to grab me again, he was never going to do anything to me again, never, never— Through the ferocious drumming of my heartbeat and the huge roaring silence of the garden I heard Susanna’s voice: Now imagine you did it. The holy rapture of it, the painless lightning running in my bones. Rising on the far side of that river into a world that was finally mine again.
In the end, little by little, the lightning drained out of me and I stopped. My arms were weak as cloth, they fell to my sides like they belonged to someone else, and I was breathing in great snuffling gulps. I knelt there in the dirt, swaying a little back and forth.
He was huddled facedown, forearms wrapped over his head. I couldn’t remember why we had been fighting. I had lost hold of any idea who he was, or who I was. All I knew was the vast cold cobwebbed darkness and us, two tiny sparks of warmth, side by side.
Birch seeds drifting down, hanging pale in the air, landing silently on his dark back. He was making a strange snoring noise. After a while he toppled, very slowly, onto his side.
I lifted one hand, heavy as granite, and put it on his shoulder. One of his legs twitched rhythmically. I thought I should lie down across him, so that the birch seeds wouldn’t cover him like snow, but I didn’t have the strength to do it. My nose was throbbing, dripping big dark spots of blood onto my jeans.
Snarled black branches, scrabble of something on the roof. I had only the foggiest idea where I was; the place seemed familiar but only barely, something from a dream or a story. It was terribly cold.
After a while the twitching stopped. Then so did the snoring noise, and I was alone in the garden.
I knelt there with my hand on his shoulder until I couldn’t stay kneeling any longer. Then I eased myself painfully down to the earth and curled up with my back against his. I was shivering in hard spasms, teeth clacking together painfully, but his back was warm and solid and somehow in the end I fell asleep.
* * *
Thin gray light woke me. I was curled on my side, knees pulled up to my belly and fists tucked into my chest, like some Iron Age burial. My mouth tasted of earth and one of my eyes was stuck shut somehow. I was stiff and sore from head to toe, damp all over, and so cold I couldn’t feel my face.
I managed to inch one hand up towards my eye, but the sight of it startled me: it was covered in dried blood, blood grained into every crease, knuckles ragged and swollen. When I spat on my fingers and rubbed at my eye, they came back smeared with brighter red. Something bad had happened.
The earth under me was soft, but my back was up against something hard and very cold and I wanted to get away from it. It took forever, every movement feeling like it ripped muscles or snapped joints, before I made it to sitting. The effort and the pain left me shaky, with an ugly red pounding behind my eyeballs. I spat dirt and blood, wiped my mouth on my sleeve.
The garden was monochrome and dormant under a veil of dew. Nothing moved, not a leaf twitching, not a bird hopping or an insect scuttling. The sky was a null gray that made it invisible. Drifts of birch seeds had settled in the little valleys in the earth.
They brought something back to me. Someone, another person, here with me— I turned around and there he was.
Birch seeds dotting the outflung wing of his dark coat, dew silvering his hair. His head was twisted sideways, face buried in the crook of his elbow, other arm stretched above his head. His hand looked the same way as mine, the blood and the knuckles. I tried to lift his elbow away from his face so I could check if he was breathing, but it wouldn’t move; every muscle and joint was rigid, as if he was turning to stone from the inside out. His hand was even colder than mine.
After a long time I managed to get to my feet and drag myself inside, stumbling, hunched over like an old man. I lit the fire—old ash whirling up, sending me into a painful coughing fit—and huddled in front of it, as