I move quickly down the path, forcing my legs to move faster, tree limbs catching the strands of my hair, tugging at the blue-stitched hem of my dress. My hands wave out in front of me to keep myself on the path, to keep from veering off into the trees and getting lost.
Night creatures stir in the underbrush along the trail, woken by my footsteps, while an owl swoops low over the ground in search of prey, of rodents scampering across the moonlit soil. I can hear its wings, the slicing of air, the intensity of its eyes scanning the dark.
I hear it all.
But beyond this sound, in the distance, I hear something else—a biting, gnawing ache. I can hear the trees cracking, fissures twisting up their trunks, splintering apart. They are sick, bloated with disease.
The sound echoes over our valley, a warning that we are not safe: The rot is looking for a way in.
My legs break into a run.
I sprint all the way back to the farmhouse, panicked, feeling my way up to the porch and yanking open the screen door. Clumsy and hot with sweat, I dart up the stairs, taking them two at a time, my hands skimming along the wall until I find my room. I stumble inside and crawl into bed, pulling the thin summer blankets up over my head.
I am a little girl again. Afraid of the dark.
Afraid of the forest.
Of the things I can’t quite remember.
FOXES AND MUSEUMS
Excerpt from Book One in the Eloise and the Foxtail series Eloise lies awake for three nights in a row, waiting for the fox to return.
And when it does, peering in through her bedroom window, Eloise is ready. She springs from her big-girl bed, already in her red rain boots, and rushes out into the night. She chases the fox past the border of the lawn and into the trees beyond her family’s home.
But the fox is quick, disappearing into hollowed-out logs and through patches of wild boar nettles. Several times Eloise loses sight of him, but always catches a flash of his scarlet fur. She chases him over a river, where she sees her wild reflection staring back, hair a nest of knots and leaves. She follows him through a gully where bright yellow poppies have bloomed all at once, to a stump coated in pale blue snails, crawling and slithering over the dead wood.
Finally, she stops and shouts after the fox, “Why do you show me pointless things?”
The fox stares back at her, tail swishing in the air.
“I want to see the darkness that lives in these woods,” Eloise demands. She knows the fox is keeping secrets, refusing to show her what truly resides in the trees. The hidden passageways, the holes in the ground that lead to other lands. “Please?” she begs.
But the fox looks back at her and snarls, as if she is the thing to fear. And it scampers away through a thicket of willows. Leaving her alone in the trees, leaving her to find her own way home.
THEO
I promised Calla I would let it go.
But I sit at the edge of the bed, hands worrying the fabric of the bedspread, and my mind keeps straying over the memory of the truck parked at the edge of the road. Tires sagging, doors unlocked. Travis Wren walked away from it and never went back.
Beside me, Calla sleeps with her face pressed into the pillow, soft, sun-browned skin and dandelion fluff eyelashes—I love her, I’d do anything not to lose her, and yet… my mind won’t stop coiling and uncoiling, stuttering over the things that don’t make sense. Let it go, I repeat to myself.
Calla reaches across the sheets as if she’s reaching for me in her dreams, lulled by the sound of the wind against the walls of the house. I should leave and head to the gate, relieve Parker of his shift, but from my coat pocket, I pull out the photograph: the distorted image of a woman I see even when I close my eyes, even when I try to force it from my thoughts. I trace her forehead with my index finger, her cropped hair, a summer-blond. Someone you’d notice if you passed her out in the real world, someone you’d remember, not because she’s pretty, but because there is a darkness about her, a sadness.
Maggie St. James.
It’s a deceit, holding the photograph while my wife sleeps a foot away. It’s a deceit to the entire community, slipping well past our borders to find it. This truth welled like a bruise in my chest when Levi spoke of trust and community and how we’re stronger together. I have defied the very framework of our way of life. And for what? Because of an itching curiosity, because of a boredom I can’t explain, but is always there. Scratch scratch scratch. Like little mice clawing at my bones.
A feeling that only disappears when I take those few cautious steps down the road.
I hold the photograph closer, squinting down at it. This belonged to an outsider.
He was here, Bee said to me in the kitchen. Travis Wren.
Could he have arrived in Pastoral without us knowing, snuck in through the back door of the farmhouse, then slept in the sunroom? Folded himself onto the old, dusty mattress while the dark fell through the windows onto the floor, then crept back out in the morning before any of us were awake?
The house comes alive at night, creaks and pops with the rising sun, walls breathing like wooden lungs, the roof finding its own weight more and more troublesome as the years wear on. A man could easily live within these walls, couldn’t he? Take up residence at the back of the house and not be known for some time, his footsteps blending in with the settling floorboards.
But why would he do it? Why would he sleep in our house and not just make himself known? This stranger.
It doesn’t make sense.
The creak of a door opening draws my attention to the hallway.
Bee is up.
Her bare feet are soft against each wood stair, and then I hear the click of the back door shutting into place. I stand from the bed and move to the window, watching her shadow scurry up through the meadow, past the pond, to the path that leads to the community.
BEE