In the House in the Dark of the Woods

by Laird Hunt

“Writing is for work and God, Eliza.” “Writing is for many things, Goody.”

A bath is a wonderful thing. Does your husband give you baths?” “Never!” I said and almost laughed aloud at the thought of that great brute giving me anything but a scolding or a kiss I hadn’t asked for.

“Never mind what I wrote. Call me Goody. It’s what the world calls me. For I am a wife.”

Captain Jane said and I blew, harder and harder, and the ground itself lit and the trees beyond and the air of the night and the night itself, it seemed, and I knew that Captain Jane had stopped blowing, that it was just me, that I was at the ending of my own great tale, that I had lit the world with its telling and that we would soon burn along with it and make of ourselves a burning, blazing suffix to the sun.

“I am no goodwife.” “And never were.”