Sofia and the Goose walked for three days. Her feet were always sore. She fantasized about having new feet. She fantasized about passing by a store that sold feet. She would choose a new pair. They would be a tiny bit smaller. She would lift them up to see whether there were warts underneath. She would wiggle the toes. She would unscrew her feet and put the new ones on. But that was an absurd fantasy.
They walked away from the forest and through the fields where the Elysian peasants farmed. In this area she believed she was more or less safe. It seemed the Enemy did not necessarily think there was anything the matter with peasants. They didn’t have affiliations with anybody. The peasants had stopped fighting back after the Enemy had razed the countryside. Her mother had said there were peasants who were entirely disgusted by the draft. They had gone into hiding, and some had even been arrested for opposing it. They had traces of Enemy blood themselves. And it was said they wanted the Enemy to take over. They even agreed with some of the propaganda about citizens in the Capital.
One night Sofia and the Goose walked through a field of moon dandelions. It was the witching hour. As the sky darkened, the dandelions began to glow like tiny satellites. They appeared like the breath of children against a closed window. As she walked through the moon dandelions, they erupted and their seeds rose in the air, swirling and waltzing their way up into the darkening and darkening sky until they affixed themselves like stars to the firmament.
Every peasant they came across looked at them with suspicion. She didn’t even think they spoke the same language. There were some parts of the country, especially farther from the forest and close to the eastern border, that spoke in the Enemy tongue.
It had not occurred to her that even if she were to trick the Enemy into thinking she was a peasant, the peasants themselves would not be tricked, or they would not want to hide or protect her.
She noticed an old lady wearing a large army coat from an Elysian soldier. She saw another farmer with an officer’s hat. When the soldiers had been killed, the peasants must have arrived like vultures to clean them of their clothes. She wondered whether there were photographs of strange children in the pockets of the coat. The photographs of the soldier’s children who were living like memories the old lady had stolen, in her pocket.
There was a child sitting on top of a truck with no wheels. He had on a gas mask. It made him look like a strange, uncanny bird. Another group of children emerged from the truck. They were also wearing gas masks. They looked so unlike the children who had been with her on the train. The ones who were dressed in elegant clothing and had tears on their cheeks as the train pulled away.
What kind of child was Sofia now? Was she an elegant child from the train? Or was she a carrion bird?
Everyone was feasting off the spoils of the Capital. But they were hungry. It gave an evil glint to their eyes. Before the war, Sofia had never known anyone who was hungry. But now everyone was hungry. Hunger was new to her. As it was to most people in the city.
Although the Goose was able to find worms and grubs to eat, he sensed the hunger of others.
“This land has a very strange, vicious appetite. I can hear its belly grumbling. When you are raised to be eaten, like I am, you sense hunger from far off. That is how I first know that a wolf is near. I don’t hear the subtle sounds of paws snapping twigs. I don’t see it slinking around. I sense it. I sense its hunger. It transforms the atmosphere around it. It’s like time slows down. It makes things quiet. You feel as though you are in a net already. You feel as though your decency has been stripped away from you. Nothing you believe to be important about yourself is important. You feel yourself stripped of meaning. It is a cold place to be. Do you feel it now?”
Sofia did feel it now. She felt naked. It was a desperate feeling. It was different from the feeling of the Enemy being close by. This was a feeling coming from her own people.
The hunger was such in this part of the country that she felt she was in as much danger as the Goose. The Goose had always said she was privileged because she did not have to worry about being eaten. She did not know what it was like to envision her body parcelled into different edible portions. She imagined a drawing of her naked body on a chart at the butcher shop. There were small darts along the legs and arms. With descriptions of them. People would come in the shop and point to her belly. Then the butcher would go put it in a sheet of newsprint and hand it to a complete stranger.
She imagined her heart being bitten into like an apple by a child, and then the child would walk around with two hearts beating in his chest. Like a marching game with two children who make sure their feet are in sync. And the child would fall in love with twice as many people as possible.
She knew it was not good to visualize horrific possibilities during a war. You could deal only with the danger at hand. It served only to make you like a frightened animal. Like a deer or a hare that can’t move at all.
On the outskirts of a village, they walked through a doorway into a house that had a variety of walls destroyed. Most of the house was in rubble, and the ceiling had collapsed. She found a pile of potatoes in the larder. Her mother used to mash her potatoes more lightly than anybody else in the world. She served them to Sofia in a small porcelain bowl that had pink roses all around the rim. She liked to have mashed potatoes all on their own. As though they were a delicacy.
Now she bit into the boiled potato and it tasted like ashes, mud, lead pencil, and chalk.
When she was little, she always had her very own plates and bowls and cutlery. They were smaller and daintier and more decorated than those the adults ate off of. She had a small baby spoon. She used it to eat sherbet with. She could never decide which she preferred, ice cream or sherbet. She liked the bright colours of sherbet but the texture of ice cream. Ice cream seemed to sit on her tongue longer. It stayed a brief while to have a relationship and tell a little story.
She saw an armoire still standing in the midst of the rubble, with its doors open and the glass from its panes all broken. Surrounding the armoire were shards of china plates and cups. Then she looked into the armoire and saw on the top shelf one single teacup and spoon. Sitting daintily. As though there had been no devastation. As though they were expecting someone to pick them up and serve delicious scalding tea.
It was miraculous to see objects so refined here. It was surreal almost. It was hard to believe that once the teacup would not have been out of place at all. But in a world that entirely resembled it.
It was an artifact from a world that seemed to have existed many lifetimes before.
Then the teacup began to tremble. Although the armoire was perfectly still. And nothing else in the rubble was stirring. It shook violently.
“It’s the soldiers. They are coming. The fine china can detect their movements. Let’s go back to the trees!” she yelled to the Goose. But before she ran, she picked up the teacup and spoon and wrapped them in an extra sweater in her bag and tucked the bundle in securely.
She had to enter the edge of the forest to hide from the soldiers. It was a moonless forest without stars. She and the Goose couldn’t see their hands or feet in front of their faces. The dark reality of the woods all around her became apparent. Each tree trunk bristling with pine needles—like the fur around the cuff of a wolf’s neck, sticking straight up.
They suddenly, from the ground, a glowing dome appeared. The light was so soft, it didn’t startle her in any way. Or make her feel afraid. It had the same glow as a small night lamp in the corner of her bedroom at home.
But how could that be? How could it be possible? How could someone have plugged in a lamp in the forest? Would they have plugged it into a tree? For a brief moment, Sofia’s notion of the scientific universe expanded. She thought she would like to bring a record player out into the woods, plug it into a tree, and listen to the Elysian Children’s Orchestra in the darkness.
Then a hundred mushrooms all around them began glowing. They were standing in a clearing in the woods, and they were surrounded by fairy mushrooms. They seemed to change wattage and colour, and so the light moved like an astral phenomenon, like the northern lights.
“It’s a fairy circle,” Sofia said, clasping her hands together.
“I have never seen anything so beautiful,” the Goose said.
Sofia had finished a jar of water she’d brought along. She stopped for a moment and yanked up a large clump of soil with phosphorescent mushrooms sticking out of it. And she stuffed it in the jar and put the jar in her bag. They slept next to its glow.
She had a dream she was lost in the forest. But then she began to hear some noises. She followed the sounds and ended up at a clearing. There were small lights wrapped around the tree branches. There was a tent constructed of colourful bedsheets, sewn together in a quilt. In front of the entrance to the tent was a wooden sign on a stand on which were carved the words “Black Market.”
Sofia pushed aside the fabric fold that served as a door and walked inside. There were tables covered in forbidden goods. Sofia ran up to them. She was surprised to recognize so many items.
There was a statuette of a naked woman. It had been on her mother’s windowsill for as long as she could remember. What was it doing here? She began to look furtively and anxiously through the objects on the tables. There was a hairbrush she recognized. All its bristles were bent and wrecked. But she preferred it to any other brush. It was carved out of wood and had an apple painted on the back. Clara had had it since she was a child.
Then she saw a copy of her mother’s book. She felt so relieved. All her problems in the world disappeared. She was thrilled. She reached out to grab it, but she woke up at the same moment. Her arms were above her head. Her hands were as empty as they had been the day she was born. She grasped at the emptiness. It seemed as though the universe was filled with darkness. There was nothing out there in the universe, no life, other than the one earth. And this was completely overwhelming. She felt how tiny she was in relationship to the rest of the universe. She rolled over and grasped the Goose in her arms. This way she felt larger at least. She wiped the tears on her face into the Goose’s feathers.