Appleseed

by Matt Bell

  The rain falls fast enough to flood the swamp, drowning the barely visible humps of spongy marshland; defeated, Chapman turns back the way he’s lately come, deciding too late to return to their newest nurseries, where Nathaniel might be waiting for him. With the first step to the east, Chapman’s most lasting desires return, coming one after another: his wants for his brother’s company and comforts, and his want for the Tree, his story he’d pretended he could’ve abandoned, if only he’d found another to take its place. If Nathaniel is ready to apologize, then Chapman will forgive him; if Nathaniel is angry, then Chapman will beg forgiveness. It doesn’t matter, not anymore, as long as they are reunited, as long as they can resume their life together.

  He tells himself these tales but they do not satisfy, because as greed resumes so does his anger at his failures, at this Territory that has so far denied his desires: “I want what I want,” Chapman screams, howling hoarsely into the pouring rain, his declaration swallowed by the storm, unanswered by the world. “I want what I want!” No voice responds, and no beast or bird flees from his sound; already the animal world is sheltering, as he should be. He stomps east, sulking, as the cold rain and blackening sky further dampen his spirits, even more so once already heavy rain transforms into a deluge accompanied by a spectacle of lightning and thunder.

  Horns lowered, Chapman slogs through the drowned black forest, its already perilous navigation made more difficult without light, with sound reduced to the cacophonous noise of heavy water cascading through the high canopy. Late in the day, soaked and shaking, he comes on the ruins of a failed inhabitation, a squat cabin collapsing against a high curve of riverbank, the holding bounded on three sides by fallen fences and on the fourth by a stand of corn gone wild, other untended crops making a chaotic go. Normally he cannot stand to step inside any man-built structure, but this house is almost broken, likely already inhabited by enough animals to be part forest. Whoever fled this place will not return. No one will object to Chapman’s trespass, if he waits out the storm here, drying his fur inside these creaking logs. He reaches the cabin stoop in a bound, then pushes the unsettled door from its hinges. Stepping through the thick cobwebs hanging from the exposed rafters, he considers what’s left, all that couldn’t be carried back east by some family fleeing the unfriendly frontier: A rough-hewn table, bench seats on either side. A bed frame but no bedding. A cradle, kicked over by a man or else upturned by some curious creature. The droppings of rats, dried kernels of corn. Surely the settlers here had wanted too, had believed they deserved everything Nathaniel plans to earn; but in the end all had been taken away, this life they’d led not lost but abandoned, as this unlucky family fell to ruin.

  Thunder rolls, and after the booming peals have passed, Chapman hears through the open doorway something equally as unexpected as this distant homestead, a sound coming fast through the trees: a song, sung by a single voice, the song no hymn or folk ditty but a dirge droning on in no language Chapman knows, maybe no language at all.

  Was he wrong that this homestead had been abandoned? Are its owners returning through the rain? He turns back, considers the fallen door, the abandonment within, then, heart pounding, he steps back out into the storm, shielding his eyes against bright amber flashes of forked lightning, as thunder for a moment obliterates all other sound.

  Despite the fur-flattening downpour, Chapman’s hackles rise. He grinds his teeth, sets a cavitied molar to complaining; he shakes his head, grabs his horns in distress, moans against the fast-approaching song, louder even than the rain ceaselessly drumming against the cabin’s tin roof. Visibility becomes broken, difficult, staccato, strobing; lightning flashes and the song is closer; it flashes again and the song arrives. But it’s no settler family that brings it.

  A lightning bolt strikes the ground nearby, its shock backlighting the scene: here is the abandoned homestead, its weather-flattened corn, its crooked fenceposts; at the barely discernible line between the farm and the forest, three bulbous figures step forward, their bare feet toeing the broken barrier of the half-there fence, their naked white skin brightly ablaze against the dense black swampland.

  At the sight of Chapman, each of the figures howls in an inhuman voice, shaking loose a tangled veil of thick dark hair, the wet mess falling over her face and shoulders, her naked torso. As wild a creature as the faun is, he’s not half as wild as these three. All three women are fleshily voluptuous, ripples of seductive fat flowing over powerful muscles, mountains of engorged breasts, and a sunken valley of belly, skin slick as damp rot, looking the spongy consistency of poisonous mushrooms. Their tangled manes cascade to their hips, they wear no clothes except the mud of the swamp and whatever bleak things they might feed upon: wet smears of rabbit ichor and robin yolk, the blood of fox pups dragged loose from buried dens.

  Witches, Chapman nearly screams, a word he knows only from stories Nathaniel’s told him, the rumors other men have repeated across the Territory. The three are horrible, but they’re not what scares Chapman most, they’re not what pulls a frightened whinny from his throat. He squints through the slashing rain to see the song isn’t coming from their mouths but from a shape the rightmost figure holds in the crook of her naked arm: a disembodied head, decapitated but still singing, its deathly pale face half obscured by stringy blond hair, some of it gathered into a messy topknot. Bloodshot eyes roll in their sockets, the nose snots and bubbles, broken veins fracture sunken cheeks, but the mouth is open and singing, impossible as this is, for a head attached to no lungs.

  The witch takes the head by its topknot, aims it at Chapman. As the singer’s gaze focuses on the faun, the voice shifts its aim in his direction: its voice is a beautiful nightmare, a rising, keening dirge, a droning repetition of unbearable loss. Chapman staggers as the drone rolls over his body, his bowels loosen; he fears he’s seconds away from vomiting or shitting or both. “Who are you?” he moans, then flinches as the witches answer, their sound unlike anything he’s heard: the witch on the left speaks like moss covering a stone, like claws pushing through fur, a voice that’s also her name; the center witch names herself the crackle of a great spotted egg hatching; the rightmost is called the unheard sound water makes rushing through underground aquifers, the secret sloshing between the pillars of the earth. Their voices primordial, pre-language, born of dirt and rock, earthquake and storm and struggle.

  Now the beheaded singer’s mouth shifts, slackening, stretching into a round shape, making the only name he has to offer, a letter that is not all of an answer. The singer sings on, the song not a name but a dream given voice until its substance fills Chapman’s skull, until his teeth grind and his bones burn and his skin shakes on its stitchings, until the dream-song becomes story, a flickering accusation spanning horn to spiraling horn.

  The First Faun

  The Mythic Earth

  Long before mortal Chapman, the first faun was born into the simultaneity of myth, a woodland being unlike any other, made to shepherd the flocks, to watch over the bees and the vineyards and the orchards, and to entertain the gods, to dance and to lust, to revel and to feast. But in the days of the myth into which the faun was born—in the eternal day that is the truest nature of myth—the faun was never only reveling or only feasting, so that at every moment he reveled, he also feasted; at every feast, he was also cavorting with the wild women of the woods; and wherever he was he was also an invited guest at his nephew’s wedding, watching his nephew vow himself to his niece, watching his niece vow herself to him; and when he was at his labors, taming his bees and pruning his vines and teaching men how to produce beer and mead, even then he was already in the wedding tent among all the other thirsty guests, lifting a wine barrel overhead to glean its last purple drops; and he was also outside the tent beneath the fullest moon he had ever seen, a moon waxed full, a moon already waning—and what is a moon waxing and waning but a reminder of mythic time, how time in a story such as this paradoxically passes even as it repeats?—and he was stumbling on unstead
y hooves toward the bride, his niece, his nephew’s wife, his cousin too, a nymph and a man and half a man, all related because in those days so close to creation weren’t we all each other’s nephews, all each other’s nieces, all birthed moments ago by the same meddling inconstant gods; and the faun was also stalking closer, lolling his long tongue through the bristle of his wine-stained beard; and he was also holding his tail in his hands, the telltale appendage twitching in his grip; and he was also standing right behind her, his niece now a new wife, a nymph of the woods made to appear gorgeously human in her wedding dress, rustic lace and dowry bead; and the faun was also pausing, weaving hoof to hoof, wanting to be anywhere else but there, wanting to be a character in any story but his own; because while he was at her wedding he was also attending her birth, where she was gifted the remarkable childhood he’d been denied; and he was also walking through her dale, the meadow she’d been charged to tend while a child, a meadow around which an apple orchard sprouted and grew and fruited; and he was also playing with her in her sun-dappled dale, where as a small girl she loved to dance with her feet atop his hooves, laughing with joy in her heart and fear in her eyes, fear of the future they shared, because she too was in every moment of the myth at once; and always he was smelling her bloom in that same place, as it would be sometime later (and at the same time), when she had grown into the first years of her womanhood, a teenager picking dale flowers, their blossoms scented like her skin, the faun caressing the flesh of petals carrying the scent of her hair, everything in her domain sticky with her bright pollen; and as the faun fled the dale he took with him a stolen handful of her soil, thick black loam smelling of his niece, earth he coveted because he did not want to covet her; and all those times the faun was in the dale he was also already standing in the bright pavilion, he was there with all the other guests watching his niece speak her wedding vows, her voice lovely but not as lovely as her husband’s, because whose voice was better than his, this man whom the gods had given their best music, who the gods said spoke for them and for all men; and at the same time the faun was reaching out to her at the far edge of the wedding tent’s penumbra of lamplight, at the very border between this civilized space and the wilder myth beyond; and the faun was overcome as he’d been the day he’d held her soil to his nose, the day he’d put it in his mouth, the day he’d swallowed the dirt down into his gut; and that day was this day, even though it was long ago and this was now; and his niece was then and always turning toward him, her eyes wet already with grief for what she knew would happen next, what was already happening, had already happened—and no matter how many times the faun was there, which is to say always, always he never knew why she was crying, what had been said to her inside the wedding pavilion to make her flee, he knew only that it was not he who’d caused her exit—and she said, Uncle; and she said, Uncle; and she said, Uncle, no; she said all three things at once, she was always saying all three—and he said, I only want to comfort you, a lie written for him by another—and always he was stepping closer, his throat cottoned with wine and his nose full of her scent, the blossom and the loam, and in those days what a faun wanted was what the gods wanted him to want; and wasn’t what happened the fault of the gods; and wasn’t it their fault even though they always said it was his; and in this moment, almost his last in the myth even though it had happened many times before, he was always saying the words he could not bear to remember but could not forget (and he was apologizing already), and she was always stepping away from him (and he was saying no too), and he was always grabbing her by the soft flesh of her arm, his fingers hard as branches, his claws sharp as thorns, and he was always saying, I am not myself tonight, and she was always pulling away, slipping free from his grip; and he was always tearing at her gown as he tried to stop her escape; and he was always speaking and his niece was always screaming; and always from behind them he heard his nephew’s voice, the call of his niece’s past and present and future husband, himself the best hope of man, a hero of the civilized world, always charging across the damp grass, always drawing his sword, always crying out in his voice like no other, a prophet’s voice, a voice the gods said would make the future; and always the whole host of the wedding was always following the groom, taking up their own arms against the faun; and always the faun knew he was caught; and always he was already regretting what he had done, what he had been made to do; and always the faun said he was drunk and always he said he loved her and always he said forgive me and always he stepped away and always she ran, even as he withdrew, and always with her next step she tripped, always she tripped, over his retreating hoof, the hoof upon which she had once stood to dance (upon which she was even in that moment dancing); and always she fell down the hill on which her wedding pavilion was perched (always she was falling), the brocade of her dress ripping on branch and thorn, and always his gaze was drawn to her face, then to her upturned feet flinging loose her wedding shoes, then back to her face, her face, her lovely face, her expression stunned the exact same shade of surprise he’d seen on the day of her birth (which was in every way this day); and always at the bottom of the hill there waits a pit of vipers, and only the gods know why, only they know what necessary sense the snakes make in their story, the pit placed exactly in the right place at the very creation of their mythic world, meant by the gods for this instance and this instance alone; and always the waiting vipers attack not in anger but in fear of the falling body, the snakes instinctively rising to sink their many fangs into her flesh; and always the faun and his nephew and all the gathering wedding host cry out as the bride is bitten, as the many doses of venom enter the most beautiful of the nymphs, whose name in one telling means “wide justice” and in another “the world,” and again as she is pulled from the pit by her groom, whose sweet voice becomes forever sweeter in its sadness and also terrible beyond belief, for what a monster is any man divorced from justice and the world; and all the while the faun laments, all the while he falls to his knees, all the while he is ashamed; and always when he looks up he sees a host of men gathering around him with their swords, always he assumes he’s once again about to die.

  In this story the faun was born into, that he was even then living in its entirety all at once, in his myth he dies, then and there, by the righteous fall of many swords, all the host cutting and stabbing and rending his body, until all that’s left is to cut the horned head from the neck, a blow saved for the faun’s beloved nephew, the new widower made fearsome by his gigantic grief, this greatest of all singers already beginning to voice his eternal elegy as he lifts his blade.

  This death happens over and over, it is always happening, the faun is always dying, but then one time there’s instead a glitch in the myth, a mistake in the weave, a skipped stitch or a dropped note: this time, as the faun reaches the climax of his myth, as his niece falls into the pit of vipers and his nephew starts his dirge, this time instead of repeating, the story ends—and in its ending the faun is only broken and screaming and painfully alive, bereft of every horror and help born of simultaneity, ripped from the endless now’s complicated joy.

  Now the wedding host flickers, now the faun’s niece and nephew flicker too, and through the strobing first note of the nephew’s song come three other guests the faun would’ve sworn had never been there before, not any of the innumerable times he’s ruined this wedding: the three witching women who are sometimes the fates and sometimes the furies.

  Wordlessly the three witches measure the faun’s punishment against his crime. Without explanation they cut from him his misdeed, then him from the story. Against his screaming pleas they stitch up what is left, leaving the faun’s shape broken, leaving his simultaneous self set adrift into linear time.

  The faun will live, the witches say, but not as he had.

  Afterward the faun made his way a year at a time, into the vast uncertainty of limited life. Now time took the faun only forward, now he had only his memories to tell him who he’d once been. But as he aged—as his fur tur
ned gray, as his teeth loosened and his horns hollowed, indignities he had never imagined suffering—even his memories grew less reliable, more inflected by doubt and despair. Could it have been true that even in her youth, the nymph he called niece was already afraid of him? That she loved him as an uncle and feared him as her attacker in equal measures?

  When as a child she danced with him in her dale, he was already killing her. Could that be correct? She’d known and he’d known too: what would happen, what had happened, what was always happening to a faun and a nymph and a man, all wedded to one another by circumstance, by myth. How was it fair that he be held responsible? How could anyone be expected to pay for crimes committed only because he couldn’t help being born into his inescapable story, without the agency to escape into some better tale?

  At the end of his myth, the witches had hurt the faun, but when they cut him from the story of his birth, they’d also given him choice, free will, control, all too late to do him any good.

  As the faun died, old and alone, barely able to still believe in the looping life he’d lived inside the myth, still he wondered: Why hadn’t the witches interceded hours earlier, at the beginning of the wedding instead of at its end? Why hadn’t they come when his new free will could’ve saved his niece, his nephew, even himself, when his injury at the witches’ hands might’ve saved their world such death and grief? Why give him his choice only after it was too late for him to change the ending?