And so her brother Peter ran from the dark woods at dusk back toward their house.
At home, he washed his face and hands. He put on new socks to warm his feet. He ate a cheese sandwich and drank a soda. He turned on the television. Night fell. Somewhere far in the back of his mind, he wondered how long “later” was supposed to be. At seven, his mother asked, Where is Joan? It seemed part of the game. Upstairs reading like always, he said. Take this dinner up to her then, his mother said, your father will be late tonight. And so he took the dinner up and put it in the middle of her bed and shut the door.
The longer he waited, the more interesting the game seemed. Maybe this once he really could save his sister, rather than the other way around. Wasn’t she always the one saving him? When he nearly fell off the roof of the house, having climbed up without permission and slipped, dangling from the eaves, didn’t she make a pile of leaves and hay and pillows and trash to break his fall? When he got locked in the granary just before the grain fill, didn’t she crawl through a sewer, come up through the floor, and get him back out to safety, just before the grain fill siren? When he’d taken up his mother’s carving knife to become a real pirate and not a pretend one, slicing open his own forearm, hadn’t she pushed so hard on the skin of his arm that it left a bruise, taken off her own shirt, and tied a tourniquet before either of them quite knew what that word meant? He thought of all this as he sat in the living room, watching television, into the night.
Near ten o’clock his mother ushered him with her dish towel toward bed, and told him to tell Joan it was time for lights-out as well. Peter said good night, shut his bedroom door, then climbed out of his window with a flashlight and set out to save Joan.
It wasn’t hard to reach the wood. A well-worn path lit up before him. But the wood was dark even in daylight, darker still at night, so finding where they’d left off was a bit more difficult. Tree and wind and night sounds rose and fell. He smelled bark and dirt and wet. He wished he’d brought a coat—the air raised the hair on his arms and he could feel the dampness of the ground cover seeping through his sneakers.
Fear takes hold of children differently. Shadows quicken their becomings, and what might be the scratching of branches or the whistling of wind in leaves and needles can take on the low-pitched hum of a growl or a grunt. Birds that cheer during the day, with their colors and flight, in the darkness sound and look the same as bats. And bats seem everywhere. He was no longer cold. He was sweating. But none of the growing wood terror caught his breath like the image he came upon after climbing a small rise that felt familiar under his feet. A great crackling sound grew as he ascended the hill. Like the sound of a hundred twigs being broken. His heart clattered inside his rib cage. His hands filmed with sweat. A light seemed to glow up and beyond what he could see. At the top of the rise he breathed hard like a runner and his skin itched and something smelled wrong, and he felt light-headed, and then he held all the breath in his body.
Fire.
The forest before him lit up. Orange and white and red. He could see he was in the right place. Where he’d left his sister. Heat burned inside his nostrils, his eyebrows. He held his arm up to shield his face. “Jo!” he yelled. But he could not see her tied to any tree, and all the trees he could see were ablaze, and he saw no evidence of a rope, or the dirty knotted socks of a stupid boy, and he coughed, and smoke stung his eyes and tears wet his cheeks and his throat constricted when he tried again to call out the name of his sister. PD dropped like kindling to the ground in a pile of boy. Crying.
Slowly, the way a morning mist dips, curls, and descends on hills and around treetops, a soft cool wet fell on his crouched back. A low sound rose up from the ground that he could feel in his knees and hands, a vibration of sorts, and then the sound took shape and became a hum, like a thousand children hitting the same low note. The very night gave way to water, different from rain though—more of a full and even wetting than individual drops—and the trees were doused and the orange light slowly turned blue. Blue light bloomed everywhere. He could see the entire forest. His hands—his body—the ground and trees and everything around him was blue. A coolness evened out the heat.
Out of the blue he heard his name echoed.
He raised his head and saw his sister walking toward him, naked. She knelt on the ground and cradled his head and torso in her arms and set him up against her thighs. She wiped dirt and tears, soot and loose hair from his face. The great humming forest song crescendoed, then died down to a near silence. After, crickets chirped naturally.
“I’m sorry,” he said, nearly into her stomach.
“Listen to me,” Joan said. “Something has happened. Don’t be afraid. The earth . . . she’s alive.”
Chapter Eight
I’ve been drawing.
On the walls of my cell. Bodies. Huge Hieronymus Bosch–style scenarios. With the handle of the toilet I broke off. I’ve been thinking about how our desires and fears manifest in our bodies, and how our bodies, carrying these stories, resist the narratives our culture places on top of us, starting the moment we are born. It’s our idiotic minds that overwrite everything. But the body has a point of view. It keeps its secrets. Makes its own stories. By any means necessary.
When I graftstoried her youth, I’d given her a childhood based on the facts we’d all learned from oral stories passed around before the ascension, and from the fragmented videos that survived her capture, torture, trial, and burning.
The story now rose up in welts from my skin. Her childhood at my torso. Here her mother, father, brother. Her town in the small of my back. But her comrade in arms, Leone, I’d written in the terms of a beloved—Leone I wrote at my thighs and up, into the very cradle of my former sexuality.