Devoured 

Devoured is a short monologue spoken by Betty, 19, who lives in Pendragon County in east Ohio.  The year is 1938 and Betty makes a little girl doll as she speaks a “once upon a time” story about an old Swedish woman who lived in the woods and made dolls and had many dogs.  One day the old woman fell and broke her hip and the dogs devoured her and became wild.  Later, a girl walked into the woods with her little sister and thought she saw an old man motioning to them to go deeper into the woods.  The old man resembled a photograph she had of her grandfather, the man who had wanted to buy the old woman’s property to build a hunting lodge but who had been struck by lightning and became delusional.  She had been told that her grandfather, Judge Rooney, had died in 1889, but she thought he might still be alive and was beckoning her to go deeper into the woods.  The girl got very lost and realized that her little sister had disappeared.  The woods became foggy as the girl called out for her sister and tried to find her way out of the woods.  When she sat down in the thick gloom to rest, she thought she heard something moving in the bushes near her and reached out her hand to find a little pile of bones.  In the morning her father found her lying in a field near her house but they never found her sister.  The girl makes dolls now, Becky tells us, and can only make out shadows in a world that looks to her like a wilderness of thick dense fog.  She and the doll look out into the darkness.  The doll has no eyes.  Light fades and goes out.