In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods

5

ADIRT, A WOODS, A LAKE, and all too close together, a miniature landscape surrounding a right-sized house: This was our land as we had first come to it, the place we had arrived newly married, childless but expectant. I had forgotten how bright those days had been, how sweet the air had smelled, but here those memories came rushing back, and even the dirt itself was moist and fragrant, readied for seed. But if the dirt had been made mostly right, still it seemed as if it was subordinate to the house, that shape rebuilt exactly as I remembered, and it seemed that instead of raising the house’s structure upon some preexisting plot, my wife had instead somehow started with its rooms, spinning them out of the black before spilling the lake and the woods and the dirt from within—and even at a glance it seemed obvious she had not finished. Despite the curve of sky above there was hanging upon it no sun and no stars and no moon, and so even the greenness of the trees and the blueness of the lake could not hide that we were at the bottom of a cave, a dome carved from beneath a blanket of blackness. I did not forget then, fought against being fooled, for in that moment I wanted all my senses, knew it was important that I not succumb to this illusion, and so I observed only what original elements I recognized, and also some of their smaller parts: In the window of my wife’s house there flickered the faintness of a gas-lamp, one nearly exhausted of fuel, and I thrilled at the sight, for I believed it meant she lived, that someone still lived inside her house.

The bear bellowed, shoved past me as I stepped farther out onto the dirt, her movements hurried with anger. I let her pass, and with the foundling left behind me in the passageway my hands were freed to drag back my torn and filthy sleeve to reveal my long-stalled watch, that round face, that hovered hand no longer walking its circles. With my other sleeve I scrubbed at its clouded surface, then abandoned my cleaning to wind its stem, and as I did when I tested our family with the fish and the rabbits, I invented my own rules to cause what would happen next—and my new rule said it did not matter what time it was, only that there was again time—and so I wound and I wound, and then I held that mechanism until the bear was halfway between the door and the house, and then with a flinch I let its wheel unwind.

What gasps racked my body then, and also the body of the bear! All that had been slowed now accelerated upon us, old inertias shuddering us forward until the bear’s legs ran too fast, tripping each other, her bone knees smacking against swelled feet. She stumbled and fell forward into the dirt, her head tucked for protection from the crash, her momentum threatening to flip her bulk, but as her shoulders hit the dirt they caught, carved a furrow into the ground, a trench diagonal across the path to the house.

By the time I had gathered the shrouded foundling into my arms and stepped back through the door onto the last dirt, by then the bear was already up again, climbed free and turned back, her bone-limited expression impossible to read at that distance. And then fragments of that bone flying loose as she shook her body, freeing the dirt from her shell. And then snot and spit and bloody worse roping out from her mouth, out of other holes, wounds, opening sores. And then with each step, more dissolution, more disintegration of what shape she had held for so long—and as her body shattered all around her, perhaps she did understand what had happened, or perhaps not.

It did not matter, not then, not to me.

The bear hesitated for some moment, rolled her gaze between me and the still-unopened house, as I stepped forward with my wife’s son held again against me, close in my care. She righted her stance, then proceeded to the house, where with her new paws she battered it as she had thrashed the logs of our first home. Here it seemed the bear held no power over the seams of the house, nor the strength of its walls, and her blows had no effect besides their terrible booming racket, echoed throughout the large chamber. The bear roared, her voice senseless with frustration, even if diminished, and I saw how in her anger she became more an animal, dumber and more dangerous, and while she worked her toothless jaws against my wife’s unencroachable doorjamb I went another way.

Let the bear try for the house, I said. She will gain no entry, and follow us instead.

How sure I meant to speak, but how worried I might have sounded, and more so when I felt the fingerling’s smirking shapes, all moving, all growing faster, radiating from my stomach and everywhere else: He was in my throat and in my spleen, in my liver and in the cork of my bones and flush throughout my head, so that my skull felt too full, so that all my thoughts were pressed in upon. I had not long left before he had the whole of me, but with that time I believed I could at least reach the lake. With every step its water pulled me more, its shimmer tugging at the shape that awaited within or else just outside my shell, an aura ready to be made flesh.

To have my breath stolen away. To stumble, one knee kissing the dirt. To stand and to struggle forward, and then to feel my voice lifted out of my throat and into the air, loud as my dry mouth allowed, and with it came the words the fingerling had waited so long to say, loud betrayals flung back toward the bear, her thrashing at the sound structure of the house:

SAVE ME, the fingerling said. SAVE ME INSTEAD OF YOUR CUB, AND I WILL NEVER LEAVE YOU.

I WILL NEVER DIE, he said. I WILL NEVER AGE.

I AM A CHILD WHO IS A GHOST WHO IS A CANCER AND I AM FOREVER.

I CAN KEEP YOU STRONG, AS I HAVE KEPT THIS WEAKEST MAN, AND TOGETHER WE WILL HAVE ALL THE LAKE AND DIRT AND WOODS WE WANT.

The fingerling said, KILL MY FATHER AND EAT HIS BODY, AND WITHIN HIM, YOU WILL FIND ME WAITING.

The fingerling said, HURRY, FOR HE IS ALMOST INTO THE WATER, and then the bear cracked the air with her anger, turned inside the sound of her voice. She bounded across the dirt, in pursuit of my burdened limping, and while I could have ensured my escape by casting aside the foundling I was unwilling to create an impasse where I held the lake and the bear held the shore—and then in only a few steps I was at the water’s edge—and there the bear struck me just once, a terrible blow landed in haste, at the shallow threshold of the water and the land, the dirt and the lake.

THE BEAR’S FIST OF BONE struck me from shoulder to hip, through my back, scraped against skin and muscle and organ and rib, and by its force I was dropped into the water, the foundling still held tight against my chest, and as I fell I tucked him within my motion, curled his dead body in the curve of my still living one, and then in the shallows came the shift, the slide sideways into another shape so that I was no longer who I had been, or else I was still him and also something more, and then from behind me came the splashing of the bear following me out into the water, into the waves that spilled up to and then crested over her heavy head.

My next transformation was not about a mouth that became a beak, was not merely arms and legs that became tentacles thickened with hooks and suckers. Even the eyes of squid were not pathed as the eyes of men, and so new-sighted mechanisms had to be made in this instant, a second long enough. I was adept now at making do with what time there was, and so here there was time enough for one last plan, the quick purposing of my new body, the filling of it with its task: to kill this bear, this mother I pitied but whom the rules of this world would not let me save; who had frustrated me for so long; who had tried to kill me and had killed the foundling instead; whom I too had hurt, but whose forgiveness I could not earn.

And what was the fingerling’s role in this fight, and whose side would he take?

Perhaps he had imagined he would be able to again frustrate me, but now it was I who frustrated him, with a body made strange, its hollows unfamiliar tunnels: If he lived part of his life in my spleen, where would he go now that I had no spleen? Where were my new lungs, my new gall bladder, my new arms and legs? For the fingerling, who had besieged my bones to bending, where was there to go when I had no bones?

Only one place, a chamber clenched.

The squid had reshaped my body but it was not all a part of me, and so I too was a passenger or else a pilot, as the fingerling had been between my bones, and while the squid first jetted toward the center of the lake, away from the bear, it soon began the long arc back, by my command. The bear was still bellowing through the shallows when we struck her the first time, raking a hooked tentacle from out the water and across her bony trap-scarred snout, and she howled in pain or frustration. The squid pressed, circled, pressed again, put our hooked and barbed tentacles to their use, all our arms with more reach than even the bear’s own long grasp, and also with a beak the equal of her mouth, if not its better, the bear’s now loose of tooth and weak of jaw, but still the squid did not bring our full fight upon her, not while she was able to stand in the low water. Instead we pulled and tore her flesh, her facing flank, and with quick blows we lured her on, and when she began to falter and to wail only then did we taunt her failing courage with the shrouded shape of her once-cub, the foundling pushed out into the lake, floating bloated upon the surface and waiting to be claimed.

How the bear bellowed then! Grayest water shook from off her roaring head, her bone mantle glistening in the false light sparkling all the surface of my wife’s new-sung world, and then the bear charged into the deeper water, fast again, fast as she had moved between the trees of her own woods. When her feet left the lake floor, without hesitation she swam on, her armored legs pumping beneath the water, churning her path as she struggled to keep her snout above the surface, pointed at the floating shroud still out of reach. The water was deep and cold, deeper and colder than its small circumference suggested, and into those depths the squid dove, and from those depths we rose again to strike at the bear, to rake our hooks across her belly, the bones of her armor, and despite those gouges we could do no real harm, would never except in that space the fingerling had shown me, that bone-bare stretch of her throat that we could not yet reach. As the bear swam, the squid frustrated her with our speed, with our ability to attack then quickly retreat, moving from her floundering shape to the floating body of the foundling, and there was no danger to me then, so deep inside: From this new station I was never once afraid of the bear, as I had been on the dirt and in the woods and in the house. All my years upon the dirt the bear had seemed to master me, and now I would master her.

As we fought, the fingerling moved within the corridors of the squid shape, assuming new posts and positions, and as the squid swam around the bear so also the fingerling was set in motion inside that movement, testing every space. The fingerling approached an organ much like the stomach he had claimed, and when he was wormed deep inside that clenched and puckered sac, then at my command the squid charged up through the depths toward the struggling bear, and there I said goodbye, goodbye to son and ghost, goodbye to bear and other-mother, other-wife who was never mine, and if they did not wholly deserve this end they got, at least they were ended, and what mercy I believed that was: To steer the squid to swim before the bear, leading her on, then to turn our body back. To feel the squid release into the water the contents of our ink sac like a fist opening, the unfolding of a hand holding some smoky darkness, holding blackness, my blackness, yes, all that ghost I had named the fingerling when it deserved no other name, and now that son, caught there in that organ, and now that son expelled at last, swimming out into obfuscation, into a cloud of camouflage, into a cloud of grief through which the squid swam, my past floating outside our body, and still I felt nothing, still I saw with the dispassionate yellow gaze of the squid—or else how could I have done what I did—and the voice and the voices of my only son surrounded us, made a cloud that was not just ink, and in it the squid saw everything and the bear saw nothing, and the water churned with the stuff of our ink and the unmakings of the fingerling, torn and threaded by the sharp slimness of that expelling orifice, and as this animated ink he floated in streaks and flumes around the bear, whose mouth filled when she growled to smell him, the clotted stink of something rotten unbirthed, gestated too long.

The squid was a hunter and a trapper too, and I was the squid, and the squid was me, and we shot through the ink toward the bear, searching for that thin breadth of bone-spaced chance, and as we jetted through that horror I heard the fingerling’s voice call out to me, call out in many voices for me to save him, to take him back in, begging as only a child can beg. Despite his treacheries he was sometimes somehow still a baby boy, and had I been a man his drowning might have undone the taut strings with which I had shut my heart.

As a squid?

As a squid I saw only a food we would not eat, flesh of my flesh, poison if I made the same mistake again. His blackness streamed around us, but all the squid cared was how it hid our long shape, masked our sharp scent. We swam the wet length of our clouded boy, and when the squid reached the bear we sought again to strike her where she needed to be struck, and against us and against the fingerling the bear struggled to surface, her mouth and eyes and ears filling with the bodies of my son, with the minnowed shapes of him. And what shapes they were! Not just ink and boy but already hunger and hatred clumping, solidifying, becoming new shapes, new forms of ancient and angry swimmers, each frustrating the bear, then tearing at her eyes, then dismantling the last solid sockets of her jaw, then eating her tongue from out her mouth.

Soon the bear was blind and belligerent, confused so that she did not know up or down, and the squid circled her flailing once, twice, amid the ink. I wanted to speak to her, to reach out and say some parting words—to say sorry, sorry again—but the squid did not have the same brain as a man, nor the same vocal cords, and without the fingerling I could not have translated her replies, and anyway what right words were there to say.

The squid dragged our hooks across the bear’s stomach, this time breaking her weakened bones across new perforations, leaving furrows for the black ghosts of the fingerling to crack wider, and when that succeeded we laid down more cuts, across the hump of the shoulders and both halves of the hips, across the plates of the bear’s back and head. I needed the squid to strike the throat, craved that hit, but could not help my marveling at our thoroughness, the glory of this hunter’s shape, so different from my trapper’s form upon the land, for the squid was an exquisite killing machine and within it I an exquisite killer. The ghosts of the fingerling hungered, desperate outside my strong-shelled body, and with no other source in the empty lake they redoubled their attack on the bear, tore strings of marrow from out her bones, and with them they grew quickly larger, shaped more like fish, then more like eels. Black scaled and dark slimed, they wiggled in and out of the bear’s armor, and when they slipped away it was with gulping throats, bloated stomachs.

All around me was the squid, and all around the squid was the black of our ink, my own personal black, a trap carried for so long so that it might snare the bear, so that within it the squid might drag her down, and I wondered then: Did she remember the first squid, in the lake above, how he too showed her the bottom of his lake? How there he promised her its future?

Did she realize that future had happened, and that here at last it was at its end, the last of the present, the beginning of the forever-past, and the bear was no human woman anymore, no bear-mother either, but some other thing, adversary made killer made legend: And although I might have felt remorse at the killing of a woman, how could I feel the same for a myth, this unlovable story?

We sensed only the slightest resistance as our hooks swung through the slice of space between the bear’s head and neck, just a small snag and then another as those sharp edges dragged through the windpipe and the jugular and the carotid, and then the squid pushed forward, shoved our head into that space as another squid had entered into my chest, and with our beak we tore the bear until a loud rising of air filled the water, then pink foam, then black, and then and then and then, and then to be the squid and to have the squid be me, to together be a hunter who had hunted: to swim unflinched as the bear jerked inside our embrace, then to feel her loosen, limp out. And after we finished tearing loose her throat, then we released her bulk to swim arcing away, so that her unblubbered bones might slowly sink, burdened by the heavy weight of the many fingerlings, their shapes come hungry to feed.

WHAT ACCOMPANIED US THEN BUT a child’s cacophony, the fingerling’s voice not one speech but a thousand, a thousand thousands, all together the sound of a break, and of a fracture. I had given him an innumerable number of pains, and he had returned to me the same, and now all of those hurts would own the depths of this lake, would feed on the bear for as long as it took to take her inside their many mouths, and so at least he would possess the mother he had wished to possess, as much as I had possessed him.

As I swam, I wanted to call out to the fingerlings, all the many schools fluttering around. I wanted to speak to them, but not to give them commands, not fatherly warnings or threats or pleas or admonishments. At last I wished to offer only names, all the names we had meant to give our many children. I wanted to give the fingerling what he had long ago asked me for, but I had no human mouth and so could offer nothing more, and anyway it was nothing he gave me back, neither satisfaction nor forgiveness nor a surface on which to attach my sadness, my relief. Whatever forms the fingerling next took on, none would be my son, and not my wife’s either. The fingerling had gone too far already, even though it had been only minutes since our separation, the annulment of our sharing the space within my shape. Now he had taken his leave of me and I of him, and whoever next heard his many voices would not be me.

The squid gathered the foundling in our two largest tentacles, our strongest arms, then in powerful spurts jetted us back to the shallows, where I could again stand, become the husband, and in my arms the foundling became the son, the only son. As I came out of the water I came out of the squid too, and as a man I smelled the foundling’s death differently, took in the decay that had rushed forward from the restarting of the clock. Upon the shore was my satchel, its strap cut from my back by the bear’s last blow, and as I gathered it up I smelled it too, the two bearskins within it. All felt foul and also fouled, and I could feel the wrongness of their long carryings, my keeping them from the grave or the pyre or the lake. I had brought these as offerings for my wife, but what good thing was I bringing?

A corpse and the coverings of corpses.

To the very end, I had always been the weakest one, and yet it was only I who had gone on and on. Among all the unfair worlds in which we lived, all the other elements had fallen and failed, and still there was me, still there was husband. Now here I was, arrived, alone—and always it was in my loneliness that I had best survived—and in the next moment the front door of the house opened, and from that portal out stepped my wife, but not the wife I had known.

I EMERGED FROM THE LAKE to see her standing in the doorway of her house, the house that was only hers, so much like the one that had been ours. My wife lingered half in and half out, her hands clenched against the doorframe, that bordered threshold between the dirt and the house, and as I jerked my body up the path I saw even at that distance how the muscles of her face made her mouth to move, but also how no words escaped. With the foundling in my arms, I hurried as best my ruin would allow, and as I walked I rang out her name, voiced it forth into the air, made the shape of its three letters, vowel and consonant and vowel again.

I called her as she was called, but she gave no sign that she heard, or that if she heard she recognized the name, and when I called again her only response was alarm, perhaps fear: at my presence, at the sight of the foundling and me together, pathed from the lake to the house. As I got closer, I saw she had been changed as I had been changed, not just by age but by some other circumstances too: Where once she had looked the part of a woman I had known, now she was fevered into some new person, a scorched wife. As the foundling had described, there had been a fire lit within her, and while it had not consumed her flesh it had filled her with its heat, so that she could wear no clothes, so that her pale skin was darkened like burned and crackled paper, and her hair was become white, robbed of its pigment. And no matter what I said, still my wife did not speak, still she did not say a single word.

This last memory of my long search, memory as failure, as failure, a faltering: To scream her name again. To kneel before her, and then to lay prostrate at her smoking feet. To thrust wildly at the air with her single syllable, that balanced word, that unanswered name savaged with disuse. To kneel, holding the foundling, rocking his shrouded shape, unable to make my wife accept what had been brought.

To want already for that moment to be over but to fear that afterward there would be only worse moments to come. And so to still be the husband and to be the father but to have neither role acknowledged and in this absence of expected station to want for time to stop again, but to know that clockless hours were gone for good.

UPON THE PORCH, ALL OF me dripped, gushed, my naked wounds made known before my transformed wife: The trap-crushed ankle throbbed again with the wrongness of its healing, and without the fingerling’s support the bear-wrenched shoulder hung crooked from its socket, and while those old wounds cried first it was the most recent that spoke loudest. The blood from that wound streaked, streamed around the almost-aligned knuckles of my spine, over my gooseflesh and old scars. Damaged breath wheezed from between the small remnants of my teeth, and as I sucked more air to say her name again I dizzied, my vision all sparks.

I did not know what other words to say, and so I said her name, said it until I was emptied of its sound, and then when I was hoarse and breathless I breathed it back in, and all I wanted in return was for her to speak some part of what I had come so far to hear: my own name returned, perhaps, or else an accusation, best followed by the terms of my eventual forgiveness.

Only after I quieted myself did she crouch down beside me, sinking her knees into the pool of my leaking.

She took my face between her hot hands, and then holding my cheeks—and then the smell of singed beard, of steamed tears—and then holding me, she said, Who are you?

She said, Where have you come from?

She pointed to the foundling, shrouded in dirty white, and as her accusing gaze lingered she said, Who is this, and why have you brought him?

And then, as if she had not already broken me, she turned and stepped back across the threshold, shutting the door.

I waited upon the porch, listened at the wood of the house, strained for the clatter and clack of objects within. After some moments had passed the door reopened, and this woman who had been my wife stepped back out onto the porch, reached out a hand. I took her fingers, took too much of them, and weaved them into mine, and though her heat hurt me I did not recoil, had waited too long to pull away in pain. At her request, I left the foundling momentarily upon the slats of the porch, then followed her out onto the dirt, where each step of hers burned away even what few patches of grass there were, and then in a circle of dirt she stopped and turned back, surveyed my wounds, the many leaks and lacerations upon my body.

With her index finger, she counted each, and as she touched them her heat sizzled and then cauterized the wounds shut, until eventually all that was left would stay there, heavy within me.

Amid the pain and stink, again her voice, again saying, Who are you?

Saying, Where have you come from?

Saying, Whose shroud is that upon my porch?

I am your husband, I said.

You left me, I said. Because you had a son, and after you left I looked for you, and later you sent him to look for me—

I said, I am your husband, and you were my wife, and together we had a son.

I said, I promise you, you are my wife still.

She listened to me speak, and then she shook her head.

No, she said. Always I have been here, and always I have been alone. Almost always it has only been me, and no other.

We were naked together upon the dirt, but still we were not as one. When I tried to argue my case, she stopped me, put a finger to my mouth, burned a streak across my already-chapped lips.

Later, she said. I am so tired.

It is time for me to rest, she said, and then she dropped my hand and turned back for the house.

Where will I go? I asked. Where will I go next?

Then come, she said, and it was as easy as that, and then she said, It does not matter to me.

Without waiting she passed through the door and into the house, and then I lifted the foundling and carried him across that threshold, and also the satchel containing the two furs, the one real and one made. While my wife disappeared farther into the house, I returned to the entranceway to shut the door against the day-like light, the almost lack of wind outside. At last husband and wife and child were again gathered under one roof, and that alone was better than what other states had for so long persisted, on all the other floors of this world.

THE LAYOUT OF THE LAST house was the same as the one we’d shared, and in the front room, I saw a wood-framed sofa like one I had built and that she had upholstered with song, set again before a fireplace clean and piled beside with kindling. On the walls hung framed photographs of our wedding day, pictures that in our first house had been destroyed by the bear, and while my wife had forgotten everything, here everything was. With the spotted tips of my fingers I touched the image of my wife’s face, and also mine, and that couple was long gone now, and it was no wonder she did not recognize us, and yet still there was something there, in or around the eyes, perhaps, or in the set of a mouth, the shape of a nose or neckline: a man and a woman just married, terrible in the potencies of their youth, their early love.

And in the kitchen: All our bowls as they had been when first stacked in their crates, before they were chipped and scratched by the bear’s expulsion of our lives from her cave. All our spoons, shiny upon the wall. All our pots and pans, suspended from their hooks, hung above the hewn-wood counters, and in the pantry only shelves, surfaces bare because I was not there to hunt or to gather, because my wife hadn’t the strength to harvest her garden—and so she had fed the foundling herself, herself nothing.

And in the dining room: A table set for two but with chairs enough for four. A candelabra with no candles. A layer of dust thick enough to hide the desire for family that once inhabited the room.

And in the nursery: The baby blankets my wife had sewn to show me she was trying. The bassinets I built to encourage her to produce what they might hold. The rocking chair I carved, the mobiles I strung. And because I did not know where else to lay the foundling, I brought him to lay upon that floor, in that room with no bed big enough to hold this slow-grown child. His shroud, ripped and dirty as it was, was still our wedding sheets, the once-white linens we were given, on which we tried our best to make our children, on which our losses slowly stained the white brown, no matter what soaps we scrubbed against its threads.

I walked down the house’s single hallway, to the door at the end where our bedchamber once was. My wife had not yet emerged, and so I knocked, and when there was no answer I knocked again, and when there was still no answer I pushed the door open.

There I saw my wife collapsed on the floor, smoking the hardwood and gasping aloud, her skin dark and also alight, the opposite of my long-cold paleness, that mark of my late life spent below the earth. I did not have far to carry her, but as I lifted her she burned me wide, scorched the arms that held her, the chest that clutched her close. Then came the stench of more crisping hair, and afterward I wore some shirt of blisters, raised and swollen where they were not burst by the boiling. The pain was extraordinary and did not diminish as I swept aside the burned blankets to reveal a bed made of stone, a copy of the one we had shared but that had required no wood. I laid my wife down upon that slab—upon her side of the bed, the side on which she had always slept—and then I slumped upon the floor beside her, listened to the long syllables of nonsense accompanying the slow smoke that escaped her mouth.

After I could not wake her I carried buckets of water from the shallowest parts of the lake, whatever inlets I could reach without risking falling in, then returned to the house to soak some towels, found where our towels had always been. I laid each one across some surface of my wife’s body, her forehead, her face and neck, her breasts and collarbones and belly and hips, her thighs and calves and feet—and each steamed, then smoked, then flamed—so that I had to snatch it back, burning my fingers. I was afraid to touch her, but when next she moaned I could not resist, and as I put my hand to her forehead to smooth back her hair, then that skin crinkled like ripping paper, and as always there was no good deed that did not worsen my crimes.

I could not sing as my wife could, and she would not wake no matter how I tried to cool her body with lake water or chilled air, let in through the now-open windows of the bedchamber, and because I did not know what else to do I again took her hand in mine, held on even as her heat opened my calluses, and as we burned together I began to speak, to tell her who she was, who she was to me.

I said, Remember I had finished building the house, or nearly so.

I said, Remember how terrible we must have seemed that day, when together we thought our marriage would then and always be celebrated.

I said, Remember: When we first arrived upon the dirt between the lake and the woods, then there was still sun and moon, only one moon, and stars too, all the intricacies of their intersections circumscribing the sky, their paths a tale to last every night, a waking dream to fill the hours of every day.

MEMORY OF MY WIFE’S CONFUSION, of her confused lack of memory: To know that she did not know who I was, even when she awoke in the middle of my story, in the middle of my telling her.

To understand she would not know her own name, no matter how many times I repeated it.

But as I spoke, her skin stopped smoking, lost some of its hottest heat even as it then stayed black and brittle. Encouraged by this cooling I confessed and confessed, and as the words moved out of my body and into the air, then with each story I saw her fever abate, diminished by right-ordered speech as it had not been by the wet cloths I had earlier tried. With each wrong-uttered word, each mistake I made or half-truth I told, the process reversed itself, set her body back toward ruin, and so I grew more careful, talked slower, put my tale on the surest path from our past to our present, smoothed out its digressions, its shifts of attention and time.

Soon I could touch the whole of her hand, then stroke her whitening forearm, and often she did not object to my touches, although if asked who I was she said she knew only whom I had claimed at great length to be. The blackness continued to leave the surface of her skin, revealing a face smooth and unwrinkled, unaged by memory, and while my speech tried to complicate that blankness, too often my words evoked no emotion.

It wasn’t until I spoke of finding the furs in the deep house that I thought I saw some new reaction upon her face, a restrained titter, or else a twitch approximating surprise or recognition or grief, perhaps a new turn of the lips, a narrowing of the eyes. It was so slight I could not identify its exact character, but whatever it was I wanted more, and before I continued I went into the front room and retrieved my satchel, and from that satchel I took one of the cub-sized furs—their previous movements so calm now—and when I gave her that fur she squeezed it tight against her chest.

And again, my questions, my asking, Do you know yet who you are?

Do you know who I am?

Do you know why you’re crying?

Still she shook her head, and still she denied, and her tears did not last long, not with her body still so hot. All the pieces of her I found in the deep house now went back into her, were returned by story, a different manner than they had escaped, sung into the rooms of the deep house: Now they came carried upon my breath, upon the word, these stories of dead child and dead bear and dead child, dying world.

After the story of the moonfall, I helped my wife from the bed, dressed her in some of the clothes hanging in her closet, as I had dressed myself earlier, in a shirt and trousers I had not seen since the youngest days of our marriage. Once she was clothed and shoed, then I had to sit down again, to gather myself before her, this ageless vision of the woman I had known and loved, long before our many complications, whom I was still growing used to in this new and unexpected shape.

And who was I to her, by the same light?

Still only a stranger, old and stooped, limping, long bearded and filthy.

She helped me down the hallway and into the front room, then out of the house, onto the porch, onto that fey-lit dirt. Her chamber’s stale air circulated different than the air above, and at its first taste I began to cough, and then I could not stop coughing. My wife let go of my arm, the arm I’d meant to support her instead, and I doubled over, hacked and wheezed, but for a time no relief came. Afterward I looked up at her blank patience, and then I said, Do you remember yet? How to create shape and sense from a song? How to make a garden out of the dirt or moons out of the sky?

I said, Once, you made a boy out of a bear, and sometimes I look at you and I think you almost remember.

My wife did not respond, but I thought I saw some flicker of emotion move across her face, and then her hair again seemed to blaze behind her, or else it was only the wind and the weird light.

My wife, I said, and because I didn’t know what else to do I stood to take her hand in mine, linked our fingers together. I set our feet upon the path that led from the house to the woods, the new and dark-barked trees, not as tall or broad as those found above but just as evenly spaced, and beneath them the pine straw was just as thick, lit by a similar diffusion of light. But here there were no badgers to be seen, no deer or elk, nor pheasants or quail, no sound but the wind, and there were no buck scrapes along the low trunks of the trees, no owl pellets coughed up and left for some scavenger. And there was likely then no cave, and this I believed I knew even without checking, because when my wife made this place she perhaps did not remember that there was supposed to be a cave, a cave and also a bear.

While we walked, I told my wife of when I first reached the great stairs, but no matter how I described it she did not recognize this landmark, nor my name for it, and so I tried again to explain, tried to find a better way to teach her what she herself had made or else first discovered.

I told her about fighting the bear at the burying ground, and at last she traded silence for curiosity, asking me, But what is a bear?

Next I told her about the bear killing the whale or the squid, and she asked, What is a whale? What shape is a squid’s?

And how to explain to someone who has never seen a bear what bear means, or whale, or squid?

What is the word child, even, if you have never seen a child?

She said, I wish—

She said, I would have liked to have had a husband, and I would like to have a son.

She said, It has been so lonely here, all by myself, as I have always been.

Maybe this house once belonged to someone else, she said, some other woman.

She said, Perhaps it was her you came looking for, but she is already gone. Perhaps I am someone else, and you are only mistaken in the way you look at me.

I said her name, begged it of her, said, Please, and then I said her name again.

I said, Do you remember any of the songs, the ones that might still save your boy, that could save me too, if there is enough of me left?

Please, I said. Please tell me that you do.

My wife, I let her go, or else she pulled loose, walked away, a step or two steps or three. She crossed and uncrossed her arms, then let them hang at her sides, hands open near her hips. She spread her legs just wide of her shoulders, opened her chest to fill it with air: a singer’s stance, and how my heart moved to see it.

A breath, a deep breath, and then a deeper one: She sucked the strange air until she was filled, and then she looked into the non-sky, into the place where moon or stars would have hung if there had been moon and stars.

She looked up through the trees, and then with a turn of her mouth she released that air, that potentially song-held breath.

What then?

What else. Only something hard sounding, a bleat, a blather. Not just not a song but also not a melody, not a chord, not a single note.

She tried, then tried again, but each try was worse than what had come before, and there was nothing of who she was within her sound.

My wife said, I’m sorry.

She said, I wanted there to be a song, a song for you.

She said, I wanted to make you happy.

I nodded, knew. Again I took up her hand. I said, You must be so very tired.

I said, It’s time for you to sleep.

I said, In the morning, we will bury our son.

I FOUND MY SHOVEL OR one like it in its accustomed spot, the place I once put it, the place some earlier, less-forgetful wife sung it back. Leaned against the rear of the house, it had shared space near the edge of the garden with my traps, but now there were no traps, and also nothing for them to catch, and that too was best.

And then back around the yard and onto the porch and inside the house, where my wife waited, where the shrouded foundling waited dumb in her arms.

And then outside again to hold the front door open so that my wife might carry her unremembered son out of our house, to lift him once more over the threshold and onto the dirt, and because I did not know where else to put him I buried him in the woods, in the same part of these new woods that I had claimed in the old, where I took the logs for our house, where I interred every beast I could. But all those days were gone, and I had promised this new woman whom I couldn’t not call my wife that I would stop speaking of them, and the digging took all morning, as my wife could not work the shovel, and I was too sick for fast work. And so another element of our world was ended, and I believed for a time that no more would come.

I avoided my wife’s blank gaze as I received the foundling’s body from her, and then I lowered her son into his grave, and then I took the two furs from my satchel to blanket them across his shape—and when that first shovel weight of dirt hit heavy upon the shroud, it was only I who cried.

IN THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED I made my living again within the house, although I did not broach the borders of the marriage bed. Instead I took the crib and bassinet and rocking chair out onto the dirt, and in the yard I broke them, and then I made the nursery mine. Into it I gathered all the remaining artifacts of who we were, those same reminders that failed to stir my wife: the photographs of our wedding, the clothes we wore on our wedding day, still preserved, and also the gifts we had been given then, meant to start our life together. Emptied of those objects, the proper house became appropriately blank, and now those shapes that I could not discard would hurt me only in private, in the length of my sleepless, darkless nights.

There were no fish in the lake nor beasts in the woods, and so we ate from the small garden behind the house, where my wife’s garden had always been, where perhaps some garden had always been meant to go. There were no pests to eat her crops—but also no bees to fertilize them, no worms to upturn the dirt, and no proper sun to light them—and so what grew there was also odd, plentiful but misshapen, underripe, without much flavor but nutritious enough. It was an unworkable garden, one whose half-sung mechanism would eventually fail from incompleteness, and when I asked her where she found her first seeds, she said that she did not know, that the garden had always grown exactly this well.

I said, Did you forget, or did you never know?

I said, How long ago did you start to forget? Do you at least know that?

She knew so little, despite my long storytelling, and when despite my promises I again reminded her that once she was able to make this whole world we now lived in, had somehow carved it free from the black, then she shook her head, said it was I who was mistaken.

She said, Why would I make a world so unfinished, if I were making it for me? Do you think I adore emptiness, or else a creation incomplete? When you speak of a bird, its wings, its feathers, I think to myself, That is something I would like to see. When you tell me of the bear, I wonder what its fur felt like under your hands and how its spoor smelled and how terribly frightening its roar must have been, even before it was the broken thing I saw from my window. And these fish you speak of, sparkling silver, why would I not want to feel their swimming around my ankles, the smallest minnows nipping at my toes, as if it were they who were meant to eat me, instead of the other way around?

I said, Once you did know.

I said, It was you who made this place.

My wife shook her head again, touched my face with her now-cool fingers. She said, How do you know these things about me? How do you pretend to know?

I said, Once you brought your son here to escape me, but there couldn’t have been this world, waiting. This is a remaking of the world we shared, the only world your son had ever known.

I said, You tried to make him a home, and for some time you succeeded.

My wife again wanted to speak, but first she stared off into the twilit sky, the dark-that-was-not-dark of our morning. She was again so beautiful, her grace terrible in equal proportion to her sadness, and after she gathered herself she said, No, this world has always been here. I did not make it. Always it was here, waiting for me to find my way.

She said, I have listened to your story and I have been moved by your words, but I do not believe you are my husband, that the boy we buried was my son.

And then I knew I should have shown her the foundling’s face, what was left of his face, how her song had made his into hers, had claimed even his nose and mouth and eyes, made them as hers were made, adopting him not just in claim but also in shape, and had I proved the foundling I would have proved it all.

My wife listened to my words, considered my trembling insistence, then said, It would not have mattered.

She said, While you slept, I opened his shroud myself and saw nothing like what you say I should have seen. Just a dead boy, whose death meant nothing to me.

Every day after I woke up to the same old touches, mindless now but still hot and cold, thick and thin, beneath and atop my skin. I coughed, spit up into the bucket I had left there for just this purpose, and when I was finished I took the bucket outside and limped it down the path to the lake, where I dumped its runny contents into the waters. There tiny black fish swam into the shallows to eat this bloody vomit, and I did not tell my wife I recognized them but rather kept their existence to myself.

A new secret then, but even if I had told her, would she have understood? Could she have looked into the water to see that the slim length her body aborted was become a school of fish or something like fish, as hungry for their father’s flesh now as when they were younger and meant to be a boy?

And so I said nothing. And so I continued to say nothing, even as other signs began to reappear, recur: Because I was sick I could rarely stand more than a few bites of what we gathered from the garden, and after each such meal, my wife asked me why I did not eat, and when I did not answer, she asked what she had done wrong in the kitchen. I hurt her anew as she asked again every evening, my mere presence enough to reintroduce doubt, my voice and my actions or lack of action enough to allow the reentry of guilt, that emotion I had carried from the top of the world to its very bottom, where now it pooled and stained all that I touched, all those I longed to touch, and it was after the frustrations of one of these late meals that we first heard the voices, the high laughter from within the woods, cut through the stillness of the dimming light, the unbroken content of our evening.

I did not hear before my wife heard, did not hear until after she asked me and asked me again if I did, but then afterward what withered flesh that sound made, my skin pebbled along every nerve line, the shivers of recognition jerking me from my chair. Together my wife and I rushed toward the woods, but she arrived there faster, possessed of a new youth, her body restored as fully as her mind was not. From farther ahead her voice called out for me to hurry, and although I wanted to respond, all that breath was already engaged in moving my bones toward her and the voices beyond, and any speech I would have made would not delay the process, and then anyway I was soon enough arriving, looking up from watching my feet to spy my wife, tall and pale and stunned, some short distance across the tree line, and there to see how she was surrounded: by the foundling, by a new crowd of foundlings.

AT THE EDGE OF THE woods stood some small number of sons, all so similar at first but marked apart the more I looked. The foundlings were all their own ages, for one thing, and each carried a slightly shifted face upon its head, a different expression of lips and mouth and teeth. Their appearance put my heart to pounding but did not disturb my wife, who already knelt before their approach, bidding them to come to her, inviting their hands upon her face and body. She gathered these boys close, took some into her arms, and there I saw a mockery of the family I had wanted, some clutch of children encircling this one woman, this woman I had always wanted above all others, and my face twisted as I saw a seventh son wandering out of the thicker brambles, stumbling with his face struck wide across the forehead—as if bleeding from the blow of a boat, as if struck hull across head—impossibly saying MOTHER, saying MOTHER wetly, with lungs soaked and sodden from a lake, and again he said MOTHER, MOTHER, and then all that water inside followed his voice out, spilling onto the forest floor, soaking his words into its soil.

Confronted with this dying child, my wife did not scream, did not even glance in my direction, while some short distance away this staved foundling fell, his voice no longer capable of words, and the other children seemed as undisturbed as my wife. They did not speak well—the true foundling had never fully outgrown the stutter and stammer of his childhood—but that did not stop them from leaving my wife to come to me, to put their cold hands upon my face, and with their different lisps they said SHHH, they said DON’T WORRY, they said MOTHER WILL BRING HIM BACK, and then there were more of them coming, walking out of the woods, and when they came they came dressed as these first were dressed, all in white, each garment featureless from a distance, but close up embroidered with pale stitching on pale cloth, the markings of our wedding sheets.

My wife stood among the growing crowd of children, all of them coming to her, and from their midst she said to me, What are we supposed to do?

She said, Are we supposed to take care of these children, and what does that mean?

As if I knew. As if there were any laws that had proved constant, reliable. And so I said nothing, because I did not know, because part of me did not want to find out, did not want to commit to another fruitless course of action, whether that was caring for these foundlings, these children found by both of us, whether it was refusing to do so. I was not as convinced as my wife that these foundlings were anything we should lead out of the woods and onto the dirt, and I did not hide my gladness when we found we could not: My wife gathered the children into a single-file column, and in this formation they followed her eagerly until the tree line—but there they would follow her no more, their fear of that threshold seemingly the exact opposite of the first foundling’s, who had for many years refused to return to the woods.

My wife abandoned her garden after the coming of the foundlings, let its plants grow wild again, as perhaps they had before. I followed her lead, went with her into the woods each morning and afternoon to watch the foundlings, and every day there were more among the trees, and always my wife tried to gather some to her, as many as she could. None came with names, and she remembered no such sounds to grant them, to mark this one from that one further than their shifted features already had, and while there were many such names within me, saved for the children we never had, I decided I would not give them to her, no matter how she pleaded.

Despite the evidence of their play, I said these were not real children, that I preferred them nameless, as even if they were real I did not believe they would prove permanent. So few things had, and I wished to never again love what would not last, and while my wife delighted in the company of these children, I did not.

In the deep house there had been a room for every aspect of my wife’s person, and here there was a foundling for every aspect of her son’s, and among them were those that reminded me most of that child we raised together: One foundling, five or six years old, gathered some of the younger ones into a circle, then thrilled them with stories previously captured in our stars, stories about the elements my wife had taught to our own foundling, all that old trap of house and dirt and moon and ghost. I listened long to his explanations, but he did not say mother, did not say father, and so either we were now unnecessary or else he was only some anomaly too, some slightly false son, and somewhere there would be a foundling who knew all the elements, and also their order. Elsewhere, another son knew none of our elements, and so named rock and stream, dust and dream, and also there were others who subscribed to just one at a time, lake or woods, dirt or bear—as if any of them knew what terror a bear was—and if they claimed to, then I made them take back their claim, and if one would not, then I swore he better, or else in my rage I would take that boy out to the lake, let the deep-swallowed shapes teach him better truth.

The only common trait shared among all the foundlings was their veneration of my wife, who walked every day among their number. The children most like our foundling followed behind her, pleading for her attention. Each wanted to show her some trick of memory, some learned thing, or else a physical feat meant to impress her, and she only rarely was, as she did not remember how to be impressed. She did not know enough of what there was in the world to feel one way or another about what she saw, to know what was better than what, and without memory there could be no right emotions, and of course she had refused what memories she had been given. The foundlings tugged at the hems of her skirts, dirtied them with their fat fingers, then their faces, pressed in close, cheeks against cloth, begging for her touch, for her kiss, for her milkless breasts, and still she did not know what it meant to be a mother, what it had meant to her to be a mother to this child, this one made many brothers.

Mother: Once it was the title of her highest ambitions, and now it became only more mystery. Despite her interest, she did not know who to be, what person these children wanted when they called her by this name, and when their frustration turned to hungry anger, always I was there to intercede, dragging them from off her body, untwisting their fingers from her pulled hair, handling them all more roughly than I wished, and so again, so again.

Back in the house, combing her long white hair—hair that never changed back, even after her fever receded—she asked me what they wanted from her, and I could not tell her, could not explain what I believed, a story I had made for myself: that each wanted to be chosen, to be made the one to be mothered.

I said, Give them nothing yet.

There are too many, I said, and you already once gave so much.

She nodded, smiled, patted my hand, but did not do what I wanted most, did not remember: not the first foundling, nor the ache that preceded him, the destruction of the first house that followed.

I said, If you were to fall in love with this many children, what worse thing might you do in their wake?

What wrong thing might we?

As I put her into her bed that night, tucking her slenderness beneath her blankets—my movements tender at last in my oldest age—she said, I want the boys to come live with us.

She said, Boys do not belong in the woods. Boys belong here, in the house.

I shook my head, stroked her hair. Where will they all fit? I asked.

The woods are big enough to hold them, I said. Let them stay in the woods.

She yawned, and then she said, We can always make more house.

She said, We will find a way to take them from the woods, and we will make them each a room in which to live, and in each room a bed for every boy, until the house is exactly the size our family needs the house to be.

Her eyes glimmered, captured the same sad light they did when the fingerling died, when all the other pregnancies that followed ended upon our sheets, ended there until there was the stain that would not come out of those threads.

We can always make more house, she said, until the house is big enough.

THE RANKS OF THE FOUNDLINGS swelled, their unparented variety now often violent without check: Here was a son that took my side instead of his mother’s, dragging some smaller, fairer version of himself across the forest, both boys bloody and beaten.

Here came another, carrying a stick sharpened into a spear, a smile carved into a smirk.

Here a third, one fist full of a rock chipped sharp, marked with the makings of the scalps worn ragged around his waist.

All these children, worse than I’d imagined, and then, fleeing from their brothers, those others more gentle, less prone to violence or at least less capable of carrying it out, and as I hid in the brush and the bramble I saw that there were perhaps three tribes forming loosely, banding together to parent themselves in the absence of better versions of ourselves. Each grouping had only the barest of identities, shifted and still mutable, and while it took my wife longer to see them I had no such difficulties. I observed our memories made flesh again, and as they returned some of them were killed again, and afterward more came to take their place, to become new killers or else again the victims, and while they were greater in number they were lesser in shape, just as the animals I’d trapped and skinned had returned, poorer for having crossed my path just once, and if this time it was not a bear that provided that mechanism then I did not know what else.

The foundlings were not all of one kind: The first were almost as the foundling I knew, their features taken from that face that held no relation to our own, to those of their supposed mother and father. That face was the foundling’s from his theft and transformation until his sixth birthday and the scarring of his face, and now it was easier for me to recognize its origins: Under his boyish skin, there was the face of the bear, high and sloped, with a squat nose, a mouth filled with too-early teeth.

Soon after these came other foundlings, more like the one I had known but lacking the wide range of the first: These all shared the same face, or closer to it, their variations of a smaller order, all just different ages of the remade foundling’s face, so much like my wife’s, remade as such after his scarring, his injury at my hands. These mother-faced children were bigger, but they were not big: Just as the foundling who came to me in the last days of our dirt was not as grown as his age should have rendered him, so these multitudes were hindered, shaped too small for their older voices, their developing adulthoods.

The last foundlings to appear at the tree line were something other, more raw potential than memory: It was only among their number that I counted some teenagers, and also some near-men as old as I was when I met my wife, before I moved farther past, into the endless years I now inhabited. No matter their age, these were the worst to behold, scarred and half shaped, for what they were made of was too slim to be a person. Some missed fingers, others limbs, even the parts of a face that made it a face instead of some other, dumber appendage.

It was these children that were the most dangerous, violent in their wrongness, and often I found one of their number dead upon the fresh-stomped paths or else one of the other children ended by their hands. Soon I walked the woods always with my shovel so that I might bury these children before my wife saw them—although perhaps she never would have, since she did not venture as far as I did, did not go past the more-adoring children at the woods’ edge. It was only I who went deep, who interred again the dead, and who slunk all day through the thickets, searching for what my wife, now ignorant in her innocence, could not search for: the child with the right song, with the full knowledge of the elements, with the combination of the two that might save us.

Often I was sneaky in my observations, but other times fits of coughing gave away my presence, or else my cramps left me immobile upon the forest floor, easy prey for the taking, and while the worst of the foundlings had not yet cornered me in such a state, still I watched them grow braver, approaching, and in their eyes I saw some memory of my own, of the way I felt the first time I stalked toward a still-living deer, trapped in my traps.

My fear then? That one day the foundlings would pass the threshold of their hesitance, as I myself had when confronted with that thrashing buck, all those years ago.

THE RULE THAT PROTECTED US inside the house, upon the dirt around it: Despite their growing numbers, the foundlings still could not leave the woods. At dusk I observed how they withdrew deeper into the woods, hiding far from the tree line, but still I often lay awake, wrapped in my blankets beside my wife’s bed, listening for the day the foundlings found some way to overcome their reluctance, as the bear eventually had.

But then one night I heard a new sound instead, a humming made by many voices, far off in the dark: not a song but rather a single note, thrummed out of their many throats, one I recognized, remembered.

This single note, possessed by all? I thought perhaps it was the last note of the song the foundling had used to raise me, a tone able to restart my heart upon the floor of the first house: What they hummed, it was not nearly that song entire, but if they had one note now, then perhaps they would produce more later, and although I knew better I went out of the house and back onto the dirt, back down the path to the woods, and what I saw there was only the empty darkness between the trees, filled not with bodies but with this sound, a child fragmented into noise, and upon my knees I closed my eyes before the buzzing hum, and from the dirt side of the tree line I let it stain me with its promise.

What day was it when my wife and I returned to the tree line together, still hand in hand, as we had taken to walking? What hour was it when we found the woods choked full with children, with all the possibilities of her child, made here into an army of flesh roiling at the tree line, no longer clothed in the white garments they had made from what we had buried, instead pressed naked at the edge of the trees?

What memories we had buried were exhausted now, consumed by what had come after, and still my wife wanted to go to them, cried out as I held her back, because my wife did not see what I saw.

Wanting again to mother, she saw only their nakedness, heard only their cries for her, for any other mother that might appear. I saw and heard that too, but I keened also what waited behind those fronted foundlings, the bear-children, the child-bears, the stained-mouth children who had fashioned their own clothes from a material that could only be their brothers, dead somewhere in the wood and now skinned, and how I gagged to spy it, and this was no way for a mother to see her children, no way for children to act in front of their mother.

It took all the strength left upon my old bones to drag my wife from that tree line, thrashing against my sick grip when the foundlings began to wail, when they cried to her, calling out not the single syllable of her true name, which only I still used, but the joined sounds of her maternal title, the one she once wished to be called instead.

My easily exhausted wife went limp in my arms, and I lifted her off the dirt, carried her away from the woods. Inside the house she fought me again, and I fought her too, dragged her through our rooms, her wrists in my wrists and her legs kicking out, kicking away at every table, at every other furniture, until all surfaces along our path toppled, spilled their contents, filled the house with the shatter of their breakage. When I reached the bedroom, I pushed her inside, and before she could turn back I shut the door and set my weight against it, and when I had it steady I turned my key in the lock, locked her in that room as she had once locked me.

I set my mouth against the door’s thick plank, and through the wood I said, You say you are their mother, but you do not even remember their first face.

You do not remember where their faces come from, and they are not yours.

I said, They were never your children. Not these.

I said, Your son is dead.

We buried him, I said, and despite these ghosts he has not come back.

She cried at the door, her voice so close I could feel its vibration in the wood beneath my cheek. She said that she did remember, that she was trying to remember them all.

She said, You told the story wrong, deceived me, hid me from what was mine.

She said, We had so many children, more than you said, and now I want to love them all.

No, I said. No. We had one, and you had one, and both are gone.

Her long motherhood was again upon her, half recalled, and want overwhelmed her, made her some senseless animal, banging and banging against the inside of the door, this trap with which I meant to hold her.

And then the banging stopped.

And then it did not resume.

And then when I opened the door, the bedroom was empty of everything except some tiny wind, blowing through the open window, rustling the curtains across the frame.

And then I had lost her again, because by the time my slower gait returned me to the tree line already I was too distant to do anything but watch as the foundlings parted ranks for her to pass, as they closed that same breach against me: Before me my wife was consumed by the churning crowding of her new foundlings, taken away within a deadly scrum from which she did not return.

MEMORY AS NEW MONTHS SPENT alone: To again be without companionship, except for the ranks of foundlings waiting at the tree line, whose stern bodies would no longer let me pass, and who would not bring me word of my wife, no matter how I begged. To again live in a world of unfaithful wives, a world where mothers chose their children over their husbands. To complain aloud and to no one of this unfairness, to pretend that there was no deeper person in her than what I gave her back, and yet, and yet.

To admit that no matter how I wanted her to be my wife first, still she had not been just mine, not since the moment of our first conception, all those years ago.

To admit defeat, because she never would be mine alone, not ever again, and it was I who had failed to join her, to become some true father to complement her endless motherhood, instead remaining only her husband, that insufficient shape to which always I stubbornly clung.

FROM MY STATION ON THE dirt I kept my vigil, watching for my wife’s return from just outside the woods. Whenever I was not weeding our garden or keeping straight our house or maintaining some other part of what world I had been left to steward, then I would return to my chosen spot, close enough to toss the foundlings whatever fruits and vegetables had ripened that day, and each time I fed them I grimaced to watch their hunger grow, but if there was never enough to feed them all, then what other option existed but to provide for some? Afterward, I laid my old bones upon the hard dirt, then waited, waited and watched as they resumed their previous activities, their actions as varied as their faces, their shifted shapes. I memorized the different foundlings that came to the edge of the woods, the ones that kept me from walking beneath its trees, and again I made some catalogue or listing, some roll call unscrolling—and by their differences I knew I named them, even if I had not meant to.

In one foundling, I heard my wife’s laugh and, in another, her sigh, some exclamation.

And in this foundling, I saw my wife’s features most complete, the boy’s face like her face, her raven hair long and flowing upon his shoulders.

And in this foundling, her touch, smoothing back the hair of a brother covered in mud and dirt, hungry and hurting, for what food there was was never enough.

And in this foundling, a game I remembered her teaching him, as she had been taught, as he now taught the others.

And in this foundling, a voice like my wife’s, singing some snatch of the song I sought. And in this one, some other part, and in this one, a third.

And in this foundling, a look like she had given me, like she gave me often, a look that could mean one or a dozen things, and how it pained me to remember each one, and also them all.

And in this foundling, I saw the bear, her long limbs, her dense muscles, and I saw her apartness, her knowledge that she had given up much to become what she was. I saw this and more, all on the face of one child, who could not understand from what lamentations he was made.

And in this foundling, an angry lesson, scarred into a face burned not here but somewhere far above us, far behind. A face never resung into beauty, belonging to this boy holding down one of his brothers, poking fingers into the younger boy’s eyes and nose and mouth. He pinched and folded the flesh of the other’s face ugly as his own, and even then he did not stop, even though I cried out to him, even though I pleaded from the dirt, and as always it was as if my words could not cross the thin border between my domain and theirs, and as always it was only as if.

And in this foundling, the kindness of the mother, rocking some smaller child to sleep, cooing all the while, as if mere sound were enough to wish the wicked world away.

And on this foundling, a suit of skin, torn free from another brother, left to wander more naked than naked. And how the skin was sewn with hair. And how it was stained with his brother. And how it kept the foundling warm, so that while the others shivered in the almost dusk, this newly clothed killer stood tall and proud, stupid and unafraid, despite all the world around him, the cold and the tired conspiring to bring him low.

And in this foundling: again, the bear, and now more of her in each new brother.

And so in this one: clawed hands at the end of too-long limbs.

And in another: a hump of muscle twisting his back, giving strength to shoulders and fists.

And in another: a mouth so filled with teeth the lips couldn’t fit over what they contained, that jutting sharpness.

And in another: a body covered with snarling fur, thicker than any yet seen, but not thicker than what was yet to come.

And in this foundling, again more of the first: His high, lilted voice. His strange way of standing, cocked sideways, unsure upon his legs. His small hands, his crowded teeth. His hair, thick and curled, like no one else’s, at least no man’s. His way of playing, often alone, often at some distance, as if every game required no other player, and also his eyes, dark and accusing, set in a dozen and then two dozen heads, all looks landing on me, lingering hard and long and suspicious, and it was no mystery to me that these gazes remained unfooled, untricked by what gentler old man I had tried to become, had pretended I had.

I kept one last watch at the edge of the woods, and when morning came still there was no sign of my wife, just these dozens of worsened children, and again they refused to part, to make way for me to enter. Even the smallest were like standing stones against me, and the oldest shook their sticks and lifted their fist-sized rocks, barked threats, and there was no peaceful way to pass their barricade. I stepped back, gathered my breath, then let loose nearly all the sound I had in me, emptied it against their own loud voices until they were culled into silence, until all the air was mine.

Every eye was watchful upon me, and to their attention I said, I am coming through you, and then I am going to my wife, to bring her back or else to stay at her side.

I said, You will not stop me.

I said, I love her and am her true husband, the only one there ever was, and the truth of that will grant me passage against you, all you ghosts.

The foundlings did not speak then, my bravado provoking no response from either their brightest and oldest, nor from their youngest, those who might not know better than to speak to one such as me. And smartly so: for silence was a better answer than words, and a harder one to take.

I was disappointed by this result but I had hardly expected more, had been foolish to hope: Mine was not the power of voice, had never been that.

My power, always it was something else, and it was a thing more terrible than even the worst awfulness these shades had imagined. And as they would not give me what I wanted, so now my anger would be brought upon them without further warning, a sudden storm from unclouded sky.