What happened in the woods?

“Friends for life, we’ll always have each other’s backs,” Grasu’s words keep ringing in my head.

FRIENDS FOR LIFE BY LAURA BOTA 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 129

“Friends for life, we’ll always have each other’s backs,” Grasu had said, that summer night before Securitatea swept him up and threw him all the way to Gherla, a piece of trash in a garbage bag.

Mother told me Grasu was back home from prison, and yet I hadn’t been to see him once.

Instead of walking by Grasu’s apartment door on my way to school, I’d take a longer route, in the opposite direction.

I was afraid to see what they had turned him into in the prison. I was afraid of all the whats and hows of facing Grasu again.

And now, there he was, shoulders slouched forward, hovering in the hallway like a ghost trapped between worlds.

One at a time I counted his steps until he reached the inner courtyard of our building: our home, a decrepit Secession mansion long turned into social housing, 12 families, multiple generations, crammed into six apartments.

“Grasu,” I slipped his name, a barely formed word through my lips. Or so I thought. To this day I am not sure if sounds could even come out of my mouth. Impossible to say if Grasu even noticed me, while plodding across the garden covered in a blinding whiteness, his steps leaving tar-like marks in the snow, on a trance-like walk towards the bench.

Our bench where we used to play our liar’s dice game every summer until midnight. The same old bench where we would tell each other stories, words pouring out our gaping mouths, like water on a starving plant.

We’d speak of ghosts, and werewolves, of monsters and of men in black. We would recount terrifying stories to give each other the shivers down our spines, about the big black dog -- the devil, according to the folk tales-- that roamed the streets of Bucharest, in search of sinful souls, especially the children’s. And then we’d look through our hearts to weigh the dreadful sins we had committed. At midnight, before the werewolves struck, we’d say goodbye with heavy eyes.