4

Further Into Deeper Shadow

24” x 36”

Mixed media on canvas

In Further into Deeper Shadow Francis incorporates the texture of raven feathers with the bony spine of the feather structure: it is these horizontal marks that compose the planes of the painting. The overall impact is dizzying: the viewer is uncertain where they are oriented in the time or space of the land. A daring piece of imagery, the dappled water in the corner of the canvas reflects the faintest sliver of moonlight once again, while Mi’kmaw hieroglyphs appear to be carved on the birch trees scattered across the canvas. Anemic figures, their faces twisted into grieved expressions, peer out from behind the trees. A woman is at the center, made of what the artist calls “unknown materials,” a resinous red drip outlining her body and pouring from the outline. While the canvas is indeed “busier” than other pieces, there is a remarkable sense of restraint revealed in the subject: all things are muted in their suffering, as if waiting for a greater truth to be revealed. The woman’s face is featureless, and only shadow figures, dark versions of the pale silhouettes, are there to witness her — not even the raven is sharing its knowledge, its feathers exposed but concealing further sight. Three small rabbits, joined at the ears, are almost hidden in another corner: a subtle use of a spiritual motif, healing the visceral images of the rabbits seen in Premonitions in Somnambulism. This piece exists in conversation with the previous pieces in the series and is part of Francis’s particular — and peculiar— surreal tendencies, fully embracing her love of the uncanny.

The pond spoke to Rita with its many voices: chirps, croaks, the splash of water when a frog darted into the weeds — but something ancient lived beneath the teeming world, calling to her with the language of life itself.

The day felt more like the spring she remembered: a cooler breeze blew gentle over a blue bird’s egg sky, cracked open in welcome. Spring, Rita figured, was a time of rupture, of the quiet violence of emergent life, water rushing from the womb in spasm, the soil rustling wormful with the carrion of past seasons. It was not in the deprivation of winter, a season that may never arrive in its ancient brutality ever again. Spring was an assault that arrived at the door with flowers in hand. The cruelty of nature itself was not a vacuum; it abhorred a vacuum. There was no nullity where Rita wished it existed — everywhere, even in decay, life insisted on itself, seeping and breaking through.

She was excited to work and then, finally, to die. Death was something Rita recognized as a collaboration: her body, moulded into mycelium and moss, bones drying into dust. Her memories would die faster than her body; as the first act of her extinction, they would transform into smoke that would cling to the corners of heaven. She would be a spiderweb, spun upon those eaves and destroyed in the span of a day.

She could already feel a disconnection from her consciousness, her excitement feverish and geared toward the work she was doing. The earth, the pond, was already rising up to claim her body as its own, her art as its own. The soft moss, the suddenly bearable light, and the cooler air all signs of encouragement, signals to continue on her path. A path like the pond loop, like beginning and ending all at once.

The pond’s language was one of sludge and stillness, slow and eternal. She recognized it as the language she would soon speak. A raven flew low through the trees, its voice sudden and guttural. Perhaps the birds were beginning to remember her. She scanned the canopy. She couldn’t see the creature in the fully-leafed branches. They had lost their crown shyness, the tributaries of light that kept them from touching.

“The crows here are so loud,” a woman’s voice said.

Rita spun in the direction of the voice. She didn’t know what or who she expected, but she recognized the woman immediately as the cashier from the gas station. “You scared me,” she breathed.

“Sorry,” the woman said, not sounding sorry at all. Rita wanted to shake her, turn her around and push her toward the road, where her car must be parked. This was Rita’s sacred place now, and that woman had said that no one else came out here. In this moment of betrayal, Rita realized she’d taken the woman’s word as a promise.

“You told me no one came out here. You meant other than you?”

“The crows here are so loud,” the cashier repeated, as if she hadn’t heard Rita’s question. She, too, gazed into the thick canopy.

“That’s a raven,” Rita snapped. “You said no one came out here — at the gas station, remember?”

“They remember faces, you know.”

“Yeah, crows and ravens do, and who knows what other creatures. There are all kinds of animals out here. I’ve seen crows, ravens, rabbits, and foxes —”

Rita paused. It was rabbits that had invaded her dreams, not crows or foxes. Not even after the swarm of blood-hungry birds, after the viscera rained down upon her. Even after all that she’d dreamed only of rabbits — the apparitional rabbits on fire. Rabbits are the Francis clan animal, Patrick had reminded her over a text message when she’d finally complained about the rabbits following her all over Eskasoni every time she visited. She’d never forgotten the angry one screeching at her as a child. They appeared often enough that she was creeped out whenever she saw them hop out from the ditches or the woods surrounding the community. Every time she went there to visit Patrick and her father and her aunties, she’d hear soft scuffling sounds as she walked the narrow roads between their houses and she’d think of rabbits. She shivered when she noticed their wide, wild black eyes trained on her.

Why are you freaking out over some bunnies?

“Rabbits are my clan animal. Well, my family’s.”

The cashier squared her gaze on Rita. Finally, some eye contact. But even as the woman appeared to finally see Rita, her expression remained blank in its assessment. “Oh,” was all the woman said, her voice cold. Obviously this fact meant nothing to her.

“What brings you out here?” Rita asked instead.

“I live here. I wanted to go for a walk.”

Rita scanned the woman’s pale face. She looked under-slept, with heavy bags under her eyes, but Rita couldn’t get a read on her facial expression. The woman’s windbreaker hood was pulled over her greying hair.

“Does anyone else come here?”

The woman narrowed her eyes. “How would I know?”

“It’s just that you told me no one came out here. And I’ve … heard people out here. At night.”

The woman’s expression didn’t register Rita’s comment. Could she have been one of the people that night at the pond? Did this woman even remember her? Surely the gas station didn’t have that many customers. The woman shrugged again.

“Good talk,” Rita said. A part of her cringed, uncomfortable with the idea that someone might think her rude. But she didn’t care — this woman was at best wasting her time, at worst fucking with her. She didn’t have time for this. Maybe by the time this woman came around again, Rita would be gone. Maybe this bitch would find her body.

“I’ll see you again,” the cashier said. Rita tried not to hear an undercurrent of threat in her voice.

“Yeah. Lovely to see you,” Rita called after her. The woman departed with a stiff gait, her head down, focused on the path. It was unlikely that a withdrawn middle-aged woman who didn’t seem comfortable even on an easy pond loop walk would be out here at night. Rita watched until the woman was out of sight. She didn’t want to follow and risk passing her.

She would turn back — it might be faster. She would check on the cabin before the woman completed the loop. Rita had taken her isolation for granted and couldn’t remember if she’d even bothered to lock the door. She turned and started back the way she’d come.

Each day she’d been at the residency, she’d walked the same path, and yet she still couldn’t quite remember the deep woods stretching to embrace the pond and its surrounding trails. Every encounter felt brand new — the sighing reeds and thick mosses that consumed the sound of her steps, the branches like tiny fingers grasping her legs, begging her to stay, to forego worries about things like property or locks or the quiet threat of small-town gas station cashiers and their weird friends.

A black shadow fell over Rita’s face, the bird so close she could taste the dust stirred by its wingbeats. The raven perched on a tree ahead. As it preened and then lifted its head to watch her, she slowed her approach, hair prickling at the back of her neck. She was being watched, not just by this bird — she felt many eyes on her at once. The corvid’s left eye was milky-white, a pearl that gazed at nothing. A hush rolled over the trees, the forest stunned into silence by the creature’s presence. Rita had read somewhere that humans understood gaze keenly — that all people could tell if something was looking at them, if they were being watched, if what they saw also saw them. The white-eyed gaze of the raven felt different — it was as if the whole forest gazed through its eyes, zeroed in on her as if on the hunt.

A painful desire swelled in her and she reached toward the tree’s lowest branch. High above her, the bird feaked, the sound of its beak hollow against the tree’s bark. Tilting its head, the bird turned its white eye to stare at her. If this was just an ordinary raven, why did she feel that glare inside her?

She’d long wished she could encounter a spirit. Even when she was trying to escape the rez’s mangy bunnies, she wished that one of them would reveal itself as something more. She wanted a manifestation, a visitation, a loved one long gone who would come to her with a message — or if no message then with a gaze to actually see her. Instead, her visitors were strange pale figures and people from town. Was that the link? It had to be, right? Some people — Molly and her mother, some of her aunties — believed loved ones’ spirits came back as birds. Maybe this was one of the ways the world was haunted.

“Hello,” she said to the raven. Its black eye and its white eye searched her face. It blinked and both eyes flashed white. “Kwe’,” she said, greeting it in Mi’kmaq.

A chorus of crows cawed from somewhere far away. Rita imagined she could hear wings fluttering, the soft crackle of landing on too-dry branches. The raven threw back its head and let loose another guttural croak that echoed over still water, an otherworldly sound that felt equal parts warning and pronouncement. Between the gas station cashier’s implied threats, the birds looming above her and the lingering eye of a watchful forest, Rita tensed with the awareness of a prey animal on alert.

“Meskeyi,” she apologized, as if she had offended the raven with her presence. Maybe she had. The growling call made her feel as if she didn’t belong there, that the animals themselves considered her an intruder at the pond, in nature itself, their screeches an omen that couldn’t be fully articulated. Like the rabbits back in Eskasoni — animals that seemed to have a problem with her. Creatures that recognized her as something separate from them and from other humans, some orphaned scrap of life that didn’t even fully belong to her family. She was such a terrible auntie and daughter and sister, had neglected her distant family in favor of her art, of creating her own life as if she wasn’t part of something bigger.

Rita scanned the trees again for the birds, and found them perched and bobbing their heads, their eyes blinking white like the flash of a ghost in the corner of the eye. Rita stepped carefully past them. The birds’ eyes followed her and she tried to send — through her movements, through some ineffable psychic communication — a message of goodwill. But the crows’ calls and ravens’ croak punctured the peace that had washed over her after she’d made her decision to die. A paradoxical desire — to desperately want to escape this danger, but still to die.

A twig snap seized her attention. A screeching rabbit tumbled out of the moss-tangled brush ahead, frenzied in its rolling, its motion across the trail propelled by violent kicks and tremors. Flashes of white rib interrupted the shadow of the underbrush and Rita gagged at the smell of burning fur.

Oh god, is it rabid?

She didn’t want to get near it, but didn’t want to leave it to die, so she ran, too aware of the birds overhead and the wounded rabbit as an erupting forest consciousness. The birds were the many eyes of the woods suddenly turned her way, the rabbit its rapidly beating heart.

It wasn’t real, none of it could be real — not the rabbit, the birds, maybe not even the woman she’d met on the trail. But before denial could fully take root, Rita saw a flash in her peripheral vision, the trees beside her blurring into the shape of a woman on fire. The searing orange blinded her with its impossibility, with a sudden undeniable understanding that the woman’s power was not in fire, but radiant darkness. The paradox of burning and rot stung her nostrils and she reeled backwards, her body instinctively putting distance between her and this being.

The forest filled with echoes of decay: a dry rustling screech, a squeal. The sounds wounded her as she twisted through lightness and awe and burning ecstasy. She had seen the eyes and the heart of the pond and the forest that fed from it. This woman was the pond’s own soul breathing light and dark transcendent over the water.

Rita channelled every bit of strength she had to escape, but the soft ground gave little purchase. The sound of dying rabbits rose from the underbrush, a shrieking chorus of indisputable pain.

Just get to the cabin. Get to safety — you’ll be safe you’ll be safe you’ll be safe —

When the cabin appeared, Rita stopped to catch her breath Only her own car was parked on the gravel driveway. She was alone.

The woman on fire had been a hallucination, surely, maybe a heat-induced hallucination based on a woman dressed in hunter-orange, another hiker making her way through these woods that were more occupied than Rita had hoped. Maybe there was a meth shack around there. It would explain a lot. If that were the case, maybe the gas station cashier, a real live person, was trying to keep her out of the area by quietly threatening her on the trail.

But if the gas station cashier hadn’t driven here, had she taken another trail in? The pond was big enough. There must have been a trailhead on the other side — certainly the locals would know.

The muddy path to the cabin was shifting and slippery as if the earth was responding to the water’s summons. In the cabin’s yard of yellowed grass, Rita’s boots set down on solid stone and she rushed inside. The door had been unlocked after all. That was the least of her worries, but shit — she’d have to check she still had everything, that her paintings were in order.

Dropping onto the small couch near the door, Rita couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten. A bowl of cereal and a nap would do her well, lend some normalcy, take little effort. Whatever it took to have that feeling, her therapist had reassured her, whatever brought her back from that awakened sleepwalking state of dissociation. When she was present but not present, caught somewhere between the moment in front of her and her difficult past, her therapist had given her blanket permission to do what she needed to do.

Maybe dissociation explained what had happened on the trail. Obviously she was dealing with some sort of mental health crisis — the isolation and intensity of the work getting to her, compounded with her clinging grief, her questions about her relationship with Mol. She still had a few days left in the residency. If she could just focus on the work she might be able to relax.

The taste of cereal was sweet and familiar on her tongue. It reminded her of childhood, the sugary jolt of color forever associated with the possibilities of a new day. In those quiet moments, sitting on the couch with her cereal, she could believe that her mother would be stable that day, that her visit to her father would rebuild their relationship. As an adult she understood this feeling, but Molly never wanted it in the house, protesting that it was practically dessert. That it was bad for her. Rita had felt no guilt placing a box amongst her things she packed for the residency. Now the cold milk and fruit-flavored crunch awakened her whole body with gratitude. With each bite, she could believe that maybe she would be okay.

Maybe she would be okay.

 

The bedroom was awash in shades of Mars Black shot through with Burnt Umber. A sound knocked against Rita’s consciousness. She fumbled for the lamp on the nightstand, pushed a water glass to the floor. When she found the switch, she illuminated a dozen moths clamouring against her window. Their furred bodies lunged into the glass, wings muttering soft desperation. A sound amplified by the memory of birds’ wings still circling in her head.

Don’t scream. They might fly into your mouth.

She’d been petrified of moths as a child; she hated the wild flapping of their wings pattering frantic against the windows, their thick idiot bodies clamoring into any flame that would devour them. Her mother had been useless to comfort her, opting instead to yell at her to stop crying and grow up.

The thought of the dust of moth’s wings on her tongue brought her stomach to her throat. The milk from her cereal curdled in her gut. She pressed her lips together as if this alone could ward off her fear. As Rita struggled with the window, the moth bodies rustled against her, caught in her hair. Rita bit back her disgust. Her wounded hands stung as she threw her weight against the window frame. Her previous struggles with the window paid off: it shot upward in a spray of old paint flakes. For a moment the moths still banged against the pane, a gory sound. But soon they settled into the night’s cool current and made their way into the dark. Rita ignored the knowledge that moths rarely travel away from light.

When Rita turned back to the glow of her bedside lamp, a memory from the previous day flashed through her like wildfire, ignited the dream from which she’d awoken: the woman engulfed in orange flames, a face atop a slender neck turning slowly toward her. At the thought of her, Rita was barely comforted by the cool breeze now rolling into the room from the open window. The woman had been almost human-shaped, but too soft at the edges, adorned in lichen. She’d not understood at the time that what she’d thought of as flames was not — there had been no heat emanating from her. What had curled up around her body was a branching, undulating fungus. This hybrid life had been her skin, licking upward, devouring air and light as it grew with each heave of the woman’s chest.

Rita was hallucinating again. She had to be. She must have come down with a fever — from something she’d picked up at the gas station, or some virus infecting the wildlife, clinging to the stagnant shallows of the pond. She’d heard of old diseases rising up from dormancy under glacier melt — the viral contagion itself undead, now existing outside of the pace of time. It wouldn’t be safe to drive. She would have to sweat this out. Crawl under the warm blanket of fugue, sink into her softening reality.

But the contradiction of the Lichen Woman screamed for her attention. When she closed her eyes, the woman was there, dripping decay from her tendrils. With each inhuman breath the woman’s body danced like a fungal fire, its movement inviting, intoxicating. When Rita opened her eyes her phone was in her hands.

Not feeling good. I’m scared, Patrick, she’d typed.

Her thumb hovered over the send button. Would he care? What would she invite into her life by reaching out to him? He’d berate her for having taken the vacation time. It didn’t matter if she’d received a grant, if she was working on her art the whole time. She was bourgeois, he’d always said, rolling his eyes. Too white, too WASPy, too removed from her community. Would he say that part verbatim, out loud? No, but she could tell by how he’d always treated her — how he brushed her off, even at the wake and funeral and salite, where the community had gathered to bid on donated items, the last time she saw him. She’d felt the distance in his too-gentle hug before she said goodbye and his preoccupation with comforting everyone but her. He was my dad too, she’d wanted to say to him. But she couldn’t say those words without choking. The possibility of his rejection, the possibility that he was right about her distance from her people, was too much of a risk.

The text probably wouldn’t even go through. She hit send.

Settling back into bed, Rita turned to face the window where a bright waxing moon was framed in peeling paint. At some point night shadows gave way again to dreams. Rabbits leaping over the moon, their arcs uneven and frantic. With each jump, light laced through the cracks in their ribs.