A History of Wild Places(53)

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.

And she would find it.





CALLA


The books I found in the garden, the journal Theo found stashed beneath the bed, were left on purpose—a way to ensure two people weren’t forgotten.

The sun dips to the west, while I stand on the porch watching Theo walk up the road for his shift at the guard hut, an uneasy feeling stirring in my stomach, like a scream that keeps growing louder. I wish he’d stay with me, but Parker will be waiting for him, and I know we need to pretend that nothing has changed—that we each haven’t found things left in our house like breadcrumbs in a gothic fairy tale.

Once he’s gone from view, I force my legs to carry me through the house and out the back door. I pull down laundry from the line that stretches between two elms, the fabric snapping in the wind. The night is warm, overheated, or maybe it’s only my thoughts that boil and cook inside me.

When I’m finished, I leave the basket in the grass and walk up past the pond, breathing, breathing. Gulping down the night sky, trying to calm my mind. I reach the trees and think of the Foxtail book, the chapters I’ve read out of order—the story unweaving itself strangely, without context: a girl chasing a fox, a girl who finds an underground museum. The book frightens me, the smudged illustrations, the dark, awful forest a place where the girl should not go.

Clouds begin to gather in the sky, blurring the stars, and I feel like Eloise from the story—searching for something, some underground place that might make sense of this ache in my rib cage. I move up the path along the creek, burnt sage still suspended from the boundary trees, hanging from string, waiting for a strong wind or curious birds to tug them down.

But something else catches my eye just off the path, a few feet from the gurgling creek.

Slumped against an elm tree, is a girl.

My sister.

Blood pooling around her legs.

I run to her and drop to my knees, searching for a wound. But when I touch her ankle—smeared in dried blood—she wakes with a start and yanks her legs back, swatting her hands in my direction. Her eyes flash upward, searching for the thing that has touched her.

“It’s just me,” I soothe.

Her mouth falls open, but no words free themselves from the tangle of her tongue. I wrap my arm around her waist and help her to stand, but once she’s upright, she shrugs away from my arms, and begins limping down the meadow, past the pond, toward home.

“Bee?” I call, walking after her. But she doesn’t look back at me, doesn’t answer.

We reach the porch, and I try again. “Bee, what happened to you?”

She turns around this time, touching the railing with her trembling hand. “The trees are still splitting open,” she says, her voice hoarse, as if she’s been crying or breathing too-cold air all night long. “We burned the sage, but the border trees are still sick.” She swallows, wincing as she shifts her weight away from the ankle that’s begun to bleed again. “I felt them.”