“Eat up. Get some rest. I’ll talk to you later,” said Gogo.
16
VERN LAY NAKED in the frost-glazed grasses, hungry for who she was becoming. Wet earth coated her bare feet, back, and bottom; it wedged into her creases, and she let it. In the mud, the border between land and body disappeared.
Icy wind lapped Vern all over and she thrummed. Its caress teased her nipples taut and drew blood to the center of her. She gladly indulged the intimacies the mountains offered her. Not since Ollie had Vern given herself over to pleasures of the flesh, but now, out here in the presence of the fresh morn, among the firs, the warblers, and the tufts of herbage, she could put her fingers to herself and feel.
Was it she who was the fiend? Practically rutting the dirt.
She thought of Lucy, of how she must be now, fleshed out and hot-blooded and mean. Like a storm cloud, she’d hover over Vern dark and ready to give. They’d become new things together, outrunning their childhoods.
Vern prayed for a glimpse of her old friend. She couldn’t control when the hauntings came, but Gogo thought with practice that might change. If Lucy was out there, she was forming memories all the time, and those memories would make their way to Vern. Vern need only learn how to access them; for the seeds of a thousand hauntings hid dormant in her recesses. Underground, an invisible web of mycelium connected Vern to anyone who had or had ever had the fungus.
But Lucy didn’t come when Vern bade, never had—in real life or as a phantasm—and Vern lay alone on the ground with only her base longings for company. She, with the vigor of a young god, fingered herself into oblivion.
She did this every morning. Had done for the last month or two. Since she became well enough to walk without the crutches. Before dawn, she tiptoed outside, undressed, and gave her body over to winter. For three weeks she’d been restricted to the cabin by debilitating pain. Finally free, she was always seeking out moments to taste the outdoors unbridled.
When snow covered the ground, she gobbled packed clumps of it. When the rain made puddles, she sucked up the brown wa ter with lips and tongue. She ate roots and weeds and poisonous berries. Past selves sloughed off, forming a wake of human-shaped pelts behind her. Two months in the mountains, and she was remaking herself anew.
Vern grabbed a fistful of weeds with her left hand as she finished herself off with her right. Her head rocked side to side, and she called out, God, God, God, God, God. She was not invoking any known deity. She was calling unto herself, this new being emerging inside of her. As if by her command, the sky opened up and it began to snow.
* * *
SILVER FLAKES dimpled Vern’s body like lichen on a tree. She quivered atop the earth and it quivered back. Spanning the underground for thousands of miles pulsed silken rivers of filament. They spoke to Vern in the hauntings, and she wanted to speak to them, too—to the antlered beast she’d seen in the woods.
Experimentally, she closed her eyes. Tendrils of invisible mycelial thread prickled her. She could see the whole shape of its body—her body. She was as big as the continent. The earth.
Vern ate with her skin. Mycelia from the dirt traversed the mycelia of her body and fed her the ground. She absorbed broken-down trees, logs, and animal remains into her cells, and for the first time in months her hunger was sated.
The fungus gave as much as it took. She and it were symbionts. Siblings. Had she no life to tend to, she’d lie out here with the mass of it until she was rot, but she had plans to look for Lucy properly and wanted to get back inside before anyone awoke to ask her what she was doing.
Since Gogo first mentioned the possibility of controlling the hauntings, Vern had tried a number of techniques to summon Lucy to her. She cooked Lucy’s favorite meals, gossiped secrets under the blankets that Lucy would’ve loved, and showed the children how to jump rope to rhymes she and Lucy chanted together as young girls. Shake it to the east! Shake it to the west! Shake it to the one that you love the best! These attempts universally concluded in frustration.
But Vern had been keeping track of the days in wait of Lucy’s favorite holiday: Valentine’s Day. Today she was going to re-create a tradition the two shared when celebrating years past and wanted to be alone to maintain the sanctity of it. She’d go inside to gather her gear, then head for the trees while the household slumbered.
Vern’s clothes lay in a pile on the porch swing. She pulled on her drawers and an oversized sweater belonging to Gogo. The cabin didn’t have a washing machine, and Gogo and Bridget relied on a laundromat in Cold Springs to clean their clothes. Vern didn’t have enough items to last between their weekly trips to Washland, and Gogo had lent her a few items to get by.