PseudoPod 505: There Is No Road through the Woods
Show Notes
“Silly as it seems — no, is — I’m actually a bit afraid of plants. I like trees, and I have a garden, but there’s something unnerving about being among all these living things that we treat as though they’re just background. They’re alive. It freaks me out. The title of this story comes from a Rudyard Kipling poem, The Way Through The Woods. I read this poem when I was about three quarters of the way finished with the piece, and it really shaped the way it turned out.
The Way Through The Woods
by Rudyard Kipling
They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.
Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods.
But there is no road through the woods.
There Is No Road Through the Woods
by Dagny Paul
The summer it happened, Mr. Mason cut down the diseased elm in his front yard and found a fist-sized clot of blood, bone, and hair in the middle of its trunk. I didn’t see it, but Ellie Langford, who was a year ahead of me and lived next door to Mr. Mason, said that she had been sitting on her front porch, waiting for her boyfriend to pick her up, when all of a sudden Mr. Mason’s chainsaw died and she looked up to see red splatters on his wife beater and a puzzled look on his face.
About the Author
Dagny Paul
Dagny Paul is a lapsed English teacher, failed artist, and sometimes writer who lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. She has an unhealthy (but entertaining) obsession with comic books and horror movies, which she consumes whenever her five-year-old son will let her (which isn’t often). Dagny was Assistant Editor of PseudoPod, and guest editor for Pseudopod’s Artemis Rising 3 event in 2017.
About the Narrator
Tatiana Grey
Tatiana Grey is a New York City based actress of stage, screen, and of course, the audio booth. She adores traveling and counts her lucky stars that acting and dancing have taken her all over the United States, to Montreal, Vancouver, Ireland, and Holland… but she loves coming home to New York where it all started. Equally at home speaking heightened language in a corset, in a leather jacket spouting obscenities, and as a dancer she has been compared to such dark, vivacious heroines as Helena Bonham Carter, a young Winona Ryder and Elliot Page. This depth and facility with multiple genres garnered her a New York Innovative Theatre Award Best Featured Actress nomination for her work in The Night of Nosferatu. Her facility with accents has landed her quite a few audiobooks and numerous on-camera roles including the role of Evgenya in the award winning I am A Fat Cat. Tatiana is a proud member of Actor’s Equity Association.
About the Artist
Christopher Walker
Christopher Walker lives surrounded by dark forests in Southwest Virginia with his wife, 2 cats, and 7-year-old son — who he’s pretty sure is a nexus of elemental chaos.
