by Dana Diehl
The first time it happened, Lana was standing in front of a shop window, trying to see past her reflection to the business inside. She doesn’t remember anything special about the moment, but suddenly her insides were collapsing into themselves and the Styrofoam cup of coffee was pulled out of her hands and she dropped to her knees, gasping, everything around her taut and bright.
The feeling passed quickly, so quickly that for a moment she wondered if she’d imagined it. But as she straightened her body and wiped her clothes flat again, she looked for where she’d dropped her coffee and couldn’t find it. Also missing: two buttons off her jacket and a single earring stud.
It happened again the next day, as she watched her clothes tumble inside the washer at the laundromat.
And the next, while she stood at the stove, stirring a pan of tomato sauce.
It always starts as a tingle in her chest, like static. The skin beneath her collarbones shimmers and ripples like quicksand. Then, a flash of bone-deep cold and something close to her vanishes. A loose sock. A spatula. A copy of The Hours. A carton of berries.
Lana lives alone in a cold place, far away from anyone who used to know her. This town, this cold place, was once rich with lumber. The mountains were cleared of trees, and the river teemed with logs being sent down to the sawmill to be manufactured.
Now, the river is quiet. Enough time has passed that a new forest has replaced the old. When Lana first moved to this town, she went on weekly walks through the woods, exploring the many trails that webbed the mountainside. Even though they were gone, replaced with invasive mulberries and cork and mimosa trees, she thought she could still sense the original hemlocks, the original beeches, oaks, and birch. Their roots must still be underground, entangling with the new roots. A ghost forest knotted beneath the visible one, whispering secrets and warnings.
When her body started disappearing things around her, Lana increased her walks to four or five times a week. In the woods, alone, it’s easy for her to imagine her affliction as a superpower. She tells herself she’ll learn to control it. She’ll swallow up hazardous waste, single-use plastic, oil spills, all those straws that get stuck in the nostrils and throats of sea creatures.She’ll soak in the pesticides creeping through the soil from nearby farms. If she must consume, she’ll consume the waste. She’ll give her body to the good of the planet.
Lana practices. She makes-believe a training montage. She unzips her jacket to the cold and tries to feed her body small things she imagines it would want to open up to. A turkey tail mushroom. A twig twisted up in lichen. An acorn. But her body never accepts the offerings. When she wants to become porous, her skin stays solid.
Then one day, Lana comes across a man.
It isn’t unusual to pass other people in the woods. Miles of county-maintained trails cross the mountainside. What’s odd is that, like her, the man isn’t following a trail.
The creek is about twelve feet across. He’s on one side. She’s on the other.
She’d been crouching at the edge of the clear water, jacket open, trying to absorb cold creek pebbles into her skin. When she notices him on the opposite bank, she drops the pebbles. They make tiny splashes, and he looks up.
He’s wearing a brown beanie and brown boots and a brown sweater. He has a soft chin and an untrimmed mustache that shrugs over his upper lip. He’s carrying a metal detector.
The man smiles and raises a hand in greeting. “Hey.” His tone is surprised, but friendly. He keeps his hand up, palm open, like he’s aware he might come across as a threat.
At one time, Lana might have seen him as a danger. She would have calculated how long it would take him to cross the creek—it’s too wide to jump across, but not too deep to wade through.
But now her body has a secret power.
Lana zippers up her jacket.
“What are you doing?” she asks him.
“I’m looking for buried things,” he says. He switches on his metal detector and continues down the creek.
Lana follows on her side of the water, stepping over rot-softened logs and fists of moss.
Occasionally, the metal detector comes alive, beeping slowly and then frantically. The man pulls a little trowel out of his pocket and digs. Then, he holds up what he finds for Lana to see. First, he finds a nail. Then, a flattened beer can.
“Usually I don’t find anything interesting,” he says. He puts the can in a knapsack slung over his shoulder. “But I’ve gotten better and better at guessing where the good stuff might be.”
Lana asks what he’s looking for.
“I don’t really know,” he says. “The woods are full of all sorts of buried things.”
She asks him to explain.
“Well, two hundred, three hundred years ago, European settlers built their homes in these woods. They’re gone. But the stone foundations of their cabins are still here. And little pieces of their life they dropped or threw away.”
Lana silently fills in the parts of the story he’s left out. When those settlers first came to these woods, wolves and mountain cougars and martens still roamed. The settlers could hear them at night: howling just outside the ring of firelight, scratching at the edges of hens’ coops, gnawing at the door to the ice house. These men weren’t meant to be here, and they sensed it, so they transformed the woods into a place they could bear. They scarred over the old Susquehannock trails with wagon wheel tracks. They hunted the animals into eradication or drove them farther north. They cleared the dark forests with axes. Eventually it became inhospitable for them, too. Nothing left to hunt. No trees left to prevent erosion of their gardens. That was when they moved on.
When the creek narrows enough, Lana rock-hops across it, and now she and the man are on the same side. He keeps walking, sometimes bending down to dig a small hole or push around some rocks, and she follows.
She follows him all the way to the edge of the forest, into a clearing where a small house sits next to a one lane road.
“You can come in if you want to see some of the things I’ve found,” he says.
She knows she should refuse, but she is feeling bold and curious.
The man’s house has a hex sign over the front door: two intertwined bluebirds. Inside is small and dark, but clean.
“What do you do for fun?” he asks as he pours her a glass of water from the tap.
“I don’t really know anyone in town,” Lana admits. “I guess I do what you do. Walk in the woods.”
He shows her the collection of unburied treasure on his fireplace mantle. A bullet rattling around inside a crow’s skull. A Union officer belt buckle with an eagle insignia. A lady’s compact, rusted shut.
“I actually sell a lot of what I find,” he says. “I have a booth at the antique store in town. You’d be surprised what people will pay for a little bit of history.”
He bends over to pick up a jar of buttons, and she notices the tender, exposed back of his neck. As he straightens, he brushes her arm with his elbow. He quickly apologizes and takes a step back.
“I’m sorry. It’s probably weird, me leading you back to my house like this.”
She smiles. “I’m not afraid. I have a secret defense mechanism. If anyone tries to hurt me, my body will eat them up. Disappear them.”
He laughs a little, and Lana takes a step closer.
He has a scar on his cheek. The eyelashes on his left eye are longer than the ones on his right eye. Lana hasn’t been this close to another person in a very long time. The moment feels full of possibility. She’s about to be brave, to close the space between them, when she feels that familiar tug between her clavicles. A cold pit piercing through her torso.
Lana shuts her eyes.
When she opens them, the man is gone. Lana clutches at her chest, gasping, but the skin is already solid.
“Hello?” she says to the empty house.
She checks the kitchen. Five boxes of Honey Nut Cheerios sit in a row on the counter. Three too-ripe bananas fill a white bowl. She checks the bathroom. She checks behind the shower curtain. She picks three damp hairs from the drain and holds them to her chest, like they might have the power to summon him back.
Lana wants to call out the man’s name, but realizes she never asked for it.
Maybe he just stepped away, Lana thinks to herself. Any moment now, he’ll be back.
She checks the bedroom. The bed is made, corners tucked in. Stacked cardboard boxes, turned sideways and filled with books, serve as a nightstand. She feels a heaviness in her chest she tries to ignore.
Below the bedroom window is a wire cage full of straw. A large, brown rabbit sits in the cage, staring at her unblinkingly. Its jaw moves in a circular motion, chewing a piece of straw. Its ears lie flat against its skull.
The room seems to tilt as Lana locks eyes with the rabbit. She steadies herself with a hand on the doorframe.
She realizes she’s breathing too quickly. In fact, she can’t catch her breath. She needs to be out of this house. She needs to be back in the woods.
Before Lana leaves, she grabs the house keys hanging from a hook next to the entrance. She locks the door behind her, and runs.
…
The next day, Lana tries to act normally. She goes to work in the downtown boutique that used to be a coffee shop. Before that it was a law office. Before that it was a courthouse. The boutique sells silk scarves and hand dyed skirts and shapeless, linen dresses. All the drywall has been torn away to reveal old, red bricks that are always cold to the touch, no matter what time of year.
Not many people come into the shop that day, so Lana spends most of her time folding and refolding piles of shirts, redoing each until it’s perfect.
Her body keeps turning into quicksand, more often than usual. She’s grateful business is slow, so no one notices when it swallows up a bobby-pin, a tank top left crumpled in the fitting room, a hazelnut creamer, and a bottle cap. She feels unmoored. When a customer taps on her shoulder, she quickly puts space between them, afraid she’ll gulp them up, too. Nothing is off limits. Her insides feel sloshy. The deep cold that flashes through her body takes longer and longer to fade.
She can’t stop thinking about the man. His mantlepiece treasures gathering dust. His family and friends who must realize he’s missing. The rabbit closed inside its cage right now, chewing steadily through its pile of hay, the water in its dish getting shallow.
After work, she drives straight to the house in the woods, parking a quarter of a mile down the road to avoid suspicion if anyone comes looking for him.
In the mailbox there’s a political ad addressed to Devon. She drops it in the trash bin next to the garage.
The house is just as she left it. The only thing that’s changed is the rabbit. When she enters the bedroom, it’s digging furiously at a corner of the cage, punching at the metal floor like it might eventually give way to dirt. Most of the straw has been kicked out between the bars, littering the carpet.
When the rabbit notices her, it stops. Freezes. Its eyes follow her as she searches the room.
Lana finds a container of rabbit kibble in the closet and drops some into the cage. She gathers as much of the straw as she can in her hands, and feeds it back between the bars. She refills the water dish using a paper cup she finds in the bathroom.
Lana watches the rabbit for a while—its brown fur scattered with lines of black and white to mimic the speckling of a forest floor, its spine forming a perfect arch. It looks like a regular rabbit, the type Lana sees in the woods, silent under a bush, ready to explode into motion. There’s a leather string tied around its neck like a collar. She wonders if this rabbit was part of the man’s collection. She imagines him digging the rabbit up from its underground burrow with a trowel when it was just a baby and placing it in his pocket, where it quivered like a beating heart.
She reaches towards the cage, wanting to stroke the rabbit through the bars, to feel its small animal warmth against her knuckles.
Just as she’s about to touch it, a word echoes through her mind: No.
It reverberates through her body. Her fingers tingle, and she recoils.
“Devon?” she says out loud.
Lana feels a shift inside her, like a release of atmospheric pressure.
“Devon, are you there?”
She likes parsley. There’s some in the fridge. The words don’t have a voice behind them, but they feel distinctly separate from her own stream of consciousness.
Lana walks to the fridge. Amongst bags of apples, milk past its due date, celery, and old take-out containers, she finds a plastic bag of wilted parsley.
Back in the bedroom, she drops the herbs into the cage. The rabbit nibbles them up quickly, efficiently.
“Where are you?” she says.
No one answers.
…
Lana wakes up on his couch, neck sore and back stiff.
She hadn’t meant to fall asleep here. She had just sat down on the couch to think. But then her hand had found the television remote between the cushions as if she already knew where to find it. And she’d thought, what’s the harm in resting my head?
She goes to the bathroom to splash her face with cold water and examines herself in the mirror. Her work clothes from yesterday are wrinkled and dark circles shadow her eyes.
Back in Devon’s bedroom, she discards her own clothes and pulls on a plaid shirt she finds in his closet, followed by a pair of corduroy pants and high-ankle socks.
The clock shows that it’s midmorning, and Lana knows it’s time to leave for work.
But the thought of going into town, spending another shift sorting through clothes while she worries about the man her body has consumed, seems unbearable. She needs time to think, to figure out what to do next.
Suddenly, a phone rings.
Lana’s hand goes to the phone in her pocket, but she already knows it’s not her ringtone. She follows the sound through the house, until she finds a flip phone, lit up and vibrating, on the floor by Devon’s bed.
The incoming call has a local area code, but it isn’t labeled with a name. Not Mom, not Dad. Maybe it’s just a spam. Or a reminder about an appointment.
“Who is it?” she asks, hoping Devon will respond, but her mind is silent.
When the phone stops ringing, Lana checks the recent call history. Other than this one, there are no recent missed calls and no voicemails. But still, she feels shaken. She doesn’t want to go to work, but she also doesn’t want to be caught in Devon’s house if anyone shows up.
As she makes her way out of the house, she reaches for Devon’s metal detector. Rather than heading toward the car, she goes to the woods.
The day is brisk and windy. Big clouds race across the sky, sporadically blocking out the sun. The branches, almost naked of leaves, clatter against each other. Lana can’t hear any birdsong.
As Lana follows the familiar creek, she lets her mind go still. She can feel Devon’s consciousness swimming beneath her own, and she lets it float closer to the surface. This man she absorbed; he doesn’t think about polar bears’ shrinking habitat. He doesn’t think about glaciers chewed away by heat waves, or how light pollution is throwing migrating birds off course. He doesn’t think about the people and animals the town’s founders killed or displaced.Devon thinks of old, buried things. He notices where the trees grow in a row and wonders if two hundred years ago they marked the edge of a schoolyard, if maybe the students helped to plant them. He wonders what it’d be like to find a wolf print in the mud, or to come across it with its snout bent to the creek, pink tongue scooping water between its pointed teeth.
Once or twice the metal detector beeps, but each time Lana kicks around in the dirt, she finds only a bit of trash or a crusty penny. The ground becomes steeper, and the detector beeps less frequently. Lana’s not familiar with this part of the forest. The trees are younger here. They’re tall, but thin-trunked from racing each other toward the light. This patch of forest must have been the last to be cleared by lumber companies.
As Lana crests the hill, she hears a gunshot crack and echo through the valley.
A few moments later, a gray-haired man in a camo jacket and bright orange vest walks across the creek a few yards ahead of her. A dead rabbit swings from one hand. A long-barreled gun is in the other.
The man stops mid-creek and raises the hand holding the rabbit in familiarity. Then he pauses and squints at Lana.
“Sorry,” he says. “I thought…” He drops his hand. “You’re on game land. Shouldn’t be out here during hunting season.”
“Sorry,” she says.
The hunter stares at her.
“You need help getting back? You’re pretty far off trail.”
Lana’s chest tightens. “I’m fine,” she says.
She waits until the hunter has disappeared back into the forest before turning around. She follows the creek downhill, using the metal detector as a cane.
She hadn’t paid attention to how long she’d been walking. Fifteen minutes go by, then twenty, and she still hasn’t returned to a familiar part of the forest.
The sky has become overcast, the forest dim despite the day still being young. A crow caws once somewhere close by, but she doesn’t see it in the branches.
Something crashes through the bushes on the other side of the creek. Lana thinks it must be a deer, and when she looks, she sees the hunter.
He’s among the trees, about a hundred feet away, his orange vest no longer draped around his shoulders. In his camo jacket, he’s the same color as the forest.
He’s standing motionless.
His back is to her.
Lana gasps. She stumbles over some rocks and runs in opposite direction, away from the creek and into the woods. Fear pulses in her chest like a trapped, wild bird.
She runs, dodging prickly bushes and leaping over logs.
A gunshot cracks through the trees, and the crow caws wildly.
Ahead of her, Lana can see a wall. Well, the shape of a wall, dressed in green moss and brown lichen. She scurries behind it and presses her back against the stone.
A family once lived here. The thought is flotsam, catching in her mind. Maybe they had a son and daughter. Some chickens that lay brown eggs.
She closes her eyes and breathes. She tells herself the hunter didn’t mean to follow her. She tells herself he’s just hunting game. He’s not hunting her.
Lana counts to two hundred, then stands up. She walks downhill through the underbrush until she finds a trail. She forces herself not to act like prey, not to run.
…
When Lana was young, there was no forest for her to play in. But there was an empty lot next to her house. Machines had cut a rectangular, six-foot deep hole in the earth in preparation to build a house’s foundation. But the project had been abandoned. The freshly cleared lot grew over with wild sumac. With every rain and every melting snowfall, the hole eroded a little bit back into itself.
Lana wasn’t allowed to play in the empty lot, but she would go there anyway.
She’d slide down into the hole, and make believe that it was her home. She used a stick to carve shelves into the walls. She laid down rocks to mark the edges of the rooms. Here was her kitchen. There was her bedroom. She piled dirt into the shape of a pillow and lay back, looking at the rectangle of sky above her. She’d see a plane pass overhead and imagine that she and the people in that plane were the only humans left on Earth.
Once, while she was playing in the hole, it started to rain. It had been raining on and off all week, and the ground was already slippery and soft. When Lana tried to climb out, her feet couldn’t find a grip. The more she tried, the slicker the sides of the hole became.
Lana considered screaming, but was more afraid of her parents than she was of the rain. She took off her shoes, which had started making a gulping sound whenever she tried lifting them from the sticky pit of mud forming around her.
Eventually, she pulled herself out. She used the shelves she’d carved as footholds. She let herself be washed clean in the rain. The next day, when the puddles had dried, she went back in.
…
That night, Lana dreams of the old forest. An untouched pocket where there are still Eastern hemlocks with pinecones as delicate as flowers. Beech trees with smooth, gray trunks like the ankles of giants. Black gum trees. Red maple. Northern red oak. Black birch. Yellow birch. Turkey tail mushrooms that grow on trunks high into the canopy.
When she wakes, she knows the dream didn’t belong to her. It belonged to Devon. Her own dreams are often dystopian, filled with anxiety, with lost things.
Two days have passed, and no one has come looking for him. Lana knows, because she hasn’t left his house. Even his phone remains silent.
Lana’s phone, on the other hand, lights up with texts from her coworkers and eventually her boss. She replies that she’s sick, that she’s sorry, but she’ll be back in a few days.
Lana eats through the food in Devon’s fridge. She watches the television programs she can sense he likes. Her body sucks up a safety pin, a spoon, and a bar of soap.
Every now and then, Devon says something.
The brass buckle needs shining.
It’s time to bury the tulip bulbs.
It never feels like he’s speaking to her, though. It feels like he’s speaking to himself, like he doesn’t realize he’s not fully here.
On the fourth day, she goes an hour before she remembers who she is. She eats two hard-boiled eggs. She drinks coffee black, even though it gives her a stomachache. She thinks about how she needs to restock her antique booth next week. She’s about to put on her shoes and step outside, when she comes back into herself.
Her body feels cool and prickly, like it does after she’s become quicksand. Though it doesn’t appear that she’s vanished anything.
Her phone is ringing in her pocket.
“Hello,” she says, without checking the number first.
“Hey Lana. Are you on your way?”
Shit. She was supposed to be back at work today.
“Oh,” she says. “I’m sorry. I was on my way. But I, I think I’m still too sick.”
There’s a pause on the other end. “Get better. But you’ve got to let us know when this happens. Don’t wait for us to call you.”
Lana sits on the bed and drops her phone on the blanket next to her.
She needs to find a way get Devon out. But how? She’s only ever consumed, not expelled. Lana can’t focus. The rabbit is chewing loudly on the bars of the cage, and the sound of tooth on metal pierces through her.
The first time Devon spoke, it was when she’d almost touched his rabbit. She’d been reaching out to touch it, and he had stopped her. Maybe it’s also the key to getting him out. She looks at the rabbit with its quivering nose, shaped like a perfect Y stitch. Its black eyes reflect her face back to herself.
…
Since her encounter with the hunter, Lana hasn’t entered the forest. But today, she walks slowly to its edge, where mowed grass transitions into brush.
The rabbit is limp and docile in her arms. Lana is surprised by its weight, by the distinct patter of its heart, palpable even through fabric. She holds it to her chest, swaddling it in her flannel shirt.
It’s that time when day tips towards night, and everything begins to lose its color.
She takes a deep breath, like she’s about to cast an incantation.
“Devon,” she says out loud. “I’m going to let it go.”
She crouches down to the grass, to show that she means business.
“Unless you stop me, Devon. You better come out and stop me.”
Lana doesn’t anticipate the strength of the rabbit’s legs. As she rests its paws on the ground, it becomes suddenly agile. It kicks out of her hands and bounds into forest, running loudly through the underbrush.
“No,” she calls after it, like it might respond.
She hadn’t meant to let the rabbit go, not really. She thought just the threat of releasing it might shake Devon loose.
And to a degree, it seems to have worked. Suddenly, Devon is thrashing inside her. Go after her. Go.
Lana listens. She sprints into the woods.
She can’t believe it when, almost immediately, she spots the rabbit poised next to a log. Maybe its disoriented, unsure of what to do now that it’s faced with an entire, open forest. Lanaslows to a tiptoe. The rabbit’s nose twitches. Its ears are fully erect. They turn, scanning the forest.
Just as she thinks she’ll do it, she’ll catch the rabbit, it bursts again into motion. Lana follows it down a hill, through a patch of mountain laurels. The forest is growing even darker, and she imagines the sun, hiding behind the clouds, balanced on the horizon. Lana thinks about turning back, but Devon’s thoughts spur her on: Go. Go. She’s not safe alone out here.
Lana is in a narrow valley now, and here the trees are larger than what she’s used to, their trunks thicker.
“Where am I?” she says.
Her foot catches on a root, and she falls, skinning her knees and scraping up her palms.
Lana gets back to her feet. She tries to brush the dirt off her hands, but that just pushes it deeper into her cuts.
Maybe there’s an option she didn’t consider. Instead of pushing him out, she could let Devon take the reins. It’d be easy to slip into his life; she could manage his antique booth, take over his role of treasure hunter. Instead of spending her days thinking about the ways humans’ choices of the past and present have doomed the planet, Lana could focus on this small patch of forest. She could replace her own memories with Devon’s. As invasive as it’s been to have his thoughts floating through her, it’s also been freeing. The world is simpler in his eyes. Maybe, with him in charge, she’d stop becoming quicksand. She could be normal, or closer to it.
As Lana reaches a clearing, she spots the rabbit huddling at the base of a laurel shrub. She takes slow steps forward, but as she gets closer, she realizes it can’t run away. The string of leather around its neck has caught on the shrub.
The forest floor ripples with roots just beneath the surface. Lana sits down on the root ofan oak that has broken through the soil and carefully reaches for the string. She tries first to untie it, but the rabbit flails at her touch, twisting the string so that it tightens around its neck.
Lana withdraws her hands. She wishes she could see inside the rabbit to its olive-size heart and speak to it in a way that it would understand, tell it that she will not hurt it. That it will be okay.
In the clearing to her right, someone has made a firepit ringed in flattened beer cans. Overhead, an airliner draws a line of chemtrails across the darkening sky. She imagines what the people inside see out the windows. A small square of forest with clean borders, surrounded by a patchwork quilt of crops threaded with roads.
The rabbit has calmed. Lana reaches again for the string. She knows the moment she frees the rabbit, it will be off again. Its paws instinctively finding their way through the underbrush, knowing which routes will be safe.
Devon knows it too. Grab her now. This is your…
But she interrupts him. She shushes him quiet.
As she unties the knot, she feels her chest open up. Feels herself becoming porous. And this time, it doesn’t stop at her chest. The feeling spreads down her ribcage to her pelvis, to her knees. To her wrists. To her feet and hands. She breathes in the waning, muted sunlight. The turkey tail mushrooms climbing the tree like steps into the canopy. The carbon dioxide in the air. The pesticides creeping through the soil from nearby farms.
She lets it filter right through her.
Dana Diehl is the author of Our Dreams Might Align (Splice UK, 2018) and the collaborative collection, The Classroom (Gold Wake Press, 2019). Her chapbook, TV Girls, won the 2017-2018 New Delta Review Chapbook Contest judged by Chen Chen. Diehl earned her MFA in Fiction at Arizona State University. Her work has appeared in North American Review, Passages North, Necessary Fiction, Waxwing, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere.