Short fiction

The World is all that the case is

A rickety old wood cabin. It rested on the verge of a forest of red oak. The air was redolent with the smell of burning wet wood and the dank upturned earth. From the three steps leading up to the porch, through the two symmetrical windows on either side of the door, the invading light passed into the darkness of a single room. The house allowed only two choices: either you gave yourself to its amorphous dark, entering into a directionless stumbling; or you took your place in one of the rocking chairs propped in front of the windows, viewing the limitless trunks and tangled foliage. The occupants were male and female, intimate although never married, pursuing a separate daily routine except at certain times of day when they hitched their trouser legs and skirts to plant themselves in their respective chairs to gaze out of their windows. Perhaps they had forgotten their names after so much time, gradually losing the individualising pulse of such things. They referred to one another simply as ‘you’ and ‘I’, creating a world of shifting binaries, defining the self in opposition to the other.

In summer time they lived off the peach tree and the windfall of other fruits that graced the tiny garden beyond the porch, before the forest. It was the man’s job, of course, to grab the hunting rifle and cartridges to go out and hunt, tackling the forest’s beasts in the vital exchange of energies that it takes to stalk, flee and kill. The woman swept the single room by the fragile light from the open door. Whilst a carcass was dragged along the forest floor, two of its legs bunched in a fixed grasp, the woman prepared the stew pot and sat on their porch steps, swinging a nonchalant leg to and fro as the sounds of birdsong floated into her serenity. At other times, before she sunk her teeth into the flesh of hunted game, she drew with her pencil and pad pictures of other rooms unlike their own, other women and men leading other lives, in different light! Yes, floods of light from all angles, and a hanging glass prism stunning the room with colours, tangible presences in the colourless air. But at least there was order in the humdrum pair of rocking chairs, routine and stability that made sense. How strange would it be to have windows behind and either side of you, how peculiar and distracting!

As the man slouched and trudged, a deer’s spindly delicate legs in hand, he wondered what they would talk about today after the meal and banking up the fire. What topics they were about to stoke up in the long dark they kept each other warm in, precious allies in their stark difference. Sheer determination spurred them to keep so rigorously to a routine at once productive and futile in its attempt to gather together a few squares through which to view the world. Sometimes they were too horny to even speak and collapsed into a spent inertia on the floor between the two chairs. But most of the time, they spoke their insistent nothings to the blown leaves and the light muffled noise of a blue jay nest on the cusp of a quarrel.

It was not a mechanical relationship, there were moments of love and affection, when slowly and happily they turned their heads towards one another, smiling at the thought of the same blood pumping through their bodies rising to warm and excite. These moments were like effervescent bubbles on still waters, no less important for their transience.  The dense forest swaddled their outlook, always lying before them in its inscrutable darkness, like a giant scorning the trials and tribulations of insects. And anyway, it was like squaring a circle, the attempt to achieve full-time bliss. There was so much to consider, so many points of potential disagreement.

When the man emerged into the garden, the woman looked up from her drawing and remarked how young the deer was that he had killed, that he should have got a clean kill, because now the blood trail might attract other animals. And there probably wouldn’t be much meat on that scrawny heap. To which the man, nodding, said he would do better next time, kill cleaner, and bigger. Placated, she took the carcass from him and heaved it along the floor whilst he watched her recede into the house and out of sight.

Fed, and the fire banked, they put the small china bowls they ate out of on the floor, and sat back, their outstretched arms hanging over the sides of the chairs. A little worn out with chores, they positioned themselves for the day’s talk:

  “Do you remember when we really cared about things? When we were young and life exhilarated us. When people used to tell me to enjoy it while it lasts I thought they were just being melodramatic, stale commonplaces that you reel off on cue. Took me a long time to see there was a load of feeling behind those phrases, that older people laugh when they say them, but really they want to cry. There’s nothing funnier than unhappiness, though, eh? I wish I could believe that.”

He felt off guard when she’d finished speaking, as if it was somehow unfair of her to make him answer to sentiments that he felt so keenly too, with just as much confusion.

  “Count your blessings?” he stopped, “That’s another one. I think you have to stop yourself looking back, yes, that’s it. There’s always now. We can always… but we’ve lived like this for so long. It’s hard to break old habits.”

  “I’m getting those thoughts, though, the ones that make me heavy in my stomach. Missed opportunities, wondering who I even am as I’ve aged. How can I still be the same person? The girl who used to ride her bike to the corner shop Saturday mornings, annoying passersby with her bell. The young woman who first got into bed with her boyfriend, my parents out, and the thud thud thud of my frantic heart. Me and you, our cabin, and these chairs. Some happiness. They’re all like little glass jars lined up on that shelf over there.”

  “I know how you feel, though you find better words than I can, better ways of explaining. I still love you, after all this time, and I know that counts for something. If nothing else adds up, there’s that. That will be true, and it’s something we’ve made. I won’t defend this life we have, but there are blessings, small and true ones.”

She remained quiet, voiceless for a few minutes. He wondered what she was thinking.

With a slow, deliberate precision: “Yes, yes, yes….Why don’t we go, leave here and go into the forest?”

He had not seen her with such a spark for years. Her eyes flamed with an energy that was exciting and a little frightening. Such spontaneity was once again exhilarating, and as he turned over the pros and cons there were many reasons for staying, but also none at all, really. It was like they were running away together, eloping like lovers from a Victorian novel.

The calm and ordered existence of the house was thrown into uncertainty. The man and the woman slowly raised themselves from the chairs, straightening their rheumatic limbs painfully as they linked hands. Opening the door, they knew they would never look back. They could hear a light breeze playing around the wind chimes hanging from the porch roof.

Standing on the porch, the man broke from the woman, stepping from the first to the second step, followed by her peremptory movement down to him. Almost immediately she stepped in a fluid motion from the second to the third step. When he joined her they stepped onto the cold, wet earth together. At that moment a blue jay descended suddenly, spearing down through the sky to the nest near the defunct cabin.

It was as if this was the sign they needed to steady and nerve them.

Turning from each other with a mutual smile, they looked into the forest before them and exulted with the knowledge that it was there, they were there and so was the deer’s blood trail, the truth that had worn down their ignorance to the clear acceptance of conscience.

They had been cowards, until today, nipping in and out of the forest for plunder or on a whim. Now they would give themselves utterly to it, leaving the rocking chairs slumbering. Mornings would begin by spangling the tops of the bottle green leaves trickling the sap downwards from heaven. Time to follow the blood trail, to relish the untrodden path. 

The two pass westward into the forest, pass into a new darkness, laughing and approaching it with open minds and not a little solemnity for the carcasses they recognized. Pointing to the tree in front of him the man showed the woman these carved words, the scrawl of new calligraphy:

Abandon ____

All ye who enter,

Confront a forest

Because you now know better—

The word after ‘Abandon’ had been defaced, leaving an emptiness at the heart of the message, a missing pivot that threatened coherence and prevented the orgiastic meaning that it hinted at containing.

The forest wailed and screeched above them as their footsteps sunk indelibly into the dust covering its floor.

I wish I could tell you more. What a life adds up to with its details, progressions, reversals and sudden revelations. But here we are in the forest, on the brink of something.

Simon Reilly