I followed a safe distance behind, squeamish at the sight of the limb. I tried to disassociate the object in front of me from the woman who had raised me from an infant, tried to lock up thoughts of her passing in the same way we’d store canned foods in the cellar, or chopped wood in the shed. With every step I tried to crush my grief, my anger. I envisioned the emotions writhing deep within me as a living being half buried, gasping for air as I pressed the heel of my boot to its throat, pushing it deeper.
Thump went the shinbone, over sharp, angled rock face. It should bleed, I thought; why did it not bleed? Upon returning to Urizon I would ask Mrs. Blott about her previous experience with corpses, her hypertension, blood in female bodies. But I could not ask Mrs. Blott. I was dizzy, I was so very tired.
Why could I not ask her? Because Mrs. Blott was old, because she, herself, was tired. Oh, but why hadn’t she called me when she felt the end was coming, before she sat down in that rocker, if she’d been so tired, if she’d known? What good was I to her if she chose not to use my only talent? Was she so ready to be rid of me? Was she so frightened, so angry with her lot in later life, that she, like Mother Farrow, like my own mother before her, would rather “pass on”? I was angry with her, suddenly. This old woman who’d pretended to care for me, secretly counting down the days until one of us was gone. She had not told me about her nephew, Matthew. She was the closest thing I would know to a mother, yet it seemed that she had not thought me her family at all.
At first, frustration fueling me, I barreled through the forest. But as the rain softened, so did my resolve, and after some time walking I was calm enough to finally take stock of my surroundings. I was deep inside the forest; I could not see the cottage, Urizon, the road. Here, the birds were mostly quiet, the animals waiting out the weather. The longer and farther we’d traveled, the taller and the thicker the trunks of the trees, the hungrier the moss at their roots. I saw myself quite small amid the vastness.
Marlowe paused to relieve himself, laying the shinbone at my feet. I looked up to try to find the sky through thickly clustered branches, and saw only brief patches of storm-foreboding gray. I could not tell what time it was or how long we’d been walking, and my stomach kept reminding me it needed to be fed.
“I want to go home,” I said to Marlowe, who had crept over to nuzzle my knee. “I’m tired. Take me home.” In answer, he licked my proffered hand with a sloppy tongue, collected his new toy, and continued, pausing to be sure I was still following behind. I wiped my hand on my skirt.
I felt that Peter must be worried. It would have taken him a moment to recover after I’d left, from my outburst and from Marlowe’s odd behavior, but when he realized I had meant it, that I actually had gone, he would be frantic. Peter was frightened of the forest as I’d never known him frightened of anything; he’d spent many years instructing me to be afraid as well. I was trying to distract myself from mounting panic when I tripped over something on the ground—the shinbone.
Marlowe had dropped the limb at the base of an old oak tree, and was digging furiously in the soil at its roots. It was a massive tree, the trunk easily fifty times the circumference of my body, the bark wizened and textured, bulbous with knots. Branches spread above us, wandering so far from their base that were it not for the sturdy junction of appendage to trunk, I might have worried they would tumble down and crush us. I whistled to Marlowe, which normally would have been enough for him to drop what he was doing and heed me, but he paid no mind.
“Marlowe,” I said, giving him another whistle and then patting at my knee. Nothing. I could have tried to wrestle the leg from him, but even as I stepped forward, I realized that I didn’t have the stomach for it. Marlowe panted through his work, and I suddenly felt I could not take another step, that I could hardly remain standing. I smoothed out my jacket and collapsed next to the oak tree, so tired that I almost touched it in the process.
As Marlowe dragged the shinbone to his newly burrowed hole, I closed my eyes and slept.
MY STOMACH WAS still grumbling, and in a sort of haze I saw myself surrounded by the foodstuffs of the forest, at the head of some glorious table that had sprung from the ground fully formed. In my vision I was feasting on venison by the fistful, eating it raw between handfuls of bright berries while a shy young roe deer looked on. I was at once, in the way that such dreams can happen, both within my body and beyond it. I could taste the gamy flesh and the tartness of the berries, and simultaneously see myself as if from far away: my eyes shut in ecstasy, the mix of blood and juices a deep red as they roiled past my chin. My hair was darker than I knew it to be, loose and waving, and on my head I wore a crown made of what looked like polished bone. The greens and browns and gray mists of the forest, the starkness of the red on my pale skin, the sense that I was caught in something merciless and wild, sent a chill through me. The other self lowered her hands. She turned to me. Her palms and her face were dirtied with blood; her eyes were closed, her eyelids veined and thin, almost translucent. She opened those eyes with their dark thick lashes, and instead of my own green ones they were deep and endless black, no whites at all, just darkness.
I RECOILED FROM my dream into waking and found myself sprawled on the tree root, my neck and chest sticky with sweat. I wiped crust from the corners of my eyes and spittle from the sides of my mouth. Turning, I found Marlowe covering his prize with soil.
“Are you finished, then?” I asked him, forcing off the unsettling vision. “Let’s go back.” I vaguely remembered having come through two large spruce trees, and looked around to try to find them.
I blinked. Was I still dreaming? Not only did I not see the spruces, I was clearly not in the same wood in which I had fallen asleep. The trees just in front of me seemed to have doubled in size, and had somehow arranged themselves along a new path. The light had changed from gray to lavender. It was very disconcerting. I looked for the black-eyed girl I’d seen in my dream, thinking perhaps she might be real after all, but she was nowhere to be found.
My hands clenched, reaching for Marlowe: I knew my dog’s stance when he was frightened, and was comforted to realize that his breathing was calm. In fact, he seemed almost excited. His tail shot upward and it beat against my knee.
Unlike the muddy mess I’d slogged through earlier, our new route was carpeted in fresh green grass. I crouched down to examine it, and caught a whiff of lushness I associated with the very height of summer—once the plants and trees are fully grown, before the sun has bleached them. One particular blade was so bright a green, so delicate and sweet, I could not help but reach out to it. My fingers hovered so close I thought I felt the pulse of its life, a quick humming vibration animating the air between us. My father’s words from hours before returned to me: “We must not have the hubris to think we can bend nature without consequence.”
But why should nature constantly bend me? I sucked in a sudden breath, and before I could reason myself out of it, reached down to grab a thick handful of grass.
It remained green.
I gasped, then frowned, disbelieving, and released the clump to twirl a single blade between my fingers. I held it so close that I could feel my own breath warm against my hand. The grass was rubbery, young, not yet hardened into the papery blade it would become. I knew that if I pressed it in my palm it would release its verdant juices and would smear into a fragrant, grassy pulp. It was softer than expected, as smooth as the untraveled skin between my breasts, and I felt the same thrill of connection that I might were a hand to reach out and caress me. My breath grew soft and shallow, my lower pelvis tight. I shuddered, and felt myself opening to experiences I had not yet imagined.
Ahead of me, Marlowe barked, beckoning. Heart full and fearful, I stood up to follow him, sliding the bit of grass into my pocket.