The woods are quiet during lockdown. On dirt-grey weekday afternoons they’re rarely busy anyway, but since the world ground to a halt even the dogwalkers have abandoned the narrow paths that wind their way between the viridescent thickets, under a canopy dense enough to block out any ambient noise from the busy London suburb in which the woods sit.
Paradoxically, the silence makes it hard at first to be sure just where the sound is coming from. It’s both faint and somehow all around you, as if it’s echoing from one tree trunk to the next. If it wasn’t for the rhythm – metronomic and insistent – you’d dismiss it as wet leaves slapping against bark. That’s what it sounds like, but as you close your eyes and try to pin down where it’s coming from, you realise that it’s firmer, more substantial.
Maybe on a different day you wouldn’t notice the subtle dissonance between what your ears hear and what your brain tells you it must be. This afternoon though, it’s like every sensory nerve fibre in your body has a direct link to the forest floor; to the trees with their spidery branches; to the coiled vines and creeping, climbing plants that seem to weave from one to the other.
Your feet are light anyway on the loose gravel path, so when you cut between two elegant beech saplings and wade through a bed of moss, you feel as if you’re floating an inch above it. There! You stop and screw your face into a frown of concentration. It’s coming from the other side of a blanket of shrubs that extend beyond the oak tree 20 metres in front of you. At this range, there’s no longer any doubt that the sound is human in origin; the soft drag and smack is punctuated every few seconds by a strangled gasp, as if someone is fighting either to suck in air or to prevent it escaping too quickly.
You rest one hand against the oak’s broad trunk and absent-mindedly pry loose a piece of bark with your fingers. Whoever they are, the person on the other side of the bushes clearly has no idea that you’ve managed to shuffle so close to their position. You wait for a pause, for the change in tempo that would indicate some awareness of your presence, but any shift is so gradual, so incremental, that you feel sure it’s a result of nothing more than their own momentum pushing them forward.
Ducking low, you pull yourself along the bright green shrubbery, your eyes scanning the ground for treacherous roots and twigs. You’re so close now: it’s like you can feel each ragged breath burst out from where they’re sitting and shimmer toward you, slipping between the hedge’s sinuous branches. You stop and close your eyes.
When you open them again, your fists are clenched; an involuntary spasm you can’t explain even months later. Turning back is no longer an option – you have to see this. See them. And the barrier here? It’s thin enough. Or you think it is, anyway. You just need to push it aside and…
Fuck.
It’s hot suddenly, and the air is heavier than it was back on the path. Perhaps it’s about to rain again.
If anyone wants to write the next ~500 words of this story, I’d be really interested in publishing and building on it! Get in touch…
5 replies on “Sinful Sunday: Wank in the Woods”
It’s surprising what you stumble across in the woods.
This is an incredibly hot photo series, and I’m definitely now thinking about what I’d do if I caught someone in that position…
I’d be interested to read that story!
I can’t write the next words because I have lost them…… I need to pay more attention in the woods
Molly
[…] to ease. It felt like such freedom! There have already been some photos from that outing shared, on his site and here. It was such a perfect afternoon and I hope when this lockdown eases we all feel the […]