Fertilizer

For so long had he belonged to the bugs and the dirt and the blackness of his eyelids. So long had they been his friends, his enemies, his lovers, his masters. So long had they been his everything and the everything—the before, the during, the after.

Until those hands—gentle—had found him.

Gentle—so gentle, he thought—if he could think—that they must have known the greatest violence.

Brushing away, gently, his everything.

The bugs abandoned him, crawled away without him. 

Wait, he thought.

The dirt left him next.

The hands scooped it up in little wet piles, taking it away from him.

Uncovering him.

Stop, he thought. Leave me.

His bugs were gone. His dirt was gone. All he had left was the blackness of his eyelids. He prayed the hands would not take that, too.

But they did.

Fingertips swept the dust from his cheeks, combed it from his eyelashes.

There was a wind—a breath—hot, if he could feel—encouraging him to blink.

I do not want to, he thought.

In response, the hands took his hands from him, separated his fingers, and ran them through long, long hair.

If he could remember, it was like silk—slick and satiny and a little bit slippery like it had just been washed.

Then, the hands cupped his around a face.

It was soft like artists’ clay and fit perfectly under his hands like a masterpiece—carefully sculpted to imitate the beauty of a woman that was, at one point, someone important to someone else.

The hands guided his down and laid them flat against a chest—not his—that was filled with sunlight and warmth and the color green.

Life.

The chest rose and fell like the boughs of a tree bobbing in time with the spinning of the world. It pushed and pulled like the cresting waves atop an endlessly deep ocean filled with things that moved and swam and danced. It woke and slept and thought and felt and lived and died and was and wasn’t but what it was, he decided, was his everything. The new everything.

It was alive, offering life to him, too, and he wanted it.

He blinked, relinquishing, finally and willingly, the blackness of his eyelids to the hands. It was hard—they were stiff, crusted shut, his eyeballs dry like raisins.

When he could finally see, eyelids peeled back until they touched his brow and cheek bones, he saw, against a slumbering, inky black forest, the silhouette of the body belonging to the hands.

She was tall—taller than him, looming—with wide shoulders and even wider hips and a well-fed belly. Her thighs were full, her arms powerful but soft. She was motherly, and even if she had not worn a jagged crown of spires and spikes and horns atop her head, he would have thought her divine, too.

Finally, she gave him his hands back, set them at his sides. 

He forgot about the bugs and the dirt and the blackness of his eyelids and thought, Please.

She seemed to hear him and leaned down, lips parted. They swept across his for but a moment with another hot breath—this one full of magic—that slipped into his mouth, his throat, his lungs, and as she sat up, so did he.

He wanted to thank her, but his mouth was dry and she hushed him as she helped him out of the dirt where she had found him. He did not want to displease her.

Once he was on his own two feet, they found he was not yet strong enough to walk. His knees knobbled and wobbled, and his feet curled in on themselves, toes scrunched to his arches. She guided him back to the ground then disappeared into the trees.

He waited a while—longer than he remembered being in the dirt—listening to her rustle through the bushes and the branches. He stared straight up—though there was no other course of action available to him—watching, through a canopy of leaves, the stars—a thousand twinkling lights blinking in rhythm to a song he could not hear. He wondered if she could.

When she returned, she presented him a bed woven of twigs and grass and vines and flowers. She helped him roll onto it, and then she took the vines in her hands and started to haul him across the forest floor.

If his face had not felt like stone, he would have frowned. Haul was not the right word because there was no struggle. She was nimble and fleet-footed and strong, and she made him believe he weighed nothing at all.

The stars overhead changed before they disappeared completely as she brought him to the mouth of a cave draped with lichen and bramble. As he passed beneath them, they scratched at his face, whispering, Intruder. Intruder.

The cave was dark, and soon his eyes adjusted to the low light. He was quite used to blackness.

He got his first good look at her face when she spoke.

“Where did you come from?” she asked him. She blinked at him with spidery eyelashes and full, pouting lips. She was beautiful in the dark. “I did not put you there. You are not mine.”

“I came from the dirt,” he said, his voice scraping, clawing its way up his throat. It came out hoarse, faint.

“The peat,” she said.

“The peat?” he asked.

“Yes, the peat,” she said. “The bog preserved you, kept you whole.”

“Oh.”

“But before that?” she prompted him. “Before I pulled you from the peat? Before you fed the bugs? Before the cold kiss took you and put you there?” 

He pictured her eyes sparkling, but he could not see them in the dark. 

“Where were you before?” she asked. “What were you before?”

“I only remember the bugs and the dirt and your hands and your lips. Am I not yours?” he asked.

She shook her head. “You are not mine.”

The world outside, past the lichen and the bramble, began to glow.

“Do not leave the cave,” she said. “I will return when the sun falls.”

He wanted to ask her why but she hushed him and pressed a kiss to his forehead. He did not want to displease her.

While she was gone, he busied himself mostly with sleep. He felt, though—somewhere in his mind or his muscles or his eyeballs—he still wasn’t sure he could feel or think—that he had been sleeping for a long time. But sleep was not the right word because it implied being awake, and there was no waking when he lived with the bugs and the dirt and the blackness of his eyelids. He also studied his hands because he could see them without moving very much, and the rest of the time when sleep would not come and he was too tired to lift his arms, he tried to remember the answers to her questions. The remembering made his head ache.

And why, he also wondered, was she digging in the dirt, if she was not looking for me? She did not expect to find me. She does not recognize me, and she does not know what I am. What am I? What was she burying?

She stayed true to her word and returned when the sun fell and night crept back into the forest, back through the curtain of lichen and bramble. He managed to sit up and greet her.

“Hello,” he croaked.

She set before him something that hit the stone floor of the cave with a wet, heavy slap. “I brought you food,” she said. “Are you hungry?”

Something warned him not to say “no” to her but also not to lie, so instead he shook his head.

She knelt, placing both knees firmly on the ground before sinking into her left hip, legs splaying out to one side. It was so delicate and feminine—but not in a fragile way, he thought. It was a choice to have so much grace and control and humility when he knew she could rattle the whole word down to its fiery bones. He knew because a pinprick of that power was inside him, now.

He fumbled in the dark, fingers gliding along the spongy surface of the meat. It was uncooked, still red and nearly writhing, but it was tender, stringy, and when his fingers finally wrapped around an arm or a leg—which, he couldn’t tell—it detached from the torso with ease. She watched him intently to see if he’d enjoy it—or at least he imagined she did because he still couldn’t see her eyes.

His teeth sank into the flesh, his two little rows of white bones scraping against a longer, larger brown and brittle bone at the center of the leg. The meat sprayed juice across his face and after he swallowed, it seemed to dissolve and squirm around in his belly.

When he had cleaned every bone and set them in a pile at her feet, she helped him to stand and led him to the mouth of the cave.

“Come,” she said, the lichen and bramble parting for her of its own will. “I will show you what is mine.”

She led him not a few paces outside the cave before gesturing to the glade before her.

It was all a shade of blue or purple under the night sky. The grass was the color of slate, and the flowers nearly glowed like polished amethyst jewels. The river that wound about in a swirling pattern was a bright cerulean, disappearing into the indigo trees circling the glade like stone walls. There was a cornflower rabbit and a lavender doe and two violet foxes bouncing in a criss-cross pattern—under and over, over and under, under and over and under again. None of them paid him any mind, and when he looked down at his hands he saw they were still brown.

“They do not recognize you,” she said. “You are not mine, but the sun is rising so we must return.”

She did not let him walk any further and ushered him back into the cave.

Again, he slept and woke in a relentless cycle, reaching for memories that would not come until there was a hammering in his head.

When night fell, she returned with with her hands cupped, dripping. “I brought you wine,” she said. “Are you thirsty? He shook his head but opened his mouth anyway, tipping his head back.

Her salty hands stung his cracked lips—a disagreeable taste when paired to the thick wine, soiled by iron from the earth and the pewter of stone. The deep red extract looked like oil in the cave shadows and dried stickily from his chin when he was finished. He tightened his mouth to a thin, straight line and forced his eyebrows apart—his best attempt to not show his displeasure with the metallic aftertaste.

He still failed to remember anything before the bugs and the dirt and the blackness of his eyelids, but he was certain this was like no wine he had ever drunk before.

She helped him to his feet and wiped his chin. “Come,” she said. “I will show you what is not mine but is not someone else’s either. I will show you what is no one’s.”

“Is that where I am from?” he asked, following her from one shadow to the next.

“We shall see,” she said.

He had by then regained his strength, so they walked out of the glade and followed the river past the dirt in which she had found him. Eventually, the river veered right and they veered left, and the space between each tree grew wider until there were no trees in sight at all.

It was only rock as far as he could see, crawling with things that made his stomach squirm: scorpions, spiders, cockroaches, and snakes. And above it all, where he was used to seeing stars, was a foggy, smoke-like wind, drowning out every other noise and color. It was ravaging and cold and suffocating and somehow nothing at all even though it was everywhere.

“This is the In-Between,” she said. “It accepts all that is no one’s.”

“Will it accept me?” he asked.

He imagined her closing her eyes as she tilted her head. “The In-Between does not want you,” she said. “You are not no one’s. You are someone’s.”

“Do you want me?” he asked. “Am I yours?”

“You are not mine,” she said. “What do you think you are?”

He thought for a moment, closed his own eyes and felt at home with the blackness of his eyelids. “My heart does not beat like it used to,” he said. “My eyes do not blink, and my chest does not rise. I am wrong. That is what I am.”

“And yet you are not dead,” she remarked.

“I am not alive either,” he said.

Her full, pouting lips turned down at the corners. “Do I not make you feel alive?”

He shook his head. “I do not feel at all.”

She walked him back to the cave as the moon and sun together painted more orange and yellow onto the sky. It was not yet dawn before he was again laying on the stone floor, busying himself with sleep while she attended to whatever responsibilities came with her duty to the forest. Important things, he thought. Heavy things. Thankless things.

When she returned for the third time, she held in her hands a gauzy cloak.

“Are you cold?” she asked.

He shook his head but pushed himself to his feet anyway, all by himself.

She draped the cloak around his shoulders, pulling the hood up and patting the top of his head.

It was thin and pokey—constructed of ten thousand spiderwebs all pinned together with pine needles and bugs running between the stitches. It reminded him of being in the dirt with all those little feet stamping and scampering and tickling and itching. It felt right to be among the bugs again, to host them, feed them.

“Come,” she said. “I will show you what is not mine.”

“If it’s not yours and it’s not no one’s,” he said, “then whose is it?”

“It belonged to a people long gone from this world, to people who ruined the earth and had to be punished by my ancestors,” she said. “They were long gone before I was born, but I have heard the stories of their destruction.”

They walked out of the glade, again following the river past the dirt in which she had found him, and veering left when the river veered right, walking until there were no trees in sight at all and the forest was replaced by the endless rock and wind of the In-Between. She took him farther still, to a horizon so far he could not stand in the middle and see either edge. This was the place they stopped—far from the cave and from the forest, through to the edge of the In-Between, where the rock met blackened, ashy soil.

There were charcoal trees, shriveled to charred, hollowed stumps. There were rectangular stone structures, crumbling and smeared with soot. Below his feet, there were hands just like his that reached up from under the soil with desperate, outspread fingers. Except these hands were wrinkled, blistered, in some places melted to the bone. Everything was scorched.

A word came to him, then.

Human.

“I am from here,” he said, turning to face her. “This is what I am.”

“Then you are not mine,” she said, turning away from him.

He shook his head. “I am not yours.”

She did not hold his hand as she led him away from what was his, back through the In-Between, over open fields until the trees grew frequent enough to call it a forest again, to where the river bubbled alongside their feet. But she did not lead him past the dirt in which she had found him.

“It is my burden,” she said, “to preserve what is mine.”

“Like the bog preserved me?” he asked.

“Yes.” With a nod of her head, he understood.

He followed her, and let her guide him back to his bugs and his dirt, to lay him among a garden of corpses she had punished like her ancestors had punished his. He closed his eyes.

He imagined her smiling at him as she scooped up small piles of peat, laying it over him, gentle. She patted after every few handfuls until he was covered.

Buried again, except for his eyes.

One last look, he thought.

As the moon gave way to the sun and its pigmented golden wash, the human opened his raisin-dry eyes to gaze upon her true form.

Where he had thought long silken hair slick from having recently been washed, he saw a matted mane of wet, rotting leaves crowned with several sets of antlers and horns and upside-down teeth. Where he had thought a perfectly-sculpted beauty, there were layers of straw and mud beaten into a horrific, misproportioned and asymmetrical ugliness with features hammered this way and that. She had no eyes at all, just hollowed out cavities where they should have been. Where he had thought a chest full of life, rising and falling, pushing and pulling—his everything, he had decided three nights ago—was a still, unmoving heap of dead things: brittle bones and rotting organs of all shapes and sizes, flowers and fungi all flattened and wilting, hands like his—still whole—and, rolling around like marbles he played with as a kid—he could remember—eyeballs, raisin-dry, just like his.

And just like him, corpses of pointy-eared men and translucent-winged women and goblin-like creatures with fat lips and tusks sticking up past their noses laid beside him in the dirt. He wondered what destruction they left behind.

He joined these bodies—the ones she had been burying when her hands found him in the dirt three nights ago—and he welcomed back the blackness of his eyelids.

He would go gently. He would not sully what was hers.

He only hoped he might atone by letting the bugs and the dirt feed upon his flesh, so that the world, without him—for her and all her gentleness—might grow whole once more.