She had answered the question of money. A minor inheritance, two and a half jobs, a year of tolerating no fewer than six roommates, financial austerity to the point of self-flagellation. She sought (and found) a small New England town whose economy had bottomed out yet still maintained a degree of natural beauty. Wooded dales and at least one river were requirements in her search; mist settling over the river in the morning was a bonus.
She rented a small house at the end of a dirt road. The exterior paint peeled, the carpet and drapes stank of cigarette smoke, and the bedroom’s water-damaged ceiling was mottled like the bowl of a public toilet. Not perfect, but what is? Anyway, it was cheap.
Her funds would last five years. Rent. Food (minimal). Books (maximal). Electricity and heat. She did not plan to get sick.
She thought: I will do nothing but read books.
Or. I will learn how to forage for mushrooms.
I will get up in the morning, whenever I wish, but no later than 9am. I will crack two eggs for breakfast. I will read or stare out the window. Maybe I will go for a walk. I will not eat lunch. In the afternoon, I will read and learn the names of the singing birds and local foliage. Lean meat and leafy vegetables for dinner. As night falls, I will wrap myself in a cocoon of blankets and read by the light of a candle. Sometimes I will gaze at the stars and decipher their constellations. On the coldest evenings, I will plug in the space heater. What a treat.
This is about how it goes for a few months: Wonderfully.
(So long as she ignores the storm clouds that occasionally flicker at the edge of her vision; pretends the shadows lurking in the corners are merely shadows; suppresses any thoughts of the old doubts, the old demons.)
She reads– so many pages of such variety that she schedules her day by genre. Non-fiction in the morning. Pop-trash in the afternoon. Serious literature in the evening. Sometimes she jumbles the order; this feels illicit. She stacks her finished books in an unused room and is thrilled by the desire to fill it.
She walks, often. Her boot prints line the mud along the river’s edge. She imagines beavers snuffling them and wondering at their origin. Are there beavers here? She is miserable at naming the birds.
She collects mushrooms, though she neglects to read a foraging book and leaves them in a row on top of an old fence until such time as she does. Her specimens crumple and slough; the fence becomes layered in fungal slime.
Every two weeks a man in a white van pulls into the gravel driveway and unloads her groceries. He also delivers her orders of books. This is her only human contact. For the first month, she allowed herself a cell phone. Her friends are few and her family ignorant, but she still amassed a number of messages that linked her too closely to a world she sacrificed much to escape from. She let the phone die. Its only useful purpose was looking up unfamiliar words from her books. The next van-load includes a thick paper dictionary and she discovers the pleasure of flicking through its thin pages in search of new meanings.
The town is twelve miles away. She has no intention of visiting it. She supposed that she’d see someone local to the area– hiking, fishing, hunting. But there is no one. This isn’t solitude exactly. There are birds, squirrels and their cousins, deer, trout. There are stars burning billions of miles away that surely have life-supporting planets revolving around them. There are mushrooms. There are the entombed words of long dead writers and even a few living ones. She is not alone, she is full of being.
But a kink appears in her idyll. On some days, the storm clouds grow too big to ignore. Rot creeps. She looks outside, sees lichen like little dead teeth eating up the trees. The old, familiar pangs. She does not leave her bed or open a book. Instead, she spends the day ideating on the various ways she ought to kill herself.
The next day, her routine will commence as usual. Reading the next chapter of a history of 18th century Pacific whaling, dipping her hand beneath the river’s surface until it turns blue, plucking a mushroom that looks like an ogre’s thumb. But a finality now looms.
Books
Quiet
Mist blanketed rivers
Mushrooms
Birds
Constellations
Freedom from relentless capitalist pursuit
All of these things are good. But they feel as accouterments to something else. She is bitter, anguished to admit: There needs to be something more. Or nothing at all.
#
It is a radiant late summer afternoon. Her back is flat on the carpet and her feet rest on the sofa as she reads. The light outside is darkening to honey. The golden hour approaches, which means it is time to switch genres. She stands and puts away her book — a hackneyed tale of an art thief finding love in Prague — and selects a new one from the pile. It is a lesser known work by a famous author. The critics insist it is not his best, but she hopes it will strike her as a thunderbolt in winter.
She settles back onto the carpet. In these moments, turning a fresh page, she is at her most content.
The sound of the doorbell is like a pair of needles plunging into her ear canals.
Bile splashes her throat. Since when did her little house include a doorbell?
It rings again.
“Hello?” calls a man’s voice, bored and hassled. Instantly she hates him.
She remains frozen. There is no legitimate reason for an intrusion. Not here. Whoever he is will go away. A spider crawls from a crack in the floorboards and looks around. She waits.
“I know you’re in there,” sighs the stranger. “Look, I just need to check the meter. I went around back but it’s behind some sort of patio enclosure. I can’t get in. Unlock it and I’ll be out of your hair in five minutes.”
She thinks: A man was creeping around my patio and I didn’t notice?
Then: My electricity is fine.
She wants to tell him: If there is something wrong with the meter, if my outlets are about to spew sparks or all of the lightbulbs are threatening to explode in unison, then should the house burn down with me in it, I absolve everyone of responsibility.
When she doesn’t speak or move, the man beats heavily on the door. The window panes rattle. The spider retreats into the crack in the floor.
“I know you’re in there. I can tell. Make life easier for both of us. Go on and open that back door and let me in.”
Her body contracts in upon itself.
“Let me in,” he repeats.
A cartoon wolf invades her mind’s eye; Or I’ll huff and I’ll puff . . .
The man’s voice moves from the door to the front windows. “Do you think this is a joke? I bet you’re rolling in there. I bust my ass all day long. Do you know how long it took me to drive out to this dump?”
Variations of such behavior repeat for the next five minutes. She offers no response. Her neck begins to ache.
Finally, he huffs. “Fine. Have it your way. I’m leaving. But I’ll be back. You shouldn’t take ignoring me lightly. This is a matter of public safety.”
Gravel spits as a large vehicle roars up the dirt road leading to the main drag. Somehow, she never heard it arrive. She crawls to the front window and peeps out to confirm he is truly gone.
Her shoulders shudder, her hands shake. Why should she experience fear? Can she not master herself?
She knows the answer. She hates the answer: I am an animal. A monkey. My emotional apparatus belongs in the present year. It is shaped — warped, dulled, contorted — by human orchestrated events spanning 3000 B.C.E to 2000 C.E. Some of them good, most of them bad. But. The tissue, the flesh. The brain and its stem. Those were fashioned in earlier eras. They persist unchanged. I experience temporal dysphoria. The body stands still, the mind races ever forward.
Now she must suffer the indignity of a sore neck, sweaty pits, and adrenaline withdrawal. As though some asshole who wants to check her meter was a saber-toothed tiger.
She storms from her home. At the river’s edge, she raises her hands above her head and hurls the dictionary into the turbulent water. Monkeys do not require dictionaries. The tome bobs underwater. It resurfaces, spine facing the sky. Were a drowning mouse to encounter the dictionary, it would scramble aboard. A lifeboat. Of course, the mouse would still die. Just slower.
She finds herself pacing the dictionary as the current takes it. Her fists clench. She can see where this is going; likely she already knew as soon as she picked up the book on the way out the door. It is as though she is an actor in a play. She has read the script and found it wanting, yet continues the performance night after night. When the dictionary reaches a shallow stretch of river, where the banks narrow and stones protrude like abscesses, she sloshes in after it. A foot away from the book, the depth unexpectedly plunges. She tumbles into the water. It is mid-September. The leaves haven’t turned yet, but they soon will. Frigid water envelops her. She becomes aware of the delineation between her outer layers of skin and the warm organs pulsing beneath. She cannot tell up from down. Her ankle catches between two rocks and for the second time that day, her body insults her with another dose of fear. It is sharp and acrid, twisted like chicken wire. It tangles her insides and every cell is fish-hooked by a demand: Breathe. Right now. Or else.
Her trapped ankle orients the earth to the sky and she simply. . . stands. Her head and shoulders crest the surface. She obliges her wrathful body and breathes. Freed of panic, her foot slides free. She grabs the dictionary and half paddles, half steps to the bank. Her clothes hang upon her like bundles of soiled beaver pelts. The wind picks up. Her teeth chatter.
On the way back home, she kneels and plucks a speckled violet mushroom, in defiance of herself. When she stands, her feet are so numb she cannot determine if she is standing or floating.
She adds the mushroom to the fence and enters the house. She strips her wet clothes at the door and wraps herself in a quilt. To whom was this performance for, she wonders as she shivers. Goosebumps colonize her arms and legs. Relics from her hairy ancestors. The thought of hair all over her body disgusts her. She thinks: As soon as able, I will shave my entire body.
But this is the actor speaking. Another performance. Perhaps she will order scissors and a razor and go so far as to stand in front of the bathroom mirror. Snip a few ringlets. She will make a face for the audience. The effort will founder. She cannot shave her head. Even remote and solitary, she maintains the common vanity.
The dictionary sits in front of the space heater. The pages heat and river water becomes vapor. It smells like the home of an old person who loved books, who has died alone, sitting in a ragged arm-chair purchased in 1983, a book of poetry fallen from their outstretched fingers.
When the dictionary dries, the pages crackle like splintered wood when she turns them.
#
She is having one of her days. Instead of reading or walking by the river, she considers self-negation. Her morning routine now includes push-ups. She has read that women rarely hang themselves (by the neck, until dead) due to the upper body strength required. She has had enough of biology. She lays on her back, damp with sweat. The doorbell rings.
“It’s me again.”
She thinks: It’s him again.
Then: I didn’t hear his truck. Again.
“I told you I’d be back.”
His voice is sickly sweet, as though he were speaking to a loathsome child.
“I bet you’ll let me in this time, won’t you?”
She is silent.
“We’ve had reports. A flicker on the grid. . . you can’t let the grid flicker, babe. I need to check the meter. This isn’t just about you. It’s a matter of public safety. Don’t you care for your fellow man?”
The volume of his voice rises, then falls. It seems he is patrolling the house. She hears a ting-ting-ting from the bookroom window.
“Wow, that’s a lot of books. Is that what you do in there? Read books?”
He moves on, circling the house.
“Me? No time to read. Too busy. When I’m not working, I have projects. You wouldn’t understand. Hell, who am I to judge? Maybe you would. How about you unlock the back door and let me check the meter and I’ll tell you about my projects.”
His voice is directly above her now. Her body has pressed itself tightly against the wall. This is a mistake. The wall shudders. The force ripples from a central point against the center of her lower back. It seems impossible for a whole house to shake from one creep’s boot. The shock causes her to roll away and yelp.
“Ha! Can’t hide now.” He is triumphant.
She stands and faces the window. The blinds are drawn, but slivers of the outside are visible between the slats. She sees stubble. A cross section of crusty red nose. Dark eyes, brimming with the intelligence of a mountain cat.
“I’m going to kill myself.” she says.
He laughs. “Good. Go ahead. Kill yourself.”
“I’m going to leave a note beside my corpse that characterizes a woman descending into further depths of depressive mania, finally pushed over the edge by a douchebag electric man.”
“Yes. Perfect. Do that. Then kill yourself.”
“You’ll be implicated.”
“Wrong. You’ve been spending too much time with your books, darling. They’ll pity you, then label you crazy and obsessive. Perhaps it was unrequited love, they’ll speculate. I’ll be famous. They’ll put me on talk shows.“
He might be right.
“Enough games.” He says. “Open the back door.”
She lays back down and pulls a quilt over her head, as she often did as a child. Odd how, as she grows older, it becomes easier to identify with her childhood self.
He realizes he has lost her attention and becomes irate. Repeated booms signal further kicks to her little house. Despite the violence he heaps upon the walls, he never touches the doorknobs or tries to force the windows. As if he doesn’t have hands, or at least not opposable thumbs. Only boots, fists, tongue.
“This is unbelievable.” he is out of breath. “I am trying to provide an essential service. The GRID is FLICKERING! Do you realize how selfish you’re acting?”
His voice fades as he walks back to the driveway.
“You’re going to regret this.”
#
Days pass, uneventful. She keeps the doors locked and orders little bells that jangle whenever a door is opened. The only time she goes outside is to meet her delivery van. A corner of the bookroom is filled to the ceiling. When between pages, the outside world dissolves. But she is squirrely. One cannot reside within a novel. She misses the river, the fungus.
An internal argument rages within her:
On one side, she is defiant. She will not be afraid. Why be afraid? Fear is the domain of the monkey. What is she afraid of? Violence, death? She already spends one day in ten considering how to annihilate herself. So what if her fears come true? Is the act of breathing so precious she must lock herself up?
On the other side, she asks: how stupid can you be?
She goes for a walk in the woods. The river has been flowing for a million years, probably. It is beyond human concerns. This does not console her. She wants to be beyond human concerns. Alas, the only way to achieve this is by dying and she is coming to realize that despite her posturing, she does not wish to die.
She follows the bend of the river. The leaves have turned. Tapestries of sepia and carmine hang above. Light filters through the branches and captures motes of unknowable matter. She treads the grounds of a cathedral. As though on cue, a maple leaf delinks from a nearby branch. Its color is the deep reddish-purple found only in crayon boxes or on distant planets. It flutters to and fro, a sheaf of a heavenly tome.
Her eyes follow the leaf’s descent. When it touches the ground, she sees what lies upon the packed dirt of the trail, sees what she nearly trod upon, and gasps. Her intake of breath is immense; seconds pass before she can expel it. How long has it been since she gasped? Children and the credulous gasp, not she.
A few steps away is a metal object. Its original color is lost beneath a skin of rust. It is the length of her outstretched arm. Longer. In the center is a pedal resting upon a coiled spring. The spring, in turn, is tucked into a crossbar. The crossbar is bolted on both sides to the primary feature of the object: A pair of saw-toothed jaws, splayed open, teeth pointing at the sky.
She has never seen one in person but there is no doubt. There is a bear trap across her path.
She thinks: I have walked here before.
Then: Oh my God.
She rationalizes: A hunter left this. It is hunting season (is it?) They must be unaware that people live and walk nearby.
She ripostes: A bear hunter?
She wishes she had her phone to confirm that people, even in rural New England, no longer hunt bears, or wolves, or indeed anything, with hideous torture devices from the frontier era. Also, she would call someone. But who?
She considers the trap. Which means she considers the likely result had she not been distracted by a maple leaf. The teeth would snap shut below her knee. Would her leg shear clean off? Leave her sprawled beside the river, spurting blood over the fallen leaves, staring in a dissociative fugue at her severed shin-ankle-foot? Probably not. More plausible: The teeth lodge deep, severing sinew and muscle. They scrape the bone. The pain is cosmic. She screams and screams. With no rescue in sight, she begins to hobble back home. Each agonizing step corresponds to further interior tearing. She cannot stop thinking of all the ways her body will never be the same.
Rocks are strewn along the river’s bank. She collects one the size of her boot and throws it at the bear trap. Misses. She finds another. When the rock collides with the pedal, the teeth snap shut with such force that the entire device leaps into the air. The resulting BOOM reverberates through the dale. The birds stop singing, then resume. She kneels and inspects the spent trap. A length of chain extends from the frame. She grasps the chain and drags the trap back home. It leaves a rut behind her; if the trap’s owner should wish to find her, they won’t have much trouble.
The back patio is enclosed by thin slats, scummy with moss. At chest level, the wood ends and a screen begins. It is warped and torn and no protection at all. She has to go inside the house and come back out to unlock the door. Inside is a rocker and a stack of green folding chairs. A portable fire pit is choked with leaves. She imagines old people in brighter times playing cards while the cicadas buzz. She drags the bear trap inside the patio and looks to the electric meter, round and gray behind the creepers, then back to the trap. How difficult would it be to prise open, she wonders. This is crazy. There is no connection between the verbally abusive electric man and the murder device she discovered by the river. Or. . .?? Moreover, even if there was, the correct recourse would not be retaliatory violence. She ought to call the cops, which she never has and never will, or simply leave. She’s only paid through December and has plenty of money remaining to rent a roach-infested hovel back in the city and resume her old life. One of her bosses might even return her job.
She retrieves her phone from a dresser drawer. Her reflection gazes from the black screen. This startles her. She didn’t realize she was smiling. Back in the patio, she lifts the trap. It is heavy and her shoulders tremble as she holds it between them. Moments pass. Daggers of rust dig into her hands. When her strength begins to fail, she allows it to drop and smash the phone she had placed beneath it. The sound is like stepping on a nest full of eggs.
The trap tumbles to its side and a sheath of rust sloughs off. Made visible is a crossed indentation suitable for a large screwdriver. Back inside, she rummages through the kitchen drawers and selects a bread carving knife with a flat nose. Outside, she jabs the knife into the indentation, applies pressure, turns. The trap’s jaws judder and slightly part. She releases the knife and they snap shut. Steadying it with her free hand, she again turns her makeshift crank. When the maw parts wide enough, she – thrillingly – puts her boot against the left set of teeth to assist its opening. The trap unfurls like a flower. Fully splayed, it clicks satisfyingly. She pulls a few strands of creepers off the meter and drapes them over the trap.
Back inside, filthy, she settles onto the couch and picks up her book. An experimental novel in which every day the protagonist wakes up to find it to be the day before. Not the literal day in the past — all recall the events that occurred before they woke up — but all a little younger, the calendar and leaves flying backwards, weather repeats. Birth approaches. The pages rasp. Fingerprints smudge each one.
She goes to bed early. She dreams of pulling off her limbs. They stretch a bit when she pulls. Pop! Her arms come off first, then her legs. Dream logic does not require her to have hands to pull. After her limbs are in a pile, she puts them back on in the incorrect spots. Legs for arms, arms for legs. Then she pulls them off again and replaces them with limbs from a different pile. There’s piles everywhere. All sorts of limbs; different colors, sizes, shapes. A revelatory satisfaction overcomes her. In the dream, she has conclusively proven that she is, in fact, not her body. Her body is just a collection of interchangeable parts. She is something else.
#
The first snow falls. The second, the third. All is white. The edges of the river freeze into brittle shards that crack pleasantly when she steps on them. The river gushes forth, black and angry, a wild movement among the stillness of snow-burdened trees. She walks only in her previous footprints. The whiteness must be kept pristine.
Rattling teeth and shivering limbs wake her in the night. The house is poorly insulated and the vent in her bedroom does not emit heat. Even if her phone was intact, she would not contact the heating company. She now bears a distrust of public utilities and their agents. She buys a second space-heater, a second quilt. To maintain her budget, she eats less and rereads a few of her favorites.
She still has her days. Sort of. Days where reading and nature aren’t enough. She casts a longing glance at the ceiling beam. She hasn’t given up on her push-up routine. But, on these days, she now considers other violent ends. Stepping into a bear trap, of course. Or other devices of torture: How should it feel to be encased within an iron maiden or strung out on the rack? What of the wheel? Or to be that guy in witchy Salem crushed by rocks?
Sometimes it’s the electric man she contemplates. One night, he will find his way in (or she will let him in). His horrorshow face is split by slats, with nothing in between, and his thick arms end at the wrists in fleshy nubs. Zip-ties are looped through his belt and his rucksack is full of tools: saws, clippers, brands.
She wonders if, all along, she was never suicidal. Just morbid. Then, she becomes smug. Are any of these fates altogether worse than working oneself to the bone, day after day, for the benefit of distant masters, masters whose actions herald a dying world– hotter, wetter, more volatile? Her smuggery increases. All of this for a chance at shelter (as slave to yet another master) and bread? A life sentence of depression. A cruel regime that hoovers up her paltry income to finance foreign wars. An internet chorus that demands she count herself lucky not to be homeless.
Is that so different from being crushed, slowly, by rocks? Giles Corey, that was the witch’s name.
On the day when the electric man next arrives, she is flipping through her dictionary while eating a late breakfast. Egg smeared across toast. She senses him breathing at the front door for a few minutes before he speaks.
“It’s me.” he says.
She laughs. He laughs.
“You’re still here. Good. You may not believe this, but I’m thrilled you didn’t kill yourself. I enjoy our conversations too much for that.”
She continues to laugh.
“I didn’t have to come here. According to the brass, I’ve done my duty. To hell with her, they say. She’ll get what’s coming to her. Que sera, sera and all that. Hey, what’s so funny?”
She bites a knuckle to stifle her laughter. Her eyes water.
“Well, anyway, I figured I’d give it one last shot. I think about you a lot. I’ve been lying awake in bed the past few nights, asking myself: Was I too harsh? Maybe I was a little too caustic. You like that word? Caustic? I do. I like words that sound like a thing falling. You start with caw and imagine a bird flying. Then you go STIC and the bird is shot right outta the air. Falls dead in the grass. caw-STIC.”
The dictionary pages mimic gunfire as she flips through them.
“Caustic.” she says. “Adjective. (Of a substance) capable of burning away organic tissue via chemical means. Corrosive, mordant, acid.”
“Not that one. Read the other meaning.”
“No.”
“Fine. Have it your way. The point is, I should have tried a different approach. I let my temper get the better of me. I’m sorry about that. I take this job very seriously, but that’s no excuse to be rude. I will be polite from this point forward.”
She holds her breath.
“Please, will you please, let me check the meter?”
“Gosh.” she coos. “I just don’t know. . .”
“Okay, you’re not convinced. I get it. This guy comes hollering and beating on your walls and then expects all to be forgotten after a quick apology.” A pause as his voice lowers. “I’m on my knees here. Look out the window. I am here on my knees, in the snow, begging you: Let me in.”
“Alright. I’ll let you in.”
“Really? Oh my God, really?”
“Be my guest. I left it unlocked. I was waiting for you.” Yearn. She wants to say: I yearned for you.
“Oh, thank God. You’ve made the right decision. Now we can stamp that flicker right outta the grid. I’m on my way.”
Giddy, unable to bear the wait, she locks herself in the bathroom. Then she turns on the shower. After a while, her breathing slows and her mirth fades. She undresses and steps into the shower. The house seems to rumble with a few muffled thuds but that might be her imagination. She exits the shower and towels off. Silence pervades. Her heart flutters. No, not silence. The birds sing, the wind whistles. It’s a wonderful afternoon. The sun shines through the windows in dust-speckled beams. They fall upon her face and arms and she is warmed by the cosmos.
The cottage gleams. Her home. Four years suddenly feels like an eternity. Who knows? She might not survive that long. Drowned or frozen or murdered. Perhaps she will be eaten by bears, which a stranger once sought to protect her from. Or the world at large will be put out of its misery in a fiery holocaust, she and her little house along with it. A mercy that would be.
She thinks: I shall go for a walk. I’ll be sure to watch where I put my feet. Maybe I will discover a new mushroom and finally crack open that foraging tome.
First, she must finish her book. She’s reading a young adult novel as schlocky as it is compulsively readable. She is at the penultimate moment, the calm before the action-packed climax. It is the night before the battle and the protagonist must decide if she wants to hook up with the boy who can turn into an eagle or the boy who can turn into a fox.
Chris Seaborne lives and writes by the sea in San Francisco. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in december, Puerto Del Sol and Blue Earth Review.
