by Tabitha Vohn
***
The smell of incense and herbs had been heavy. Just as before, the members gathered themselves in a circle amongst the stones and, just as before, she sat on the outcroppings, not wanting to intrude but only to observe. Janson stood among them, his gaze meeting each of the faces before closing his eyes. The others did the same. All was quiet. For unending minutes, the only sound was the gentle hum of the crickets, and the occasional hoot of the owl. Then the drumbeats began. Then they began to rock and sway. Tabitha closed her eyes and imagined fathoms of tortured souls rising out of hell as the veil of the dusk closed in upon the wails and primal utterances, and the smoke burned her lungs. Hands lifted and heads shook. It took on its own semblance of wild, mad music, lost in the sounds the soul makes when the shame of self refuses to care. Some of them would wriggle themselves into exhaustion, like a mad fit, falling upon the ground not inches away from the flames. Some were on their knees, flinging their neck and shoulders back in feverous gyrations. Their shadows danced in the flames like faery concubines. Tabitha let her mind and all its confusion drift away, content to be smothered in the temporary madness of others.
The woman she had been a year ago would have run shaking in the opposite direction, and would have believed in the mystical properties of rosaries and holy water. She would have prayed to forget what she could not understand, and therefore feared. But now, in the clamor of their chaos she felt whole, centered. She didn’t need to fall away into their frenzy of some feigned enlightenment to feel transplanted. This was witness to another world, ancient and crude, and for these moments she was out of the space and time of her own tattered existence.
An hour would pass before they all lay, breathless, depleted, against the cold earth. There would be blissful, utter quiet for some time. Then, the drumbeats would take on a sensual note. They’d start low and then work louder and faster as the cloaked figures would begin to rise, languid and silkily, from the ground, remembering one another.
Tabitha felt the familiarity of those beats in her blood. Her bones ached with their clarity. She rose to go, feeling the danger of what was to come, no witness necessary. As she stepped out, a black robe was cast at her feet. She turned to see the shimmer of Janson’s skin in the firelight, burning brown and rippling like and animal’s hide. He burned his sight into her. “I don’t feel it’s necessary to speak with you about the expectations of residency here, or of respecting our practices…”
She draped the robe on a nearby log with deliberate calmness, and walked away. As the rest of the men and women would cast away their robes, the women would run first, into the woods or into the fields. The men would give them a head start before pursuing after their desired one (or two, or three). Tabitha would not go to her cabin, not yet. Once out of sight of the circle she would run, up the mountainside she had come to memorize and could navigate even in the dark, thanks to her walks in the early dawn. She would cross the creek and scale a Cliffside which was overrun with a moderate, rushing waterfall. She would climb into the small alcove behind its spray where- after the first night that she had experienced one of the community’s gatherings- she had stowed an extra sweater, a blanket, and a small paring knife. She would wrap herself in the crisp cool of the water and misty air, and listen to the cries that reverberated off the trees and rose out of the grass like phantoms.
She thought of Janson, and stifled a laugh, thinking of his ridiculousness. How foolish she had felt after that long talk, knowing she had exposed a precious pocket of her heart to this man who, while offering what seemed like sage advice, had been arrogant enough to cast a robe at her feet. She hoped he was very cold, and thought about how she would have readily erased all the confusion and heartbreak she had created, would have thrown herself a slave at her lover’s feet, one of many, before ever letting the bastard who had stolen her brother- her only family, forever from her life- place one trembling member on her.
Janson went to her cabin first. He forced the door as gently as possible, checked under the bed and in closets. He looked in the window of Sephora’s cottage, and saw Sephora knitting with a pile of children sleeping around her feet. He scaled the mountain, along the path that Amelia said she always takes. His skin burned with cold while his body pulsated with fire. Finally, chilly and spent, he happened upon Ursula and Ambrose, and joined them.
Tabitha crept back to her cottage as the early morning’s light muted the darkness, breathing in the mask of silence that closed in over the coal, snuffing out the lingering smell of smoke and the ghost-echo of gasping release. She walked past the open graves of lovers, their pale corpses left to rot in the dew. The click and moan of her front door was in itself a melody against the hum of unspokenness. She took in her kitchen: the pale pine walls and floors, the crimson scarf thrown over a wing-backed chair, the threadbare rug with a ladybug nestled on its hem, her armor gleaming like sea glass; of clean dishes in the cupboards, the cast iron faucet catching a ray of light, her gaudy shoulder bag by the door, reminding her of a moment ago, of forever ago. A crow cawed from outside her window, and a brown cat bathed itself on the sill.
She wished she could freeze this moment, and live forever within its portrait of contentment. She wondered at how all things seem to blend in perfectly with happiness when there are no other living beings to spill the paint and smudge the edges. Why so much of the earth is filled with water, and we are all forced together on our mad little islands, and why some of us bother with this attempted escape from humankind and all its ugliness, when it becomes apparent too well and too soon that we can never outrun it, as we cannot outrun ourselves. “I don’t feel it’s necessary to speak with you about the expectations of residency here, or of respecting our practices…”
As she crawled wearily into bed, Tabitha sighed; it was time for her to go.