{"id":1906,"date":"2021-11-21T15:07:14","date_gmt":"2021-11-21T15:07:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=1906"},"modified":"2021-11-21T15:07:29","modified_gmt":"2021-11-21T15:07:29","slug":"1906","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=1906","title":{"rendered":"The Wild Wood by Mildred Clingerman"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Wild Wood<\/em><\/strong> by Mildred Clingerman (F&SF<\/em>, January 1957)1<\/sup> opens with a family trailing around town looking for a Christmas tree. Margaret, the mother\/narrator, has had enough, but their insistent four-year-old daughter drags them down a side street, and they end up at \u201cCravolini\u2019s Christmas Tree Headquarters\u201d.
While her husband and daughter go into the depths of the barn-like structure to find the perfect tree, Margaret is surprised by the owner, Cravolini, who touches her forearm\u2014this gives Margaret a brief vision of the pair of them in a cabin, and the feeling that they have met before. Her husband interrupts the encounter before she can make sense of it, and she goes to join the rest of them:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Don led her down one of the long aisles of trees to where Bonnie and Bruce were huddled beside their choice. Margaret scarcely glanced at the tree. Don was annoyed with her\u2014half-convinced, as he always was, that Margaret had invited the pass. Not by any overt signal on her part, but simply because she forgot to look busy and preoccupied.
\u201cDon\u2019t go dawdling along in that wide-eyed dreamy way,\u201d he\u2019d said so often. \u201cI don\u2019t know what it is, but you\u2019ve got that look\u2014as if you\u2019d say yes to a square meal or to a panhandler or to somebody\u2019s bed.\u201d pp. 124-125<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The sexual frankness here is not the first instance of this in the story\u2014during an earlier embrace, her \u201cfrank desire\u201d is referred to\u2014and both pale in comparison to the second encounter between her and Cravolini while she is looking at four blue candles:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDo you like those candles?\u201d he asked softly.
\u201cWhere is my husband?\u201d Margaret kept her eyes on Bruce\u2019s fine blond hair. Don\u2019t let the door open any more. . . .
\u201cYou\u2019re husband has gone to bring his car. He and your daughter. The tree is too large to carry so far. Why are you afraid?\u201d
\u201cI\u2019m not afraid. . . .\u201d She glanced fleetingly into the man\u2019s eyes, troubled again that her knowledge of his identity wavered just beyond reality. \u201cHave we met before?\u201d she asked.
\u201cI almost saw you once,\u201d Cravolini said. \u201cI was standing at a window. You were reflected in it, but when I turned around you were gone. There was nobody in the room but my sister . . . the stupid cow. . . .\u201d Cravolini spat into the sawdust. \u201cThat day I made a candle for you. Wait.\u201d He reached swiftly behind the stacked packing boxes that held the candles on display. He had placed it in her hand before she got a clear look at it. Sickeningly pink, loathsomely slick and hand-filling. It would have been cleaner, more honest, she thought, if it had been a frank reproduction of what it was intended to suggest. pp. 125-126<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The rest of the story tells of further visits over the years, with Cravolini repeating his behaviour and Margaret unable to tell her husband. Then, on the climactic visit (spoiler) she meets the sister at the door of the store, who directs her to a bed at the back. When Margaret gets there she realises she is now the body of the sister, and she watches herself leave the shop with her husband and family. Cravolini has \u201cthe proud, silly spirit\u201d he desired.
I\u2019m not sure the possession ending makes much conventional sense, but the story works on a dreamlike\/nightmare level, and is notable for its unconcealed sexuality.
*** (Good). 3,450 words. Story link<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. I recently bought this writer\u2019s collected short story volume, The Clingerman Files <\/em>(Amazon UK<\/a><\/span> \u00a32.99).<\/span> I suppose I should really get into it, but I rather like coming across stories like this, and Stair<\/em> Trick<\/em> (F&SF<\/em>, August 1952), one by one in the wild.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Wild Wood by Mildred Clingerman (F&SF, January 1957)1 opens with a family trailing around town looking for a Christmas tree. Margaret, the mother\/narrator, has had enough, but their insistent four-year-old daughter drags them down a side street, and they end up at \u201cCravolini\u2019s Christmas Tree Headquarters\u201d.While her husband and daughter go into the depths […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[506],"tags":[426,24,501,25,504,505,12],"class_list":["post-1906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mildred-clingerman","tag-426","tag-3-2","tag-christmas-tree","tag-fsf","tag-mildred-clingerman","tag-possession","tag-short-story"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1906"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1906\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1912,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1906\/revisions\/1912"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}