The Vaster Wilds

by Lauren Groff

pushed the girl down and had his way with her body as she screamed and wept, and when he had used her, he left her lying there in the dirt bleeding. Some time passed, then one day, when this same man was out in the bay gathering oysters, he looked up to find that his companions were nowhere near him, that they had disappeared as if they had been told to flee, and even the birds in the trees had silenced themselves and were waiting. Then, as though magicked out of the fog that lay upon the waters, women began to take shape all around him and came close and had him surrounded in silence. Before he could cry out, they put a leather thong in his mouth so that he was muted and could not scream, then they dragged him away with them by the hair of his head, and in that same night, four women tied him as naked as a newborn babe to the twinned trees visible from the gate of the fort, the man’s arms and legs wrenched outspread and his body stretched to the near snapping of his joints. Then they built a fire in front of him so that his pale skin was glowing against the dark behind him, and they loosed the thong in his mouth so that his screams could be heard even into the heart of the fort. Then all at once, more women poured out of the forest with sharpened oyster shells in their hands. With these as their knives, the women slowly flayed the skin off the man, first his eyelids so that he had no choice but to watch what they were doing to him. Next, the skin of his arms and legs and ...