Harriet was given no love of any kind, for the Townspeople wanted a mystic, and they thought they could create one through torture. They believed that a mystic would bring spiritual complexity to their Town—the same thinking that often leads rich people to take up Buddhism in later life. The Townspeople chose Harriet, and then subtracted shelter and affection. Education had never been part of the question, and sex, they imagined, would take care of itself. She was kept in a stable, fed raw flour and fallen fruit and made to drink water from a hose. Her desire to make jokes at her own expense was crushed, for it was a suspect quality, in such a young person. And then, one April, Harriet was let loose unsupervised in a field.
She parcelled out her time building homes for herself under trees—this life was not that different from the life that was normally hers. Burrowing moles left behind small packets of grass, which she collected and formed into beds for the animals she thought might approach. Meanwhile, the Townspeople produced a yellowish, oniony sweat, their eyes bulged with concentration, as they worked day and night to not love her. Individual successes were rewarded: who could see, in a telescope as in a dream, the girl shivering as she slept beneath bark, and refrain from wincing? Who could bear to watch her try to remove her lips and eyelashes, which she had been told were purely decorative, and not interfere?
A river ran by Harriet’s field. Once she saw a child, attended by two women in halter tops that featured reindeer kicking up showers of sequin snowflakes. The women held the child up by her armpits and skimmed her feet across the surface of the water, barely wetting her soles. Where are your clothes? the child said to Harriet, having spotted her. The women stopped their movements: Who? That night, Harriet built a bed for this child, too. Later that week, animals finally approached—the thin wolves, the spring bears—but they did not sniff Harriet lightly and then, overwhelmed by her innocence and purity of heart, depart. The Townspeople watched the encounter in their telescopes; they could not reach her slowly enough. They wove toward her with wonder and delight, as if moving through close-set trees toward a sudden, sourceless waterfall.
My face in the dirt. Crushed to violets and lemony grass. With shut eyes I see—
Harriet was later sealed like a gumball in a clear plastic globe and suspended over the Town square, while everyone waited to see if the skin grafts would take hold. The skin of her thighs became the skin of her cheeks, the skin of her back newly coated her front. Strangely, she indeed became a mystic, but not the right type, for her sense of humour bubbled back up, and her attempts to traverse between spiritual planes typically ended in broken hands and feet, and evermore-delicate surgeries. Harriet went about her calling with a steady cheer that the Townspeople found both admirable and appalling. She would rise in the morning and not even take coffee before flinging herself over and over again at the spiked and burning veil between the worlds.