Carved into the sign is a word, a welcome for those who have made it this far: PASTORAL.
Yet the man standing before me looks anything but pleased by my arrival.
He looks terrified.
FOXES AND MUSEUMS
Excerpt from Book One in the Eloise and the Foxtail series
Eloise crawled from beneath the sunflower-embroidered blankets of her wood-framed bed, and tiptoed across the floor. The fox spooked at her movement and its face vanished from the other side of the window.
But she caught sight of it again, darting through the backyard, past the crooked swing set her father had built two summers ago, to the border of the woods. It paused at the spiky line of trees, beckoning her, its eyes just as wild and vibrant under the moon as they were at the window.
She glanced at her cherry-red rain boots beside the bedroom door, feeling the pull to chase after it, but when she looked back into the yard, the fox was gone.
Slipped into the dusk and dark.
PART TWO THE FARMHOUSE
THEO
I like the way her head looks resting on the pillow.
A hard, white shell with a cascade of auburn hair draped over her sun-kissed shoulders. When she sleeps, sometimes I don’t recognize her: She is a stranger in the bed beside me, breathing softly, her chest expanding like a bird pressing against its cage. She is a curiosity, a woman who feels like an endangered creature—a thing I don’t deserve.
A summer wind blows through the open windows of the old farmhouse, and in the distance, I see the line of broad oak trees that border the community—a line we do not cross.
Calla wakes, a dimple drawing inward on her left cheek, eyes pearly and clear in the morning light, drawing to mind the images I’ve seen of the ocean: specks of light winking across the roiling surface. I curl my toes, as if digging them into wet sand—a sensation I’ve only ever imagined.
“You couldn’t sleep again last night?” Calla asks, running her fingers through my hair. She moves with the slow gentleness of a wife who can’t see the thoughts strumming inside my skull—the ideas I would never say aloud, the places I sometimes imagine beyond the walls of Pastoral.
“I was thinking about winter. About the snow,” I answer, a strange little lie. But my wife doesn’t like it when I talk about the outside. It irritates her—her ears drawing down, the line between her eyebrows puckering close. So a lie is easier, as lies usually are.
“Winter won’t come for another few months,” she says softly. Plenty of time to prepare firewood and stock the cellar for the cold months ahead.
“I know.”
She slips free from the sheets and walks to the closet, the old wood floor moaning against even her softest footsteps. She is pretty in this light, younger-seeming than her true age. She pulls on a pair of jean cutoffs with holes worn in the pockets from too many washings, and a thin cotton T-shirt. Our clothes are in endless need of mending, of stitching, an ongoing effort to make everything last for one more season.
Whatever we have is all there will ever be.
Calla looks out the window at the fields beyond the farmhouse, the chores to be done, fruit trees to be harvested, laundry on the line to be brought inside. She places her hands on her hips then turns, crossing the room back to the bed—her movements slight and easy. She is comfortable in this house, inside these walls. I peer up at my wife and at first her expression is flat, giving nothing away, but then a little smile curls across her upper lip, as if she’s forgiven me for my silence. Forgiven me for whatever wandering thoughts were flitting around inside my head. She kisses me full on the lips, tracing her finger up my temple, coiling it in my dark hair. “I love you still,” she says, a reminder.
At times, in the long hours of late afternoon, it feels as if we are living a life we have agreed to share but we can’t remember why. A sentiment I suspect many married couples feel after the years have worn thin. But now, in these early dawn moments, my wife feels familiar in a way that makes my heart ache just a little. A soft pain that’s hard to describe. “I love you still,” I answer in return.
“I’m meeting Bee in the orchard,” she says, lowering her hand from my face and walking to the bedroom door.
I nod.
Perhaps we are like two old people who have lived together too long, a lifetime, a hundred years or more. The cobwebs of tiny mistruths, little papercut deceptions, rooted in our joints and slung between rib bones. We’ve built ourselves on these microscopic lies, so small we can’t recall what they were. But they’re there all the same, binding us to one another. But also ripping us apart.