We are insipid, ignorant, foolish in our attempts to protect the community.
I rise up from the ground and my legs carry me through the meadow to the creek, to the edge of the boundary. With bare feet, I cross the creek at a place where the banks widen and the cold mountain water is shallow, but it still numbs my toes, and I move quickly, stumbling over the smooth stones I can’t see. At the other side, I pause on the muddy bank, not wanting to make a sound.
A foot ahead of me are the boundary trees.
I think of Theo, who crossed down the road and returned unharmed, without sickness inside him.
I step forward, reaching out a hand for the nearest tree. I don’t know the boundary as well as other parts of Pastoral. I rarely come this close to the edge—I do not know these trees, their spacing, their broadness, the sound of their leaves against the midnight air.
My fingertips find a smooth trunk, soft like the surface of young skin. It’s an aspen tree, narrow around but tall, its tiny leaves chattering high above me.
I move to the right, touching the next tree, and then the next, running my hand high over my head and then down again, feeling the bark. I’m searching for something.
Something.
On the fifth tree, I find it.
A laceration in the wood.
The soft bark has been peeled away, cleaved down its center. I hurry to the next tree in the line, and each has been split open, flesh bared to the night air, sap bleeding to the surface. It’s sticky and sweet on my fingertips, collecting beneath my nails—as if the trees were crying, bemoaning their wounds.
This is the sickness. This is what we fear.
I drop my hand from the tree and take a step back.
My lungs are suddenly too tight, and my feet stumble back into the creek, slipping over the stones beneath the water, scraping my ankle bone across a rock and feeling the warmth of blood rising to the surface. I scramble up the far bank, away from the border, away from the rot. My hands fan out ahead of me, searching for something familiar. I find a tree: a broad elm, branches sagging low near the edge of the meadow. I slump down against the trunk, my motions stiff, shivering from the cold of the creek, and draw my knees up close.
Blood drips down my ankle bone, across my bare foot, pooling against the ground, smelling metallic. But I don’t touch the wound, I don’t try to stop the bleeding, I let it spill out of me. And I wonder if maybe I’ll bleed out right here, turn pale and anemic beside the creek, until I go limp. A part of me wishes for it. A soft letting go.
I hold my breath and listen to the trees swaying and creaking beyond the border, sick.
A thought enters my mind: I could pass into the forest, over the boundary, and disappear. Some aching part of me craves it, to let the darkness take me. I press my fingertips together, the sap sticky and wax-like on my flesh, and I wonder if perhaps it’s already too late. Perhaps I have it now. Rot, rot, you’ll soon die of the pox.
A memory wants to break against my eyelids, so close I can almost see it, but then it’s gone.
Hastily, panicked—my bravado gone—I wipe my hands against the grass and dirt, trying to clean away the tree sap. My fingers find my belly, palm flat against my cotton dress, and another sensation ripples over me: I must protect it. The life inside me. So small, only a heartbeat thrumming warmly in my gut.
And just as quickly, I think of Colette and her baby: how desperate she must feel, how impossibly, painfully helpless.
A line of tears streams down my temples to the grass.
I close my eyes, and a warm, drowsy feeling sweeps over me like bathwater. I dream of a lake made of salty, bloodred tears. I dream the world is made of watercolors, sad and dripping, melting in the summer heat.
In my dream, my eyes can still see, and when I look upon Levi standing in the meadow beside the pond, he is fanged and wild-eyed, with lies spitting from the tip of his tongue.
In my dream, he is the thing I fear.
FOXES AND MUSEUMS
Excerpt from Book One in the Eloise and the Foxtail series There was no light in the underground.
Only gloom and twilight from the shaft of moon that shone down through the well. But Eloise had a book of matches she’d swiped from her father’s desk in his study, and when she struck the match, it sizzled against her fingertips and the flame cast eerie shapes up the walls.
The eyes that had been watching her all blinked in unison, then sunk into the dark, disappearing. Whatever they were, they were not gone, only hiding just out of sight.
The fox bounded away, down the rows of museum shelves, where some unknown curator had been collecting artifacts to be preserved. She chased the fox, because she knew this museum held more than old, dust-covered relics. It concealed a book. A book that would know her fate.