The Vaster Wilds

by Lauren Groff

She removed the gloves, and closing her eyes to not see how they were stained red, she plunged her hands into

the frigid water and scrubbed and scrubbed, but when she brought them out again, no longer feeling as though they belonged to her, she saw there were still rings of blood around her nails, and she put the gloves on hurriedly to hide them and warm her hands again.

He had seen the girl, had been biding his time until he could find her alone. Now he dipped his head to the space that had held her body, and licked the warm stone.

Eww

For it was a truth that mothers, having already lost their liberty when they bore children, having been tethered to the earth with this new soft tender body they must now protect forever, were the ones who understood the delicate balance between the price of freedom and the price of their children’s lives.

Then, even within this mother squirrel’s sight, feeling deeply indecent but, she thought in shame,

she was so very hungry, she took more of the downy matter from the nest and some dry innards of bark and made a fire and roasted the baby squirrels, which were so tender that their bones melted as she chewed them. And because there was still some fire left, she dug out the fish’s tail from the sack, as it had begun to stink, and broiled it upon the coals. Crouching, she finished it off and felt much better indeed.

To amuse herself as she walked, she began to imagine what form her savior might take, for she was raised to expect a savior, had been told from the moment of her birth that a savior would come to deliver her.

But of course men, particularly the godly ones, have little common sense.

the left boot had a nail working its way up from under the sole, and the nail worried her mightily.

Wonder when this is gonna create a problem...

She selected the female with a sorrowful heart,

the female duck was smaller and exhausted by her labors. The girl took the duck by the head and lifted it and swung it and broke the neck so quickly that the male did not even sense in his slumber that his mate was gone. In the morning, he would awaken to find his dream of mate and nest and ducklings had been robbed of him in the night; he would find himself lonely, and he would wail with the sound of a trumpet and flap his wings and burst up into the sky because his grief could find no other outlet than in flying. She felt a pang in imagining this, for she herself had known the confused search for one now gone.

In her sleep, a voice spoke to her. What, girl, is the purpose of your journey? the voice said. I want to live, the girl said. If I stop I will die. You are willing, the voice said, to suffer so greatly? I have known suffering before, she said. Not so great as this, the voice said.

Still, the dark of her fault remained, a shadow within her. The knife again so furious in her hand, the slickness of the guts on the blade. For god in his wrath was just.

And she laughed at providence handing her such precious stuff here in the wilds, where, without trade, it became trash.

She remembered fullest the times of plague, even such tiny arms as hers enlisted to hold the babies who were dying. Poor mites, she could feel them in her arms even now, with their gasping struggling breaths, each drowning to death in their own tiny lungs. Three little babies she held like this, herself only four years old or thereabouts; she held them for hours in her terrible pity even while the other children grew bored of their babies’ dying and passed them around like dirty poppets or put them down and wandered off and only came back to hold their hands over the babies’ mouths to see if they had died yet. But the three babies she herself held she clung to, though her arms did feel as though made of lead, until she felt the change in them when their breath ceased and whatever souls their small bodies contained escaped and drifted off toward god. She held them even when an awful stillness took their fled souls’ place.

And in the thicker smellier depths of the town, they had to step over a dead dog lying in the street, and her bare toe accidentally grazed the dog’s side as she stepped over it; and

with this lightest of touches, the dog’s gassy belly burst, and all of its juices spilled from it, as wine from a wineskin spills, all over the street, and the stink of it made her vomit on her own clothing.

But of course it was not the sin of what her body had been forced to do that gnawed upon her; her only true sin then was that the whole time it took place she was dreaming of murder.

For a long time afterward, her mouth could not stop salivating, because if she had knocked the fawn down, she would have fallen on the tender creature and eaten its flesh without even cooking it; she was so starved, she would have chewed down the tender bones. She imagined it over and over until she could taste the babe’s dark rich blood upon her tongue.

staff, she thought, was the sign of a pilgrim. There was pleasure in this thought. A pilgrim wound his way to sacred lands for the salvation of his soul.

And not long after, over the wet and slopping ground, she remembered that a staff was also a sign

of an old person, an unsteady person. A person only a few steps away from death.

She would give herself a new name born of her struggle on this new land. It felt wrong for her to travel through this wilderness without a name; she felt she was walking through the world unskinned. But no name that came to her seemed right, and soon the fever and the walking burned the idea out of her mind, and she went on walking, still nameless, unmastered, through the wilds.

She never did give herself a name

The nail in the boot had at last worked all the way through the heel, through the various waddings and paddings, and was now biting into her flesh with every step. But her body was numb in the low boiling fever, and she was glad she did not feel her body fully.

And this thought made her shake, for if the gospel was changeable between species, then god was not immoveable. Then god was changeable according to the body god spoke through. And that god could change according to the person in the moment the soul was encountering god. And this meant that when the godliest of the ministers in the city and in this awful place, back in the fort, spoke on god’s behalf they were only speaking a mote of the far greater truth. They were only speaking the part of god that they themselves could glimpse.

And perhaps, she thought, god was neither trinity nor singular but multiple, as various as the many living things that did live upon the earth. Perhaps god is all. Perhaps god already lived within all. And this place and these people here did not need the english to bring god to them.

She thought of the gentleman’s son, his wasted body so overrun with pustules that they were between his toes when she pulled the boots off him. These boots, which had carried her so faithfully these many miles.

🙁

mushrooms so like a man’s privies immodestly

erect that, despite the sorrows of her body, she laughed with astonishment. Then she kicked the mushrooms to pieces.

Kick those men to shit

It is a moral failure to miss the profound beauty of the world, said the voice in her mind. Yes, she said aloud, for now she did see the sin in full.

She looked upon the mother bear, who looked upon her. Then, spilling the bright hot pain in her head, she bent and with her hand she touched the cubs. Then the mother bear did stand upon her rear feet. In the shallow water she stood and she moved ungainly and she came back making huffing noises and clacking her deadly teeth. The girl squared her body to the bear. She dropped her stick. She opened her hands. She spread her arms.

Her fever roved through her, she let it, and the smallpox swallowed her body in dark bloom. This thing she had carried with her own bones and flesh and fought with would be far more deadly than any foe.

What a privilege it was to witness someone you loved awakening to the new day, to the joy of seeing your own face.

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

The crossing was brutal and the child Bess, so simple and dumb, barely survived. Then setting her first footstep on the wild earth of this new country, the child Bess had felt the badness of the place

and the english project in it, and from that moment forth, she refused to eat. She laid her body down and clenched her teeth and starved,

When the corpse was lifted out, they split the shroud and there the pale dear face was again, shining dim in the torchlight, hair gleaming golden. Soon the hair caught the icy blowing snow in it and whitened. Then a

soldier stepped near to the girl’s body and raised an ax above his head to split her skull open, and the girl, watching in horror, knew without being told that a body that did not die of disease in this place was a body that still bore good meat. And she could not move; she watched, frozen, as they began to butcher the child.

The loss of a star dims not the splendor of the constellations;

To be alone and surviving is not the same as being alive, she understood.

Then everything that made the girl herself through the shedding of time did come out of her, and this essential self of her passed into the air, and the wind that blew over her prone body lifted it into the larger, higher world. She had been born a babe out of the darkness out of nothing; she had sparked to first breath and first wonder. As is the truth of all the people who have walked and will walk upon the earth, she returned at last to all she had been before life.

The wind passed, even as it is passing now, over all the people who find themselves so dulled by the concerns of their own bodies and their own hungers that they cannot stop for a moment to feel its goodness as it brushes against them. And feel it now, so soft, so eternal, this wind against your good and living skin.