August Breadcrumbs
by Logan Anthony
Lilac spills through the cracked window, hitched to the breeze, nearly taking me down to my knees on this grimy kitchen tile. White ceramic soiled enough to look like granite. I’d never loved it white anyway. I dash over the stain-striped rug beneath the table that’s become a shelf in its disuse. Leaning against the countertop, the cold porcelain of the sink reaches through my linen tank to draw out goosebumps. I have to hold my breath against the foul smell rising from the dishes, a practice that’s become second nature by now. I haven’t done much upkeep around the place—not with such distraction.
Out the kitchen window, I find another August, so soon, unfurling her sodden post-summer haze over our corner of the world, stretching out of hibernation, once again shaking the sleep from her knotty limbs. I stand barefoot in the kitchen, palms against the glass, leaning over the cesspool sink to watch the sky swirl according to the whimsy of the wind, thinking. These are the dog days of summer. Thunderheads disperse and gather in the eaves of the ochre sky. These are the disorienting days of crisis. We aren’t sure who we are anymore. I’m not sure
we ever were. The thoughts continue to spiral—this is why I shouldn’t be alone.
I turn to leave the windowpane free from the burden of my hand and catch sight of a plume of smoke to the southwest, rising steadily over the forest. Out of habit or muscle memory—I’m not sure which—I reach for the shotgun leaning around the corner.
“Too close.”
When you’re all alone in a house, the space stretches wider, taller. Shadows lengthen, deepen. It’s only a matter of time before you start speaking aloud to yourself. I duck my head to peer out the window some more. Smoke curls over the treetops, tendrils pulled taut in the wind, stretching to dim my corner of the sky. The same wind seems to run through the walls, pulling me back to the moment.
The ritual.
I smack my forehead with the palm of my hand. It’s less a realization and more an
unsettling whisper that settles on the back of my neck, hot and light footed, biding its time.
Waiting to be heard. It circles my neck delicate, a soft pair of hands choking the breath from my
windpipe. I quickly make a mess of the math in my head. It can’t have been a year already, but
somehow, it has. Almost. Just a few days shy.
Not much time left.
A hollowness scoops my chest empty and settles into the cavity left gaping behind. I can’t stomach having lost track of the days. Backing away from the window, my shrinking reflection darkens less and less of the glass. I retreat to the bedroom, keeping my eyes on the floor. But the mirror in the hall has a way of drawing me in. Around the cracks, shame pools in my cheeks. Unruly hairs curl to outline the blade of my jaw. A faint shadow, noticeable only in the right lighting. A clap of thunder rolls in my stomach. The scars fall back open. This is why
the mirror is cracked. I can’t look at my reflection without being gutted.
I close my eyes and turn slowly in a circle. The olive corduroy of my skirt swishes just below my knees.
“It doesn’t matter how I look. Only how I feel.”
I repeat the mantra until my hands stop tingling and blink away the flash of a familiar curl-framed face. I could be anything. Anyone.
I can’t do anything today.
I have too much to do today.
In the bedroom, I use the landline to call my boss Larry. The cough is easy to fake. Man’s so gullible he’d believe just about anything you told him if you know how to put a twist to your words. Even easier on the phone. But it’s your eyes I feel staring back at me through the cords and wires, and through the sweat coating my palm, I swear I feel the phone burn hotter and hotter. As soon as the receiver clicks the call to an end, I sprint to the bathroom, retching. The full extent of the promise I’d made you this time last year unravels at my feet. The only promise I’d ever made to you out of fear.
We can’t let them complete the ritual.
Society has led us to believe what comes after death must be unconditionally accepted and must remain unaltered. To dismiss the folklore instead of heed its warnings or follow the footpaths it spent centuries wearing into the topography. I disagree. Stopping the ritual is the only way to keep your body in one piece. So long as your skeleton stays whole, your life force remains housed in the hollows of your bones, awaiting awakening. Promising possibility.
I gather supplies in a blur. A fresh bundle of sage from the stores. An armful of basil from the garden, bundled tight with twine—every leaf matters. Windproof matches. Two sticks of cinnamon. Dried vervain—full heads of the flowers—for protection. I spoon a pile of anise seeds into my mouth, toss another spoonful over my shoulder. Your voice sings in my head as I store the supplies in my canvas pack and sling it onto my back. The rest of what we need awaits discovery along the path.
At the forest’s edge, the trees have multiplied. Both in size and numbers. Your voice sings around me, no longer confined to my head. We stand shoulder to shoulder, shouting into the canopy for all the things we’ve already accepted we’ll never have. Wealth. Decent parents. Fortitude. Consistency. Eternity. You, I don’t say.
Here, echoes don’t bother to return. We wait in silence so thick it muffles the voice when you try to speak. To apologize. This always upset your stomach: addressing the forest as an entity. Apologizing before understanding the extent of the responsibility it claims. You feared the sentient being, eons older and wiser than either you or I.
We understand this. The forest and I.
We move forward, you trailing along behind me, your feet inches above the loamy soil I sink into with each step. The foliage seems to peel apart as we approach, a path in the making. We arrow along this leading path, unquestioning. And, with our fragile selves immersed in this powerful a realm, August continues to gain on us. That limitless stretch of space spinning into mist, glimmering past to cloak in shadow the passage ahead—the bridge between summer and fall—to hide our escape from us. To trap us under an illusion of hospitality only to slit our throats as soon as we dare to give in to the lull of sleep.
August, with her molasses days so generous in their passing. With her swollen, arthritic hands stirring slowly, sadly. She’s been at this for many years. Remorse reddens her eyes. She no longer wishes to pull the focus away from the turning of time. And yet, she cannot stop. A spell binds her at the wrists to this fate. Spinning the days away into tendrils of molasses. Empty calories. Sticky; messy.
As time continues to slow around us, we no longer operate according to the traditional units of time. A day has become too small, too insignificant. A day is a loss most people canafford. Not I. Most ignore the edges for the center. But, the edges of things are always more inviting.
We come to, and cross, a misty clearing. The canopy droops and thins. Shocks of sunlight cut into the scene. A look back assures you are still spindling along behind me, a thread running off my spool. Past the clearing, the canopy knits back together, dissipating the sun in darkness. Shadow. Here we are once again, toeing another horizon, forever screaming our lungs to scraps for the things we’ll never have. The things we deserve. The things everyone deserves.
My boots rip moss from the earth with each step. Some losses are necessary: it’s what I tell myself. A step forward, and another tree line swallows us.
The tree line. I gasp, suddenly recognizing where we’ve come.
Mere strides ahead, the breadcrumbs materialize. One by one. Exactly where we left them, scattered throughout the loop we used to trod until the mud of the earth pulled us down. To our knees. To bloody our knees. To our already bloodied knees.
These aren’t breadcrumbs you eat. Something that vulnerable in a forest like this wouldn’t work. No, something much stronger. Much more powerful. Something meant to last.
It was last August. I cracked open the seams in my skull. I wove a trail of memories throughout these woods. Our woods. Old memories. Steep price, making room for the forest to occupy the hollows of a mind. Things get messy. Wipe the pity from your eyes; we’ve always paid the steepest of prices. It’s what we do in this life. Turn your focus back to the map before the words years ago you willed yourself to swallow rise fast and sharp like bile behind your teeth.
We come to the first memory. A ball of opalescent light, turning in the air, waiting. It was there, where the honeysuckle’s thick around the trunks and the bittersweet vines with contempt, climbing trees it set out to fell. You stomped through the swamp in your father’s worn out rubber boots, chasing me until I had nowhere else to go but back home. Your cheeks flamed when you heard me call your place that. Home. As if it were mine. As if it could be. I only made that mistake once.
Forging on, we come to another memory, turning in a flare of violet. There, between the blackened stumps of trees once scorched, your laughter lifted my lungs from the mire into which they’d sunk. A song that balmed me from the inside out. The tethers I imagined around my wrists tightened, securing me to your chest. It started then. How deeply I could hear you. Your heart beat frantically beside mine the rest of the harvest and into the cold, snowy trenches of the year.
There are other memories, too. Darker ones. Roadblocks. Flickering in and out, harsh and colorless. The seasons we spent unearthing skeletons along the trails before we knew of the destruction we caused with every stab of the shovel into the viscera of the forest floor. How the scars remain, even now. Even today. What were we after all that time? Wisdom? Power? Authority? The adventure of discovery? A child’s imaginary treasure? I’m not sure. Now every time I enter this forest my back hunches under the weight of the guilt. Those souls we snuffed out with every skeleton we dismantled. I can’t forget them, no matter what memories I leave
behind. Tension thickens the thread between us to a cord. You’re remembering, too.
We continue, and the path begins to narrow. The next breadcrumb glistens ivory from behind a rotting log overrun with oversized ants. Yes. We’re in the clearing where you spoke softly to me. Your voice as delicate as my own. My name caught between the jagged edges of your teeth. Sticky. Messy. When you looked at me, your eyes burning and tinged ruby red, lust built inside like a current. I’d always imagined myself a river, privately, in the world of my own head. You made me all I’d ever imagined before you ever touched me. Your hand heavy and light all at once when you settled it against my shoulder, the side of my neck. I’ve never experienced
something as terrifying. You leaned forward to kiss me, but I cut you off.
“Let me help you, please. Just this once.”
The words had coiled so tightly in my throat for so long I tasted blood as soon as I released them. I wanted you, I just wanted you whole first. But, you took off screaming into the forest, wings erupting from your back like they’d always been there. However human you appeared, I’d known from the start how you had to fold yourself away to fit in a crowded room. I recognized the slouch in your shoulders because it echoed my own.
You didn’t return for a month. Then two. Then three. The water running in my head clouded with dirt and decomposition. Then, a knock at the door. Flashing lights and faces we didn’t recognize. That’s about when I started referring to us as we—the forest and I. Now your year’s mourning is about up.
In a few days time, the authorities will unearth your coffin, remove your corpse, break off your lower jaw and bury it beside a body of moving water. The ritual.
But I have a plan.
From the moment we are born, our community teaches the legends of the Korrhut.
There is a story of the ancient empress of a faraway land. One spring, her wife fell ill and in the night she succumbed to Death’s hands. They buried her in a shallow grave near the window of the empress' bedroom where she could watch over her beloved, until she herself passed and they could be re-buried together.
For weeks the empress would sit at the window, staring at the slowly settling slump of grass above her wife’s remains. Weeks stretched into months. Sticky, messy weeks. June and July passed without acknowledgement. August took up her stirring once more.
The once-socialite empress withdrew inward. She refused to leave her room. She stopped eating; stopped speaking. She stopped rising out of bed altogether, unable to convince herself of a reason worthy of expending the little energy she had left to cling to. As romantic as it sounded, her vow to watch over her beloved’s remains slowly gnawed away at the sanity left exposed on her sleeve. It drove her mad. She became reclusive and obsessive and irrational. A year was all she could take. Loss solidified into a sharp point. Instead of a dull ache constantly pulling at the insides of her chest, the pain had mutated and grown stronger, sharper, better aimed. Even better timed.
Meanwhile, the empress had grown tired despite the alarming amount of sleep she took. Bone tired. Exhaustion that pulls the ache from your bones even once they’ve stopped moving. She stretched out above the grave of her beloved and knocked back a vial of poison, spilling a few drops on the yellowed grass in her haste. She had worried about pain. Instead she found herself floating in a weightless joy she had never experienced without the company of another. She closed her eyes and wilted to a memory within seconds.
When the guards of the castle found the corpse of their empress atop the grave in the cold of the morning, they took her inside immediately and began exhuming her wife’s body in order to rebury them together in the empress’s tomb.
But when they opened the coffin, the empress’s beloved was no longer dead.
Her unsecured skull bobbled furiously atop her spine. Golden light pulsed in her empty eye sockets. Her fingers trembled greatly. She opened her mouth, revealing newly pointed teeth, and bit down on the closest thing: a hand.
The guard yelped and, acting on instinct, ripped his arm back, and with it, the skeleton’s mandible clean off her skull. The guard dunked his wounded hand into a nearby stream with the mandible still dug into his hand.
As the water ran over teeth and bone, the undead remains of the empress's wife screeched and writhed violently for a moment before the light dimmed in her eye sockets and she slumped back to the position she had been put in the coffin one year before.
“It got lighter,” the guard shared later. “The bone did. After she...the creature… whatever it was… slumped back in the coffin.”
He trembled, realizing he felt the life force leave the bone.
The kingdom had inadvertently discovered the powers of the poison in bringing the dead back to life. The empress’s death led to the discovery that removing the lower jaw from the skeleton one year after death prevents the life force from ever reawakening in the body.
Now, us, in our forest: we’re here to find that plant once and for all. The one the empress used to create the poison in the story. Took me months just to unearth the name. Heliutrophiumn Gluroisus. Weeping snake ash.
We’re going to create our own poison. We’re going to pour it over your grave, the forest and I. We’re going to free you, broken wrists and all. Whatever your ailments, I will heal.
At last. Shoulder to shoulder. Immersed in forest.
We’ll be whole again.