Fragments #2

                She seldom spoke. Instead she lingered in silence during the daylight hours. When forced, her responses were terse and abrupt like a woman who had more important things to attend to. Despite her mother-in-law’s best efforts, she spent many hours alone on protracted hikes that often occupied the better part of the day. Alone she walked beneath a canopy of leaves, passing in and out of the dappled sunlight which filtered down from above. Hour upon hour her feet took her down nameless trails where the air hung thick with ghosts. Wordlessly she wandered in concentric circles around camp like a lonely electron orbiting a nucleus. She was a restless thing finally settled amid the white pine thickets and dark places. Her footsteps were silent on the carpeted forest floor thick with a lifetime’s worth of fallen needles. She stopped and stood, pausing to ponder that beneath her weary feet rested the ruins and remains of generations of fallen trees. Fallen here was the legacy of their ancestors, buried deep in the perpetual entropy of existence ---a slow decomposition into nothingness or rather into the base elements of life, fuel for progeny. She wondered whether this would always be. Would life always give way to life slowly over the course of decades, of centuries? Or would the mechanics of life eventually still until the ground lay satiated, piled high with the wreckage of civilization? Body upon body. Bone upon bone.

                A squirrel rustled in the brush.

                Her fingers twitched nervously as she rejoined the trail, grasping, it seemed, for some invisible object. She passed over a stream. Frogs, startled by her presence, threw themselves about wildly, hopping to and fro as if struck hysteric. The dilapidated boards shifted perilously as she crossed over the slow moving brook. A trout darted for safety under the bank and disappeared. She envied the thoughtless creatures that lived their short and often tragic lives unencumbered by the concerns of the day. Those whose home was little more than a nestled patch of grass or an eddy in the current had little to consider in the way of possessions. “Consider the lilies,” she recalled, but her heart did not rejoice but rather burned with jealousy for these tiny creatures that remained blissfully ignorant of loss or despair.

                She passed through an oak opening familiar to her. Tyler shot a doe here last fall. It was getting late so all four of them had come out to dress the animal and carry it back to camp. As her husband performed the gory task, she had struggled with a haunch as it tried to slither free from her tenuous grasp. Still fresh in her memory were the stains that bloodied her dress. Afterwards she knelt down beside the creek, submerging her hands in the icy water. Transfixed, she watched as the blood washed away in cloud-like bursts and was swept away by the modest current; carried off like dandelions on a summer day.