Stray Woods

By Shaun Tennant

While on the run from the law, Josh Farewell decides to visit a park he remembers fondly from childhood. However, things have changed over the years, dead bodies are turning up, and Stray Woods Park is now home to something sinister. Something that won't let Farewell leave alive.

A "Farewell Reality" short story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shaun Tennant
• Release date: Aug 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476431376

Shaun Tennant

Shaun Tennant is a young writer who grew up in Ontario, Canada watching as many movies as possible. After an education in screenwriting, Shaun turned his attention to writing narrative genre fiction.

Book preview

Stray Woods

A Farewell Reality story

by

Shaun Tennant

Smashwords Edition

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Stray Woods

Copyright © 2012 by Shaun Tennant

Cover Photo Spooky Vultures © verinize - Fotolia.com

Smashwords Edition License Notes

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It had once been a place of such happiness and joy, but it was now a place of evil. That’s what Josh Farewell thought as he looked through the chain-link fence surrounding what used to be a playground. For forty years, children had run down well-worn paths through the thin woods to the central playground equipment, where they could climb and swing and chase each other. Josh had been one such child.

The playground equipment had changed since his own childhood—wood replaced by plastic, chains replaced by solid, brightly painted steel—but you could still see the purpose in in it. It was built for fun, for play, to elicit laughter and shrieks of joy. That would never happen again. The joy had been stripped out and would never return. Josh didn’t even really blame the murder for that. He blamed the town.

The playground was surrounded by a small forest, and on three sides of the woods were houses, on the fourth side a road. A path had been hammered into the ground by generations of running shoes and bike tires, following the three main pathways. Two paths came in from the road, converging on the playground; while the third ran from the playground to the back fence, where it opened to a paved catwalk that let kids walk through to the neighbourhood behind the park. Together, the paths formed a Y with the equipment at the centre.

Sometimes, kids would stray from the paths, running through the woods when there was snow on the ground, or colourful fallen leaves in autumn. But most of the time, kids stuck to the pathways, never really spending much time