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The Pond When the Moon Threw No Light

24” x 36”

Acrylic on canvas

The first in the series, The Pond When the Moon Threw No Light is a charcoal-hued grisaille: the dark grey brushstrokes are thickly layered on the canvas, creating a deep, mossy texture, surprising the viewer with the revelation that this piece contains no alien elements—you would almost think the moss had formed on the work itself. The darkness of night on the pond is illuminated with small strokes of gold and white, surrounding pale humanoid figures that are barely discernible. Francis depicts these figures in faint outlines, descending, ghost-like, into the black pool of the water. The mysterious figures seem unaware of the viewer’s gaze, and the overall impact is one of voyeuristic unease. The interaction between the human and other elements of the natural world is unsettled here, punctuating the darkness only with the movement into water and the viewer’s sense of witness.

Dark shining night sighed into the expanse of the pond. The Frog Croaking Moon, Squoljikus, was a faint sliver humming into the sky above. It threw no light.

Rita watched the running silhouettes from the pitch-black shadow of the cabin bedroom. She’d awakened to the crunch of footsteps on gravel and stumbled, sweaty and confused, from the rickety single bed. Footfalls rushed the spring peepers and bullfrogs into silence. Her own heavy breathing surrounded her, almost obscuring soft movements down the bank: splashing deep into the green-brown water.

Pain pulsed up her leg from the stumble. She crouched at the window, breathing dust and mildew as she squinted over the windowpane and into the distance. Technically, there was no reason to stay hidden in the bedroom, but there was also no reason for anyone to be at the isolated pond, or near this small cabin — let alone for people to be in the water in the middle of the night.

A bloated, pale body flashed through her mind, conjured from the passive consumption of a thousand police procedurals screaming blue light into her parents’ living room. She fumbled toward the bedside table, feeling for the cool glass of her phone. No texts had sent or come through since she’d arrived at the cabin, but just in case — just in case — she should check. Her hand shook and she nearly dropped the phone. When she hit the button she grimaced, waiting for light that didn’t come. Her phone was dead. From outside the window came a loud thump, followed by dragging, grunting.

A body. A limp assembly of limbs, heavy with the absence of story. Of course. It had to be a body. Rita shut her eyes tight. It couldn’t be held off; the memory was a wave destined to crash over her. It always happened this way — a procession, a rosary of grief, focusing and shuddering through her memory: her father in his coffin. The eagle feather in his hands. His eyes — she remembered, with a lurch in her gut — were sewn shut. No matter how much she’d tried to forget that fact, she couldn’t forget anything she’d learned about the embalming process in late-night YouTube spirals, her wakefulness burning electric with the fear of her own mortality.

Incense and murmured prayers had filled the thick basement air of the reserve church. Prayers her tongue couldn’t shape. She had neither the full grasp of the Mi’kmaw language at her disposal, nor the religious background of her cousins or her brother. Maybe if she had grown up on the rez it would be different; the community was ninety percent Catholic, eight percent Baha’i, and traditional in their own admixtures. It was a place where prayer could be shaped by any number of languages, few of which spoke to her own soul, or her life, or her memories.

The trauma rhythm continued its perfect torture: the same flashbacks came in their expected sequence. The hospital looming in the distance. The ICU with its bodies stretched out in beds, some destined for death despite everyone’s efforts, prayers, begging palms held open to the sky.

What could she do? Rita exhaled again, a slow and deliberate attempt at calm taken from a history of therapy appointments where bored counsellors recommended breathing techniques, strategies for noticing her own embodiment through body scans, stretches, any number of ways to contend with the weight of her being. The perfect blackness of night in the cabin danced swirls in her adjusting eyes as she breathed, steadying only when the sounds outside stopped. Crouching at the window, she stared as silence cut through the dark. She couldn’t see anything out there.

Maybe this wasn’t real. Hallucination or not, she could ignore it, crawl back under the covers. If whatever was going on out there was real, it would not be worth the risk of being seen. It could be people out for a midnight swim, people throwing anything into the pond — not necessarily a body — and whatever happened in this nowhere town was none of her business, right? It could be some weird local thing, she didn’t know. Possibly no one had noticed her rented car, itself black and tucked beside the cabin in the black night. She could check the locks, go back to bed, forget all of this.

She could be dreaming. She’d sleepwalked as a kid, hallucinated all manner of things, found herself waking up on the porch some mornings with muddy feet and the imprint of grass on her arms, impressions of an unknown hour. There was even the one night, when she’d awakened to a gunshot, the sounds of screaming that rose and fell and then died. In the morning she’d told her mother about it in a trembling voice. Her mother had laughed. She hadn’t heard anything. Rita must have been dreaming. No one else had heard anything, her mother had said, and surely such a thing would cause a ruckus, would wake the whole neighborhood, wouldn’t it? For the rest of the week Rita had scanned the newspaper but found nothing.

“Well, t’us, vivid dreams are a good thing for an artist to have,” her mother reassured her. “Lots of creative people get inspiration that way.”

The Mi’kmaw language always sounded weird coming from her mother, even though her mother was half Mi’kmaw. She had been estranged from that side of her family for years and wouldn’t tell Rita why, wouldn’t share any knowledge with her other than a few words or phrases. She was much more into telling Rita how she should behave and what convoluted beauty rituals could improve her appearance. Rita knew her mother wouldn’t want her to paint the grisly crime scene she’d sworn she witnessed. She’d prefer the kind of dreams that etch happiness into waking hours, the kind that immerse the dreamer in warmth like bathwater.

But when the nightmares continued, her mother took her to the doctor, then a therapist, and neither were able to pin down what was wrong with her. A vivid imagination, Dr. Rose had finally said, and when Rita looked over at her mother she saw the gleam of smug satisfaction in her eyes. In that moment, Rita knew her mother would never care as much about her mental health as she did about being right. She mourned what her life could have been if her mother had been able to open up to her more, to see Rita for who she really was and not just who she wanted her to be: not a doll, or a mirror, or a blank canvas onto which she could project her hangups, but an imperfect child. If those things had been different then maybe Rita’s dreaming would have taken the shape of sunlight, beaches, calm light-dappled days in the fresh air. Those were the dreams that begged to be made real, not the scenes that haunted her well into adulthood.

Rita crawled back to the bed. The floor was cold on her hands and knees, the sheets soft and smelling vaguely of bleach and fresh air. It would be better — if something untoward were really happening — if she pretended that she wasn’t there. Her back pressed to the mattress, she stared into the black expanse of ceiling above her and willed her body to relax. She tensed her feet then released the tension. A body scan meditation, like her old therapist had instructed. She moved her focus up her body: tense, relax, tense, relax. One body part at a time. A dismembered self slowly made whole.

This was just like her, right? Just like her to avoid the problem, any problem, to do nothing and hope it would go away. But this was a dream. It had to be.

She listened, her limbs wire-tight. The footsteps and splashing had faded, but their echoes thrummed through her. She would need to do more than one body scan meditation tonight. Outside there was no sound of doors opened or closed, no motor, no rattling gravel from a retreating car. As the silence stretched into the night, she had no way of knowing how much time had gone by. The thing to do was to fall asleep again. She was never good at waking herself up; this was the only option, to close her eyes and drift away. What was it to fall asleep in a dream? Nothing piled upon nothing. Immersion into a waiting oblivion.

She closed her eyes and the darkness, its silence, took her with it.

 

A loon shrieked a mournful call over the water. The sound was unmistakable, but impossible — loons typically lived in ponds only in the summer, to nest and raise their young. She hoped she might find the bird, do some preliminary sketches, and paint it. Landscape painting had come so naturally to Rita, with her deep love for art and nature but with no mind for science. Ever since she was a child she would devour natural history books, absorbed in learning everything she could about local species, climate, and ecology, thrilled to name and know the world around her. The odd time when she would visit her father, he would teach her the Mi’kmaw names, the words resonating in her subconscious, nesting there for later understanding.

In the dim morning light of the cabin bedroom, Rita squinted, listening for the loon. Now that the climate was in chaos, now that the Atlantic coast fell to flame and choked on wildfire smoke earlier and earlier each summer, the rhythms were off. The sweltering, stifling spring humidity had tricked all life, disrupting the cycles that had existed from time immemorial.

Everything was tainted, including her.

Her hands shook a little as Rita willed the memory of the previous night away and pulled up the stiff, dirty window. The paint peeled at the edges, a dull white that revealed soft wood. The cabin was shabby chic, or so the listing had said. In these cases, chic was always a relative term. But that was okay for her purposes. The rustic nature of the place made people think it was authentic, whatever that meant.

The humid air grasped at her throat as the loon’s call grew louder. Rita scanned the pond’s placid waters, trying to pinpoint the bird’s silhouette in the distance. The fog rolled thick over the horizon, smothering the tops of the surrounding trees. Somewhere along the shoreline — or in some hidden inlet — Rita could hear splashing, a choking sound of distress. An animal noise — or fear beyond language. Was something out on the water? Something from the night before? The loon’s call — maybe an echo from her troubled dreams — trembled over the expanse of the pond and faded again into quiet.

Sweat clung to the small of her back. Rita pulled her white t-shirt from her skin and scratched a mosquito bite on her arm, feeling suddenly alone. Sure, that was the point: space to concentrate on her painting, to make the most of the grant she’d been awarded. But Molly was right; her loneliness was less sharp out here in the country, in a place where everything was both solitary and part of something bigger than itself. She might have romanticized the residency a little, imagining herself painting in swaths of golden light each day, reading by candlelight, heating her food on a woodstove. The pond was the biggest in the province, a few kilometres around, surrounded by forest and trail. Surely it could offer a lot in the way of inspiration, especially for a landscape painter.

Molly hadn’t texted her since she’d arrived, but who knew, maybe her texts just hadn’t gone through. The reception was spotty. Rita ignored the fear that snapped a rabbit snare in her gut. The phone was charging now, and she tried not to be bothered by its silence, the absence of spoil from a futile hunt.

On a shelf in the bedroom, Rita found an old battery-operated radio and switched it on. Success: the battery still had charge. She turned the dial, scanning the band. A country station: twangy guitar. Another country station: twangy auto-tune. Rita wrinkled her nose. She could measure city limits by the prevalence of country stations. Her fingers rolled over the dial, the lined metal reminding her of childhood afternoons playing with her grandparents’ weird old-timey antiques. Static, static, static, faint conversations cut through with more static, forming languages that were not comprehensible as English or French, sounding more like rustling leaves and sighs. Not even public radio reached this far into the country. Rita switched the radio off, still lonely for human voices. She should’ve loaded her phone with podcasts.

She would have to go into Àite an Lòin. She tripped over the syllables in her head, imagining her tongue twisting over the “original Gaelic” name for the town, trying to remember the pronunciation. Rita had rolled her eyes when Molly mentioned the naming initiative — surely they could have looked into the original Mi’kmaw name before going straight to Scottish Gaelic? But she’d tried to learn it in earnest anyway.

She would have to step outside the strange melancholy of the cabin and venture into the two-cow town. There was a gas station and there would be people. She could bring up the dream — or not-dream — casually ask if anyone had been around the night before, mention that she’d heard people around the pond, in the water. But nothing that would arouse suspicion. Certainly nothing about bodies being dragged. She would get a feel for the tiny town she had blown through on her way to the residency, admiring the blur of evergreens weeping the smell of sap through her open window, disrupting sky slung grey, then meadow, field, farm.

 

The day Rita had received the residency acceptance letter was the first time she’d slept late for months. She’d been trying to strike the balance between opening shifts at the art supply store and half-hearted efforts at geting a collection going. Blinking awake with daylight streaming onto her face, she sat up on her elbows and admired how the morning light shone on Molly’s freshly tanned legs. It felt good to have her back home, and they’d celebrated her return from the Beautiful Bali Bae! two-week tour. Rita had made a big chicken dinner — Molly’s favorite — and bought an expensive wine, a Southern Californian brand that had gained prominence in recent years more for its vineyards than its quality; they were outside the radius of the wildfires devouring the west coast year by year. Her curator had recommended it. Even with these gestures, though, there was an ineffable tension behind each word of their conversation, a taut wire that either of them could trip.

“Good morning,” Molly whispered. She lifted her leg up in the air. Molly knew Rita loved her long legs, and Rita didn’t hide her admiration for their tanned shapeliness. “Like what you see?”

Rita shrugged, a smirk creeping across her face. Molly feigned offense, shoving Rita on the arm. They both stared up at her leg, considering it.

“God! I’m almost as dark as you!” she chirped, letting her limb fall back down, over Rita’s knees. Rita grimaced but didn’t say anything, but Molly really should’ve known better than to say that kind of shit. She always got like this after hanging out with her insufferable friends, talking like a multi-level marketing phrasebook, acting like a possessed Stepford wife. God, Rita missed when Molly wasn’t involved in that scene, back when they’d first met and she did her own art, when they’d work quietly side-by-side, Rita touching up her landscapes and Molly working through her photorealistic oil portraits of a beautiful, diverse array of local women. Rita got the sense that Molly couldn’t handle the constant rejection of creative life — her need to control everything, to jot down and measure and restrict every moment of the day did not work with artistic chaos. So she gave up on it and moved further and further into whatever this was — some cursed mixture of hustle culture and life coaching. She didn’t seem to resent Rita for sticking with art, but over the past few months there had been arguments about money: Molly always wanting more, Rita not able to provide it. Rita reached out to caress Molly but grasped at air as Molly rolled toward the bedside table and grabbed her phone.

“Oh! It’s here it’s here it’s here!” She threw off the blanket and jumped up. “Stay there!” she shouted, her voice fading as she ran down the hall.

Rita turned over and looked through the window. Somewhere in a part of the sky she couldn’t see, a raven was croaking, others further off joining in, their voices rising like a cresting wave. They were always there, the most vocal animals in this quiet family neighborhood. The budding leaves on the branches outside the window reminded Rita of Monet’s almond blossoms painting, of the annual cherry blossom gazing festivals in Japan. Dark branches that would yield bright petals, soft blues and explosive pinks. The world would be blooming soon, weeks ahead of when it used to, unbearably hot and humid and wrong. Rita tried to feel hopeful but hope felt misplaced, crass, unwelcomed. The hot weather made her feel wrong, too, like she didn’t fit in this new scheme of life, an aberration of rot in the blooming world around her. Staring at the leaves and buds, she wanted to eat those blossom-soft colors and let them fill her with their life. Drink the milky white latex from plant veins like an elixir. Bright teeming life converging inside her, a cure for the death that was gnawing at every part of her. Rita closed her eyes, wishing these feelings didn’t invade her mind so frequently, a lightning-strike without a clap of thunder.

Molly ran back into the room and threw a large envelope on the bed. It hit Rita in the back.

“For you!” she sang. Her long brown hair shone in the morning light. She crawled back onto the bed and curled up next to Rita, folding her tall body over her, both of them now facing the window and the bright world outside. Rita had already started to open the envelope before she realized one end was already torn.

“You opened it already?” Rita said, casting an annoyed glance over her shoulder.

“Well, it’s pertinent to me, too.” Molly giggled. “Just look!”

The Provincial Arts Association logo at the top corner of the letter inside sang blue and green and purple squares in the uneven shape of the coastal land. “Dear Rita Francis,” the salutation read. Rita’s heart leaped as her eyes skipped to “grant approved for funds in the amount of $5000.00 for production and research of THE DEVOURING.”

“I’m so happy for you!” Molly beamed.

“What the fuck? Thank you? But, uhh, what’s ‘The Devouring?’” She did air quotes with her fingers, trying not to shake. Confrontations had been so quick to detonate between them lately.

“Your new art project, duh!”

“But I didn’t —”

“You were so sad,” Molly interrupted. “And it hurt to see you so sad. I saw the deadline was, like, a week after your dad died. I wanted to do something nice for you.”

Rita’s stomach clenched. She tried to fight the dread, force gratitude even though she had a right to be upset. She’d do anything to avoid yet another fight during the fragile peace of their reunion.

“So you forged a grant application? In my name? With my work?”

“Yeah”. Molly’s face fell when Rita’s stare lingered. “What, are you mad? Why are you always —”

“Mol, I literally don’t have a project, or any ideas for a project. Plus you can only get these grants every few years. What if I wanted it for next year?” The few ideas she’d had lately fizzled out practically before she put paint to canvas, each muddied landscape an incomprehensible mess. Her sketchbooks were filled with listless, half-hearted attempts to capture a scene, ghostly apparitions of landscapes made with smudged graphite, grey as the concrete in the downtown core.

“What kind of title is The Devouring?” Rita said, propping herself up on her elbows. It was a terrible title, not at all one that Rita would choose, but Molly herself admitted that titles weren’t her strongest suit.

“It’s a working title, maybe. I mean, I just thought —” Molly stammered. “I thought you could at least start on a project. I know the stuff you’ve already started isn’t going anywhere.”

Rita tried to hold Molly’s gaze, but couldn’t. “It’s fine. Really.”

“I feel like maybe it isn’t?” Molly clipped each word as she always did when conflict rose between them. She moved over on the bed away from Rita, sitting up. Rita pressed her lips together as they fell into silence.

“It’s just … well, I don’t know,” Rita finally said. “Jesus, it’s a lot of pressure for me, especially right now.”

She didn’t speak any of her many fears: that she wouldn’t be able to come up with something, that her old work simply wouldn’t make way for new, that her former experimentations with mixed-media landscapes were already stale and impossible to elaborate on, belonging to someone with more exuberance and willingness to scour the world for found objects, to interrogate their meaning. Since her father died, she hadn’t wanted to be out in the world. That reluctance also stretched into her issues with Molly, and now Rita worried that Molly had done all of this to get rid of her, that she was making room for someone else, possibly someone she’d met on the cruise. The idea was paranoid, even for her, but all the same she found herself shoving away images her mind conjured too readily: Mol with a smiling, sunny partner; someone who believed in the future, despite the odds, someone without the abandonment anxiety and grief that weighed Rita down despite years of therapy.

But then another thought occurred to her and Rita could barely suppress a shudder. Molly’s fraudulent application could have been an attempt to make Rita into this sunny, carefree person — a person buoyed by competition and the content creation validation cycle. Someone focused only on monetary success. A person she’d never been and would certainly never become. Rita turned to look at her.

“I just believe in you,” Molly said, avoiding her gaze. She looked out the bedroom door, tucking her sleek bob behind her ear.

Even grappling with her irritation and fear, Rita looked at her girlfriend in admiration. How had she awakened with such perfect hair? Typical Molly.

“I know you can do this. I checked and the studio out in Sawmill Farm is rented all summer. But I think I know the perfect place for you to do it.”

I bet, Rita thought. Of course you do. Of course this was happening. What else was she going to lose? Should she be grateful? Maybe this loss, too, could teach her. Or maybe Mol was being nice, and Rita needed to be forced from the inertia of grief. She had to trust that her girlfriend wanted what was best for her. No conditions, no ulterior motive.

“I bet you do,” Rita finally said. “You’re so good at planning. I’d love to hear about it.” She forced a smile.

This surrender perked Molly up. She settled back on the bed, the sparkle returned to her expression. Rita’s smile widened into something genuine. Molly was quick to get offended but equally quick to forgive, so their fights, however frequent, usually didn’t last long. Molly’s family had gone down the shore in her childhood, and she often recalled with a gleam in her forever-starry eyes, ice cream stands and hair thick and dry with salt water from hot summer days at the beach. There were real sand beaches there, not the stony lakes that dotted the province, not like the ones outside Rita’s hometown or down the road from the rez where sharp rocks bit into your feet until the moment you hit the freezing waves, and not like the cold, dark rivers that turned your lips blue after too long in their waters. Of course the only cabin left at this time of year was deep in the farmlands, near where her father had spent time as a kid. It was where his mother and father had lived before centralization, when the Mi’kmaw people were forced off their lands onto the bigger reserves in the province. They’d gone further and further north — all the way to Unama’ki, the land of fog — probably hoping they could escape the changes. Maybe this place of her ancestors, this fresh air, would do her good. Maybe she could take a few days to pop over to the beach. Molly would figure it out for her. Just like she’d figured out the rest of it. No need to worry.

 

Rita pulled into the cracked asphalt parking lot of the Àite an Lòin gas station — the only one in town, as far as she could tell. In these small places, the gas station doubled as a grocery store, and this one was sparsely stocked. Rows of canned foods in brightly-colored, sodium-packed tins jutted up against neon boxes of sugary cereals screaming their cartoon claims of goodness. She’d hoped there would be fruit, but unsurprisingly there was scant produce: just wilted lettuce and small pale carrots. It was a vain hope — so many crops in the warmer climates where produce was imported from at this time of year were in failure and nothing local would be available for months yet. Rita could practically taste wild strawberries for how much she wanted them — their soft sweetness and the fresh cold bite of them — but she hadn’t had them since she was a child. The hot weather made her crave them, and now that it was hotter more often and for much longer, she dreamed of them for months on end.

When she entered the store, the bell above the door rang and a middle-aged man dressed in head-to-toe camouflage stopped chatting with the cashier, a woman probably in her sixties. They both turned to stare at her, breaking their mutual gaze only long enough to glance back at each other.

A flush of self-consciousness burned Rita’s cheeks as she moved to the cooler and grabbed a large bottle of water. Grimy bottles of pop with orange stickers advertising a perpetual sale price sweated inside the case. With the water bottle chilling her fingers, she walked the aisles, trying to build up the courage to make conversation with the locals at the counter. There was nothing else she needed except answers to her questions about last night.

The man looked at her with an appraising sidelong glance. As she brought her water to the counter, she told them she was staying at a nearby cabin for a residency and was wondering how big the pond was. The cashier told her that the pond loop was three kilometers, all told. She wasn’t likely to encounter anyone else there.

“We weren’t expecting you to come here,” the man said.

A cold confusion rushed through her. Had they already known about her stay?

“Excuse me?” Rita stammered.

“Word gets out when there’s someone in a residency,” the cashier said. She waved her hand toward the door, in the direction of the pond. “We tend to leave those folks alone.”

“Well, I don’t mean to put you out.” Off stolen land, Rita thought. Yeah, that would be a shame.

“Oh, no, we don’t mind,” the cashier said. “No shortage of places to get lost around here.”

“Okay. That’s good, I guess.”

“You don’t need to worry,” the woman insisted. “Folks around here are nice to everyone.”

The cashier’s emphasis on the first half of “everyone” told Rita this was almost certainly not the case. She couldn’t tell if this conversation had been cordial, or a warning. Was there something hateful in the air here? Something beyond stereotypical small-town bullshit, something dug into a land where the violence of displacement marked her.

There it was — that hitch in her chest like blazing terror, that feeling she sometimes thought of as inspiration. Maybe that violence was something she could deal with in her paintings. She closed her eyes — not longer than a slow blink — and it came to her. Something figurative, maybe a woman, simultaneously a part of the landscape and completely alien to it. Maybe she could incorporate something from around the pond — mix soil with paint or add leaf impressions —

“Right on,” she replied, her stomach in knots. She made a concerted effort to sound breezy, a tone she’d learned from Molly. “Well, I’m not here for very long.”

“You’re here pretty early in the season,” the cashier said.

The man at the counter was still sizing her up. She felt the knife-curve of his gaze slide over her.

“We don’t usually get people here until late June, early July,” he finally muttered, looking into the middle of her forehead. Rita hated when people refused to look her in the eye, something which happened surprisingly often. It was confirmation that others found her intimidating despite her quiet presence, her paranoid politeness.

“That’s true,” the cashier added. “Usually people come here just for the summer.”

“Ah,” Rita said. An awkward pause. “It’s warmer now than I can ever remember.”

The two locals’ eyes travelled over her again. Rita resisted the urge to roll her own eyes at them. They had to be used to tourists from all over the world traveling through this place from which her people were dispossessed. There was no right or reason for them to look at her like this.

An absurd thought crept into her mind. Maybe they were, like, into her. She suppressed the smirk that tugged at the corners of her mouth.

“Anything else?” the cashier asked.

She wanted to mention the unexplained activity at the cabin last night. It had been too dark to tell if these were the people who had cohered into strange pale shadows and had darted into the water. As soon as the thought came to her, she dismissed it. The last thing she needed was for the locals to think there was a crazy lady — or worse, some sort of snitch — staying out by herself at the pond. Plus, if they were part of some wild swinging community preying upon unsuspecting cottagers, she didn’t know how she’d word her refusal. Somehow, she knew “no, thanks, I’m actually a dyke in a relationship with a bougie white woman” wouldn’t go over well.

Rita shook her head, said a terse “thank you,” and left. As she backed her car out of the gravel driveway, the foggy silhouettes of their faces turned to follow her movement from the dirty shop window. In her rearview mirror, they faded into vague shapes, like she had seen the night before. She would definitely lock the door — and maybe the window, if she could — before going to bed that night.

Even if there were no threats, she needed to protect the solitude of this place. In the city it was hard to feel truly alone — individual experiences clamored against each other, solitudes mutated and merged in split-second interactions, transactions of awareness. You could go days without talking to anyone, but there would still be countless people outside your window, smothering their alienation and trauma with polite silence and pleasantries or shouts of drunken joy, seeking or avoiding their own solitude and never fully arriving in it.

Rita turned her car onto the empty stretch of road to the cabin. She was entering her true solitude. Why did people need to be in nature to process the things that happened to them? Maybe it was because what was thought of as wild did not require a veil — it saw you as you truly were: an animal skulking among animals.

Checking in with herself, trying to identify her feelings, Rita ran through her old therapy tricks. She was anxious and needing to reassure herself. It was okay that she hadn’t asked the locals about the footsteps, and probably safer. There was no need to be marked as a weirdo. She’d probably been having nightmares. The newness of the place had registered too strongly in her mind and made her dream vividly. That was all.

She could stick it out. It would be good for her curriculum vitae to be able to list this residency among her others. It had been a few years since the last one and getting any grant application approved was good news. Her art career — its gallery openings and hours of painting and framing and networking through exhibitions and collaborations — felt so distant from her current reality; a murky recollection of abstract dream, a sun-bleached movie poster forgotten in the corner of a dusty neighborhood convenience store.

So, sure: time in nature, a chance to engage with land that was new to her and ancient to her ancestors, something outside of the city parks, the outskirts of town on so-called Crown Land. She was a landscape painter forever seeking new landscapes. Perhaps it would be good for her to be alone with herself, her grief, her work, just her and the pond, with the pain of inspiration still pricking somewhere in the back of her mind or some unknowable place in her heart. Rita gave herself the same reassurance that all poets and artists and writers gave themselves when something was unbearable: perhaps it would be good for her art.