![]() More hands, and more voices I am lifted a kaleidoscope of green above me, and fractal patterns in the sky. My waking moments are few, and my impressions disjointed. That’s how babies are born, after all: cradled in someone else’s arms, sucking, helpless.Īfter that, the fever pulls me under again. No, a girl-a girl with a thin, tight mouth, and creases at the corners of her eyes, and hands as rough as willow, as big as baskets. You’re safe now.”īlack hair, loose, a tent around me: a woman. Then I swallow, gulp, suck, while the hand stays under my neck, and the voice keeps whispering encouragement. A sensation of ice, and liquid sliding: water filling my mouth, my throat, pouring over my chin, melting away the dust, the taste of fire. Bram, where the hell is that water?”Ī hand under my neck, and then, suddenly, salvation. Black hair, a pointed nose, bright green eyes-pieces of a puzzle I can’t make sense of. I can’t think the world is all fractured. The voice pulls me back from the tunnel, and for a moment I’m horribly disappointed when I open my eyes and see not Alex’s face, but some other face, sharp and unfamiliar. I am in a black tunnel filled with mist, and I am not afraid.Īlex is waiting for me on the other side Alex standing, smiling, bathed in sunlight.Īlex reaching out his arms to me, calling. They are all watching my body descend into the grave, and they are singing. I am being lowered into a narrow, dark space, and my aunt Carol is there, and Hana, and my mother and sister and even my long-dead father. Above me is blackness, and all around me is blackness, and the forest sounds are a symphony to sing me out of this world. When I can no longer go forward, even by an inch, I lay my head on the ground and wait to die. That is how she comes into the world, the new Lena. I’m too terrified to sleep if I sleep, I’ll die.Ĭrawling, insides curled into dust, mouth full of the taste of smoke. At night, driving rain, fierce and cold: huddled between the roots of an enormous oak, while around me unseen animals scream and pant and rattle through the darkness. At one point, I reach a river: I am so weak, I am nearly taken under by its current. ![]() Step by step, fighting thorns, bees, mosquitoes snapping back thick, broad branches clouds of gnats, mists hovering in the air. My only thought is to move, keep going, deeper and deeper, away from the fences and the world of dogs and guns and. I have no idea where I am or where I’m going. I take off my shirt, rip off the hem, and tie the cleanest bit tightly around my chest so it presses against my wound and helps stanch the bleeding. An animal, coming to investigate, scurries quickly back into the tangle of growth. ![]() I cough up air and spit bile into the flat, shiny leaves on either side of me. There is nothing in my stomach, but I throw up anyway. The wound is shallow, but seeing all the blood, the missing skin, makes everything real: this new place, this monstrous, massive growth everywhere, what has happened, what I have left. A bullet has skimmed me on the side, just below my armpit, and my T-shirt is wet with blood. ![]() At least one regulator must have clipped me while I was climbing the fence. I’m not sure how far I’ve traveled into the Wilds, and how long I’ve been pushing deeper and deeper into the woods, when I realize I’ve been hit. I run, and when I can no longer run, I limp, and when I can’t do that, I crawl, inch by inch, digging my fingernails into the soil, like a worm sliding across the overgrown surface of this strange new wilderness. I force my way through a black, wet space of strange noises and smells. That’s how I am born again, in pain: I emerge from the suffocating heat and the darkness. Fire in my legs and lungs fire tearing through every nerve and cell in my body. ![]()
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