What Should Be Wild

by Julia Fine

  5

  It was a thirty-minute walk from Mrs. Blott’s house to Urizon, but only half that distance through the wood. That morning I’d thought about shortening my journey by cutting through, and elected against it out of practicality: Peter would be livid, I would certainly be lost. The trees here were tricky, shifting things.

  Yet after all that had transpired that afternoon, I no longer cared. I left Mrs. Blott, Matthew, and my father behind and marched into the forest with Marlowe as my guide. He showed no remorse as he trotted along with his usual happy posture, tail upright and swinging. He dodged fallen branches and bulldozed mushroom spores, all the while dragging the shinbone, muddying the tissue at its knee. On occasion, he encountered a stubborn rock or root pile and had to turn back and nudge at the leg with his nose, or prod at it with one of his front paws to help it overcome the obstacle.

  I followed a safe distance behind, squeamish at the sight of the limb. I tried to disassociate the object in front of me from the woman who had raised me from an infant, tried to lock up thoughts of her passing in the same way we’d store canned foods in the cellar, or chopped wood in the shed. With every step I tried to crush my grief, my anger. I envisioned the emotions writhing deep within me as a living being half buried, gasping for air as I pressed the heel of my boot to its throat, pushing it deeper.

  Thump went the shinbone, over sharp, angled rock face. It should bleed, I thought; why did it not bleed? Upon returning to Urizon I would ask Mrs. Blott about her previous experience with corpses, her hypertension, blood in female bodies. But I could not ask Mrs. Blott. I was dizzy, I was so very tired.

  Why could I not ask her? Because Mrs. Blott was old, because she, herself, was tired. Oh, but why hadn’t she called me when she felt the end was coming, before she sat down in that rocker, if she’d been so tired, if she’d known? What good was I to her if she chose not to use my only talent? Was she so ready to be rid of me? Was she so frightened, so angry with her lot in later life, that she, like Mother Farrow, like my own mother before her, would rather “pass on”? I was angry with her, suddenly. This old woman who’d pretended to care for me, secretly counting down the days until one of us was gone. She had not told me about her nephew, Matthew. She was the closest thing I would know to a mother, yet it seemed that she had not thought me her family at all.

  At first, frustration fueling me, I barreled through the forest. But as the rain softened, so did my resolve, and after some time walking I was calm enough to finally take stock of my surroundings. I was deep inside the forest; I could not see the cottage, Urizon, the road. Here, the birds were mostly quiet, the animals waiting out the weather. The longer and farther we’d traveled, the taller and the thicker the trunks of the trees, the hungrier the moss at their roots. I saw myself quite small amid the vastness.

  Marlowe paused to relieve himself, laying the shinbone at my feet. I looked up to try to find the sky through thickly clustered branches, and saw only brief patches of storm-foreboding gray. I could not tell what time it was or how long we’d been walking, and my stomach kept reminding me it needed to be fed.

  “I want to go home,” I said to Marlowe, who had crept over to nuzzle my knee. “I’m tired. Take me home.” In answer, he licked my proffered hand with a sloppy tongue, collected his new toy, and continued, pausing to be sure I was still following behind. I wiped my hand on my skirt.

  I felt that Peter must be worried. It would have taken him a moment to recover after I’d left, from my outburst and from Marlowe’s odd behavior, but when he realized I had meant it, that I actually had gone, he would be frantic. Peter was frightened of the forest as I’d never known him frightened of anything; he’d spent many years instructing me to be afraid as well. I was trying to distract myself from mounting panic when I tripped over something on the ground—the shinbone.

  Marlowe had dropped the limb at the base of an old oak tree, and was digging furiously in the soil at its roots. It was a massive tree, the trunk easily fifty times the circumference of my body, the bark wizened and textured, bulbous with knots. Branches spread above us, wandering so far from their base that were it not for the sturdy junction of appendage to trunk, I might have worried they would tumble down and crush us. I whistled to Marlowe, which normally would have been enough for him to drop what he was doing and heed me, but he paid no mind.

  “Marlowe,” I said, giving him another whistle and then patting at my knee. Nothing. I could have tried to wrestle the leg from him, but even as I stepped forward, I realized that I didn’t have the stomach for it. Marlowe panted through his work, and I suddenly felt I could not take another step, that I could hardly remain standing. I smoothed out my jacket and collapsed next to the oak tree, so tired that I almost touched it in the process.

  As Marlowe dragged the shinbone to his newly burrowed hole, I closed my eyes and slept.

  MY STOMACH WAS still grumbling, and in a sort of haze I saw myself surrounded by the foodstuffs of the forest, at the head of some glorious table that had sprung from the ground fully formed. In my vision I was feasting on venison by the fistful, eating it raw between handfuls of bright berries while a shy young roe deer looked on. I was at once, in the way that such dreams can happen, both within my body and beyond it. I could taste the gamy flesh and the tartness of the berries, and simultaneously see myself as if from far away: my eyes shut in ecstasy, the mix of blood and juices a deep red as they roiled past my chin. My hair was darker than I knew it to be, loose and waving, and on my head I wore a crown made of what looked like polished bone. The greens and browns and gray mists of the forest, the starkness of the red on my pale skin, the sense that I was caught in something merciless and wild, sent a chill through me. The other self lowered her hands. She turned to me. Her palms and her face were dirtied with blood; her eyes were closed, her eyelids veined and thin, almost translucent. She opened those eyes with their dark thick lashes, and instead of my own green ones they were deep and endless black, no whites at all, just darkness.

  I RECOILED FROM my dream into waking and found myself sprawled on the tree root, my neck and chest sticky with sweat. I wiped crust from the corners of my eyes and spittle from the sides of my mouth. Turning, I found Marlowe covering his prize with soil.

  “Are you finished, then?” I asked him, forcing off the unsettling vision. “Let’s go back.” I vaguely remembered having come through two large spruce trees, and looked around to try to find them.

  I blinked. Was I still dreaming? Not only did I not see the spruces, I was clearly not in the same wood in which I had fallen asleep. The trees just in front of me seemed to have doubled in size, and had somehow arranged themselves along a new path. The light had changed from gray to lavender. It was very disconcerting. I looked for the black-eyed girl I’d seen in my dream, thinking perhaps she might be real after all, but she was nowhere to be found.

  My hands clenched, reaching for Marlowe: I knew my dog’s stance when he was frightened, and was comforted to realize that his breathing was calm. In fact, he seemed almost excited. His tail shot upward and it beat against my knee.

  Unlike the muddy mess I’d slogged through earlier, our new route was carpeted in fresh green grass. I crouched down to examine it, and caught a whiff of lushness I associated with the very height of summer—once the plants and trees are fully grown, before the sun has bleached them. One particular blade was so bright a green, so delicate and sweet, I could not help but reach out to it. My fingers hovered so close I thought I felt the pulse of its life, a quick humming vibration animating the air between us. My father’s words from hours before returned to me: “We must not have the hubris to think we can bend nature without consequence.”

  But why should nature constantly bend me? I sucked in a sudden breath, and before I could reason myself out of it, reached down to grab a thick handful of grass.

  It remained green.

  I gasped, then frowned, disbelieving, and released the clump to twirl a single blade between my fingers. I held i
t so close that I could feel my own breath warm against my hand. The grass was rubbery, young, not yet hardened into the papery blade it would become. I knew that if I pressed it in my palm it would release its verdant juices and would smear into a fragrant, grassy pulp. It was softer than expected, as smooth as the untraveled skin between my breasts, and I felt the same thrill of connection that I might were a hand to reach out and caress me. My breath grew soft and shallow, my lower pelvis tight. I shuddered, and felt myself opening to experiences I had not yet imagined.

  Ahead of me, Marlowe barked, beckoning. Heart full and fearful, I stood up to follow him, sliding the bit of grass into my pocket.

  The nascent path wound in a mazelike spiral that seemed to take me deeper toward the heart of the wood. Instead of gnarled branches, the trees here had smooth and stately trunks. I reached out to stroke one, and was pleased to find that my touch had no effect.

  After years of tripping over things and taking special care to watch my footfalls, of plastic tarps and varnishes and waves of shame each time I looked down at my body, I had stumbled into a world in which I was welcome. Here it was easy to push past my thoughts of Mrs. Blott, her nephew, my frustrated father and his rules. I touched as many tree trunks as I could, stroking their bark, kissing them. They grew so tall that their leaves hung far above my reach, or else I surely would have touched those too. At one point, overcome, I lay facedown in the grass, inhaling its sweet scent, removing my jacket and spreading my arms, moving them up and down by my sides like a child making an angel in the snow. The blades tickled my bare arms and neck. The world that I had watched from my window, separated from me by protective glass, became real in those moments; the difference between reading a story and embarking on adventure, between dreaming a kiss and receiving one.

  Eventually, urged on by Marlowe’s whimpering, I stood to follow him farther. Faint birdsong reached us through the branches. I noticed a spotted chipmunk dash across my path, a plump pink earthworm slink over my shoes. Luscious moss blanketed stones, ferns growing intricately patterned in soft, paler greens beside them. Unlike in the forest by Urizon, no dead leaves crowded the ground. The air was clear and sweet and dry; the sun was tender.

  Not twenty minutes after we had started down this trail, Marlowe barked with glee and turned a corner, disappearing from view. I raced to join him, and to my surprise saw Urizon just ahead of us, marvelous against the evening sky.

  Shifting Galaxies

  It has been so long. It has been such a long time. Alys can stand, still and silent, for years, watching the trees sway in the breeze. She can practice the movements—a flick of a wrist, a glyph drawn in the dirt—that bring her closer to her clansmen. Ask the oaks to stop and listen, call the poplars from their clearings, murmur old words that tell even older stories. The twitch of a finger reroutes a vine that has trapped a little wood mouse. A whisper calls forth a limb that holds a nest of owlets: their mouths stretched wide, forever waiting for their mother to return. Alys struggles to remember a life before this forest, cannot remember why she conjured this eternity. She is ready for the life that comes after.

  The girl in the bower, the girl with red lips, creamy skin, smooth black curls—the girl who does not shiver in her nakedness, but wears it calmly, proudly. If Alys leans in very close, she can watch the girl’s heartbeat flutter behind the supple breast, the dark pink nipple, the row of ribs climbing from waist to sternum. If Alys leans in very close, she can hear the purr of the girl breathing, in and out, out and in. If she holds her hand up to the lips, she can feel the bursts of breath, vital and warm.

  The breath stops. The girl coughs.

  Alys steps back. Something is coming.

  THE OTHER BLAKELY women sense the change—the networks of roots and fungus that keep trees in communion sending messengers: vines tugging their shirtsleeves, paths rerouting at their feet. Come at once, the wood says, something is different. Eager, the Blakelys arrive.

  From close by—could it be coming from within?—a distant, inconsistent shuffling, strewn with labored breathing and occasional canine grunts, sounds from the foot of the girl’s pallet. In front of the women the dirt swirls without impetus, collapsing in on itself like a home with a rotting foundation. The child Emma gasps. Imogen reaches for her hand.

  It is a sinkhole, thinks Imogen, an undertow of darkness that has finally come to eat us. She gives Emma’s stubby fingers an instinctual pat.

  “Where is it all going?” Kathryn asks of the twigs, the unmoored seedlings, the scurrying wood lice that struggle to escape the deepening hole. Mary kicks Kathryn’s ankle with the heel of her boot. “Ouch!”

  “Hush.”

  An object is appearing, a shape molting out of darkness, shedding soil. At first Imogen thinks it a leg of mutton, a rotting piece of someone’s half-eaten supper. But as it emerges, this odd flower, from the ground, Imogen sees it is the knee joint of a human: a wrinkled calf, an engorged ankle, five plump toes. Imogen shudders. Her eyes dart around the circle to gauge how her companions will respond. Though they’ve spent centuries together, they have long behaved as bears, solitary creatures mostly content to roam separate domains. Imogen does not know their histories, though she assumes all have known some sort of darkness. Who comes from carnage? Not Kathryn, who hides her eyes under her palms. Not Mary, who swallows heavily, nor Lucy, whose pale face tinges green. Not Emma, who cries out again, but this time finds no comfort. Perhaps Helen, unblinking. Or Alys, who stares at the shinbone, eternal serenity unwavering.

  Swift as it appeared, the shinbone once again is gone, buried under the dirt that rises fine as sand into their eyes.

  “Look,” says Emma, moving forward. She takes a step to break the circle but is brushed aside by Lucy, sweeping ahead, hovering over the black-eyed girl, whose lids, for the first time, twitch faintly of their own accord.

  The girl’s eyes open. They are an inky pitch, an endless dark.

  Leaning down toward the black-eyed girl, Lucy tells her, “Do not be afraid.”

  6

  Moving forward, I frowned at Urizon’s silhouette, so abrupt, interrupting the tree line. I looked back to view the path I’d traveled, trying to determine how I’d suddenly found my way home. But though I’d only gone a foot or so since turning that last corner, behind me, the route had quite fully disappeared. My spiral path was gone; the wood was the same unruly wilderness it always had been. When I turned again to observe it from the lawn, it looked as it had looked for all sixteen years of my life.

  I squeezed my eyes shut, let them open, but the trick had no effect. There was the knot in the old oak tree where robins made their nests. There was the rotted, peeling fence post, cocked at its odd angle. Everything was as it should be, as it had been when I left.

  Was the other wood a dream, I wondered, a delusion? Chilly and damp, I put on my coat and peered through the tangle of trees. Nothing seemed especially unusual. I reached into my pocket for the blade of fresh grass I had hoarded upon its discovery, and understood the extent of my desire only once it emerged, still green, unaltered by my hand.

  My forest was real—a shadow forest that existed alongside my everyday wood, intangible and shifting, but always beside me. It had not exiled me entirely. I wanted to return at once, but I supposed that its caution was fitting: I was a foreign body, to be excised until the wood knew more precisely what I was. It had spat me out and then contracted its long tongue, but was not closed to me forever. The blade of grass was proof.

  My stomach gave a violent growl. Soon, I promised myself, I would return to decipher the wood’s meaning, but for now I was hungry, back at home, shivering. Dry clothes and dinner were my most pressing concerns.

  I stepped over the fence onto the Blakely property and climbed the steps to the back terrace, suddenly worried over what I would tell Peter about the day’s events. He would be angry, of course, that I’d so obviously disobeyed him, but I hoped that the distraction of my new discovery would save me from a lecture. A lamp
was on in his study, and I expected to find him there frowning, muttering, absorbed in the papers he’d been staring at that morning when I’d left. He’d be mourning Mrs. Blott as much as I was, though he likely wouldn’t show it. Perhaps I could be of some comfort.

  I hung my jacket on a hook in a back closet, where it dripped comfortably onto Peter’s boots, and made my way down the dark hallway, rehearsing an explanation of the afternoon inside my head:

  I got lost chasing Marlowe.

  I must have acted out of shock.

  I had a bizarre vision of a girl who looked just like me, picnicking with terrible manners.

  The last I spoke aloud as I reached the study door and pushed it open with my shoulder: “I’m very, very sorry, and prepared for any punishment you’ve . . .”

  My eyes took in the window, cracked open, a bit of breeze rustling the pages of a manuscript. The dirty dinner plate, its contents now congealing. The tea gone cold. Peter’s binocular contraption zipped into its canvas case, abandoned in his armchair. Peter, himself, nowhere to be found.

  “Hello?” I raised my voice so that it echoed through the hallway, into the dark kitchen, the library. I moved through the house, flipping switches to fill sitting rooms with light, one after another. All were empty.

  The car was gone from the driveway, and I realized he must still be at Mrs. Blott’s house, handling whatever it was that one handled after natural death had occurred. Perhaps he was needed for paperwork, had decided to sit with the body, might have been asked by the nephew to stay. My breath caught a bit at the thought of the two of them together, tending to the joint that had once held the limb now buried by the oak tree. Did they cover Mrs. Blott in her favorite quilt, the blue one with the little white knit flowers? I hoped that they had. Maybe even now Matthew and Peter were digging as Marlowe had dug, forcing their full weight behind their shovels, flicking raindrops from their cheeks, preparing a new home in the ground for what remained of Mrs. Blott. I knew that when I reached the cottage the true loss of her would hit me; the fist of my sore heart would unfurl and stretch its fingers into the empty spaces her passing had left.