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In Nature

by kings

By kingsPublished 3 years ago 6 min read
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image from pixabay

Maggie's son marries a week before Christmas in a barren patch of land beneath the hemlocks where nothing ever grows. Maggie drapes white lights from the limbs. She wraps a delicate woolen blanket around her son's pregnant bride. The morning of the wedding, she gets up early and spends hours clearing a path through the fresh snow so that the guests, including the bride's aunt and friends from the ranch where the young couple works, can come up to her cabin for warm bread and jam and champagne. Glitter is flung at some point. When the snow melts in patches a few weeks later, Maggie notices it blending into the ground and curses.

Maggie is awoken every night in January by the foxes' tormented mating sounds, which sound like children's screams. She has trouble sleeping, but she finds solace in the foxes' ancestral rituals. The land is a strange and lonely place. Her husband has been dead for quite some time. Her child has grown up. There are people in neighboring houses and through the woods, but no one has ever invited her to supper in the ten years she's lived here. When the foxes return to their lair under her tool shed for cub season, she gets excited.

On a morning when the cold still blows through the trees, that day arrives in the first week of March. Maggie raises seeds inside, under the heat of little lamps. She is reading a book about birdsongs from the library. She makes tea and drinks a lot of it. Maggie's son phones to say he'll be home soon.

Everything is decided over the phone. He's packed his belongings and said his goodbyes to the property. The girl will return to her aunt's house with the baby. The newlyweds will split and be absorbed into the old families in the same manner as the icy woods create animals and then swallow them up again.

Maggie is devoted to her kid. She should appreciate the companionship. But she always assumed that one day he would be fully matured, like if he were a baked good.

He is enthusiastic at first. He chops firewood and commutes to town. He poisons an ant colony that has been living in the roof for far too long. He treats Maggie as if she were much older than she is, as if she couldn't do these things without him.

They eat stew at night and he fills her in on the news from the outside world. She listens to him go around in circles; his politics have an edge to them that she doesn't recall. His palms are calloused, and his hair is long. Maggie is baffled as to why he has been ordered to leave the ranch. She is familiar with the establishment, the types of people it hires and allows to return year after year, and the issues it ignores. Perhaps it's best not to inquire.

He is looking for a job. He lopes to the edge of the road one day and takes a ride to the nearest big town, which is an hour away. Maggie discovers more information about him while cleaning his room, including odd talismans. On his dresser, he had a perfect row of wild mushrooms. On his pillow, he had a long gray hair. A ripped newspaper ad for an empty bar near the state line. She reaches for a shadowy shape under the bed, then reconsiders. Her son arrives after midnight and is depressed for days. With the stuff she doesn't know, she could fill a well.

Maggie waits for a few warm days in a row and then turns the earth to plant her seedlings. The dog fox watches from the edge of the woods. With a new litter he hunts for the whole family. He’s been known to go through the neighbor’s trash, to tear up her garden. His responsibility makes him rash and desperate. But foxes parent for one fierce, sweet season and then release. By June the cubs will be off to their own territories.

Maggie walks for hours through the woods when she has nothing else to do. She keeps track of changes, such as new growth and fallen or about to fall dead trees. She's always been a fast learner. She used to work in a museum. She used to reside in a huge metropolis. Then she began digging out to quieter areas in quest of her own house, anything other than the sterile, colorless suburbs where she had grown up. She can't recall what had been so horrible about them now.

She lets the hens out into their yard after the last frost. It's a light-filled pen with double-wired reinforcement. The dog fox is grumpy. He's almost licking his lips, she thinks. Her son joins her on the porch, and the two of them watch the animal flee into the woods together.

Her son boasts, "At the ranch, we take them out with a twenty-two," before retiring into the house and reappearing with a gun far larger than that. It's so comfortable against him. Maggie catches her breath; she suddenly feels weightless and has to brace herself against the railing. She sees her son cock the pistol and point it towards the woods at an empty location. The fox has long since vanished.

She then slowly bobs her head in the direction of the trees. She tells him, "That's not how I take care of things." When she returns her gaze, he is already inside.

Maggie sometimes wishes she could just give in and let the foxes take what they want. Humans have so much, and they have it so readily. She imagines her son as a young boy, grabbing colorful cereal boxes from the sweet cereal section. When she would pull him back from a tantrum, she sees his small, angry body, its clammy desperation. She believes that so much in nature boils down to hunger. Human hunger, on the other hand, is a far more serious and scary issue. She recalls the other child, the new one, and mentally counts down the months till she is nine.

Maggie is visited by the parties of her youth in her sleep that night. The buzzing, the lights, the strangers. She is still delightfully inside of her dream as she wakes up to a filthy kitchen. A bottle of champagne, left over from the wedding, taps on her feet lightly.

A can of stout sat in its own thick brown spit, cooking wine. It's as though the house has been drained of all its contents. She discovers her son dozing by the door. He's a lot heavier than he was the last time she carried him. She drags him out onto the porch nonetheless. She then gathers his belongings, including his luggage, sweaters, and books, and stacks them near the woods' edge. She wraps a loose woolen shawl around his passed-out body. She then takes a lengthy walk.

The days are now so long that the light in the late evening is absolutely stunning. Her garden has a good year that year. Her birds produce considerably more eggs than a single person can consume. She places them in baskets on the porches of her neighbors, along with comments Maggie thinks seem kind. She bakes a cake one morning and eats it all before noon. After that, she bakes another one. She'd missed this aspect of solitude, its lack of boundaries. For months, she'll stare out the window at the empty space beneath the hemlocks and think to herself, "Once there was a boy, who has since vanished."

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