserably together for all of his life, a life that now seemed all too much. He would do what he had always done when these things happened, and he would just take it. All of it. He wouldn’t leave a scrap of meat on the bone. He ignored every road sign telling him to stop, stop trying; telling him it wasn’t even worth the little effort he put in, that there was nothing waiting for him on the other side. He had always just kept driving, but with all these thoughts singing together in unison, it hit him that he had never once asked why.

For the second time today he got the notion to kill himself, figuring now was as good a time as any, and in a swift jerk of the wheel he attempted to do so.

Much to Jared Lebowitz’ total and absolute surprise, he didn’t hit a tree. He didn’t hit a large rock, or a sign post, or even a stray fungus. He just passed through them. The burdensome weight in his stomach turned to an inexplicable bliss. He was going 45, and he leaned on the gas as the speedometer crept up to 60. The bumpy texture of the forest floor started to turn just as smooth as the interstate, the trees and their branches passing right through his car like opaque and vapid imitations of themselves. His foot was like a vengeful moon, calling the tides of gasoline forth to bring the car to 65, 70, 80 now. Jared did not see his life flash. He did not remember a hot summer day, or the first time he saw himself in a mirror, or the name of his fourth grade basketball team, or anything at all in fact. At first, he saw the trees, each with a unique grain, and he watched as patterns began to develop. As the car shot from 95 to 100, the trees began to form like oversized raindrops, gone from his vision just as soon as they had entered. They started to come together, resembling some bygone existence he wanted to be familiar with. He pushed the pedal hard into the felt interior underneath it, pushing the car from 120 to 135 to 160 and on. Those trees, those trees in the deep Pennsylvania thicket, came together to form an image for Jared. It was her again, standing as she was when he saw her before. She finished tucking her hair behind her ear and said only three words.

“Who am I?”

Jared had no way of knowing for sure, but he decided her name was Samantha, and this, somehow, was enough.

*************************************************************************************************************

A state trooper, taking a different route to work on a whim, would come to find a crashed car in a ditch early in the morning of February 15th, 2013. Upon further inspection, he would find the cold body of a middle-aged man, about 5’11”, lying in it. There was a large wound on his forehead, and when the state trooper felt for a pulse he found none. Selfishly, he had hoped the day wouldn’t start this way, but now it had. He called in to the nearest station and reported the body. While discussing the details over the phone, he interrupted himself to shout “Oh, shit!” When his correspondent called out to ensure he was okay and inquire what had elicited the remark, the state trooper responded succinctly “I’m fine, one sec.” The state trooper’s name was Eric, and he loved his wife very much.

The person he had been talking to was an older woman, long retired from fighting crime but not yet financially free enough to not be working the phones at the criminally⁹ understaffed police station so she could make ends meet at home. At night, she managed a Papa Johns. Her name was Janice, and upon hearing Eric’s second report, she passed the phone off to the chief without hesitation.

What Eric Russo described to the police chief at the Branchville Police Department also gave him the inclination to pass the phone off to a higher up, or possibly a higher power. The first car had seemed like a routine accident, but the second car Eric found had clearly left him shaken. This is the conversation that transpired between Officer Eric Russo and Chief McWhorter of the Branchville Police department:

ER: “It’s like, uhh… it’s, Jesus Christ, I really don’t know. The car looks to be almost undamaged except for there’s, uhh, there’s a tree right through the driver’s seat.”

There was a heavy reluctance in his voice, like even he couldn’t believe the information he was relaying.

MW: What do you mean there’s a tree through the driver’s seat? Do you mean through the front of the car and into the driver’s seat?

ER: No, the front of the car’s intact. Maybe a few scratches, but no major damage. It looks like the tree grew…through the car, I guess?

The chief hesitated, deliberating the careful words of his next statement.

MW: Officer Russo, are you okay? Maybe you should come talk this out with us, we can all figure out what’s going on here.

ER: With all due respect buddy, I’m fine. When I woke up this morning my coffee didn’t brew upside down and my eggs didn’t turn into butterflies, so I’m pretty sure this fuckery you have going on in your town isn’t a problem in MY head, it’s general negligence and, I swear on my mother’s grave, probably voodoo. I gave that lady I was talking to the location of these wrecks, and frankly I feel I need to report this to the major, so I'm gonna head on my way. Thanks for telling me I’m a loony, I’ll see you when we inevitably have to meet to figure out what happened to this stupid tree car.

The chief was taken aback with this stranger’s hostility, but thought quickly to say something before Officer Russo hung up. It was a question that had popped into his mind, and he knew it would plague him not to know the answer.

MW: Wait, Officer Russo.

ER: Yes?

MW: Was there anyone in the car with the tree?

ER: Oh shit, sorry. I’ll admit I got a little flustered there, but I’m glad you asked, cause that’s important. There is.

MW: Where, the trunk?

ER: No, the driver’s seat.

MW: You said there was a tree there.

ER: There is.

Not wanting to waste another minute, Chief McWhorter held his hand to the receiving end of the phone and told Janice to send some officers out to the location Officer Russo had provided her. She asked who, and he responded “Whoever,” before resuming his call.

MW: How can there be a tree AND a corpse in the driver’s seat? Is it in front of the tree?

It is funny how when we die we go from a “them” to an “it.”

ER: It’s, uhh, well, shit. Y’know now that I’ve had a second, I don’t blame you for suspecting me to be crazy. 

MW: How do you mean?

ER: The tree is also growing through the body, not just the car. Tore a hole straight through it.

MW: Tell you what, I’m gonna do us both a favor and stop asking questions about it. Please let the major know about this, I have a feeling we’ll be talking again soon.

Upon alerting the major, Officer Russo was instructed to resume his regular duties, and he and Officer McWhorter would not come to speak again or meet in person until a charity banquet some years later. He would recount the details to his wife later that night, and she listened attentively. It made for an engaging dinner conversation.

As soon as officers arrived on the scene, backup was called. Chief McWhorter was already turning the key in his ignition when the call was made. He had to see for himself, and it was just as it had been described to him. More cops and paramedics rushed to the scene, the paramedics hoping to no avail to save the middle-aged victim, who seemed to have passed only from an internal bleeding that could’ve been remedied had help come sooner. The man who died in that car had thought back to a particular day of fourth grade in his dying moments. He remembered three things:

1. The teacher couldn’t have been older than 40, but her face suggested decades more. He recalled her incredible and steadfast dedication to her job, and thought of how time had not been kind in return.

2. The exact dimensions of the side profile of one of his classmates, a black girl by the name of Hannah Jefferson, whom he had stared at almost the whole lesson.

3. That “Pennsylvania '' translated to “Penn’s Woods,” named after the State’s original proprietor William Penn. This scrap of knowledge had only managed to absorb into his brain because Hannah Jefferson was in the bathroom at the time.

As for Jared, you may have already deduced that he was the body in the other car. It was a skinny birch tree, and it grew up from his rear through his torso and up further through his head. They might not have been able to identify the body if not for the license plate. They tracked it back to a frantic Mrs. Lebowitz, wondering desperately where her boy could be but trying to assure herself that he was an adult who could handle himself, and that his phone had simply run out of battery. When she got the call, everything in her very being hollowed out, and a powerful sadness echoed throughout its shell. Of course she cried. She never really stopped crying, she was merely granted an occasional respite from her depression by a god she no longer cared for. Her only son, gone in an instant. The paranormal circumstances under which he died only upset her more. When everyone around her cried out for an investigation, she would be the only one to state that she simply didn’t care where the tree came from. She didn’t care if a person did it or if it was a ghost or some kind of demon or Lucifer himself. Her boy was gone, lost forever to the forest, and with him so went her heart.

There was a girl from Jared’s high school who sent a letter to the house some weeks after his story had made the news. She explained that she had always had a crush on Jared, but was too nervous to ever try to get close with him. She explained that she regretted this deeply. She wrote a whole host of things she had loved about Jared, among them his humor, his curly hair, and his “unceasing need to be kind to everyone.” It was at this line that Jared’s father broke down and wept. She ended the letter by saying she hoped it hadn’t reopened any emotional wounds, and she had thought to say she wished he were still here, so she might say all this to him, but decided against it. She knew that thinking of him still here would only bring pain to them, as it did to her. Jared’s father would never read this section of the letter, as he had already ripped it up into a million little scraps. He did not do so out of anger at the girl who wrote it, but out of something much deeper. He ripped that note with the fervor of the whole of human consciousness and its interwoven trauma, he did so out of pure desire to end that vicious cycle, to escape it for even just one second. He cried so hard his mouth and face felt dry and rotted afterwards. He allowed himself to feel the pain of his loss in every crack and crevice of his very soul. He wailed. No one was home. Days later, he would not cry at the funeral, but would stand solemnly beside his wife as friends and family gave them their condolences.

The letter would stay in his mind for practically all his life, and he would frequently pour over each and every word, which he remembered verbatim. He couldn’t forget it if he tried, and he had. What struck him one day was that he didn’t feel for this girl who missed his son, and mourned the loss of him from this world. He didn’t feel for her; he was her, and she him. She was his wife and his mother and his rabbi and his doctor and all his coworkers. She was every celebrity and every homeless person he had ever seen. She was good and evil and everything in between. She had died in that car crash, and he had too. All 7 billion of them had watched his boy die, and all 7 billion of them wailed in agony, and all 7 billion of them felt the pain of their loss in every crack and crevice of their very souls. They felt a small pride in shouldering their small portion of the great collective pain, and a greater pride in attempting to overcome it together.

1. Although he suspected he could, if someone were into that kind of thing.

2. A Catch Twenty-Poon

3. An extravagantly extensive menu, by the way. It included lobster, chicken tikka masala, chicken tiki masala (a variation on the tikka masala that featured pineapples), oysters, baked potatoes, fajitas, spaghetti, spanakopita, and of course, The Ken Burger© with Ken Sauce© (chipotle mayo).

4.  Another example: What is my mother’s horrible secret?

5. Jared did not know this, but it became a Big Band station around 8-9pm depending on if the host had to do dialysis or not that day. He would never come to know this, as he would be dead by 8:30, and the host had dialysis that day.

6. Hopes? Dreams? A special sauce that’s just chipotle mayo?

7. His pants were dry, save for a bit of piss that dribbled on his left thigh a few minutes before, and yet he felt like his water was breaking.

8. It wasn’t even clever. What bothered him more than the slur was the lack of effort.

9. No pun intended.