The Vaster Wilds

by Lauren Groff

With each step she drew away, everything there loosened its grip on the girl.

She had learned the lesson of only forward movement from the wife of Lot, who had glanced backward once as she was fleeing the destruction of sodom and by her weakness and the wrath of god had been transformed to a pillar of salt.

Into the night the girl ran and ran, and the cold and the dark and the wilderness and her fear and the depth of her losses, all things together, dwindled the self she had once known down to nothing. A nothing is no thing, a nothing is a thing with no past. It was also true that with no past, the girl thought, a nothing could be free.

The world, the girl knew, was worse than savage, the world was unmoved. It did not care, it could not care, what happened to her, not one bit. She was a mote, a speck, a floating windborne fleck of dust.

Perhaps the eternal chain of being was not a chain at all but a ring, one life not ending where the other begins but all souls overlapping.

For what woman has not, walking in the dark of the street or along a path deep in the countryside, sensed the brutal imaginings of a man watching her from his hidden place, and felt the same chills chasing over her skin, and quickened her steps to get away.

It is a moral failure to miss the profound beauty of the world,

laughing darkly at the absurdity, all that wasted fear to find the foe too, too solidly within her own small self.

For what is a girl but a vessel made to hold the desires of men.

The loss of a star dims not the splendor of the constellations; she did not have the force to remember which of her voices had said this.

Rejoice, small ant, she thought, in your one life, though too soon dimmed it shall be.