The panting starts up again. Objection trickles from her mouth. Hnn. Hnn. Hnn. Her grip crushes his fingers. She moans, and the noise leaks away until there’s no louder sound than the flames on three sides of them. Her eyes squeeze shut. Then they open, wild. She stares, unsure what she’s looking at.
“How long can it last?”
“Not long,” he promises.
She claws at him, an animal falling from a great height. Then she calms again. “But not this? This will never end—what we have. Right?”
He waits too long, and time replies for him. She struggles for a few seconds to hear the answer, before softening into whatever happens next.
CROWN
A man in the boreal north lies on his back on the cold ground at dawn. His head extends from his one-man tent, facing upward. Five thin cylinders of white spruce register the breeze above him. Gravity is nothing. The evergreen tips sketch and scribble on the morning sky. He’s never really thought about the many miles a tree travels, in smallest cursive increments, each hour of every day. Forever in motion, these stationary things.
The man with his head sticking out of the tent asks himself: What are those treetops like? They’re like that cog-toothed drawing toy, spinning out surprise patterns from the simplest nested cycles. They’re like the tip of a Ouija planchette, taking dictation from beyond. They are, in fact, like nothing but themselves. They are the crowns of five white spruces laden with cones, bending in the wind as they do every day of their existence. Likeness is the sole problem of men.
But the spruces pour out messages in media of their own invention. They speak through their needles, trunks, and roots. They record in their own bodies the history of every crisis they’ve lived through. The man in the tent lies bathed in signals hundreds of millions of years older than his crude senses. And still he can read them.
The five white spruces sign the blue air. They write: Light and water and a little crushed stone demand long answers.
Nearby lodgepoles and jack pines demur: Long answers need long time. And long time is exactly what’s vanishing.
The black spruces down the drumlin put it bluntly: Warm is feeding on warm. The permafrost is belching. The cycle speeds up.
Farther south, broadleaves agree. Noisy aspens and remnant birches, forests of cottonwoods and poplars, take up the chorus: The world is turning into a new thing.
The man rolls over onto his back, face-to-face with the morning sky. The messages swarm him. Even here, homeless, he thinks: Nothing will be the same.
The spruces answer: Nothing has ever been the same.
We’re all doomed, the man thinks.
We have always all been doomed.
But things are different this time.
Yes. You’re here.
The man must rise and get to work, as the trees are already doing. His work is almost done. He’ll strike camp tomorrow, or the day after. But this minute, this morning, he watches the spruces writing and thinks, I wouldn’t need to be so very different for sun to seem to be about sun, for green to be about green, for joy and boredom and anguish and terror and death to all be themselves, beyond the need for any killing clarity, and then this—this, the growing rings of light and water and stone—would take up all of me, and be all the words I need.
PEOPLE TURN INTO OTHER THINGS. Twenty years later, when everything depends on remembering what happened, the facts of that night will have long since turned to heartwood. They put her body into the fire, facedown. Three of them will remember that. Nick will remember nothing. Bedrock in the minute she needed him, he turns worthless in the aftermath, seated on the ground by the flames, close enough to singe his eyebrows, as senseless as the burning corpse.
The others place her on the ready pyre, a thing as old as night. Her clothes burn, then her skin. The flowery words on her scapula—A change is gonna come—blacken and vaporize. Flames bear the flecks of her carbonized soul into the air. The corpse will be found, of course. Teeth with fillings, the nubs of unburned bone. Every clue will be discovered and read. They aren’t getting rid of the corpse. They’re sending it into forever.
Of leaving the scene, none will recall anything but forcing Nick into the van. Orange flickers above the evergreen woods, as wraithlike as the northern lights. Then dark snapshots