“I know at times we all feel frightened,” Levi continues, taking two more steps to the front of the stage. “But I assure you, if we do not breech the barrier, we will not risk bringing the illness back onto our side.”
The group falls into a long, stale hush. Feet no longer shift in the dirt, bodies do not adjust in their seats. Even I feel the tug of Levi’s words, leaning forward to absorb whatever he will say next, each word like cool water on skin. “We will burn sage along the perimeter again, just as we have before, and push the illness back into the trees.”
Several women near the front of the circle whisper softly, and I can picture their nodding heads, their lips pinched in agreement. Levi’s always been a good storyteller—even when we were teenagers, he’d tell long, meandering tales to the younger kids—and there was something about the way he spoke, the lilt that hung against each word, the magnetic, enchanting gleam of his eyes drawing you in. He’s even better at it now, more skilled. He’s had practice.
But I don’t stay to listen to the rest of Levi’s speech.
I push away from the corner of the building and count my steps back to the edge of the woods, where the path leads away from Pastoral to the farmhouse. I’ve heard all the stories before, the warnings: how several of the first settlers back in the early 1900s became sick, how they fled the woods soon after, abandoning everything they had built here.
And when Cooper bought this settlement fifty years ago, the founders of Pastoral didn’t believe in the old stories—not at first. They didn’t believe there was an illness in our woods. They passed freely through the forest, they visited the outside towns, and new arrivals were welcomed. It was a community with open borders.
But we stirred something loose in the trees. We awoke a disease that had been asleep.
And now we live in fear of something we can’t even see.
Levi will tell this story tonight; he will remind us of what’s at stake.
But my own mind rattles with other thoughts, with a memory: Travis Wren—whose truck Theo found down the road. He came through the forest, past the boundary, and he arrived at Pastoral. It wasn’t long ago, a year, two at most. He was in our home, secretly, hiding in the old sunroom, curtains drawn and grass growing up beneath the floorboards. A ghost we didn’t know we had.
And then he simply vanished.
Maybe he was sick. Maybe he brought it past our walls and then died. Maybe something else happened. Something I can’t pinpoint—something I can’t quite remember. And the not remembering is what’s unhinging the gears and cogs of my mind. Shaking me apart. Making my skin itch and burn, a piece of charcoal sizzling inside my rib cage.
I can feel the hole where the memories should be, gaping, bottomless.
I move quickly down the path, forcing my legs to move faster, tree limbs catching the strands of my hair, tugging at the blue-stitched hem of my dress. My hands wave out in front of me to keep myself on the path, to keep from veering off into the trees and getting lost.
Night creatures stir in the underbrush along the trail, woken by my footsteps, while an owl swoops low over the ground in search of prey, of rodents scampering across the moonlit soil. I can hear its wings, the slicing of air, the intensity of its eyes scanning the dark.
I hear it all.
But beyond this sound, in the distance, I hear something else—a biting, gnawing ache. I can hear the trees cracking, fissures twisting up their trunks, splintering apart. They are sick, bloated with disease.
The sound echoes over our valley, a warning that we are not safe: The rot is looking for a way in.
My legs break into a run.
I sprint all the way back to the farmhouse, panicked, feeling my way up to the porch and yanking open the screen door. Clumsy and hot with sweat, I dart up the stairs, taking them two at a time, my hands skimming along the wall until I find my room. I stumble inside and crawl into bed, pulling the thin summer blankets up over my head.
I am a little girl again. Afraid of the dark.
Afraid of the forest.
Of the things I can’t quite remember.
FOXES AND MUSEUMS
Excerpt from Book One in the Eloise and the Foxtail series Eloise lies awake for three nights in a row, waiting for the fox to return.
And when it does, peering in through her bedroom window, Eloise is ready. She springs from her big-girl bed, already in her red rain boots, and rushes out into the night. She chases the fox past the border of the lawn and into the trees beyond her family’s home.
But the fox is quick, disappearing into hollowed-out logs and through patches of wild boar nettles. Several times Eloise loses sight of him, but always catches a flash of his scarlet fur. She chases him over a river, where she sees her wild reflection staring back, hair a nest of knots and leaves. She follows him through a gully where bright yellow poppies have bloomed all at once, to a stump coated in pale blue snails, crawling and slithering over the dead wood.