August Ansel - The Attic

Relatively comfortable now, Arie folded the towel on top of her clothes, felt for her folding knife in the pocket of her skirt, drew it out. It was the only thing she needed for the rest of the ritual.

Twenty yards upstream was a massive sandstone boulder. It sat half-in and half-out of the river, and in the daytime the water around its base teemed with fish. She found the first foothold, about two feet up, and hoisted herself. Her shoulders and knees were sore from carrying Curran’s supplies earlier, but after that first step it was an easy climb. The top evened out to make a nearly flat surface. Smooth from eons of weather, there was a shallow declivity in the center, stained and spotted, that always looked to Arie like a well-worn mattress.

Minding her knees and elbows, she lay down on her back in the center space. The stone was cool under her. Bits of lichen made furry patches under her fingertips and shoulders, heels and buttocks. She pulled her wet hair from behind her and fanned it out across the rock. If she’d been able to see herself from above, she would seem to be a woman airborne, falling through space or weightless in orbit. The moon spared nothing. The wavy nimbus around her head and the thin thatch between her legs were silver. Every little goosebump threw a shadow so that her whole skin was a pointillistic wonder. Her belly was flat between her sharp hipbones, and her small breasts, though softer than they once were, were still round in the cool air. She spread her arms and legs like Michelangelo’s Vitruvian Man and looked the moon full in its face.

“The month is gone, but I am not,” she said. “I sojourn. My life is…” Her voice faltered. Unbidden, she heard Handy instead: Don’t say it. She lifted her chin. “I sojourn. My life is my own,” she shouted. She waited, consciously slowing her breathing. “I sojourn. My life is my own. I shall not give, neither shall I receive. Rest for me. Rest for the Mother.” The tears that had tried to form twice during the long day just past finally came. They rolled into her hairline and ears, their wet trails hot, then cool. “Mother, I sojourn yet a while longer,” she said. Her voice failed on the final word, and she was racked with sobs. She lifted her arms above her, palms up, reaching for the moon with her wrists cocked back. The dark scars, her pledge to the Mother, her only gift to the future, were deep purple. She cried until she was hoarse and her sinuses blocked, cried the way she had as a little girl, weeping with her head under the blanket so Daddy Mack wouldn’t hear, wouldn’t climb the stairs.

Handy. Renna.

How could they lodge themselves inside her this way? Even Curran. Talus. After all the months of solitude. Before that, too, the time alone between Granny’s death and the day the Pretty Pox swept through like a scythe. She was desperate to have back the simple task of minding her own diminishing days. Everything else, and everyone—family, friends, neighbors—she had released to their own destiny. And now she found that, even in the midst of all her deliberate letting go, her heart was a traitor.

Admitting them all. Opening itself around them in love, despite her.

Finally, she sat up and wiped her face, turned her head and blew her nose onto the rock. Her hair was barely damp, a silky cool curtain down her back. She pulled her legs together, straight out in front, and opened her knife.

The marks ran in two neat rows down both thighs, small chevrons that resembled a child’s line drawing of geese on the wing, arrows pointing at her feet. Twenty marks, one V for each month since the Pink had accomplished its work. Each leg had two rows of five; this month it was her right leg, and that would make twenty-one. The oldest Vs, high on her legs, were pale white lines. Each successive scar was a darker shade of pink or red; the one from last month was healed, although it still itched now and then.

She ran her palm over her thigh and visualized the new mark. She rubbed the spot with her thumb and made the cut. It had to be deep enough to bleed well and scar well. The sting was intense and caused an echo of sensation between her legs, a small clench of muscle that rarely happened to her anymore. The feel of the blood was like the feel of tears. It trickled down either side of her thigh and pattered onto the stone. It would be food for something. A few mosquitos gathered, and she let them light—they’d be food for fish or bat or crane fly soon, or simply dead in the first frost.

After the blood slowed and thickened, Arie got to her feet. She was stiff and sore, sluggish in all her movements. She closed the knife and climbed off the boulder. It was always harder getting down than going up, easier to slip when she was tired and drained. Before she dressed, she wrapped her leg with a fresh rag. She thought again what a motley group of wounded they all were: bitten, cut, and bashed. She felt settled, though, cleaned out. Once more bundled and done with the ritual for another month, she picked up a flat stone and, with a practiced flick of the wrist, skimmed it out over the placid surface of the river, breaking the reflection of the moon into dozens of moving ripples.

Up the bank and into the clearing, she considered her new circumstances. The cutting not only marked her with the passage of time. It lent the gift that narrows focus: pain that clarifies. She saw now that she didn’t have to make herself responsible for the lives of everyone under her roof. Neither did she have to resist the strong sense of good company well kept. She would urge them to go, all of them together if they would, but only after they had a little time to heal and plan. If they were a gaudy target now, the five of them in her ramshackle hideout, they were also more—more eyes and ears, more muscle and sinew. Even more tooth and claw.

The meadow and the trees ahead were quieter, now that the moon had passed its zenith. The path into the woods was nearly invisible. This was the hardest moment, every month—swallowing dread and walking into the dark.

Ten feet from the place where the shadows obscured the trail, something huge fell from the treetops in a lowering arc, straight toward her. It was a great horned owl, utterly silent, and if it hadn’t thrown a wide shadow in the later light of the moon, she would not have seen it coming. She ducked at the moment it passed over her, and the displaced air pressed against her face and neck. Turning, she watched the owl drop into the deep grass of the clearing, which closed over it like water over a stone. There was the sound of invisible struggle, thrashing and a sharp bleat of pain and terror that made the last singing crickets fall momentarily silent.

All meandering thought dropped into an urgent blank, and Arie hurried out of the clearing, away from whatever was dying in pain and blood behind her. She couldn’t see anything in the trees, and she kept herself from breaking into a run only by an act of steely will. This was different than the return trip from Curran’s camp—that had been like swatting away a fly compared to what she felt now. The path was as familiar to her in the dark as it was in broad daylight, but rather than counting her steps, as she normally did, she kept her hands clenched at her belt and hurried in a stiff-legged gait. She was somehow sure that if she held her hands out in front of her—as instinct demanded when rushing through the dark—she would touch something unexpected. Or it would touch her. It would be her own great horned owl, a set of smothering wings and rending talons she was destined to succumb to.

Curran moved around the downstairs, getting his bearings in the mess. When he’d gotten here this morning, nerving himself to get inside, the couple of furtive glances he’d had through the haphazardly covered windows had only partly conveyed the wreckage. Arie had warned him about keeping Talus out of it, and when he saw the amount of broken glass everywhere he was thankful she had.