Swamp Dreams, Pt. IV
ISSUE #173
Swamptember is over.
The week after I saw M. at the tree was endless. Every night, I would watch her scrape at dirt. She’d rip grass from the roots, snap the twigs off of boughs. These sticks built piles around her feet until finally she’d cease and stand, panting. Then she bent and cradled them like children before walking back into her building. The light would stay; she’d disappear.
One day, when she finally ran out of wood on the ground, she shimmied up the trunk to try to grab her branches. The tree, knobbed and wrinkled, held her kindly, but no haven could hold her frenzy. So she fell.
I waited, at first. It was when the cat came out to sniff that I scrambled down the steps to the moonlit square. Skittering at the sound, she cowered behind the door to M.’s building as I ran to the place where she fell. She lay motionless, dark hair tangled in a timber pillow. Her nails were caked with thick, black dirt. When I grabbed her wrist, she flinched. Her eyes, sharp and gray, snapped open to meet mine, widened when she saw the dark side of my face. She reached out to touch my cheek as if I were a ghost.
“What are you doing here?” M. asked the question I’d wanted from her for days.
“You fell.” I felt the scrapes like Braille on her warm wrist.
She looked around with slow, measured movements, revealing early what I’d learn to be her sense of exhibitionism, her penchant for performance. Then, she got up, gathered her sticks, and nodded her thanks before walking to her dorm.
“Wait!”
She turned, indifferent to my suffering.
“Well, come with then,” she said.
That night, she took me to the roof. We walked up her stairs, a mirror of mine, past her floor to an access door that opened to the black sky. Some type of structure was blocking the moon. Without pause, she walked right up to the mound, and threw the sticks on a pyre standing six feet high.
I met M. next to the pyre almost every night. I would tell her stories as she hunted for wood. She showed a great interest in the swamp. It was perhaps the only thing that animated her, breaking her spell of nonchalance. I found myself repeating my father’s old stories. They were the only ones I truly knew. When I spoke of the cottonmouths and alligators, she’d turn away quickly, betrayed by the whip-crack of her emotions. I played it like a drum.
One day, I told the stories of the hollering Swampers in standing canoes, whose calls were not unlike the cries of birds. They would sing wordlessly, ululating, often by the light of the rising moon. Walking ahead, I was met with silence. I turned my heel on a russet leaf to find M. looking at me like a specimen, like I’d been trapped in the one home I had. I draped my hair over the good side of my face, displaying my shadowed and wild eye until she laughed again.
Eventually, she told me the meaning of the pyre. “Some day, I’m going to burn my paintings.”
“Paintings? You paint?”
“Not for long. Not to last.”
So I had her, finally, take me to her room, which opened to a cherrywood desk on the left side of the door. Farther back, by the window, was her provided bed, and to the right was an easel and pile of canvases. They were thrown with no order across the floor—oils, orange and red and brown, among pictures of forests and dark, wooded streams. The one I saw most clearly was that of an immense tree, looking much like the one from which I’d watched her fall.
Inching slowly, without thinking, toward that painting, M. rushed ahead to stand beside it. She bent her head in an act of shyness I’d never once seen from her. The oils held a magnet’s power over me, and I followed like a leaf pushed slowly by the wind. She’d painted it, framed it, as if it were a portrait. A tree as if painted as a person. There were solemn children playing at its feet, neither with each other nor entirely alone.
All of a sudden, I felt rolling tears. I’d been struck by a feeling of pure abandonment, the silent vacuum made by a fading shadow. I nodded as M. flipped through her works, trying to represent eager interest while hijacked by arcane despair.
I left, tracing fingers across the courtyard tree as I passed its gnarled trunk. I saw her crawl into bed from my window, like a ghost watching a lover’s routine. Then, her light went out.
I dreamt we were on a beach covered in toys —stranded, half-sunken, broken things strewn across the brown-baked sand. The air above was mountain purple, congealing like a bruise. I walked with my mother towards a lone beach house, engulfed in crackling flames. I stopped in shock, but my mother kept walking. All the way to the open door. Then, it was black. I heard sirens from my bed. Colored light was dancing on my wall, and I drew my face to the window.
Fire bloomed and sprouted like leaves from the top of M.’s building—our bright, red canopy beneath the moon.
Swamptember is over.