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them lining up to be defined, pinned down, understood, and dismissed.
    He squatted down in front of her and pulled her hands from her face. “Julie was my friend. You’re just something that came out of the woods and stole her.”
    Julie.
    Why do little girls get lost in the woods?
    “Sammy!”
    She rolled over and pulled her knees in under herself. Her butt rose into the air, but the weight of her tree pinned her face to the mud and wet leaves and pine needles. Her voice was muffled as she struggled and called to him for help.
    Sam backed away from her. Somewhere under that mass of muscle and sticks and leaves, Julie sobbed. What had he done? Sam took another step back. He should go to her now. Take it all back. Make it all better.
    He turned to run.
    Julie roared.
    Sam’s foot tangled in a deadfall, and he tripped. He snatched at the air and felt something squish between his fingers like the mud of Mad Dog creek. He saw Julie’s broad green leaves sweep up and away into the sky as he plunged toward the hard ground of the town square. He heard the townsfolk gasp.
    One of her pale hands darted through the air and snagged his ankle. Julie lowered him to hang upside down by one leg in front of her awful face. Her other arm snaked out, and she grabbed his other ankle and scissored his legs open and shut, open and shut. Her lips and teeth were smeared with Big Betty’s blood. She closed one eye in a terrible wink, then opened it again. A rumbling came from somewhere deep inside of her.
    “Julie,” Sam said and let himself go limp. She would crush him like a pig in those huge jaws. It was no more than he deserved.
    Julie released one of his legs and took him under the arms and turned him upright. Easily, like a kitten. She shook him a little and pulled him in close. With an effort that twisted her face and pushed her tree higher into the air, she puckered her purple lips. When she kissed him, her kiss covered him from head to toe. Then she put him on his feet and let him go.
    Sam stepped away from her. A trembling overtook her, and she shook from the top of her tree down to her feet. Her huge head suddenly moved up the trunk of her tree like an elevator. When it reached the top, her leaves became a thatched roof, and her eyes went blank and became windows and her mouth became a door. Her feet went yellow, grew talons, and her trunk split into two giant chicken legs.
    The witch’s hut ran out of town, kicking up dust and scattering the crowd, and as it left, Sam thought he saw her in the window, the sudden white flash of her smile, the black shadow of her hair. She would be waiting in the woods.

Pretending

    T he missile silo was Stuart’s idea. It was his turn to make up a holiday tradition. The silo belonged to a man named Johnson who had moved his family back to Cheyenne. Johnson and his wife had spent a lot of money fixing the place up, and they’d given it their best shot, but it hadn’t taken long to discover that a missile silo was an awful place to raise a family. Now he rented it out to people like Stuart.
    The party this year was Stuart and Marilyn, Bill and Elizabeth, and Lewis. Bill was a lawyer and Elizabeth taught math at the same college where Stuart was in Psychology and Marilyn, when she wasn’t on sick leave, was a research biologist. Lewis was a computer programmer. Sally was missing this year. She’d left Lewis and gone back to New York in the spring.
    Last year it had been Elizabeth’s turn to come up with a candidate tradition. She’d taken them to the Mojave where they had jumped out of an airplane. Since none of them had done it before, they jumped in tandem with instructors snugged onto their backs. Lewis had made a lot of bad jokes about being ridden to earth by the sky patrol. The instructors were all getting good xmas eve overtime but none of them seemed happy about it. On the way down, Marilyn had wet her pants and hadn’t spoken to any of the others for weeks afterwards.
    The year