August Ansel - Shadow Road

It was the full moon.

THE RIVER WAS TOO FAR to go for the ceremony, too steep a hike to make in the dark. The only place Arie had ever met the moon was at the creek near home, up on the big sandstone boulder. Now home was gone. No creek. No boulder. The spring in the hillside would have to do.

It was a short walk from the cabin, but unfamiliar, and she felt worn thin as an old sheet. She hadn’t minded her age so much in the past few years, but since being caught in the fire there had been only hardscrabble and scratch provisions. The mild uphill climb to the spring seemed steep. Her knee gave a warning twang, and she favored it, letting her left leg lead each time she had to step up.

After a few minutes she heard the trickle of water coming from the stone heart of the mountain, and she let the sound guide her. It seemed such a meager substitute for the swimming place she’d lost. But as she drew close, she was buoyed to see the moon reflected directly onto the water. The place where the spring erupted from the hill gave the illusion of molten silver flowing into a waiting vat.

She pulled the little mandala and the knife from her pockets and set them aside. Without hesitation, Arie stripped off her clothes, folding them neatly and setting them away from the damp ground. It was a cold night on the hill. Even with the wind gusting, she wondered if there would be frost by morning.

Edging forward on the stony ground, Arie approached the spring until she was close enough to see her reflection, a dark, hovering shape fragmented and mended repeatedly by the falling water. The light of the moon bounced off her likeness.

She pulled loose what remained of the braid she’d made that morning. When her long hair tumbled over her back and shoulders, she thrust herself forward, palms against the mossy hillside. Head angled directly under the spring, Arie gasped. The freezing water poured onto her head and ran in wide rivulets down her scalp and neck, down the twisted pucker of her burned shoulder blades and into the channel of her goose-fleshed buttocks. A blade of pain began to pulse in her forehead, but she held her breath and stood still until she was entirely wet, soaked as a caught fish.

Finally, she stepped backward, gasping for air. Her fingers had gone numb. Water cascaded from the ends of her hair and off the points of her elbows, blackening the surrounding earth in a widening arc. Lacking a towel, she pulled the soft flannel shirt she’d worn all day from the pile of her clothes. It still held the heat from her body and Arie hugged it to her, basking in the smell of fire and cooked food and clean dog that emanated when she did.

Once she’d dried herself as well as she could, she spread her coat on the ground, far enough from the spring to avoid getting splashed, but near enough that she could watch the moon where it angled through the trees.

This place was not the same place, this water not the same source. This place, where she would count time, was not the same as the sandstone boulder that had caught her blood and kept her secrets. But the hard dirt beneath her was the same good earth and the water from the spring had traveled from sky to land and back to sky since time out of mind—old rock, old water, all the same. Arie was the new thing here, to be sure.

She spread her limbs akimbo, offering everything, from the ache of her cold extremities to the dire struggle of her aging heart to warm her.

“The month is gone, but I am not.” The words stuttered through her chattering teeth. “I sojourn. My life is my own.” She tried to slow her breathing, imagining it wasn’t cold she felt, but heat, the deep heat of the bath she’d had last night. “I shall give, and I shall receive, but my life will forever be my own.” Her muscles relaxed just enough that she could speak clearly. “Rest for me,” she said. “Rest for them. Rest for the Mother.”

In time, she thought. Rest for the Mother in time. With that, Arie released thought and surrendered to her body, to the feel of it spread on the ground, held there by grace, the attraction of gravity keeping all things in order. “Mother, I sojourn yet a while longer.”

She lifted her bare arms, so thin these days that every line of muscle and sinew was visible. Turning her wrists to the moon, she offered the null signs as she did every month since they’d been cut there so long ago. The smooth ridges looked almost black tonight, more like tattoos than scars. Every month since she was sixteen, this promise—no child, ever, would come through her. Rest for the Mother.

Arie sat up then, legs outstretched. She was trembling again, skin knotted with cold, breasts like stones. She put her fingers in her armpits, then breathed on them until they began to pulse with the ache of returning circulation. Twenty-one orderly marks on her two thighs. The new V would go on the right leg this month. Symmetry.

She opened the blade, held her palm over the place until her skin relaxed a bit, and cut. The first stroke was easiest and the pain brightest; the second cut took a fraction more deliberation. Over in a moment, another small offering of blood to seal the promise. It trickled down the outside of her leg and dripped onto the lining of her coat. It will travel with me now , she thought.

Bundled into her clothes again, the little wound snugly bound, Arie started back to the cabin. There was a familiar sense of ease, a light and empty sensation she always relished after the ceremony. When she was still a bleeding girl, the offering each month was more straightforward. But menses quit when the Pink arrived, a confluence of circumstance that seemed weirdly orchestral. Thus the little calendar on her skin was conceived.

Just within sight of the cabin, she stopped short. Her folding knife was tucked into her right pocket, but the left pocket was empty—she’d left the little redwood mandala sitting on the ground by the spring. Arie closed her eyes and gave a short groan. Sighed. “Well, shit.”

Never mind the late hour. Never mind that the climb would likely get the new wound on her leg bleeding again. She had to retrieve it.

No more than a dozen steps back up the trail, she froze. A pair of orange-yellow eyes shone in the trees ahead. She grasped the handle of her short spear and stared. A moment passed, then another. Arie’s own eyes watered with concentration, watching that shine. The animal didn’t blink. It didn’t move.

“One of us will have to make a choice here,” she said. Her voice was low, confidential. As if coming to a decision, it stepped halfway out of the shadows. A wolf, the second one Arie had ever seen. Her mind seemed to bifurcate, lizard brain flooding her body with every chemical signal that facilitated bloody battle or desperate escape. Another part yearned forward—the wolf’s muscular perfection made her want to reach out, to run her two cold hands through the heavy, silver fur that rippled in the high wind, first one direction, then another.

“Well, look at you,” she said, in the same way she spoke to Talus. The wolf stood still, its nostrils flaring as it took her scent. Watching it, time seemed to fold back on itself and Arie was remembering the day Handy had appeared in her path, stopping her short as she walked her trap line. He’d seemed in that moment every bit as dangerous as a wolf. As the thought entered her mind, she did as she had done then. With conscious deliberation, she let go of the short spear and, not breaking eye contact, slowly unbuttoned the plaid shirt from collar to breastbone. She pulled the shirt open, just as she had done that day, bared the scar over her heart.

“I am only a sojourner,” she told the wolf. “You sojourn, too, friend. A rightful inheritor.” The wolf tilted its massive head, ears cocked toward the sound of her voice. “Pilgrim,” she said, “will you give me rest?”