8

A little boy at the window, face flattened to the glass, clouds blooming from the depths of moist lungs. Croaking. Spitting. Wailing. Flat palms pounding. Knees locked and toes curling. Dirty fingers tearing at the ledge of the window frame. Blood on fingertips. Coughing. Voice cracking but still strong.

Another—a girl—hugging her own elbows. Rocking. Head behind her brother’s knees. Eyes tightly shut. Rocking. Rocking. Feet twisting. A squeak, barely registered. Covering her face. Parting her hair. One eye on Adelaide. A puddle of urine beneath her small frame.

And Adelaide, watching, sweating. Her eyes, wide and nearly sightless. She gasps. Scared, wildly scared. Clutching her knees. She, too, rocking. Rocking. The room spinning. The wood floor beneath her feet like home at last, if only for a moment. She watches the windows, one by one. Listening. Waiting.

The room spins faster. Her chest tightens. From the lantern on the side table, light as bright as an emergency flare reflects against the glass, stinging her eyes. Adelaide would speak words if her lips weren’t numb. And then everything blurs as the room turns to gray, then white, then black.

The howls continue outside long after Adelaide has fainted on the sofa.

When Adelaide wakes, her eyelids are too heavy to open, her limbs too sore to move, so she lies on her sofa and she listens.

Outside, the wild woman is loud and frightened, her shouts echoing through the small cabin.

Adelaide forces open an eye and peers across her living room.

The children are still there. It wasn’t a dream.

They watch the empty place beyond the window as somewhere outside, their mother cries for them. The little globes of their heads turn left and then right. It would be in perfect unison were it not for their tendency to pull away from each other, as though ricocheting from the same point in opposite directions.

A nonverbal communication passes from the girl to her brother, almost imperceptible. He begins to cry.

More sounds from outside, different from before. Shuffling, pushing, pulling. And then the blast of metal striking metal.

A scream.

The children plaster themselves to the glass as stones and sticks slam against the walls, the window.

The wild woman barks a dozen strange sounds into the night sky.

And then she is silent.

The girl wants to cry out for mother who is hurt and needs her help. She wants to scream. She wants to run but she is trapped. And so is brother.

The girl is standing in brother’s mess, and when she lifts her foot, brother’s mess drips from her toes, warm and wet. It has not gone down into the dirt and clay and disappeared forever. She does not understand.

The girl listens for mother. She is gone now. But mother will come back for them. She said so. After all the mad noises and sad noises and hurt noises, the girl heard mother say, Stay quiet, stay small, stay hidden. I’ll be back for you.

The girl looks around for someplace safe to hide, someplace safe to wait. But inside this world of quiet things and soft things, safety is not found, and so she lies flat against the floor, the wood somehow colder than the earth.

A pungent smell wakes Adelaide, and the ticking clock echoes from her bedroom, tapping vehemently against her skull. Wake-wake-wake. The room brightens with each passing second.

Adelaide sits upright on the sofa and struggles to piece together the events of the night before. Her calf throbs, and the wood floor spins beneath her. She closes her eyes until the nausea passes. The smell in her cabin is as piercing as the sound of her clock, and she brings her nightgown to her nose. Dirt, decay, fungus, and something that Adelaide cannot place.

A puddle of dark liquid seeps along a crease in the wood, disappearing beneath the sofa, and trickling closer and closer to the floorboard that pulls away from the nails. Adelaide snatches a pillow from the sofa and smothers the liquid before it can further penetrate her sanctuary. A quick sniff of the fabric confirms her suspicions. Urine.

Adelaide gasps. The children! They are nowhere in sight. Have they escaped? She stands, clutching the side table for support, nearly knocking it to the floor. She begins to call out for them before realizing she doesn’t know what to say. They have no names, they share no language, and she has no more grass to throw.

The children are not under the bed. They are not behind the sofa, nor in her bedroom closet. Adelaide paces outside her cabin, peering into the trees, and inside the chicken coop. She walks along the river, but the children are not there either.

She doesn’t want to look at the place where the chain still dangles over the wattle fence. But she must.

Adelaide listens to the morning air, but it betrays no secrets, and the spotlight of the rising sun leaves little room for doubt—the wild woman is gone.

Adelaide rushes from the corner of the fence and falls into the dirt. The shovel lies just beside the trap, tossed haphazardly, its blade shoved into a mound of dirt. The dirt is red.

An innocent woman has torn her own injured foot from these steel jaws because of Adelaide’s sanctimonious actions. Her wonderful plan, isn’t that just swell? Adelaide is an intelligent woman, but the best she could think of was, Let’s kill the beast? Like a villager consumed by mass hysteria, she’d convinced herself that this was her only choice. And for what? A carrot? A pumpkin?

Adelaide doesn’t deserve to live. She should have shoved those pills so deep down her gut, they’d have made it straight to hell before she did.

The wild woman is out there somewhere, injured, leaving blood in her wake like sweet candies for predators more dangerous than herself. And the children must be with her, traumatized, and traveling with a mother who is bleeding profusely. And who may or may not live to see the next sunrise.

Adelaide picks up the shovel and tunnels into the earth until blisters pop on her moist palms, distracting her from the pain in her calf. She shovels until her mind is so occupied with the growing hole that she is no longer thinking about the children she tried to kidnap. She digs until she can no longer remember the last few days, nor the reason for digging this hole in the first place. Ah, yes. To bury the trap. She should simply walk away, never think of it again. But the forest has a long memory, and if she does not bury it, her little homestead in the woods will become a place to be avoided. A cavity of sorrow and regret. Another floorboard that pulls away from the nails.

Avoidance is far from forgetting. But burying is a hell of a lot closer.

Adelaide has been a fool. She has no business raising children. That time for her is over now and everyone is better for it. She will continue with her life for a few more days, and she will not think of the children or the wild woman a moment longer. She will get her bearings, and then, when she is ready, she will feed Henry and the girls one final snack. She will straighten up her house, clear the garden. And then.

And then.

Then she will sleep.

Adelaide hobbles to the hole she has dug and drops the trap into its gaping mouth. The walls collapse immediately under its weight, and Adelaide need only kick a few lumps of dirt on top before she no longer sees the trap smothered in a feral woman’s blood.

Freed from the steel in her arms, Adelaide already feels lighter. The sun rises beyond the trees, casting vibrant copper shadows across the landscape. Adelaide dusts her hands on her nightgown, which is now so dirty that it will likely become tomorrow’s cleaning cloth, and walks toward her cabin.

There are still potatoes on her kitchen counter. Some may be rubbish, but some may yet make a decent breakfast for her. And as for chickens, well, chickens simply love rubbish.

The kitchen faucet spits to life and coughs cold, clean water into the sink. She pulls a small wooden bowl from the cupboard and begins to pare away the hardened outside of her potato slices. The chickens will be pleased.

Outside the window, Henry and the girls pluck at sluggish insects, and Adelaide raps on the window with her knuckle.

“I’ve a yummy breakfast comin’ your way,” she says, as if this morning were the same as any other. As if she hadn’t maimed a woman last night and put an entire family at mortal risk. As if she doesn’t have the urine of a petrified child staining her floor. As if she had never been so cruel and selfish.

Adelaide stops cutting and looks behind her. The feeling of being watched is overwhelming, and she squints through the morning haze. Her living room is empty. There is no one at her windows. But to be sure, Adelaide walks the length of her cabin before returning to the sink.

Once the final potato has been trimmed, she wipes the smears from her knife.

And then she sees motion captured in the reflection of the blade.

Adelaide spins, driving her back against the sink.

The children are right there—tucked above the large hutch in the corner of her kitchen. They huddle together, their eyes angry and accusatory. More than likely, they are simply scared, and Adelaide knows this, but her guilt leaves no doubt of their contempt.

Adelaide places the knife against the counter, and it topples from her grasp in a loud clatter, a reminder of how little control she currently has over her own body. Over anything.

The children jolt at the sound.

Adelaide forces herself to breathe.

“How . . .”

Her voice is quiet, barely a whisper, and she struggles to finish the sentence. How . . . are you still here? How . . . did you get up there? How . . . are you feeling?

Perhaps she should say, Welcome to my home. Perhaps she should say, I’m sorry.

But it doesn’t matter what Adelaide says at all—they can’t understand her anyway.

Adelaide pushes herself from the sink and the children recoil at her approach. She holds up her hands.

“It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you.”

One of the children squeaks and buries his head against the wall, while the other continues to watch Adelaide. The children are clearly frightened. Wild. And likely hungry.

But they are not alone. They have Adelaide now.

Adelaide does not break eye contact for fear the children may leap on her back like feral monkeys, ripping at her hair and tearing at her eyes. The children are older than she originally thought. Her estimation is no doubt imprecise, but she suspects they are about five or six years old. Though petite, they are remarkably fit, their bodies a tight bundle of sinew, muscle, and hide. They are filthy, their hair matted and caked with mud.

They are stunning. Adelaide is breathless in the face of such beauty. They are like creatures from a storybook, or fine sculptures carved in stone.

Adelaide is as frightened as the children—perhaps more so—but she is also excited for this new adventure. She does not want to bring past failures into the present, but deep down, Adelaide has already begun to think, now I have someone to love again.

She approaches, a mere inch at a time, until she stands just below the children.

She raises her head and stares into the children’s wide, pleading eyes. She smiles, almost laughs. They flinch.

“Nothing to fear, little ones. I’m as lost as you are.”

The girl pulls brother farther away from the woman with the wild eyes and from her long, scary hands reaching for them.

The woman looks a little like mother, but also not like mother at all. Her skin is different from mother’s. And her lips are different from mother’s. And there’s something bright and soft covering her entire body, and that’s the most different thing of all.

Brother jumps and squeaks every time the woman speaks, and the girl jumps, too, because the woman does not speak words, only sounds that aren’t really words at all.

The woman’s eyes are the color of the sky during the time of the flowers. The girl didn’t know eyes could look like that. She wonders if one day her eyes will look like that, too. She hopes not. Those kind of eyes scare her.

The girl wants to scratch her leg and brush her hair from her face, but she can’t move. Not with the woman looking at her with those eyes and making sounds that aren’t words. Near the square forest inside the forest, where mother got hurt, the woman was happy and kind. But she’s not throwing grass anymore. She’s not fun anymore.

The girl looks up but there is no sun to help her see. She looks down but there is no mud to cover her body. She looks around but there are no trees to climb.

Brother claws at the girl’s arm and she speaks to him softly and tells him it is okay, even though she’s not sure it is okay. Because this is no forest, and there is nowhere to hide from a beast with eyes the color of the sky.