CARROTS
And so we sat and gazed upon the flickering pictures of hot days long past. Smoke wreathed the air and settled in thin hoods over our eyes. The smell of it gently rasped the inside of my nose. I shifted on grandmother’s lap.
What are those? I asked, and gently prodded the screen.
Carrots, she replied. I think.
She wasn’t sure.
We were quiet a moment, as I examined the image. I squinted through the sludgy air and brought my nose so close to the surface that the pale blue light momentarily washed over my retinas, turning them milky and smooth.
They were different back then, I said.
Yes, grandmother conceded. I suppose they were. For one, she continued, they didn’t have fingernails.
How odd, I thought.
And then I went to stir the soup.
❧
THE HOUSE
The house was small and square, perfectly so. When it was cold, as it was back then, pale smoke rose from its stout chimney only to disappear immediately among the branches and clouds. There weren’t often any birds, though on occasion, one would fly by, a reckless streak burnt dark into the sky. It was far from the others, the house. Far from the closest town and the road that led there, but the forest in which it sheltered made the physical distance all the more great. Because of its location, it was rarely visited. Most days passed in roughly the same manner, filled as they were with the scurrying and screaming of small animals, and the moaning of the branches as the wind slipped gently through them.
The day I first came upon the house it was fall. I suppose that’s how I came to see it in the first place, as the naked trees, stripped of their greenery, no longer obscured it. Of course, I now know that that was not the case. I found the house, that day, because it wanted to be found. Had it been any other time, and I any other soul, I would have continued blindly on, past the house, and into the rest of my days. As it was, I did not.
It was a hard, dry day, and unseasonably cold, so the fallen leaves remained vivid and vibrant even as they crunched underfoot. It gave the forest a crisp taste, though if I paused for a moment and closed my eyes, I noticed the faint spice of decay. If I brushed back the leaves, I would expose an entirely separate world, much richer and more damp.
Something crawled frantically over the toe of one boot. I stayed still for a moment and watched it burrow back below the crested leaves and further, deeper, into the mulch. I was not in a rush. But then the wind picked up, as though she too had been disturbed, and I felt the sting of it on the backs of my hands. I walked on. It grew colder, but, for a time, no darker. It was the time of year where every day seemed to exist in the odd half-light of late dawn or early dusk, with the shadows having skulked off so that the world appeared shallow and flat.
I squinted into the milky white and hunched my shoulders up around my ears. Inside my thin boots my toes began to burn and throb. I had no measure of the time that had passed since I had set out, but seeing as darkness had yet to fall I moved on. At the time, it felt as though it were the only option. Perhaps it was. I can’t be sure, of course, but thinking back on it now I don’t recall ever considering turning around. I don’t recall thinking much of anything, really. It was as though my mind had been pared down to nothing but basic functions. The lifting and lowering of legs, the blinking of eyes, the heaving of lungs, the beating of heart. I heard only my footsteps and the blood in my ears, threaded together like burning beads by the high-pitched keen of the wind.
I gazed at the ground until all the reds and browns and oranges broke free from the confines of the leaves and mingled together enthusiastically in the dirt. My eyes smarted, then ran. The color blurred further and after a moment I slowed to a stop. The house was there when I looked up. Something hot curdled in my stomach, then tried to crawl back up my throat. It had taken me by surprise, the house, looming as it did suddenly and without warning from amidst the trees, through the gap-toothed branches. Right angles and straight lines jarring in the sea of listing trunks. I felt rather as though it had tracked me there. We peered at one another.
No, I told myself firmly. I peered at it. It sounded true but felt like a lie.
I blinked. The house remained. The wind receded, then returned all at once. Somewhere above me, the tops of the trees creaked and thrashed and the branches nearest the house’s walls pressed against it. Elegant fingers softly stroking. Small sounds, and yet they seemed to hang in the air. After a time, I noticed the white smoke snaking from the roof. It had no smell that I could detect, though the forest scent was thick in my mouth so it may have merely been too faint to register.
I figured that I had arrived at the house from the back, face to face as I was with a blank wall, devoid of windows. The wooden shingles were worn softly grey, the same shade as the trunks crowded around it. I took a step forward. I took another. I walked around the corner and came upon another blank wall. The same weathered shingles lay in an unbroken stream across its surface. No windows. The only irregularities were tiny chips and chinks notched out of the wooden pieces, and small spots on which hardy colonies of moss had taken root. I contemplated this for a moment, then continued on. Though it too had no windows, the next side I came to did have a door. Set flush in the wall and entirely without adornment. The handle was also of the forest, a curving sliver of bone so white and smooth it nearly glowed. Apart from that, the entrance was unremarkable. It was marked by no path or steps flowing up to its lintel, and the surrounding landscape remained unruffled. The smoke streamed straight up into the air. I inched closer. Despite the lack of windows, I felt exposed. I shifted a beat to the left and clasped the trunk of the nearest tree. The cold had thoroughly seeped into my limbs by then, and they moved stiffly and jerkily. The bark was no warmer.
A quick look around the last corner of the structure confirmed my suspicion. No windows on that side either. I returned to my tree and waited. Not for long. I couldn’t help myself. I was drawn to the house. Of course I was, I would think later, of course. I scurried forward and paused. Crept a few more steps.
The house gave off a strange heat. I only noticed as I was nearly at the door, and even then the difference in temperature was subtle. The heat of another body, or of a breath freshly exhaled. I glanced up and noticed that the smoke continued its upward trajectory, course unchanged. The warmth flushed over my face, a soft hand cupping my chin and ruffling the ends of my hair. I reached out a hand. The bone doorknob was alive beneath my fingers, as though still forming part of whatever body it had been pulled from. I tugged on it. The door stuck briefly, then swung smoothly open, clearing an arcing swath of leaves from the entry.
I expected the interior of the house to be dim, given the absence of windows, and it was dusky, but not as dark as I had anticipated. The inner walls were pale honeyed wood, the color of sun shining through closed eyelids. A small fire burned low and white in a simple hearth, feeding on a lump of spiny twigs. A cot melted into a shadowy corner against the far wall, and bunches of herbs hung from the sturdy-looking beams and rafters that supported the roof. The room smelled of cinnamon, though somehow more wild than the ground, store-bought variety.
I had been gazing at the bed, trying to make out if anyone was in it, so I didn’t see the figure until they were beside me. The scent of cinnamon burst and bloomed and rolled off their body in waves. I turned slowly to face them and felt an ugly flush rush from my collar to my cheekbones—an intruder, caught in the act. I braced myself. Something slipped in my gut and I twitched, about to run. No longer blissfully blank, my mind was nonetheless of no assistance. White noise filled my thoughts with a sick, grinding sound, reducing me to gritted molars and sweat-clenched palms.
The figure wore a wide-brimmed hat, larger and softer than those I was accustomed to seeing. It cast a heavy shadow across most of their face, while the hanging herbs obscured the rest. They placed a hand on my arm and stepped forward.
My child, they said. Come sit down.
So I did.
We sat near the fire on low wooden stools, upholstered in the softest leather.
Call me Mother, they said.
So I did.
Mother, I began. I searched in vain for some explanation for my being there, in her house. Finding none, I paused, then gathered myself up to begin again. You have a lovely home, I managed to say.
She smiled, firelight shining on smooth black teeth so that they appeared liquified.
It’s very old, she said.
Did you build it? I asked.
She laughed. It tinkled and shattered on the stone floor. Of course not, she said. No one did.
She stretched up in her seat and plucked two mugs from the mantel. She settled one in the cleft of her lap and held the other out for me to take. I obliged, and leaned forward. She held my hand with the tips of her fingers before letting go and sitting back.
Tea, she said, and smiled. Good for chilly days.
The steam that rose from her mug was unusually substantial, verging on smoke-like as opposed to vapor. I gulped some down.
Thank you Mother, I said.
It warms from the inside, she said. Then slipped out of the hat.
She no eyebrows and no nose. A mouthful of teeth but no lips. Her face was unlined and unshaped, the perfect oval of a faraway moon. Her eyes were two swarthy bruises, roughly a third of the way down her face, with a tiny black pinprick in each centre. She smiled again. This time wider, and I noticed that they weren’t teeth, but rather stones that filled her mouth. Those smooth, flat, river rocks that are permanently wet.
She placed a hand on mine, where it rested on my knee. I realized that it bore only two fingers and no palm; merely two branching prongs that cleaved the end of her arm. Her skin was warm. She squeezed gently.
I’ve waited, she said, for a very long time. My child.
She was growing. No, not quite. I was shrinking. The effect was nearly the same, in the end, except that my clothes rose up in great dead drifts around me. One hand slowly vanished beneath her long fingers while the mug of tea grew heavier and hotter in the other. She looked down at me and smiled. A tooth quivered in her gums as a leech-like tongue slid out through one corner of her mouth.
My scream sounded breathy and high-pitched, the scream of a child. Of course it was. She laughed and clutched one hand to her chest, as though watching something especially endearing; eyes half-closed and head tilted back. I drew my hand away and shrank into the cavernous billows of my old clothes. One hand grasped desperately at the folds of cloth, hopelessly loose, in an attempt to steal them around my newly small body. The other scrabbled blindly along the stool as I made to push myself backwards off of it. In their frenzy, my fingers encountered a variation in the smoothness of the stool’s upholstery. I traced the outline before looking down; I can’t say why. I was having trouble forming thoughts and, in fact, what was surging through my mind could hardly be called thoughts in the traditional sense as they were rather too ephemeral and amorphous. Shapes and color peppered with pattern and shading. They tumbled together slowly, viscously. When I managed to fix my eyes on my hand, and the stool upon which I sat, I saw that I was holding a nose. I whipped myself away from the seat and tumbled onto the floor. I swam through the clothes, tearing at them as I hauled myself towards the door, although time and space had begun to bow and bulge in entirely unpredictable ways, so that each of my movements threw up spangles of bright lights and seemed to take hours to complete.
I began to crawl. I could hear Mother somewhere behind me. She sounded quite unconcerned, though I could no longer understand what she was saying. Words had lost their flavor and turned to rubble in my mouth. I spat on the floor. I kept going. The hanging bundles of herbs cast long shards of shadow across the floor, so thick that I felt their furred velvet below my hands. I heard them whispering high above me, and, at length, one bunch fell from the rafters and rolled across my path. Its eyes were scrunched tight, as if in pain, and its mouth squeezed into a tight pucker. Mother clapped her hands in delight.
My children! she cried. My children!
I had nearly reached the doorway when she picked me up. She held a corner of her cape around me like a swaddle. It smelled of wool and grass. I gripped the fringed edge in one pudgy fist. Her face glowed as I gazed up at her, an internal halo. She stroked my cheek with one tapered finger. She drew me closer and kissed me gently on the head, then breathed in heavily.
I love the smell of babies, she said.
❧
HARVEST SEASON
I was too young to remember planting the crop in great detail. It must have been warm out, though not hot, and damp, though not wet, but I only know this from listening in on the others’ discussions. In any case, it had been done, and now it was time to harvest.
My brothers roused me from bed, mumbling quietly to themselves as they prepared to leave. I sat on the grubby floor alongside them and tugged on rubber boots and a coat. And then we went out into the night. Strictly speaking, I was not supposed to help with the harvest. I was likely more of a hindrance, but once I had been discovered, no move was made to return me to the cabin and I was grudgingly allowed to stay.
The work was hard and the night cold, so that the sweat that seeped from our brows soon turned frosty. It glittered in the starlight; there was no moon. That was important, I understood. For a successful harvest. And so we worked quickly and kept track of the sky. Ears of corn, heads of lettuce. Potatoes. I sat in the bed of the truck amid the baskets of food and nestled them together so they would stay safe on the rutted road. I swung my legs off the back edge and enjoyed the lurching sensation of no ground beneath my feet. I watched the rows of men hunched over matching furrows in the earth, everything stained the green-black of night. The air was spiced with the smell of dirt, and living things, and sweat.
As the last of the baskets were being loaded, a potato sprung from the top of the pile and rolled a couple of feet away. One of the older boys fished around for it for a moment before passing it to me. He shined it on his shirt to remove the clods of dust, and handed it to me with a wink. I cupped it in my hands and it was warm, fresh from the soil. On the way home I produced a small knife and began removing the skin. It took me a while, and what I lacked in speed I lacked equally in elegance, so that quite a bit of the flesh was also lost in the process. My hands were stained red and smelling of iron when I was done, and a small bloodied heap sat between my feet. I held it out in front of me at arm’s length. It grinned at me with skinless lips and bruise-colored teeth, then winked slowly.
I gouged the eyes out last.
Save them, my father said without looking away from the road. That’s the best part.
❧
BABY SOFT
The days were jaundiced, yellow ringed with white, and the nights black but for where they were shot through with whorls of heat lightning. Sometimes, at the start of one such fevered day, the sun would fail to rise. Instead, the sky would grow a sickly green band just above the ground, and the ambient electricity would flap and whine restlessly. It tasted metallic and bloody.
Moments of stillness were bloated by some thing, some feeling, that the daily balance was weak and tenuous. She spent a great deal of time waiting for something to happen. The dirt thrummed, hot and alive, under her bare feet and then the sensation skittered through her body to lodge at the base of her throat, never totally dissipating. She felt the stirring most acutely in the spring, when the calm that reigned serenely through the winter months was ripped suddenly apart by fresh light and colour. She struggled then, without the cold comfort. March’s sudden exuberance was destabilizing and she mourned the passing of early dusks and late, pale dawns, and wondered why it so affected her year after year after year.
And the rain. So different from the sleeting sheets of October or November, the precipitation then thick and sluggish with the promise of ice. Spring rain brought a hot, steaming dampness, turning the air limpid and drawing beads of humidity up to the surface of her skin. She raised two fingers and wiped the moisture from her upper lip, then blinked the sweat from her eyes. The air smelled yellow-green. Slick leaves and wet ground and new life. Turned earth striped through with peaty richness, all rot and moss and decomposition. She stretched for a moment, reaching her arms high above her head, straining for the slightest brush of cloud. Then she got back to work.
As the day wore on, of course, she would come to miss desperately the dampness of the morning. The sun soon sliced through the fog, everything made hard and cruel. The rising wind gripped her forearms tightly where she had exposed them to the air, sleeves pushed up from her exertion. Spring has an edge, with its steely fingers clutching and clawing at soft flesh. She still had so much to do.
A basket at her feet full of what needed planting teetered for a moment where it had been set down on the broken earth. She bent down, steadied it, then gripped a small mass and placed it the freshly dug hole. It slimed dully until it was covered with soil. She wiped her hands on her pants, already an enthusiastic mass of grey-blue smears and red-brown spots, the fabric stiffened in strange peaks where the fluids had already dried.
She went on. Edged to the next hole, nudging the basket along with the toe of her boot. Bent down, filled her hands, dropped their contents in the hole. Straightened up. Filled the depression with dirt. Patted it down, alternately with her soles and the flat side of a shovel. Wiped her hands.
The day wore on. Her eyes lurched in and out of focus, dark splotches staining her field of vision every time she straightened up. The sun had shifted, so that it glared out at her at eye level. It was wreathed in smoke and ash from the fires beyond, still burning brightly.
Her hands were full when she heard it, the shrieking and manic flapping, just above her head. The great bird’s wings clipped her cheek. It ripped upwards, still screaming and clawing at the air. She watched it roiling for a moment, all steely feathers and whites of eyes, then saw it readying to turn back. She waited until she could see the froth seeping from its mouth before shooting it. It was dead, but she shot it another time. It jerked in the dust, then was still. She pulled herself up, knees protesting, and stood over the body. The eyes were stuck open, two shining coins in the waxy skin. The nose crooked, broken before, undoubtedly. He was really quite beautiful, she thought. Gravel-colored eyebrows matching the tone of the downy feathers that inched up his neck. She smoothed one between her thumb and forefinger, careful to avoid the barbed edges, then stroked one cheek. Only the hint of a beard.
Sighing, she rolled the bird a short distance away, unburdening the furrow. To deal with later, she thought.
She stooped for a moment in the dirt, where she had fallen, then straightened, hands cupped. The tiny body nestled between her palms was uncharacteristically dull, its slick surface coated with soil. Baby-soft.
She placed it gently in the ground, curling it onto its side. A fleshy half-moon in a crumbling sky.
❧
GOOD MORNING
I’ve always woken up early, if you must know. I crave being alone, there in the grey-green gloom, pink light poking through with tired fingers. I can only see it later, of course. Although sometimes I only put in my eyes, simply letting the rancid light wash over me, no shadows marring the smooth surface of my face.
On other days, there are things I must do. And so I tug the small mirror closer. I breathe into loose fists to warm my palms, and then rub my hands together vigorously until tiny shards of tingling prick my fingertips. I pinch and pluck at the skin left on the floor from the other day, easing it over my hips. Rolling and kneading, smoothing and shaping. Soon enough the tissue loses its nighttime stiffness. Shafts of light, thick and rich as raw meat, fall through the open door. Thin spires of dust whorl its flanks like so many veins of fat. I pull up my legs where they bunched a bit behind the knees and close the door softly behind me.
Jacqueline Bédard lives and works in Ottawa, Ontario. She spends long runs in the woods thinking up stories.