Hello, gentle listener, and welcome to Nocturnal Transmissions, the fortnightly podcast that brings you dark tales, both old and new, performed by your humble narrator.

Kristen Holland. If you go down in the woods today, you're sure of a big surprise. If you go down in the woods today, you better go in disguise.

For today we play Angela Chews.

The Boyfriend Game. game. Melody is in love.

Or at least she thinks she is. She's seen him at the park before, but only from a distance.

It was a trick, one she fell for, to call the woods cluster dam a park. Park suggests a square

of uniform manicured green, not this sprawling hilly acreage overrun with trees and

overgrown hiking trails. At the center of the tangled wilds, a lake gaped, wide as an open

mouth, the glistening dark jewel at its heart. Melody first visited the park as a retreat from the claustrophobic walls of her subsidized student dormitory

and accidentally strayed from the path. She ended up wheeling herself in circles, the trail back to town

obscured by deciduous shade, bruising her ankles on the rocks and roots. But she came back. She likes it here now,

sticks to the paths, finds it helpful to cycle through the nuances of her assigned readings

while she walks alone in the quiet. She rarely encounters other people, which surprises her, given the frequency of her visits.

Where are the svelte female joggers with their muscled thighs?

The sororities of stay-at-home moms pushing their bulky strollers.

The high school kids skipping class to smoke weed and make-out.

Almost everyone's backyard eventually melts into a high school kids skipping class to smoke weed and make out. Almost everyone's backyard eventually melts into a horizon of trees around here.

Maybe the woods just don't hold the same appeal,

not the same allure as they do for a girl who grew up surrounded by asphalt and overflowing dumpsters.

Most often she's seen him at the lake's perimeter, his angular silhouer to cut out slashed into the thick

grey fog that boils from the surface of the water. Sometimes she spotted him above, surveying the park from atop the sparse crest of a steep hill,

or glimpsed him far below, a shadow cutting across one of the thicket choked trails.

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