FSF, March-April 2010 Read online

  On the seventh day, I trudge through the muggy heat of midday, up the hill to the olive grove. I carry a sack of bread and cheese. Aaron's book rests snug inside my waist sash. A breeze picks up as I near the crest of the hill and the cool wood. I walk through the grove, trailing my fingers across the trees’ smooth backs and letting the wind lift the hair from my neck. The treetops create a canopy that filters little dapples of sunlight onto the ground. I am going to see Aaron. I am going to ask him if he's seen the places he draws in his book, or if they're fancies. I am going to ask him about the obelisk and the zepplin. I am going to ask where he found the Dark-eyed Junco, and what it is. I smile up at the canopy and round the last stand of trees.

  The clearing stands empty. Aaron hasn't arrived yet, so I crouch down and pluck at the blades of long grass. I split one down the middle with my fingernail to make a whistle, hold it to my lips, and blow. The grass makes a dry, sputtering tweet. I bite my lip and grin. If I close my eyes, I can picture my father sitting cross-legged beside me, showing my young self the trick of it. When I tire of my game, I make a chain of flowers and drape them around my neck and head, the way I saw the little girls do. I walk the circumference of the meadow, letting my hand trail over the saplings and low brush at its border. I pause at the spot where Aaron and the girls laid their blanket. Something has been carved into the thick trunk of one of the nearby trees. I kneel beside it and brush the markings with my fingers. The cut stands out faint and boxy, but I can read it. Ourania. A thrill passes through my chest. I stand and scan the meadow, expecting him to stride into view at any moment. But he does not come.

  I take the little hinged, bronze knife I carry from my pocket and unfold it. The bark is thick, but I keep my knife sharp. It cuts a bright yellow line in the trunk below my name. I strain my arm against the hard wood and run my hand over my work when I have finished. Aaron. His name joins mine on the tree's flesh. I braid long slips of grass into rope as I wait, flip through Aaron's book again, and lie back to stare at the clouds passing soundlessly overhead. If only I could make time pass more quickly, the way the wind moves clouds at its whim, so Aaron could be here already. I close my eyes. A wind shakes the leaves at the top of the trees, making them rattle like a rainstorm on all sides of me. I lean back against the earth and rest Aaron's book on the slope of my chest. For some reason, I find it easy to sleep here in the heart of the meadow. I'm sure Aaron's footsteps will wake me when he comes. I let myself drift on the hush of leaves.

  I dream of Aaron coming to me through the fold of trees. He kneels and lays himself over me. I feel the length and firmness of his body pressed against my belly, my breasts. The grass is like silk against the soles of my feet. It rises up and braids itself into a bower over our heads, shading us from the sun, as if the earth itself is responding to the heat in my body. I find myself over Aaron, with his hips tucked between my thighs. I pull the bindings from my hair and let it down so it falls in waves over his body. I kiss his throat, his chest, the soft, dark indentation of his navel, covering him with my hair. I feel his hands cupping my skin, and then, and then....

  I wake, feeling as if the world has tilted on its axis. My chest heaves as I try to catch my breath. At first, I don't know where I am, and I paw at the bed of grass around me, trying to work my way to my feet. The sun has sunk low in the sky, a bloody bronze color. Far off, something howls. It is like the long, low baying of a wolf, but sharper, with the sound of rending metal folded in. My heart seizes, and I jump to my feet.

  Late. It's too late.

  I make for the olive grove, scattering chains of flowers and grass behind me as I run. I clutch at my sash and discover I've dropped Aaron's book. I scurry back to the meadow. There, beside the patch of grass I've tamped down in my sleep, it lies half-hidden in the weeds. I snatch it up and run again, through the darkening grove and down the hill, my feet fleet over the roll of the earth, terror beating in my chest.

  The lights of our house shine bright. Mother has lit the lanterns without me. She stands, wrapped in her shawl, waiting by the front gate of our house. She must hear the sound of my footsteps, for she turns, and relief rushes her face. She holds out her arms and I run straight to her. Only when I've buried my head in the soft, dark folds of her cloak do I feel myself shaking.

  Mother pulls back and holds me at arm's length. She slaps my face, which she has not done since the time in my fifth year when I tied a bucket to our goat's tail and he trampled part of our summer garden in his panic. “Where have you been?” she asks. And then, without waiting for me to answer. “I thought you were gone. I thought it had taken you."

  "I...I was hot, so I went up to the olive grove. I feel asleep,” I say. Then her other words seep into my ears. My heart quickens again. “What would want to take me?"

  She presses me tight against her. “Nothing. Nothing. Promise me you won't stray past the borders of the farm. If you do, I can't protect you."

  "But what do you need to protect me from?"

  Mother stares at me. Her eyes look like dark, polished river stones. “There are all manner of evil things in the world, Ourania, that you are lucky not to know about. Let us not change that."

  * * * *

  Day wept as she fled, and her tears flooded the earth. All the beasts cried out and raised their hands to her for mercy, but the deluge swept many under. Then Day felt something move within her. She looked, and found Night's child growing in her belly. Day dried her tears and went to Man to strike a bargain.

  "Man,” she said. “Have pity. I am with child by Night. Only call off your beast so we may raise our child in peace, and I swear Night and I will part forever. We will each take up our course in the sky, as always was."

  "Very well,” Man said. “But should you ever stray again, I will loose my beast and hound you to the ends of the earth."

  Day agreed, saying, “For even if we never meet, Night's child is dear to me."

  Thereafter, the pattern of days returned to the earth. Man became chief among beasts, and he turned his hand to quelling the earth and seas, and all within his ken.

  * * * *

  Seven days pass, but I do not visit the meadow again. The grain is almost ready for threshing, so Mother and I sharpen our collection of scythes. I wonder what kept Aaron from me, if it was the same thing I heard howling, the same thing my mother fears. If my mother fears it, it must be too terrible. I am sick from wanting to ask her what it might want from us, but I don't dare. I am nearly finished with Darwin, and geometry helps keep my mind from straying to the olive grove and my strange dream. C=2(pi)r; A=(pi)r2; V=(pi)r2h, I think as the sun beats down on the roof of our house. A=1/2 bh; a2+ b2=c2

  "I have something for you,” Mother says at breakfast one morning. She dusts breadcrumbs from her hands as she rises and holds up a finger, telling me to wait where I am. I clear our breakfast and wipe the table clean with a wet rag. Mother returns holding an oilcloth package bound up with twine. She holds it out to me. “Open it."

  I cut the twine with my knife and fold the oilcloth away. A nest of fine, creamy linen rests inside. Light from the window catches in the fine weave, making it shimmer like sunshine on a lake. I let out a short breath. This is fabric for a priestess or a bride, not a girl who mucks around with goats and spends her days winnowing grain.

  "What's this for?” I ask, turning from the kitchen window, my arms brimming with cloth.

  Mother steps into the square of light with me. Her dark hair has fallen out of its tie. It curls down her back and over her breasts like thick, unchecked vines. The light picks out the thin hairs on her forearms, bleached fair by the sun, and warms her browned skin to gold. She reaches out to touch my face and I swear I feel all the heat of summer brush my skin. “You'll be a woman soon,” she says. “That brings certain duties and certain boons."

  I feel the air quiver around me, and I open my mouth, a hundred questions ready to tumble from the tip of my tongue. But Mother drops her hand. The air changes, as if something has gon
e out of it, like the release of tension between the earth and sky after a thunderstorm. I sink into my chair, my legs trembling.

  "I thought we might dye the border this afternoon, after your lessons,” Mother says, folding the oilcloth and twine together for safekeeping. She winds her hair back off of her neck, and I see the smudges of soot on her elbows and faded oil spots on her clothes again. She scoops up a water pail in each hand and holds one out to me. “Come on, help me with the pump."

  * * * *

  I still can't sleep at the midday hour, but I don't dare scale the hill again. The echo of Mother's unnamed terror is too real when I wake each morning. I lie on my back in my cot with Aaron's book open in one hand, and the other cupped over my own breast. If I close my eyes, I can imagine it's Aaron's hand, not my own. I press my fingers against the soft flesh of my lips and think of him and his imagined body until the heat from my dream courses through me again. When it is gone, I feel something other than myself. Foreign and hollow, though I don't know why.

  I get up and pace the quiet house with Aaron's book. I find the stub of red clay Mother uses to mark measurements on cloth and stone, and take it out to the garden. First I stare out over the vegetable rows with the clay poised over a blank page of Aaron's book. I bite my lip and pull on my ear. The mouser sleeps atop the garden wall, his eyes closed to soft slits and his tail twitching against the stone. I put the clay to the paper and try to imitate the subtle curve of his ears, the ripple of muscles beneath his fur. I block in the balance of stones in the wall, with a thick snake of vines twining up through the cracks and over the top. I hold the paper out. It is not at all neat like Aaron's drawings. The mouser might well be a toad on a woodpile. Mouser sleeping on our garden wall, I write below my scrawl, so Aaron will know what it is, if he ever sees it.

  Still, it is only my first attempt. I assume this skill is like baking bread or math. I must practice my hand at it. I move over to the cone of wooden stakes where our bean plants grow and hunch over its flowers. I record these and label them, then a black, crook-legged maria bug I find resting beneath the late spinach. I wander the garden, taking down everything I find in Aaron's book until my skin begins to feel tight and hot under the sun. I creep indoors.

  Mother lies fast asleep with her back to the wall. Her hair curls around her shoulders. She looks soft, all the drive and hurry wiped from her face. I wonder if I look this way when I sleep. I settle in the chair across from her and begin sketching, trying to spool myself, my life, together again as I go.

  * * * *

  I cannot wait another seven days. No amount of mathematics or sketched mimicry can quell the heat flaring beneath my skin or the worry in my stomach. I will go to the hill, and I will not lie down to sleep. I will find Aaron or else leave word for him that I am waiting. My limbs shake as I slip from the house at noon and lift a sharpened scythe from the barn wall. If there is really some terror out there, I will not go unarmed.

  I mount the hill again. My trek through the close files of the orchard seems to take longer than usual, but maybe that is the crawling feeling, like ants covering my skin, making time slow. As I step into the meadow, I feel a thrum in the air. The air smells hot, like when Mother works on her conductivity experiments. I adjust my grip on the scythe and step away from the sheltering trees.

  I have only moved a few paces into the meadow when my foot strikes something hard and ungiving. It makes a hollow noise. I kneel down in the grass and run my hands over it. A long rail, made of thick, sun-warmed metal. Several feet away, its twin runs parallel, with a neat pattern of heavy wood boards spanning the distance between the two. The rails stretch across the length of the meadow, and now I see a break in the trees on either side where someone has cleared all the growth to make a path for them. I run to the break. Farther off, on the next hill rise, I can make out the dark curve of the track disappearing over its crest.

  A low howl fills the air, the same I heard before. My chest tightens with horror. A black cloud rises over the hill, cumulating and moving at terrifying speed, faster than I have ever known any beast to run. Beneath the screen of smoke, I make out a flash of dark metal glinting in the sun. It stretches in a sinuous trail over the top of the hill, like an asp or a millipede, gaining velocity as it drops toward the valley floor. The metal thing dips along the swale, then tilts its face toward me and begins to strain up the hill. It beats out a hollow rhythm, metal against metal, with a horrible, tooth-scraping grind between beats.

  I drop my scythe and run back along the wooden path. The sound of the thing—is it animal or some kind of machine?—drowns out the slap of my sandals against the boards. The ground rumbles beneath my feet, growing to a constant tremor as the high howl and screech flood my ears, my mouth, my entire body. The noise fills everything. My heart shudders in time with the creature's unearthly growl, like a bell reverberating, and I throw myself from the path, into the high grass. I huddle, clutching the earth. The world is nothing but rattle, rock, clack, and moan. And then as suddenly as it came, I feel the thing pass. A rush of air sucks at me, leaving the grass swaying as the roar retreats into the distance.

  I stand up. The air tastes acrid, like burning rock. I feel grimed. I run my hands over my hair and skin. A fine, gray dust has settled on my neck and arms, and through my hair. I spit and wipe my eyes. I stand mere feet from the track, and on the other side, there is a man. He wears a brown suit, cut in a simpler version of the style I saw on Aaron, and a domed hat I recognize from the book of drawings. A silky piece of fabric hangs in a knot at his throat. His face is older by far than my father's, more lined and baked by the sun. Drifts of gray hair sweep out from under his hat. But his eyes, those are brown and deep as a cistern.

  "Ourania?” His voice sticks and comes out as a croak.

  "Do I know you?” I call back. I can hear the waver in my own voice. I hurry forward until my feet meet the rail, then stand back a pace. Who knows if the metal creature might come ripping through the trees again?

  He walks toward me and lifts his feet over the track without pause. We stand within a hand's breadth of each other, only the span of the metal rail separating us. I look up at him. I study the folds of flesh under his eyes and the creases at the corners of his mouth, the shape of his ears and the familiar, broad line of his nose. I know. Oh, help me, I know.

  "Aaron.” His name comes out of me in a rush of breath. I want to double over, for I feel as if something has knocked the air from my lungs. I hold out a hand to keep myself upright, and he catches it. He helps me over to a patch of low grass in the shade of the olive trees. I sit, hard. He kneels by me.

  "I knew,” he says. His eyes rim with wet. “I knew if I kept coming I would find you some day."

  "Aaron.” I lift my hand to touch his face. His skin feels thin and soft. “What happened to you? I came to the meadow after seven days, and you weren't there, but I saw where you carved my name.” My eyes flick across his face. I know of many stories my father tells, where a sorceress or some such casts a spell on a man to make him take a form other than his own.

  "Have you been cursed?” I ask. “Who's done this to you? My mother, maybe she can fix you. She knows....” I spy the sadness welling in Aaron's eyes and let my voice trail off.

  "Ourania.” He takes my hand and buries his face in it, kisses my work-rough palm. “I'm not cursed. I'm old, that's all. I've grown old, and you're still young, after all these years."

  "Years!” I snatch my hand away. “It's only been weeks since I saw you, not even a season."

  He shakes his head. “I came after seven days, and then another seven. I came every Sunday I could for fifty-two years. This is the first I've seen you."

  My breath hitches and my vision clouds. I cover my face with my hands. The meadow air is too close.

  "At first I thought you couldn't get away, and then I thought I'd gone mad. That I'd dreamed you altogether.” He pulls my hands softly away from my face. The skin around his eyes crinkles as he smiles. “But yo
u're here."

  I feel a sob welling up in my chest. I try to tamp it down, but it breaks through anyway. Aaron holds me and we rock together in the dry grass.

  "Take me away with you,” I say, finally, pulling back from him. “I wanted to see where you came from, if the things in your book were real. I wanted you to show it to me.” I pull the book from its place at my waist sash.

  His mouth opens as he stares at it. He reaches out and brushes his fingers against its leather cover. “Like new,” he says. He takes the book from me and begins paging through, turning each leaf faster and faster, until he reaches my drawing of the garden wall. He stops. Aaron traces his finger over the page, then closes the book. His face looks pale. He stands and hands the book back to me.

  "Keep this,” he says.

  I scramble up after him. “It's yours,” I say.

  He shakes his head again. “I had forgotten all about it. But you,” he says, touching his hand to my face again. “I can never forget you.” He leans in to kiss me.

  I close my eyes. Our lips touch and I see him as a young man, straight and unlined, untouched by age. I would gladly stand here until the sun sinks from the sky. I would gladly follow him to whatever strange land he would lead me, even if it means braving beasts of smoke and metal.

  Aaron breaks away and steps back. “Thank you, Ourania.” He turns and begins walking to the line of trees.

  Time slows and crystallizes around me. I feel the pump of my own heart and the gentle sway of wind picking at the hem of my skirt. Aaron is walking away from me, but for the life of me, I cannot follow. He reaches the tree line and looks back. He smiles. Then passes through to the other side, and I see him no more.