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You left the strip of cabins on the dusty road without turning down Basin's offer.
You&& (working title) is a queer novella about when home is other people, including the monsters lurking in the woods. Check out the about page here. You&& is a sequel to Sometimes The Mountain Buries You.
You left the strip of cabins on the dusty road without turning down Basin's offer. You left without taking up their offer. You're still considering it.
Mostly you consider avoiding the need to take up Basin's offer.
By the time you leave Basin's cabin, you're so well-healed it takes no time at all to trek far from any sort of road. Here in blue-grey rock and needle-bearing tree, you feel everything around you and it puts you at ease. The cool moisture trapped between soil and canopy, the scuttle of insect bird mammal, the sounds of plant life. A constant sensorial choir that fills your lungs and presses against skin. All-encompassing nature how it should be, encompassing you.
How it should be most of the time.
There is a reason you were lying in the ditch.
Tracking the things that shouldn't be here is easy. The way they touch the ground leaves marks unlike any of the many animals you share the calls of. Plants sound different after being trodden on by them. There's a taste in the air when you're on their trail.
This one in particular tastes like ozone and the sharp impact of boulders on boulders.
You understand what hunting is. You understand bird rooting out bug, cougar stalking deer, Heather and Jared with rifle in hand picking their way through woods. This is not hunting.
This overrides any intent, purpose, consideration. Something tells you to consume with such overwhelm that you struggle to make conscious thought and decision.
The thing is roaming. They are always roaming. What other thing they could be doing is beyond you, with it in your senses you become nothing but a mouth to swallow it whole.
You know when it notices you because you're in its head. It's in yours.
You've learned from your prior encounter. You've learned—you later, regrettably, realize—from being in Basin's proximity how better to be in and out of its.
The only damage done to you is what is inevitable in your snapping strike to pluck it from its surrounding.
With its pitch-sticky limbs in your grasp, with bear snarl from your throat because you are of these woods and it is not, you rend still-living parts to swallow near-whole until it is no more.
Consuming it is sickening. That innate drive pilots you, puts flesh in the rows of your teeth, works your gullet until ozone and the sharp impact of boulders on boulders is removed from the all-encompassing nature. Until the all-encompassing nature is again how it should be.
With overwhelm satisfied, the you that has conscious thought and decisions consider your injuries—few. The you that has spent some sunsets tracking this thing now reckons the some less sunsets return—shelter. The you that remembers a cup of tea contemplates how to add fire to your shelter—comfort.
Between your sickening meal and your shelter are fireweed, hissop, pine mushroom, and more that you carefully forage, taking only some of where there is plenty. As you gather them you shift the orientation of twig and needle underfoot, drawing lines between the trees that you've spent the past year memorizing.
When you make it to the familiar crack in the rock that you shimmy through, the memorized trees remain so clear in your mind. You can feel their connections underground—root and mycelium—lines traced by the twig and needle you shifted. In the cave that is your shelter, you sort your fresh forage amongst past—bark, berry, nut. When a moose crosses the lines you drew, you can nearly see it, you can certainly feel it—an awareness dancing across your skin. When the footfall of a deer snaps a twig in a line, you feel a prickle near painful.
The inevitable damage to you from your sickening meal is not so much that you'd consider Basin's offer. Lying on cedar bough, you hold together what are probably injuries only so shallow because you had experienced being in Basin's head. You wonder what things from the woods could replicate Basin's stitching you up, how much you could replicate from your experience of being stitched and their experience stitching.
You wonder what a tea from the wildflowers you've collected would taste like.
You left the strip of cabins on the dusty road without turning down Basin's offer. You left without taking up their offer. You're still considering it.
Mostly you consider avoiding the need to take up Basin's offer.
By the time you leave Basin's cabin, you're so well-healed it takes no time at all to trek far from any sort of road. Here in blue-grey rock and needle-bearing tree, you feel everything around you and it puts you at ease. The cool moisture trapped between soil and canopy, the scuttle of insect bird mammal, the sounds of plant life. A constant sensorial choir that fills your lungs and presses against skin. All-encompassing nature how it should be, encompassing you.
How it should be most of the time.
There is a reason you were lying in the ditch.
Tracking the things that shouldn't be here is easy. The way they touch the ground leaves marks unlike any of the many animals you share the calls of. Plants sound different after being trodden on by them. There's a taste in the air when you're on their trail.
This one in particular tastes like ozone and the sharp impact of boulders on boulders.
You understand what hunting is. You understand bird rooting out bug, cougar stalking deer, Heather and Jared with rifle in hand picking their way through woods. This is not hunting.
This overrides any intent, purpose, consideration. Something tells you to consume with such overwhelm that you struggle to make conscious thought and decision.
The thing is roaming. They are always roaming. What other thing they could be doing is beyond you, with it in your senses you become nothing but a mouth to swallow it whole.
You know when it notices you because you're in its head. It's in yours.
You've learned from your prior encounter. You've learned—you later, regrettably, realize—from being in Basin's proximity how better to be in and out of its.
The only damage done to you is what is inevitable in your snapping strike to pluck it from its surrounding.
With its pitch-sticky limbs in your grasp, with bear snarl from your throat because you are of these woods and it is not, you rend still-living parts to swallow near-whole until it is no more.
Consuming it is sickening. That innate drive pilots you, puts flesh in the rows of your teeth, works your gullet until ozone and the sharp impact of boulders on boulders is removed from the all-encompassing nature. Until the all-encompassing nature is again how it should be.
With overwhelm satisfied, the you that has conscious thought and decisions consider your injuries—few. The you that has spent some sunsets tracking this thing now reckons the some less sunsets return—shelter. The you that remembers a cup of tea contemplates how to add fire to your shelter—comfort.
Between your sickening meal and your shelter are fireweed, hissop, pine mushroom, and more that you carefully forage, taking only some of where there is plenty. As you gather them you shift the orientation of twig and needle underfoot, drawing lines between the trees that you've spent the past year memorizing.
When you make it to the familiar crack in the rock that you shimmy through, the memorized trees remain so clear in your mind. You can feel their connections underground—root and mycelium—lines traced by the twig and needle you shifted. In the cave that is your shelter, you sort your fresh forage amongst past—bark, berry, nut. When a moose crosses the lines you drew, you can nearly see it, you can certainly feel it—an awareness dancing across your skin. When the footfall of a deer snaps a twig in a line, you feel a prickle near painful.
The inevitable damage to you from your sickening meal is not so much that you'd consider Basin's offer. Lying on cedar bough, you hold together what are probably injuries only so shallow because you had experienced being in Basin's head. You wonder what things from the woods could replicate Basin's stitching you up, how much you could replicate from your experience of being stitched and their experience stitching.
You wonder what a tea from the wildflowers you've collected would taste like.