The Man in the Woods

KarenParkman

In May, Chase left his life in Cambridge to go live in the woods. “In a place with more trees, rather,” he corrected when explaining to colleagues that filled the sterile cubicles of the textbook company where he’d worked for nine years. That way it didn’t sound like he would be living off the land, which he would not be doing. He made jokes: “Didn’t every adolescent boy dream of being Thoreau?” though the time when he believed himself capable of thinking great thoughts had passed.

He’d dreamt of staying in the Berkshires, where his parents used to take him and his two brothers every summer. Perhaps he hoped to revert back to a younger version of himself, the version that skipped rocks and rode his bike to downtown Stockbridge. But he settled for a considerably shabbier arrangement in an old cabin on a pond in western Massachusetts, near the Connecticut border.

There were some things he could not leave entirely behind, like his two children, who arrived for a visit with Chase’s ex-wife, Ellen, about three weeks after he moved in. They tumbled out of Ellen’s car and demanded to see the dock before Chase even finished hugging them hello. Now, Maddy and Aiden were admiring a group of peaceful mallards.

“Why are the boy ducks the colorful ones?” asked Aiden. “That seems backwards.” “The boy ducks attract the girls,” Ellen explained. She was weighted down by the kids’ bags—they’d insisted on looking at the pond before going into the house.

Maddy batted her eyes and did a flat-footed waddle to make Aiden laugh. Chase regarded them with a mix of adoration and apprehension. They were at such terrifically weird ages; Aiden was six, and Maddy was eleven. Ellen herded them up the rickety wooden stairs that lead up the hill to the back porch of the cabin. Before following them inside, she placed a flat palm on the porch’s wooden beams and pushed, as though expecting them to crack.

The inside was decorated with old lawn ornaments and paintings of birds and the floorboards protested loudly when walked on. With Ellen here, Chase half-expected the floor to cave in and make a mockery of his whole endeavor.

The kids went to argue over who got which twin bed in the second bedroom while Ellen surveyed the kitchen with Chase.

“Well, it seems sturdy enough,” she said.

“That’s like what you’d say about a ship you hope won’t sink,” Chase replied. She accepted the joke with a nod and a shrug. A little over a year had passed since their divorce, and they’d only recently discovered how to speak to each other in a relatively normal way. Trying out a joke or saying something kind felt less like jumping off a cliff.

Ellen called the kids into the kitchen to kiss them goodbye. “Squeeze as hard as you can, so it lasts me ‘til next week!” she said as she knelt down, the three of them a clutching mass by the kitchen table. Chase felt a tug behind his sternum; Ellen was better with kids; she knew how to act with and inspire en- thusiasm.

The kids waved from the window, bouncing their hips against each other, while their mother’s car disappeared from the driveway. Then Maddy sashayed into the bedroom to change into her bathing suit and said, “So what are we exactly supposed to do here?”

Chase had booked the cabin after what felt to him like a message from the universe that he should remove himself from normal life.

Soon after the divorce was finalized, Chase started seeing men. On the nights he didn’t have the kids he ventured out to gay bars. He made an online dating profile. At first he did all this in a detached sort of cloud. He had the idea that he would eventually go back to women, so there was no need to make a fuss. Then, after spending the first night in another man’s bed, he woke up to find detachment replaced by panic. He felt skinned and adolescent in his mid-thirties. He was both insanely attached to every man he went out with, and terrified to spend another moment with him, whoever he was. He and his heart were crashing wildly around the greater Boston area. It seemed very late in life to be going through something like this. The final straw was getting into a car accident with his children in the backseat. It wasn’t a serious accident, nor had it been his fault; the other driver had barreled through a stop sign and hit the passenger’s side of Chase’s car as he crossed an intersection. At the moment of impact, Chase was turned slightly, addressing Aiden, who was poking Maddy, and so did not see the other car coming. The question of fault in the eyes of the insurance company hardly mattered with his children in the backseat. The point was he could have been facing ahead. The other driver, a young woman, had pressed her hands against the sides of her face and said, “Oh no, oh no,” while they exchanged information. Her guilt did not alleviate his own.

The divorce, the stress of dating, the process of learning all the new ways to have sex—he felt he could have faced all that if the car crash hadn’t happened. He could no longer stand his apartment or its appliances. He quit his editorial job at the textbook publisher. As soon as the lease on his apartment ended May1st, he dumped half his stuff at Goodwill and the other half in storage, and booked the cabin for twelve weeks.

How to explain this series of events to Ellen, or anyone else? He didn’t know how to talk about any part of his life anymore. All he knew was that he needed to get away. “You need a physical expression of the change you’re enduring inwardly,” Ellen offered at one point. She was a guidance counselor and liked to help people articulate their feelings. “That sounds right,” said Chase.

On the third night, the kids sat at the kitchen table in their bathing suits while Chase scanned the fridge for something to feed them. Since moving into the cabin, he’d occupied most of his time by cooking increasingly complex meals. How much easier to focus on stirring a risotto instead of thinking about his failed marriage. Last night he’d made a filet with a cherry demi-glaze served with spinach soufflé. The night before, pork belly cured in miso. He drove thirty minutes to the nearest town, to a butcher who sold beautiful, translucent slabs of meat. He’d been so many times the butcher, a tall and amiable man, now expected him.

The kids were not interested in his culinary ventures. He made them scrambled eggs, again. “And as for me,” said Chase, pulling a packet from the fridge, “I’m having liver.”

“That. Sounds. Disgusting,” enunciated Maddy through a mouthful of eggs.

They watched as their father chopped the mushrooms and onion while the butter began to crackle in the sauté pan. When he bought the liver, the butcher had asked him what he planned to do with it. When Chase replied he was going to smother it in a brandy cream sauce, the butcher raised his fingers to his lips and then let them burst in appreciation.

“Do you know what the liver does?” he asked while adding the liver to the foaming butter. “I saw a drawing of a liver in a human body in the back of Maddy’s science book,” said Aiden. “It looks like a Thanksgiving turkey in there.”

“That’s great, Aiden,” said Chase, a little alarmed at the comparison. He let the meat brown for a couple minutes before adding the onions and mushrooms. “I think it’s a kind of filter. All the blood in your body runs through it and it cleans it out.”

“And you’re eating it?” exclaimed Aiden.

Chase poured brandy in the pan. “It’s good for you.”

“People eat hearts and kidneys, too,” Maddy told Aiden, who shook his head furiously.

Chase looked at them; their plates were empty and they watched the stove expectantly. “Watch this.”

He struck a match to the brandy so a flame burst up from the pan. Maddy and Aiden gasped, then applauded. Chase added heavy cream and turned the dish out onto his plate. “Do you want to try it?” It was a beautiful dish, rich and thick with alcohol and dense meat that had served multiple, mysterious functions before it was removed.

“Bleh,” said Maddy.

“Forget it,” said Aiden.

That night Ellen called to say goodnight to the kids. Aiden passed the phone back to Chase, saying, “She wants you to say goodnight, too.”

Chase accepted the phone, a bit surprised.

“How are you holding up, just the three of you?” asked Ellen.

“I’m just glad to have their company. The only person I see here is the butcher in the next town over,” he said.

A silence followed this, and he was surprised to find it thick with tension. He felt a tremor of panic, the need to backtrack. “I just go to his store. I buy things to cook. I’ve been cooking a lot. Trying a lot of new things—new dishes.” He faltered; it seemed hopeless to continue.

“They say it’s good to try new things, but no one mentions the danger of them becoming a habit.”

Ellen sighed, and Chase could sense her wanting to take back what she’d just said. “No, actually, I’m glad you know someone out there. If something happens you have someone nearby to call. And…you always did like to cook.”

Chase gripped the phone. He wanted only to rush past this tiny, ridiculous miscommunication. Not so long ago, they’d been able to sense each other’s moods and meanings through the alchemical connection of their marriage. Or at least they were able to breeze past the moments where they didn’t completely understand each other.

He knew that beginning to date men hurt Ellen in a way that dating women wouldn’t have. It meant Chase’s desires had been mysterious and unreachable to both of them all those years. It meant they knew much less about each other than they’d hoped. He supposed Ellen wondered, though she did not ask, how his attraction to men had factored into the divorce and how aware of it he’d been before they decided to split.

“I can really feel myself becoming centered out here. Becoming more…myself,” he declared. “Being out in nature really reminds you how amazingly, perfectly suited creatures other than humans are to their environments. How they belong in them. They’ve been in a long, long conversation with the earth over thousands of generations, and now they live exactly as they’re designed. You would like it here,” he added for some reason.

“That’s good, Chase,” said Ellen. “Good for you.”

In the mornings he took long walks. Though the landscape surrounding the porch was an unimpressive blanket of leaves, scrubby bushes, and spindly trees, the pond itself was quite beautiful. It was edged by healthy pines and big boulders that begged to be climbed on. He liked to see the ducks land in the water all together, in a graceful stream.

He had this fantasy when he went out for walks that came from his childhood, when he would play in his parents’ backyard by himself. He was surprised by its reemergence. He imagined himself wandering the earth after an apocalyptic event, like a nuclear war or a pandemic. He learned to hunt and live off the land, leap stealthily from one rock to the next, defend himself from evil roving gangs of human survivors. It was too embarrassing to consciously wonder about, but Chase enjoyed sinking into this character every morning. It allowed him to walk without faltering, to catch the slightest movements in the trees, to carry some measure of toughness, of grace.

He had seen an ad at the convenience store for a living museum in one of the nearby towns that recreated rural life from the early 19th century. Once the kids were up, he asked them if they wanted to go look at the animals. They shrugged agreeably.

“Dad,” said Aiden once they were on the road. “How come Mom sounds mad on the phone when we’re with you? Are you mad at each other?”

“No, she isn’t mad,” said Chase, though it hit him with more clarity than usual that for all he knew, Ellen was mad. “You know we both get sad when we’re away from you guys.”

“She’s just worried. She always worries about you,” said Maddy happily. “She asks us all these questions about how you’re doing after we see you.”

Chase looked at her through the rearview mirror. She was holding a book about a sixth grade girl who is whisked away by a warlock who tells her she was actually a princess from a fantasy world destined to reclaim her kingdom. Maddy had explained the plot in excruciating detail at dinner the night before.

He said, “Your mom shouldn’t be making you think she’s worried. I’m okay. We’re okay.”

“I didn’t say you weren’t okay,” said Maddy, lifting her book back in front of her face. “You’re just living out in this weird place right now.”

He half-winced, half-smiled at Maddy’s brash, intuitive wisdom. He wondered if she also had a fantasy when she walked in the trees, of being a warrior princess from the imaginary worlds in her books. That private image of herself would get her through just about any level of loneliness or boredom. But then she would become self-conscious about it and bury it deep somewhere, where it would only return in times of crisis.

Chase parked the car in front of the visitor’s center, an enormous white-paneled house with black shutters. Dirt paths led through the village to each attraction: a barn with a silo, a field of crops, various shops, and, in the distance, the white steeple of a church. They went into a little white house and met a young woman in a blue bonnet who explained to them about the lives of women in her time period. On the back porch she let them take turns churning butter in a wooden barrel. “How do they make butter now?” Aiden wanted to know.

“I have no idea,” she replied, and Chase couldn’t tell if she was answering in character.

Chase bought them locally made fudge from a shop and they sat on a bench to wolf it down, observing the other groups of tourists and the villagers in their hoop skirts and long coats. “Can you stay here overnight?” asked Aiden. “I would rather live here than go to school.”

“They go back to their regular lives on the weekend I bet,” said Maddy. “To catch up on their TV shows.”

“I bet they live here,” said Aiden defensively. “I know they’re just acting, but I bet they live here and act all the time.”

They looked to their father for confirmation, but Chase shrugged, not wanting to prove either of them wrong.

“If you lived back in this time, you would not be able to go on dates with men after you got divorced,” said Maddy to Chase.

Chase felt the space around his diaphragm freeze and then get very hot, though Maddy had spoken in a neutral tone.

He and Ellen told Maddy and Aiden that Chase was seeing men almost a year ago, reasoning that this would give the kids time to get used to the idea before they met a boyfriend. They told them in the foyer of Ellen’s house after one of their weekends with Chase. Ellen had muddled the explanation by calling it, “making a new family, but with a man,” which Aiden understood to mean his father wanted another brother. “But you already have Uncle Jack and Uncle Rob,” he explained patiently.

The whole conversation ended awkwardly. Both children said, “Okay,” as though they could tell this was an important announcement but weren’t exactly sure how it related to them. They wanted things to be normal. Maddy, being older, seemed to reason that this was a thing younger boys were potentially teased for, but adults were exempt from that danger.

They’d reacted similarly to the car accident. They’d been shook up at first, but later that night Chase overheard them in the bathroom, when they were supposed to be brushing their teeth, planning how they would tell their classmates they’d been in a car crash. Aiden even asked Chase if he could bring the crumpled bumper to school for show and tell.

Still, the kids’ comments on it gave Chase a teetering feeling, as though any conversation on the topic could be irreparably messed up. He coughed and motioned for a juice box. Maddy handed him one and continued, “Unless, would you even be allowed to get divorced?”

“When I’m older,” said Aiden, “I’m going to be a candlemaker from the eighteen hundreds. And I’ll never get divorced.”

At the end of the week, Chase and the kids met Ellen in Worcester, halfway between the cabin and her house in Roslindale. They ate together in a diner off I-290. The kids told their mother about the pond and the town that was stuck in time. Chase caught Ellen’s eye and tried to gauge how aware she was that this was the first time they’d all eaten a meal together around the same table in months.

In the parking lot, as the kids settled into Ellen’s car, Ellen asked in a whisper, “Chase, how much longer do you plan to stay there? And where exactly are you planning to live once your rental period is up?”

Chase pretended to think. The timing, the timing of everything. It was the only thing that mattered. It was the difference between comedy, humiliation, and derangement. August 1st loomed like a big, gray cloud. Finally he said, “I guess I’m waiting until it feels like I’m done here. And then I’ll know what to do.”

Ellen sighed and put the kids’ bags into the trunk. Before she got in the driver’s seat she folded her hands on the top of the car.

“The kids want to know where their father is. I don’t think this is a matter of you not knowing what to do. I think this is a matter of you wanting to stay in between things.” Chase spread his hands. He did not want to go through life making expressions of helplessness, but it seemed the only gesture available to him.

The kids were watching them through the back window. Ellen gave Chase a smile, to wrap things up. As she got into the driver’s seat she said, “Just don’t go crazy out here.”

He woke up the next morning depressed, as he always was after dropping off his kids. He went out for a walk. When he was the man in the woods he could disappear into his surroundings. He could pretend the paths were familiar, that he knew the types of birds by heart, that the sounds of cracking branches meant something to him. He accidentally wandered into the backyard of another cabin, where an older lady peered at him, startled, from behind her curtains. He bolted.

The butcher greeted him that afternoon as he perused the display cases in the shop. Each purchase chipped away at the modest savings account he’d accumulated from his publishing job. But he couldn’t bring himself to think of this. He picked out a rabbit saddle he planned to stuff and wrap in bacon.

“No one else knows what to do with this,” said the butcher. “Try feeding it to a wife and kids—you won’t get far.”

He had said some variation of this multiple times. Chase took a deep breath and replied, “I’m here temporarily with my partner. He’s finishing his PhD. My kids live with my ex-wife but they visit twice a month.”

This was more information than the butcher asked for, but he seemed to like being confided in. He moved like a bartender, wrapping and weighing the meat without having to take his eyes from his customer.

He slapped a price sticker on the white paper and said, “Next time your kids visit, tell me. I’ve got these filet steaks—I’ll give you a discount.”

Chase left feeling strangely unsettled. This was the first time in weeks he had said something about himself out loud to a stranger and he chose to say something untrue. He’d invented a life for himself. On the drive home he considered if it was the life he really wanted. He closed his eyes briefly and tried to see the face of the imaginary partner finishing his PhD.

He remembered the suspicion the butcher had inspired in Ellen. She probably imagined him out having exciting, youthful sex with strangers, strangers whose bodies would never remind him of hers, while she put the kids to bed and considered signing up for Match.com. He wished he could tell her how far off that vision was from the truth. He wished she could know how inept he felt, how mad with grief, how hopelessly far from love.

It had occurred to him even before his marriage—as far back as high school—to sleep with a man. But he was terrified to initiate a romantic connection. The possible reactions of friends and family bothered him far less than the idea of being rejected, or not knowing what to do in bed. And he had Ellen, his wife and friend—why couldn’t he want her more? They married so young, right out of college, and sex was the least organic part of their relationship.

He wanted desire to be a non-essential part of himself, something that could be taken out or put away. It was too messy, too impulsive to be considered part of who a person really was. It was the body behaving without the mind’s permission. But now, desire was revealing itself to be an assertive force, demanding attention. It was so different with a man—the broad shoulders, thin, hard hips matching up, like a palindrome. It made him buzz, like all the liquid in his body had been carbonated.

Chase woke up early the next morning, the first day of June. Because he had no television, he did not know of the approaching storm until a few hours before it was scheduled to reach western Massachusetts. On his walk, the trees whipped in the wind. Back indoors, he found three voicemails on his cell phone about the storm warnings, two from Ellen, and one from the landlady who owned the cabin.

He shut all the windows and unplugged the appliances. The rain began that afternoon, a slight trickle that morphed over the hours into a downpour, interrupted by rolls of thunder.

When the electricity went out he lit candles, filling the living room with the scent of cinnamon. He sat on the floor with his back against the ottoman, reading a mystery novel he’d unearthed and eating cold leftovers: braised short ribs and a leek and potato quiche.

The walls rattled in the wind, first pleasantly and then angrily. They seemed to breathe in and out with the long gusts of the wind. The air was electric and thick with humidity. At dusk, Chase peered out the window to see great, flat sheets of rain, rolling like the surface of water brought to a boil. In the dying light he could see the driveway had been reduced to a puddle.

At that moment he felt so exposed, so alone and out of the way, he understood that he had no idea what he was doing out here.

The way he had dropped it all—a person wasn’t allowed to just do that. He thought of all his stuff stacked up in the storage unit. The coffee machine, a wrinkled armchair, stacks of documents he was afraid to throw away—all his worldly possessions in an eight-by-eight foot tin box. Perhaps those things would wait for him, but you couldn’t do that with people. They wouldn’t be stored away for later.

The cabin shook with the next roll of thunder. He should have gotten a nicer place, where he could see neighbors. How stupid it would be if he came out here only to be washed away with his cabin in the storm. What would happen to Maddy and Aiden?

Maddy and Aiden! How did he get such good kids? He wanted them to bring every hurt, every disappointment to him. He wanted them to take all their sadness out of themselves, put it on a plate, so he could consume it for them, like a lemon meringue pie. He wanted them to show up at his house and say, “Here can you take this please?” and then bound out the door into their easy, happy lives while he waved goodbye, swallowing all of it, absorbing and removing it from their lives, until they showed up next time with more.

He hadn’t missed the kids this intensely in some time, and he reached up to feel his rib cage above his heart. Their and his aloneness, and Ellen’s, seemed like a terrible shadowy force, something that began in the brain but leaked out into the atmosphere, separating people from each other, trapping them in the knowledge their feelings belonged to no one but themselves.

Then there was a loud and terrible crash and the sudden descent of branches.

Chase threw himself down to the floor, shocked first by the sound and then by the realization that he was surrounded by leaves. He’d cut his hand on a piece of glass—from the window, the window must be broken. The rain was pouring through the smashed frame, soaking the floor. The shock turned to terror. He flipped onto his stomach. His knee was pinned beneath a branch, and in his fear he yanked it out, scraping the skin. He dug his fingernails into the rug and began pulling himself away from the wet embrace of the tree, the wind whipping through the window.

As he crawled his way out a strange focus settled over him. He was the man in the woods, wholly without support, so hardened by life that his whole purpose could be summarized in a single phrase: stay alive. He had only to pull himself with slow, fluid movements, out from under his captor. He thrived in this state. He would build a shelter from the howling winds, and crouch down, ripping his clothes to wrap his knee and bloody palms, and wait for the light to come. He broke free of the branches, the pain in his twisted knee growing with each movement, and crawled out of the way of the rain pouring through the window. He leaned against the doorframe of the bathroom, where it was dry, the adrenaline draining from his body, and continued to imagine the ways he could rescue himself.

The storm steadied into a lazy rain soon after. Chase fell into a restless sleep on the floor, his head on the fluffy bathmat. He woke when his phone rang from where it was lying on the bathroom tiles; the landlady calling. He pieced together that a tornado had touched down in Springfield—practically next door, he thought, part amazed, part nauseous. She asked if there was any damage. He peered around the doorframe to look at the branch. Its thick middle arm rested on the loveseat so the branches touched the coffee table. The window frame was splintered and the lamp was in pieces. Chase told her there was a tree in the living room.

She groaned. “I’ll be there in an hour. God, it’s a lot of baggage, you know? I chose a life with an awful lot of stuff in it,” she said, and hung up.

For a moment he sat on the bathroom floor, dazed. Then he jolted upright and grabbed his phone to call Ellen.

“Put the kids on,” he said when she answered. “I’m okay. Put them on.”

There was a rustling sound and then Aiden’s voice. “How bad was the storm?” he shouted. “Are the ducks okay?”

“The ducks are okay. Dad’s okay,” said Chase.

“Don’t worry about the ducks,” said Maddy. They were on speakerphone, their voices scratchy. “We wanted to watch the weather channel but Mom said we had to be in bed and she’d tell us what happened. And you’re okay!”

“What did the people in the olden days museum do?” asked Aiden. “And the horses?”

“Um—they have storm shelters,” said Chase. “Under the barns. They’re all safe and dry together under there.”

“That’s a relief,” said Aiden.

He heard Ellen ask for the phone back.

“Come back here,” she said. “Listen—I’ll put you up in a hotel. For a week. You can look for a place to stay from there.”

Chase faltered. But of course—he couldn’t keep living here with a tree in the living room. Somehow the fact that he would have to leave had not yet occurred to him. He shrank from the idea. It wasn’t time to go back. He was supposed to have until August.

“I have to think,” he said.

“Chase, for God’s sake!” said Ellen. “What are you doing? What are you doing out there so far from—from your life? You can’t stay there, so you’ve got to come here. This is where everything is! It’s all so simple, I don’t know why you insist on making it so goddamn hard for everyone.”

Chase rested his head against the tiled wall of the bathroom. What was this—shame, again? The constant companion of his life, following him around like an old reliable dog. He told Ellen he would come to Roslindale later and they would talk. The main thing was to see Maddy and Aiden. He could figure out what to do from there.

“I’m really glad you’re not hurt, Chase,” Ellen said in a rush. Her voice was higher. “My God, if something happened.”

He hung up and pulled himself to his feet. The branch lay defiantly across the floor of the living room. A breeze from outside ruffled the leaves.

He turned his back on it and went outside to his car. The tires were submerged in two inches of water, but miraculously, it started.

He drove on the curvy narrow roads with no destination. There were only a few other drivers out, and each time someone passed they waved, as though to acknowledge both their survivals. The ground was littered with branches, sinking into the mud.

The extent of the damage left him feeling dwarfed and small. He was not the man in the woods. He was from a world of useless knowledge. What could he do? He could cook. This seemed hopelessly beside the point.

Finally he was there, where he’d been going without realizing it. The butcher’s shop. It was his only destination, the only place he ever went.

He peered through the windows. It was dark. The humming glass cases were now silent and damp with condensation. Chase froze as a figure emerged from the back room. He hadn’t even let himself hope someone would be there. The butcher started at the sight of him, and then his face opened up in recognition. He unlocked the door.

“You made it,” he said. Chase knew he meant made it through the storm—but it sounded as though he’d been expected. “Come inside.”

The butcher led him past the glass cases to the back room. It was a room of Formica and stainless steel with knives and big slicing appliances. But for all that, it was small and warm. Chase sat down on a stool by the counter. His throat was dry. The feeling of inevitability was fading. Chase did not know why he had come here. He was embarrassed, but the butcher did not look irritated. He looked at Chase as though he had invited him in, which, Chase remembered, he had.

“I’m sorry to come by here,” said Chase, as though he’d been asked for an explanation. “The place where I’ve been living is ruined. I don’t know where to go next. I couldn’t think of any other place to go.”

“You don’t have to apologize,” said the butcher. “It’s all right. That storm—after a thing like that, it’s normal to want to come out to talk to someone.”

“To confirm that you really are still alive.”

He startled himself a little, saying that. The butcher looked at him curiously. Chase took note, suddenly, of the meat in the silent glass display cases.

“What’s going to happen to all this food?” asked Chase.

The butcher’s face twitched into a frown. “It’ll have to go. It’s already starting to go bad. I don’t mind telling you it’s going to break my heart to watch it all go into the trash.” He reached under the counter and pulled out a shimmering red slab of cured ham. It was certified Spanish Serrano ham, one of the most expensive items in the shop, wrapped in a blanket of gorgeous brown fat. The butcher conjured up a knife, which he used to slice off a long, transparent piece. He handed it to Chase.

“Let’s enjoy what we can.”

Chase realized he had not eaten since the afternoon before. He and the butcher ate slice after slice. The jamón was all muscle and salt, intensely satisfying, each filmy slice packed with sustenance.

The butcher wiped his knife on his apron. Chase’s phone buzzed. He grasped at his pocket, but ignored it. It would wait. There seemed to be no urgency outside this room. Chase said, “I don’t have a partner here. There are kids, but no partner.”

The butcher nodded sympathetically. “It can be hard to say that out loud sometimes.”

“I suppose it doesn’t really make a difference. I guess that’s why people come out here to the middle of nowhere. So no one can say whether you’re one person or another. Do you think?”

The butcher considered it. “Well, as far as I know, you could be anybody,” he said. Chase realized he did not know the butcher’s name. He wondered if he had read the signs right. He tried to remember how Ellen had first approached him. She had made some comment, something warm and inviting but a little cutting, like she knew something about Chase just by looking at him. But all Chase remembered was that he and Ellen had smiled at each other and something was contained in that smile—a sort of helpless knowledge. It was a look that said, it’s too late, we have already embarked.

The butcher was looking at Chase with a different sort of smile, as though he was wondering what Chase would do next. This could be a breakthrough, Chase thought, or it could be the most humiliating moment of his life. As Chase considered his tactics he realized with equal parts horror and excitement that he was doing the simplest thing; he was leaning forward.

Machinations

JaninaAzaKarpinska

Unclean ShawnaErvin

Slow, meditative music played from an iPhone to a small speaker at the front of the meeting room at the Presbyterian retreat center in the Colorado mountains. I had been hired to teach a creative workshop Saturday afternoon, then invited to stay until the retreat ended after breakfast on Sunday.

Women silently rose from their places at round tables and filed into lines at the back of the room. Church leaders, all women, sat on one side of long tables. In front of each leader was a serving bowl with warm water, a bottle of scented soap, a hand towel, and scented hand cream.

The pastor, a woman, had quoted a Bible verse about Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. “We wanted to offer you comfort, to give you what Jesus gave his disciples, to serve you in a way that would be uniquely female.”

The only sounds were the soft muttering of prayers from leaders as they washed and dried hands, the shuffle of footsteps over the carpet, the whoosh of chair cushions when each woman sat or stood. Outside a large window at one end of the meeting room, the sun gradually turned the sky orange and pink, then deepening shades of blue.

Twenty-five years earlier I stood at the bottom of a staircase in the church I had gone to since birth. I backed into a kids Sunday school room, the tall youth pastor towering over me. He was stern.

“What you reported is serious.”

I was sixteen. I had reported my dad for sexual and physical abuse, had been placed in foster care. It had been several weeks. I begged for a ride, went back to church expecting hugs, offers of places to live.

I nodded, looked at the pastor’s belly. I couldn’t get around him, I knew.

“You love your church family?”

I nodded again. My dad was the assistant pastor and music leader. My mom was the bookkeeper. I had been dedicated into the fundamental Baptist congregation as a toddler, run down the hallways with a younger brother after services, memorized verse after verse, gone to church twice each Sunday and on Wednesday nights as long as I could remember, learned how to convert people, followed rules that forbid secular music, TV, movies, alcohol, tobacco, playing cards, dancing, and more.

“I know you love them. I know you want to guard your church family’s hearts.” He took a step toward me.

I backed up. I studied the toys on the shelves for what would hurt him the most—a metal toy truck, a marble ramp—and moved closer to the shelves. My stomach lurched and burned. My skin tingled.

“What you reported, what you said, what you…” The pastor looked up and down my body. Disgust curled at the corner of his lips. His gaze lingered at my breasts. “Until you are ready to repent and confess to your sins, it’s best if you aren’t here. You need to take some time to make your heart right before God, before the church. You understand, right? Love is not easy.”

I crossed my arms, curled my shoulders forward. I was dirty, dangerous. I would learn later that my parents stayed in the church, that the church put up the bail money for my dad until his trial, that they advocated for my dad to be sentenced to probation rather than prison time.

At the retreat, I watched the sky turn purple, then black, stars flicker above a mountain. I hadn’t planned to take part in the handwashing ritual. I was there to teach women to play with language. Despite the gap in time, my exile from the church was still tender.

Women at the table where I sat gestured toward lines, urging me to have my hands washed. I no longer believed in God, but reluctantly took a place at the end of a line. The leader was the woman who had hired me. If I was going to have my hands touched by a religious person, I wanted it to be someone I knew. The line moved forward. A woman sat down, extended her hands. Soap, towel, hand cream.

I would be next. I sighed, imagined the leader saying she was glad I was there, that the workshop had gone well. I imagined my hands wrapped in a towel, the leader holding them for a moment, then massaging hand cream into my parched knuckles.

The woman ahead of me stood. Whoosh. I stood back to let her pass. Another woman slid into the seat and laughed. “I was waiting for the end of the line,” she said. “I knew you’d want to wash my hands.”

The woman and the leader laughed softly.

“This will be my last one,” the leader said to me. Another leader a few lines away saw me. I didn’t know her. She waved a hand over the empty chair in front of her station.

My stomach lurched. Reluctantly, I walked toward her. The leader held her palms out. I lifted my hands from my sides, then stopped before I might give something I couldn’t get back. I shook my head slowly, then more vigorously.

“I can’t,” I said to the bowl. I smelled lavender and a hint of lemon. I craved touch, that gentle moment, to feel in her touch that I had become clean again. My hands shook.

“You can’t?” The leader’s hands were soft, her fingers curled gently.

I imagined my hands falling into hers, the sound of her voice lulling me into belonging, watching my sin dissolve in the bowl. Grief threatened the peace of the moment.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I shoved my hands into my pockets and backed away. “I can’t.”

Nerve Cell JosephineFlorens