Air escapes my throat. “Fine.”
I hear Calla and Theo leave the house through the back door.
But I don’t sit and wait for them to return, I slink down the hall, the wound on my ankle where I tore it open against a rock still stings when I move, but not enough to stop me from venturing outside and up the path to Pastoral.
Tonight is the end of the ritual.
Tonight, Ash and Turk will be pulled from the ground and we will know if they have the pox inside them. If they’ve been cured or not. If they will be allowed to live… or not.
When I reach the gathering circle, I stay back in the trees, out of sight. The sun is nearly set and I can feel its serrated edges of light breaking across my skin, warming the parts of me that Levi will never touch again.
Levi.
I haven’t seen him since I told him about the baby, since he said that he doesn’t love me enough to stay with me and raise our child. Since he broke me open. And still, he is a dichotomy of pain and devotion inside my ribs, my heart beating against these two emotions: the weak-kneed desire he stirs loose inside me and the grating anger at the back of my teeth.
I want to hurt him, and I want to sneak up to his front porch and beg him to love me still.
I hate it. I hate the way he makes me feel.
A hush sinks over the group gathered at the circle around the Mabon tree. I can’t see the two men buried in the earth, but I can hear their low, labored breaths, their struggle to draw in air. Their heartbeats have slowed, the cold of the earth pulling the life out of them.
I strain, trying to hear any hint of the illness, to know if it’s truly inside them, but every breath sounds raw and serrated, and I can’t be sure. Infected or not, they sound like they’re dying.
Levi emerges, walking to the Mabon tree.
The others shift on their wooden seats: bare feet against the dirt, toes wriggling; fabric scraping together as arms are crossed; throats cleared. While my own body fidgets, my mind bulges with a thousand things I want to scream through the trees at Levi. But I stay quiet.
“It’s been many years since anyone has left our borders,” Levi begins. He doesn’t know how wrong he is. “And many years since we’ve had to perform the ritual.”
I hate how it feels, listening to the oration of his words, the swooping cadence of each vowel. It makes me feel weak, my eyes heavy in a way that’s hard to explain, like I could slip back into the gravity of his arms and believe anything he said. I could fall in love all over again.
This is what he does to me: this man whose baby grows inside me, fingers and toes, a tiny warbling heart. This man who loves someone else.
I press my palms to my ears, muting his voice, and blocking out the rush of wind through the trees. I remind myself of what he’s done to me, and the familiar hurt rises again, the hate finding structure and meaning inside my chest. This is what I want to feel—not the other thing. I want to loathe him with a deep, wretched pain that cannot ever be undone.
I release my hands and the rustle of the trees fills my ears again.
“Now,” Levi continues, “we will see if these men have been cured. Or if the pox has already rooted itself inside them.”
A dull silence falls over the others, a collective breath held stiffly in dry throats. And then another sound, the heaving of two men being pulled up from their graves. Of dirt sloughing away. Of ropes grating against limbs. Of Ash and Turk moaning against the effort.
Someone, Parker I’d guess, and maybe Henry, are tugging against the ropes, which have likely been looped over the branches to help hoist Ash and Turk from the ground. They are being pulled upward by the same ropes that bind their arms overhead—a method to avoid touching the men at all. To avoid contact if they are still infected.
I feel myself leaning closer, away from the tree line, straining to hear. To understand what’s happening.
Someone is crying among the group, a woman: Marisol, I think, Turk’s wife. Perhaps she shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t witness this—someone should take her away, but the weeping continues and no one stops her.
The limbs of the Mabon tree creak strangely, the ropes bearing too much weight, and my body cringes against the sound. The men are hanging now, suspended, arms overhead. I wish I could see them, look into their eyes and know if there is darkness in them.
“Their blood will reveal the truth,” Levi says. Even at this distance, I can hear his heart rate rise, a club against his ribs—the tension building inside him for what he must do next. He moves beside the two men and I know he holds something in his hand. A blade. A knife. A way to cut through skin.