Beast From The Far Grass

CHAPTER 1 — THE WIND TURNS

The river stones were hot enough to cook on that season. Heat sat on the village like a hide left in the sun. Even the pigs came down to drink later, when the glare had slid off the water and the mud at the bend went dark.

Our house was good. The roof did not leak. There was always meat and sour drink and someone laughing in the other dark after the fire went low. I lived with Mother and my sister and my brother. I was not a child. My blood had come with the rains two summers past. Mother had started watching which boys I looked at.

I looked at none of them.

Our men are built like river reeds. Narrow shoulders. Narrow hips. Legs like spears. When they stand together after a raid their chests do not fill a doorway. I had let two of them put their mouths on my neck behind the drying racks and felt nothing but the wish that they would finish talking. Their hands were small. Their smell was village smell: smoke, pig fat, the same river we all washed in.

I had stopped going to the night fires. I sat with the women and scraped hides and thought of lands I had no names for. Places where the ground stayed cold. Places where men were not shaped like us. Old men told those stories when the fire was low — great shaggy beasts of the far grass, hides thick as a thumb, hunters who followed them until the air itself turned white. We did not follow those beasts. We took heads when ridge-men came for pigs or women. We kept our bend of the river and our racks and our good roof. That was enough for everyone but me.

I did not say that out loud. There is no use saying a hunger you cannot feed.

The morning he came I was at the trade stones with the other unmarried women, turning salt cakes so they would not stick. The path from the north was a pale scar in the dust. At first he was only a dark shape on it, too wide, moving wrong. Our raiders walk light. This one walked as if the ground had agreed to hold him.

Then the shape became a man, and I lost the measure of him.

The frame on his back was poles and lashing and pale hide stacked in thick sheets. That frame would have needed two of our strongest to drag. He carried it the way my brother carries a water gourd. When he set it down the ground seemed to notice. When he stood up straight his shoulders were the width of our door. His arms were thicker than my brother’s waist. His chest was a wall.

I had no word for that much man.

It was the hot part of the day. Sweat ran off him in sheets. It darkened his chest and made rivers down the slabs of his belly and soaked the waist of his hide. He wiped his face with the back of one enormous hand and the wet flew off into the dust.

The elders came out. He spoke to them in a mouth-noise that was not words. Deep. Like stones rolled in a cave. They pointed at the hides. He pointed at salt and dried pig and two strings of teeth. Trade. That much I understood.

I did not mean to step closer. My feet did it.

The wind turned.

The smell hit me in the mouth first, then lower, as if it had hands.

It was not village smell. It was salt and animal and something burnt and something green and something I had no name for that went straight between my legs and made them heavy. I wanted to put my face in the wet hair of his chest. I wanted to breathe him the way dogs breathe each other in the yard.

Only dogs do that.

I had never wanted to smell a person. Not Mother after cooking. Not the boys after a run. Sweat is what you wash off. Sweat is what makes you wrinkle your nose at the racks.

Why did this sweat make my mouth water?

Am I wrong in the head?

He did not look at me. He looked at the hides and the elders and the sky as if the heat were a live thing biting him. Sweat kept coming. A drop ran from his throat down the dark hair and I watched it the way I have watched blood run from a fresh cut — helpless, hungry, ashamed of the watching.

My sister pinched my arm and hissed. I stepped back. The smell stayed.

We walked home with millet still on my hands. I ground more millet because that is what you do when your head is not right. I turned pork on the hot stones because Mother asked. The fat popped. The smell of cooking should have been the only smell. It was not. Under it, still, was him: salt, hide, the wet of a body too big for this heat.

I was wet between my legs and I had not touched myself.

The wet had come by itself while I thought of his how tall he would have stood over me. I pressed my thighs together over the cooking stones and it only made it worse. A slow, stupid pulse. I shifted my weight. The wrap clung.

Sweat never smells good.

Why does his smell good?

Wait. What am I thinking?

I told myself I was sick. I told myself the heat had gotten into my skull. I scraped a hide until my wrists ached and the pulse between my legs did not care about the ache. When I bent to lift the water gourd I felt myself slick, and the feeling was so new and so animal that I almost laughed, which would have been worse than crying.

Brother came in from the gardens and talked about a broken fence. Sister talked about a girl who had smiled at a reed-boy at the night fire. Mother put more root in the pot and looked at my face once, the way she looks when she is counting whether you have a fever.

I did not have a fever I could name.

We ate. I tasted nothing. In my head the outside man set that frame down again and again, and each time the ground noticed, and each time the sweat flew from his hand into the dust.

Night came slow, the way it does in the hot season, sky going bruise-colored over the river. The house settled. Brother snored like a pig in mud. Sister’s breathing went long. Mother turned once and was still.

I lay on my mat and stared at the dark roof.

I put my palm flat on my own belly first, as if I could press the wanting back in. It did not go. It had a direction. Down.

I had touched myself before. After the reed-boys, once or twice, curious, unfinished, more bored than anything. This was not that. This had a smell attached to it. A chest I could not span. A drop of sweat I had watched like it belonged to me.

I slid my hand under the wrap.

I was swollen. Wet enough that my fingers made a small sound I hated and needed. I bit the sleeping-mat. Two fingers, because one was not enough thought, and I did not yet have a picture of what would be enough. I thought of his hands, which were as wide as my face. I thought of putting my face under his arms like a dog. I thought of the frame on his back and how easy he had made a weight that would have broken two of ours.

The pulse gathered. My hips lifted off the mat without asking me. I turned my face hard into the cloth so no sound would get out of the house that had always been good to me.

When it broke it was not like the old small finish. It dragged. It left me shaking and stupid and wetter than before, as if the body had opened a jar and did not know how to close it.

I lay still a long time. The river made its night noise. A dog barked once toward the north path and went quiet.

He was out there somewhere. At the trade stones, or in the thicket where travelers camp if they do not sleep inside the village. Sweating, even now, because the heat did not leave him.

I pulled my hand back. I could smell myself on it. Under that, in my head, I could still smell him.

Sweat never smells good.

I said it again in the dark, like a rule.

The rule did not hold.

I slept badly. In the thin sleep I saw the north path and the too-wide shape on it, and my feet, which had stepped closer without being told, and the wind that had turned as if it had been waiting.

When the birds started I got up and washed at the jar like any other morning. The wet between my legs had not dried the way honest work-sweat dries. I changed the wrap. I ground millet. I did not look toward the north.

I looked anyway.

The path was empty dust.

He had not come to our door. Of course he had not. Why would he? He had hides to trade and heat to fight and a body the village had no measure for. I was a girl at cooking stones who wanted to smell a man like a dog.

Am I normal?

I did not ask Mother. There are questions that make a good house less good.

I turned the pork. Fat popped. My thighs pressed together over the work, and the pulse started again, smaller, meaner, as if last night had only taught it the way home.

A few days could go like this. I already knew it. Chores. Wet. Thought of him. More wet. Shame. More chores.

I did not sneak out.

Not yet.

The wanting sat in me anyway, stored like meat for a lean season, and I kept my eyes on my work, and the wind off the north path kept smelling like a thing I was not allowed to want.

CHAPTER 2 — PORK

Days went the way I had known they would.

Chores. Wet. Thought of him. More wet. Shame. More chores.

I saw him twice from far. Once at the trade stones again, the pale hides stacked like a second body beside him, sweat already making rivers in the dark hair. Once on the path toward the north thicket. Both times the smell came first, on the hot wind, and my body knew before my eyes. I ran outside with millet still on my hands.

He was not coming toward our house.

He never came toward our house.

I started to hate the house a little, which was a rotten thought, because the house had done nothing wrong.

Mother gave me the pig behind the house when the sun was high. A young one. Good meat. My knife, the stone, the hook. This was work I knew. Work that kept a good house fed.

I hung it. I opened it. I worked the hide.

The hide was thick. My knife worked and worked. Fat shone. The skin did not want to give.

I thought: is that what the outside man’s skin is like? That tough? That much of it?

I ran my palm over the cooling fat and imagined a chest I could not span with both arms. Warm. Breathing. Wet with a smell that did not belong to any pig.

The knife slipped. I had to stop and lean on the post with my forehead until the shaking passed. The wet between my legs had come again, meaner than at the cooking stones, as if the hide itself had taught my body a new trick.

I finished the pig with my jaw tight.

I took a strip of the good pork and the sour berries and the hot root and wrapped it the way we wrap meat for a man who has taken a head. I told myself I was wrapping it for the pot. I set it aside in the shade. My hands knew what they were doing before my mouth would admit it.

Then I went to the river.

The current was brown and honest. I waded in to the waist with the knife still in my fist like a fool and put my whole hand under the water between my legs. The cold made me gasp. The cold did not stop it. I thought of tough hide. I thought of sweat flying off an enormous hand into dust. I thought of putting my face between his legs like a dog, only dogs, am I normal, and I bit my other wrist so the village would not hear me spend in the river like an animal.

I came back with wet hair and a clean knife and a parcel in the shade that was not for the pot.

Sister looked at my mouth. I told her the current was strong. She went back to mending.

Night. The house settled the way it always settled. Brother’s snore. Sister’s long breath. Mother turning once.

I waited until the waiting hurt.

Then I took the parcel and went barefoot through the gardens and along the pig-path and into the north thicket.

His fire was a small red eye. He sat with his back against a fallen trunk, the hide-frame beside him. The heat of the day had not left him. Sweat still shone on his throat.

He looked at me. He did not reach for a blade. He made a sound that might have been a question.

I had no words he would know. I held out the pork.

He took it. He smelled it. He ate it.

A meal I had packed for two people went into him in the time it takes to lace a sandal. He did not pause. He did not burp. He licked the leaf wrapper and looked at me again, and something in his face was pleased in a way that made my stomach drop.

He pointed at the food, then at me, then at his own chest. Then he patted the ground beside his knee.

I sat. My heart was a trapped bird.

He uncorked a small skin of fat — rendered, clean, smelling faintly of smoke. He poured some into his palm. He took my wrist. His hand closed all the way around it and the ends of his fingers stacked on themselves. I had known his hands were wide. Knowing is not the same as being held.

He put my palm on his chest, and moved it.

Circle. Press. Down.

His skin was hot enough to cook on. The muscle under it did not give. It was like putting my hand on a warm boulder that breathed.

The smell rose off him thick. Salt. Animal. Burnt. Green. The thing that had ruined my chores. I was shaking. I could not stop breathing through my mouth. Every time I leaned in the smell got heavier and my cunt clenched on nothing.

He guided both my hands. Shoulders. The thick caps of his arms. The slabs of his belly where sweat and fat mixed and my palms shone. He made a low sound when I found the places that pleased him, and that sound went into me the same way the smell had.

This is how his people say thank you for food. I understood that without words. Body for body. Work for work.

I told myself I was paying a trade. I told myself I could stop.

I did not stop.

He took my wrist again and moved my hand down.

The hide at his hips was already tented. When he pushed the leather aside I forgot how to swallow.

I had seen our men. I had seen pigs in rut. I had not seen this.

It rose out of the hair heavy and dark and thick as my forearm at the base, the head like a fist, already wet at the slit. The vein on the underside was a ridge I could have followed with a fingernail. It twitched when the night air hit it. It looked like it would split me. It looked like it belonged on a different kind of animal.

Will I walk after.

Why does he smell like that.

Why am I dripping down my own thigh looking at a thing that should frighten me.

He closed my slippery hand around as much of it as I could hold. I could not close my fingers. The heat of him there was worse than the chest. Fat and sweat made a filthy sound when he showed me the stroke he wanted — slow, tight, root to the place my fist would not meet.

His head went back against the trunk. The noise he made was not a village noise. It was deeper. It vibrated in the wood.

I worked him until my shoulder burned. He put his huge hand over mine and made me faster. The head shoved through the ring of my fingers again and again, wetter each time. I watched it the way I had watched that first drop of sweat on his throat — helpless, hungry, ashamed of the watching.

When he spent it jumped in my grip and painted my wrist and my belly and the dirt between us in thick ropes that kept coming. The smell of that mixed with the smell of his skin and I thought I would spend just from breathing. My hips made a small stupid circle on the ground. I bit my lip and did not finish. I did not know if I was allowed.

He looked at me with heavy eyes. He touched my wet mouth with his thumb, curious, as if he were not sure I was real. Then he pointed at the dark path back to the village.

Go.

I went.

The pig-path felt longer walking back. My wrist shone. I washed in the river before I slipped onto my mat. Cold water. Scrubbing. The spend left my skin and stayed in my head. I could still smell him on my hands after the water.

I put those hands between my legs and finished what the fear had not let me finish in front of him, biting the mat, seeing that thick dark shape behind my eyes, the way it had jumped, the way my fingers would not close.

I walked fine the next day.

My legs worked. My feet found the stones. Mother gave me millet. Sister asked if I had slept. I said the heat.

I had slept. Some.

When I turned the pork on the cooking stones my thighs pressed together and I thought of tough hide and a forearm-thick heat and a thank-you I had no word for.

He had sent me home.

I already knew I would go back.

CHAPTER 3 — STONES AND WORK

BIBLE AMENDMENT The outside man has no hair to speak of in this telling. Do not mention hair on his chest, belly, arms, jaw, or head as a scent-place or a sight. Smell lives in sweat, skin, fat, hide, breath, and the spend she already knows. His chest is a wall. His throat is a wet river. Stop there.

—

The day after I walked home fine, the house was the same house.

Millet to grind. Water to lift. Hides to scrape. Pork to turn. Sister’s needle. Mother’s pot. Brother’s fence talk. The roof that did not leak.

My wrist remembered a thickness my fingers could not close around. That was the only new thing, and it was not a thing I could set on a shelf.

I ground millet.

The stone was warm from the season. I put my weight on the grinder the way he had put my palm on his chest — circle, press, down — and the grain went to meal too fast, sloppy, because my arms were thinking of a boulder that breathed. I stopped. I started again smaller, like a good daughter. The meal piled. My thighs were already slick inside the wrap and I had only been awake for the time it takes to walk to the river and back.

Sweat never smells good.

I said it while I worked. The stone did not care.

Mother sent me for water. The gourd was heavy. I liked that. Heavy made sense. I passed the trade stones without meaning to look and looked anyway. Pale hides. No frame. No wall of a man. The north path was empty dust again.

On the way back the wind turned.

The smell hit me so clean I nearly dropped the gourd.

Salt. Animal. Burnt. Green. The same hands the smell had the first day, except now the smell knew what my palm had done. It went between my legs as if it had a right.

I set the gourd down hard enough to spill and ran to the yard.

There he was.

Not here.

He was a wide dark shape at the far edge of the trade ground, speaking his cave-stone noise to an elder, wiping his face with that enormous hand, sweat flying into dust. He turned toward the thicket, not toward our door.

He was not coming here.

I stood in the yard with wet running down the inside of one thigh and millet-dust on my wrists and a look on my face I could feel from the inside, ugly and open.

Sister said my name-that-is-not-a-name from the doorway, the short sound we use when someone is being strange.

I picked up the gourd. I said the spill was the heat. I carried water like a person who had not just run toward a man the way a dog runs toward a smell.

Inside, I poured. My hands shook. Mother watched the pour, not my face, which was worse.

I scraped hides in the shade.

The hide was work I had done since I was small. Scrape, fold, scrape. The blade whispered. I thought of his chest under my palm, hot enough to cook on, no give in it. I thought of the fat he had poured, smoke-clean, mixing with the rivers on his belly until my hands shone. I thought of the sound he made, the one that lived in the fallen trunk.

The blade whispered. I was wet enough to leave a mark if I sat wrong.

I did not sit wrong. I stood and scraped and hated the hide for being dead and cool.

Midday Mother put me on the pot.

Stir. Root. Fat from our own pig, not his little skin of rendered grease. The spoon went around the way he had taught my fist to go — slow, tight, then faster when his big hand closed over mine. I stirred like a fool. Broth climbed the rim. Mother took the spoon from me without a word and set me to turning pork on the stones instead.

The stones were hot.

Of course they were hot. That is what stones are for in this season.

I turned the meat and the heat came up through the wrapping at my knees and I thought of sitting beside his knee in the thicket. I thought of the leather pushed aside. I thought of the thing that had risen out of him thick as my forearm, head like a fist, wet at the slit, twitching in the night air.

Will I walk after.

I had walked fine. That was the joke. My legs had worked. The question had not been for yesterday. The question was for a day I had not lived yet, and my body was already trying to live it on the cooking stones.

Fat popped. I pressed my thighs together. The wrap clung. I shifted and felt myself slip against myself and had to bite the inside of my cheek.

Sister was mending two steps away. She did not look up. Her needle kept time like a small honest heart.

I wanted to put my face against the wall of him and breathe. Not like a lover. Like a dog. I knew that. I had known it since the wind first turned. Only dogs do that. Why had I never wanted to smell anyone else. Am I normal.

The pork browned. I turned it. I did not sneak out. It was day. There was no night-thick path to lie to myself with.

Afternoon was water again, then the gardens, then a second hide because I asked for more work the way a person asks for a lid on a pot that is boiling.

Brother talked about ridge-men seen far off, nothing close. I made the right noises. I thought of a thank-you that was not words. Body for body. My shining hands. His spend on my wrist in ropes that kept coming. The smell of that mixed with the smell of his skin.

I had washed the wrist in the river. The river had done its work. The head had not.

Near dusk I went to wash the day’s honest dirt off me.

The current was brown. I waded in. I meant only to be clean.

My hand went under the water by itself.

I bit my wrist — the same wrist — and spent in the current standing up, knees loose, thinking of the stroke he wanted, the filthy wet sound of fat and sweat, the way he had pointed at the path and said go with his hand because he had no word I owned.

I came back dripping. I changed the wrap. The old one was soaked in a place that was not river.

I put it with the wash pile and prayed Mother was tired.

Night.

The house settled. Brother snored. Sister’s breath went long. Mother turned once.

I lay on my mat and did not go.

The not-going was a kind of work too. Harder than millet. I could see the small red eye of his fire if I let myself. I could feel the fallen trunk. I could feel how easy it would be to take another parcel, or no parcel, only myself.

I did not take myself.

I put two fingers where I was swollen and bit the cloth and finished fast and mean, not like the first night’s long shaking, more like putting out a coal with a foot so the house would not burn. It did not put the coal out. It taught the coal the shape of the mat.

I slept in pieces.

In one piece of sleep he was at the trade stones and the wind turned and I ran and he still did not come to the door.

In another he put my hand down again and I still could not close my fingers.

When the birds started I got up sore in the hips from nothing but wanting. I ground millet. The stone was warm. Circle, press, down.

He was not coming here.

The wanting stored itself anyway, like meat for a lean season, and every chore I owned had learned his shape, and I kept my eyes on my work, and I did not take the pig-path.

Not that night.

The night after that was another matter, and I had not admitted that yet, not even to the mat.

CHAPTER 4 — THE WALL

I lasted one more day of stones and work.

Only one.

The millet remembered his chest. The spoon remembered my fist. The wrap remembered the river. I did not take the pig-path that first stored-up night, and the storing did not make me good. It made me thin in the head.

The second night I brought pork again, and fermented millet in a gourd, and myself, which was the true parcel.

His fire was the same small red eye. He was waiting as if waiting were a kind of sitting. Sweat still shone on his throat. The heat had not learned manners.

He ate the meat the same way — gone, no pause, a pit with no bottom. He drank. He pulled me into his lap as if I weighed nothing.

My back hit the wall of him. Hot. No give. The smell closed over my head: salt, animal, burnt, green, and under it the ghost of his spend from the night my wrist had learned him. I made a sound I did not own.

He stripped the wrap from my chest and looked at my breasts the way a hungry man looks at a second serving. His mouth was hot. The scrape of his jaw was skin and heat, not softness. He sucked until I grabbed at his shoulders and could not span them. My hips moved in his lap by themselves. I felt him under the leather, that forearm-thick rise, already hard, already a problem I had come back to on purpose.

He uncorked the fat. Poured it into his palm. Poured it on my hands. Put my hands on him the way he had the first night — circle, press, down — except this time he pulled me tighter so my slick belly and breasts slid on the wet wall of his chest while I worked him. Body for body. Work for work. My skin going everywhere his sweat already was.

I thought: this I can do. This I can give.

He pushed the leather aside.

I knew the sight now and it still stopped my throat. Dark. Heavy. Thick as my forearm at the root, head like a fist, wet at the slit. I could not close my fingers. I did not try to pretend I could.

He put my mouth where my hand had been.

I could not take much. My jaw ached at once. The taste was salt and skin and the same smell that had ruined the cooking stones, thicker now, living on my tongue. I used what I could — lips, spit, the fat, the stroke he had taught me — and the rest of him stayed a hot weight against my cheek and throat, a thing I could hold and smell and not swallow.

I was let down already and he had not even asked me for the rest.

He laid me on the hide.

His hand covered my whole mound. One finger was thicker than any village man I had let near me. He found I was already soaked and made a pleased grunt I felt in my spine.

He opened me on that single finger, slow, watching my face. It stretched. It burned in a thin bright line. It also made my hips lift off the hide without permission.

He added a second finger and I grabbed his wrist with both hands and still could not stop him. I did not want to stop him. The burn went wider. My eyes watered. My cunt made a wet sound around him that mortified me and made his mouth show all its teeth.

Then his other hand went lower.

A thick pad of thumb — no: a finger, slick with me and with fat — pressed the tight back hole I only knew as a place for waste. I startled. I would have said no if I had a word he owned.

He did not stab. He circled. He pressed. The tip of him there was a different bright. Not the same stretch as the two fingers in my cunt, not foreign enough to be another country. The same ecstasy with a different door.

Animal thoughts came that I had no right to. Pigs in the yard. Dogs. The way a body has more than one hunger-mouth. If he put that finger in, would I spend like a beast in the dirt. Would I want it again. Would I want thicker.

He worked both at once.

Front and back. Two thick fingers pumping the soaked place, one slower pressure at the rear, and my mouth still on him whenever he let me rise to it, sloppy, jaw screaming, tasting him while he wrung me.

It felt so good I was ashamed of how good.

The back play especially — small, mean, exact — sent sparks up that made me push onto his hand like I had no village and no mother and no wrap to go home to. I thought, stupid and clear: I should try this at home with the long pale garden fruit, the thickest one, the one Mother pickles. I should learn that door before I come here again. I did not have time to be shocked at my own mind. He kept fingering me until I was dripping down the hide, down his wrist, down onto my own heels.

When I spent on his hand I thought I had pissed myself. I had not. It just felt that much. The back hole clenched in time with the front and the difference and the sameness braided and I sobbed into the root of him, drooling fat and spit, full of smell and taste and the slick sound of my own body giving up.

He let me shake.

Then he put more fat on himself until he shone. He put more fat on me until I was a mess. He lined that dark blunt head up where his fingers had been.

My mind said yes.

My mind had been saying yes since the wind first turned.

He pushed.

The head alone made me arch and claw the hide. I had thought I understood stretch. I had not. It was a thick, slow, splitting pressure that did not care what I had decided about pain. The tip seated — that fist of a head — and my mouth opened on a sound that was not pleasure and not only pain.

He gave me a finger-width more.

My hips said they would split.

Not a thought. A fact in the bone. The wall inside me was not a mood. It was a door too small for the beast I was holding. Penetration with this was not possible. Not tonight. Not with the body I had carried here like an offering that had turned out the wrong size.

I grabbed his sides. I shook my head. Tears went sideways into my hair — my hair, not his; he was smooth heat and sweat and the wall of chest I had slid on.

He stopped.

He was breathing through his nose like a bull. Sweat dripped from his throat onto my breasts. The head of him throbbed in that first impossible ring and even that little was a claim. I was dripping around it, traitor body, still fluttering from his fingers, still tasting him, still smelling the whole thicket as if it had been built out of his skin.

I felt I had failed.

Food I could give. Hands I could give. Mouth I could give, badly, jaw-sore. The sliding of my whole front on his wet chest I could give. This — the thing his thickness wanted, the thing my mind had already handed over — I could not.

I have to do better.

I said it in my own language against his shoulder, which he could not hear as words. I licked the sweat there because I could not take him and I could still do that. Salt. Animal. The green burnt thing. Sensory pile-on until I could not tell if I was going to spend again or be sick or laugh.

He eased back.

He put his fingers back.

Cunt and back hole together again, filthy and kind, until I was dripping in strings and spent a second time with his cock laid heavy on my belly, a forearm I could hold and kiss and not house. I worked him with both slippery hands and my aching mouth and the glide of my breasts, let down, fascinated, overloaded, and when he spent it striped my chest and caught in the hollow of my throat and I breathed it like a dog because that was the one truth I had never been able to talk myself out of.

He pointed at the path.

Go.

I went.

I walked like a woman who had been over a horse that had only begun to move. Not ruined. Not fine. A warning in the hips. The first ring of me throbbed around nothing, remembering a head that had not been allowed farther.

Mother was not asleep when I slipped in. She was a shape in the dark that did not speak. In the morning she looked at my throat, where his mouth had left a mark I had not hidden well enough, and at the way I set my feet.

She did not ask where I had been.

She gave me water. She put extra millet in my bowl.

Sister sat by my feet and pretended to mend a wrap and did not look at my face.

I closed my eyes and I could still smell him. I could still taste him. I could still feel the finger-width that had been too much, and the back hole that had not been asked for and had liked it anyway.

I had failed the one thing.

I would do better.

In the garden, later, when I was sent for root, my eyes found the long pale fruit Mother pickles — the thickest one, cool in the shade, blunt at the end. I did not touch it. Not yet.

Fear had closed me. I knew that now. The mind had said yes and the body had believed a split that might have been fear wearing the mask of bone.

Next time I would have to give myself fully, or not go.

I already knew I would go.

CHAPTER 5 — UNTIL THE SKY GOES PALE

The extra millet sat in my bowl like a kindness and a warning.

I ate it. My hips carried the memory of a head that had only begun. The first ring of me throbbed when I sat, when I stood, when I turned pork and the fat popped and my mind went, traitor, straight back to the hide.

Sister mended. Mother did not ask. The mark on my throat darkened.

They sent me to the garden for root.

The long pale fruit were stacked in the shade where Mother pickles them. Blunt ends. Thick as a wrist, the biggest ones thicker. Cool skins. I had passed them all my life and thought only of sour jars and winter.

Now I thought of women I would never see.

Somewhere in the far grass, where the great shaggy beasts were not stories, there were women who belonged to men built like him. How did they do it. How did they house a thing that thick. Did they start as children on smaller men and grow the door. Did they use fat and time and a stubbornness I had failed at. He had taken from dusk until my jaw failed and his body had not lain down. A man like that would want a night, not a visit. Whole dark. The time it takes the moon to climb and fall. How did those women walk in the morning. Did they walk.

I looked at the thickest fruit until my face felt hot.

Fear shuts a body. I had seen it in animals all my life and called it nothing.

A pig that fights the rope stays tight. A pig that goes still opens for the knife, for the hand, for the work. Dogs that panic bite and clamp. Dogs that trust roll over and give you every soft place. A doe in the snares that thrashes breaks her own leg. The one that breathes and waits can be cut free.

My mind had said yes. My hips had believed they would split. Maybe the split was fear wearing bone’s mask. Maybe the women of the far grass were not bigger than me. Maybe they only stopped fighting the size of what they wanted.

I have to give myself fully, or not go.

I took the thickest fruit.

Not to the house. Behind the garden fence, where the beans make a wall and the river-sound covers smaller sounds. I used the clean fat from the cooking skin I had pocketed like a thief.

Front first.

I was still sore from his head. The blunt end asked the same question he had asked, only cooler, only dead, only a thing I could stop without failing a living man. I breathed. I thought of the pig that goes still. I did not clamp. I let the fat work. I let the fruit seat deeper than a finger-width, deeper than last night’s wall, and the burn went wide and then — not gone, never gone — usable. I spent on it with my wrist in my teeth, shaking in the beans, furious that a pickle-fruit could teach me what I had denied him.

Then the back door.

That one I had already liked. Animal-door. Waste-door that had sparked anyway. The fruit was thicker than his finger. I went slower. Circle. Press. The same ecstasy with a different hinge. I thought of dogs. I thought of how a body has more than one hunger-mouth. I took what I could and spent again, quieter, meaner, and lay in the dirt between the rows until my legs remembered they were legs.

I washed the fruit in the current. I put it back with the others. No one counts pickles in the hot season.

I walked back to the house with a secret that was not only him now. It was me, choosing.

Night.

I did not bring pork. I brought the fat-skin and myself.

His fire was low. He had the leaf-twist already, bitter-sweet, a coal waiting. He looked at me a long time. He saw the walk. He saw I had come knowing.

He put the leaf aside and pulled me in.

There was no slow teaching.

He got me on my hands and knees on the hide because that way he could hold my whole hip in one hand and the back of my neck in the other. When he pushed, I was still sore and the soreness made every increment brighter. I did not shake my head. I breathed like the pig that goes still. I thought of the fruit in the beans and the women of the far grass and the yes I had already spent.

The head seated.

The finger-width after it came, and my hips tried to tell the old lie about splitting, and I did not obey the lie. I pushed back.

The wall gave a little.

I heard myself make an animal noise into the hide.

He fucked me like a man who had carried the far north on his back and had decided I was the thing he would empty himself into until the sky changed color.

I have no true count of how long. The moon moved. The night insects changed their song. My arms gave out and he caught me around the waist and kept going, my cheek in the fur, my mouth open. He was so deep I felt him in my stomach. When I clenched he made that cave-stone sound and drove harder.

He would work me until I was shaking and dripping and half-gone, and then he would pull out — still standing, still thick, shining with me — and sit back on his heels and take up the leaf again. Five breaths of smoke. Maybe the time it takes to skin a small fish. I would lie there twitching, aftershocks running through my thighs, my hole slow to close, leaking his spend into the hide. I could not stop moving. My hips kept making small helpless circles on nothing, chasing a fullness that had just left.

Then he would put the leaf down and put himself back in, and each time he seated himself a finger-width deeper than the time before, as if my body were a path he was cutting and I had finally stopped stacking rocks in it.

The third time he came back I thought I would split and I let the thought pass through and did not make it a law. The fourth time I spent so hard I lost the village, the trees, the good roof, everything except the drag of him and the smell of his sweat raining on my back.

He never went soft. The leaf-rests were not because he needed to. They were because he liked watching me lie there ruined and still offering. This was how the far-grass nights must go. This was the hours I had no word for: a man’s heat that does not lie down when a village boy would have rolled off and snored.

Toward the pale edge of morning he turned me onto my back and folded me until my knees were at my shoulders. That way I had to look at him. That way I saw the wet wall of his chest and the thick column of him disappearing into me and coming out shiny and coming back. He put his forehead against mine. His breath was leaf-smoke and salt. He said something in his not-words that might have been a name or a claim or only noise.

He gave me the last of it then. All of it. The place that had been the wall of the world opened and he sank until his hips met mine and I could not take air. I spent on that last width with my mouth on his shoulder so I would not wake the pigs. He spent with a groan that I felt in my teeth and kept rolling through it, short and heavy, until there was nothing left in either of us.

He did not pull out for a long time. When he did, I could not close my legs. I could not find my feet.

He lay down in the grass a little off the hide and I crawled to him because the hide was a lake and I could not stand. I put my face against the wet wall of his chest the way I had wanted to the first day, like a dog, and breathed. He put one enormous hand on the back of my head and left it there.

I slept.

When I woke the sun was high and vicious. He was gone from beside me. The frame and the hides were gone. The fire was ash. There was a strip of the pale far-north hide under my cheek, cut clean, as if he had left a piece of that other world in payment or in memory. On it he drew the mountain of my village with snow on top. Will he be back in winter?

I sat up and the world tilted. Between my legs I was swollen and open and painted with dried spend and grass. When I tried to stand my knees folded. I laughed once, a stupid small sound, because I had asked myself if I would walk proper and now I had the answer.

I lay back in the grass until the shaking quit. Then I crawled to the river on my hands and knees like a child and sat in the cold water up to my waist until I could feel my feet again.

I made it home past noon, slow, using the garden fence. I passed the pickle-fruit in the shade and did not look at them long. They had done their work. He had done the rest.

Mother was at the door. She looked at my hair and my walk and the mark his mouth had left that I had not hidden well enough.

She did not ask where I had been.

She gave me water. She put me on my mat. My sister sat by my feet and pretended to mend a wrap and did not look at my face.

I closed my eyes and I could still smell him. Salt. Hide. Leaf-smoke. The thing that had never smelled good on any other man.

I did not know if he would come back on the north path.

I knew that the reed-boys at the night fire would look even smaller now.

I knew that when I butchered pig I would think of tough hide and thick heat and a weight that made the ground notice.

I knew the women of the far grass were not a different animal. They were this: still, open, given.

I knew I was not a child.

And I knew that whatever was wrong in me — the wanting to smell him, the wetness at the cooking stones, the way I had pushed back onto a thing that hurt — it had a name now, even if I still had no word for it.

It was him.

It was still him, in the ache, in the leak I could not stop, in the way my hips twitched on the mat when I remembered the leaf-rests and the next width.

I turned my face into the sleeping cloth so no one would see me smile.