This is the thing he’s been keeping from me, hidden from view, but always there just the same. A lie I sensed, felt in his palms every time he touched me, masked behind half-closed eyes, where he thought I wouldn’t see.
“Maybe I’m immune,” he continues. “Maybe I can’t get it.” He seems alight suddenly, eyes widened, like he’s been holding this in all this time, and now he can’t wait to get it out. “I’ve never seen anything out on the road, not until last night. It was just sitting there—a truck—and I don’t think it’s been there long. A few years at most. There were only a couple seasons worth of dead leaves on the hood.”
The roar in my ears grows louder, fear mixed with hurt: Theo has lied, and worse than that, he has risked his own life.
“Someone just left it there,” he adds, eyebrows drawn upward. “Someone named Travis Wren.”
“I don’t care about the truck.”
“He didn’t just vanish,” he goes on, ignoring the hurt rising in my voice. “He either went back down the road, or he came to Pastoral.”
I look to the door, biting my bottom lip, terror ebbing in my mind, making it difficult to think clearly. “There’s no one named Travis in the community,” I say. We shouldn’t even be talking about this. He shouldn’t have gone over the boundary, shouldn’t have risked everything, only to find some worthless old truck and a photograph.
He scratches at the back of his head. “I know.” More footsteps creak upstairs, Bee moving down the hall to the stairs. I should shout up to her to stay put, to not come any closer, because Theo might be infected, but her footsteps stop. Maybe she’s retreated back into her room.
“No one new has come to Pastoral in over ten years,” I tell him. Not since our borders became unsafe. When the rot edged so close to our community that we had to mark a line around Pastoral that we would never cross, or risk getting sick.
“Maybe he came and we didn’t know,” Theo suggests, his voice tremulous, unsteady, like he doesn’t quite believe his own words.
“If a man came wandering up the road, you or Parker would have seen him at the gate.”
Theo’s mouth turns down.
“If someone new came,” I continue, hardly taking a breath. “We’d have a community gathering, we’d perform the ritual. We’d have to know if he was sick.”
“I know,” Theo answers, looking down at the photo again.
“You risked your life, you risked everything by going past the boundary,” I tell him, tears wetting my eyelids, the floorboards feeling as if they’re swaying beneath my feet. To imagine him stepping over the boundary, his heart beating in his chest, lungs gulping in the night air, forces a spike of nausea into my stomach. I can’t even walk within a few feet of the boundary without fear rapping at my rib cage: a dark hole of unease widening inside me. We have been taught to fear the trees, but this fear feels as if it were born inside me, taken root long before the first stories of an illness began sweeping through the community. I fear what lies beyond our boundary as though it already lives within my dreams, always there, trying to draw me out into the dark.
Yet my husband has walked over the boundary every night for a year—a whole year. As if it were nothing. As if he wasn’t afraid.
“Whoever that man was,” I begin again, “he probably left his car and walked back down the road, away from here. And maybe that photograph was his wife, or his girlfriend; it doesn’t matter.” My voice sounds weak, splintered, and I wipe the tears from my cheeks.
Theo looks to the window over the kitchen sink, but he doesn’t speak—as if all the words he had planned to say, to justify what he’s done, are now trapped in the attic of his mind. And I wonder if the rot might already be inside him, making holes in his lungs, turning his blood the color of a black winter sky. I wonder if it’s already too late.
I turn away from him, knocking over a dining room chair, before I push open the screen door and step out into the dawn light. I descend the porch steps, past the garden, now fragrant with basil and chamomile and lavender, where the hens peck at the ground, plucking worms and seeds from the rows.
I hurry away from the house, toward the pond, the morning birds singing from the trees and a chorus of frogs erupting from the shallows.
I think I hear Theo say my name behind me. I think maybe he’s stepped out from the house onto the porch, coming after me.
But when I glance back, he’s not there.
BEE
I heard them arguing.
My sister’s razor-edged voice bouncing along the high walls of the old house. The timbre of each word like a blackbird screeching from the pines in the heat of afternoon. While Theo’s words seemed to stall in the air, as if he was unsure of them. Like he was saying things even he didn’t quite understand.
Theo went past the boundary.
He walked up the road and found a truck abandoned in the forest. And he may have come back with illness tiptoeing down his spine, into the deepest part of his bones.
Disease. A word that lingers in the throat after you’ve said it. A word spoken too often within the community. A threat that’s always close: blood in the stomach and lungs and sometimes in the eyes. Weeping, weeping. But the blood is not crimson, cut-from-the-flesh red. It’s black—rotting, virulent. Thick like soil after it rains, an awful sight. A memory you can’t shake once you’ve seen it.
We call it a disease, but its true scientific classification is unknown: spores or virus or bacteria, we have no idea. But it rots away your insides. It begins in the trees, turning the leaves spotted and decayed, then the bark begins to peel away, revealing pale white centers, sap weeping down their sides: a last cry for help, wounds that will never heal. The disease hangs in the air from these open wounds, waiting to be breathed into lungs, to touch bare skin, to be passed from one organism to another.
It’s a kind of blight that the founders had never seen before in the outside. Something new—anomalous. And it has infected the forest surrounding Pastoral. A barrier we cannot pass through.