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Three weeks after I was cut from the earth, I woke in my bed. The sheets felt strange beneath me. The mouser cats felt strange beside me. The house was too enclosed, too empty, and too full. I crawled out of bed and pulled on clothes. My sister Mud slept on the couch. I didn’t understand why, but she was safe so it didn’t really matter. When the sun rose I was sitting on the front porch, my face to the east and the pale dawn sun. And I realized that I was nearly human again. Or could be, if I chose.
Like a flowering plant, a morning glory trying to bloom, new leaves and some kind of odd, tight blooms were all over me, trying to open. I ripped the flowers away and watched them disintegrate into ash and vanish into the land below me. I sat on the porch swing, unsettled and despondent as the sun rose, before I went back inside and sat on the couch, where Mud directed me, to sit and to think. To decide what I needed to do. I hadn’t gotten very far in my plans, beyond some amorphous ideas and visual images. Words were still hard.
I was still sitting on my couch, a blanket over my knees and cats prowling across the furniture. Mud had been banging around in the kitchen for two hours now. The scent of fresh bread was warm on the air. And I felt a car pulling slowly up the hill to Soulwood. No. Not a car. A van. Familiar. This was the first time I had felt and understood sensations that I once took for granted. Unit Eighteen was on the way up. I looked out the front window, wondering what this might mean.
Birds were fighting in the oaks out front. Deer were pawing and eating the grass in the lower part of the yard. Squirrels were picking out nesting sites. The ground in the three acres of yard was warming, the grasses and herbs reaching for the surface and the pallid heat of the sun; the cold temps were gone. Spring had arrived.
And people were coming up my hill. I thought it might be okay for them to come.
Inside, the woodstove had heated the house. The dust that had accumulated while I worked the case was gone. The dishes were washed and put away. The house was neat as a pin. I felt a small measure of pleasure at being able to remember that saying, one of Mama’s, though I’d never understood how a pin might be considered neat.
I had been home for weeks, Mud staying with me, taking care of me. I had no idea why Mud had been allowed to stay with me for so long. She assured me that T. Laine had handled it and Mama and Daddy hadn’t seen me, which was a good thing, as I had changed a lot.
Mud had been busy with more than housecleaning. She had caught up the winter chores in the garden and it felt hopeful and ready for spring. She had also scraped much of the bark off of me, down to the skin below it. Had hacked my roots away. Clipped and cut my leaves. Except for the pale white blooms this morning, and the leaves I sprouted here and there when I slept, I looked almost human again, though my joints were still dark brown with bark-like flesh on elbows, knees, feet, and knuckles. But that was fading, softening, vanishing as Mud rubbed them down with my winter emollient every morning and evening. Overall, my skin was browner. Not tanned, but nut-brown all over, though paler skin was visible at my underarms and in blotches on my torso. My eyes were the glittering green of spring leaves and emeralds. My hair was rougher, curlier, redder and browner in streaks. Most mornings when I woke, it reached the middle of my back and wild curls sprang out around my hairline like rootlets or vines about to burst into leaf. Mud kept the plant parts clipped and I hadn’t told her about the flowers this morning, thinking—hoping—they were just an anomaly.
I believed that in a week or so I would look and sound human to the casual observer. I’d look human, but I was different.
For the last week, as she groomed me like a topiary animal, I had begun to talk with Mud, to understand her words. To remember my human life. My pasts, all of them. My youth. My family. My marriage. Unit Eighteen. And with each memory that returned, Mud and I celebrated. Today, Mud had invited people over. That was why the van was climbing the hill. Company was coming. Ahhh . . . I remembered.
I felt the car stop. Felt people, sentient beings, get out and walk to the porch. Rick. T. Laine. Tandy. JoJo. Not Occam. I didn’t know how I felt about that. Rick knocked on my door.
“They’re here,” Mud sang out, racing in from cleaning the bathroom, which often meant carrying leaf trimmings to the yard. I smiled at the thought. She sped to the front of the house and threw the door open. Let them in. Chattered at them. I studied their faces, which were carefully neutral and noncommittal. JoJo’s head was wrapped in twisted vines—no, they were braids—adorned with beads that sparkled like sun on water. She wore green and black, the color of leaves and dark wood. I liked it. T. Laine was wearing black pants and a thin jacket with a white shirt. She had cut her foliage—her hair. Tandy was wearing browns. Good tree colors. Rick was wearing the same colors as T. Laine, even in his foliage, which was white and black in ribbons of color. It didn’t mean anything that they were dressed alike. And Rick’s leaves— No. His hair. His hair had new white streaks in it. Accomplishment shot through me at the thoughts.
They said hellos, to which I said nothing. They sat. They stared at me as if waiting for me to speak, but I had nothing to say.
Mud had made tea and coffee and now placed a bread plate on the coffee table along with a jar of my homemade jelly. On the plate was a loaf of bread she had made herself and sliced. A stack of plates and forks were nearby. I remembered that Leah had traded a townie for the plates when she was first married to John. She had been proud of the barter and told me about it every time we used them.
Mud went to the kitchen and my eyes followed her. She brought back a cup of coffee and gave it to Rick as if she was his personal servant. Repeated the trip and gave Tandy a cup. But she offered nothing to the women. Church training. I hated it. I felt a spark of disgust and fury, though it fizzled and disappeared. Fury and disgust were human emotions. I hadn’t felt them in a long time.
Rick started talking. “We’re here to debrief. You know what I’m saying?”
A debrief was a summation. I remembered. Mostly. Though it seemed a long time in the past. I nodded again, silent. The front door opened and Soul walked in. She hadn’t been in the van. Soul was a light dragon, an arcenciel. She had flown. I remembered that too and felt a momentary satisfaction that the memory was still inside me somewhere. She took a seat in the rocking chair, watching me, her gray clothing floating with her movements.