By then the point of the forest was the getting through it.
Then it lay behind them, all but its sharper details—flies licking at
dried blood, I think, on a random tree stump—getting swiftly lost,
its muffled birdsong, too, that had come less, it seemed, from
the trees than from beneath, mostly, as if somewhere deep,
deep inside the earth. Maybe meeting you has been
the one good reason I lasted so long in a world that must
eventually not include me, I almost said to him. Past the forest,
the shore, where the land ended, where briefly the waves hitting it
seemed the latest example of how squandering momentum can
become routine; while, upon the waves, the taken-for-grantedness
of shadow play seemed its own example: how one way to prove power
can be to quietly assume it. Then except for offshore, where the dark lay
like—defiantly—a ship at anchor, everything was itself. As it always
had been. They took off their shoes, their clothes.
They swam out to the dark ship.
Copyright © 2024 by Carl Phillips, Scattered Snows, to the North, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
