Movement Nine — Under the Tree, Far From the Smell of Metal

When I woke, I was still with Iris.

She was asleep beside me, the particular boneless, unguarded way she sleeps when nothing in any world has given her reason yet to wake — and I want to tell you, honestly, that some very old, very simple part of me found this almost funny, lying there beside her in the gold, unhurried light of a meadow that had clearly never once heard the sound of an axe breaking against anything. I really am nothing more than a plant, I thought, to have caused so much trouble. To have carried something like that inside me for however long it had taken to run its course, and to wake, afterward, into exactly this — warm grass, warm light, a woman sleeping quietly beside me as though nothing at all had happened while I was gone.

I noticed, lying there, that the smell was already gone — entirely, completely, as though it had never once had any claim on this particular stretch of grass at all. I breathed in, slow and deliberate, half expecting the iron and the rot and the smoke to still be waiting somewhere at the back of it, and found only the ordinary, familiar sweetness of the meadow at that permanent gold hour, warm grass and warmer skin and, faintly, whatever had been left cooling in that abandoned cup near the hearth. I pressed my hand flat against the ground beside me, testing it the way you'd test something you weren't yet certain you trusted, and felt only soft, unbroken earth, no chill settled deep beneath it, no memory of knees that weren't mine pressed into the same patch of grass before me.

I leaned in and kissed her face, gently, at the soft place near her temple where her hair had fallen loose across it in sleep, and felt her stir, faintly, without waking. We ended up asleep again after that, together, under the old nameless tree at the meadow's edge, far — impossibly far, in every sense that mattered — from whatever had thickened the air in that other place, that other morning, that other body I still wasn't entirely certain had ever truly been mine.

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I don't know how I got there. I don't know, even now, whether any of it had truly happened at all, or whether it had simply been some strange, unwelcome dream, the kind that arrives uninvited and leaves without explaining itself, the way certain memories do when you least expect company. I turned the question over once, briefly, lying there in the warm grass with Iris's breath slow and even against my shoulder, and found that I didn't have the strength left to hold it for very long. Perhaps that, too, is simply what a plant is — a thing built to notice the weather it has just survived, and then, gently, without any great ceremony, to let itself stop noticing, because noticing forever was never once part of what it was made for.

I thought, distantly, of the man who had begged, and of the certainty in his voice at the very end, and wondered whether some quieter, gentler version of whatever had moved through me that morning had reached him too, somewhere in whatever came after his own last breath. I hoped it had. I found I couldn't hold that thought very long either.

But I am a plant, and there is only so much a plant can be expected to know, and only so far a plant can be expected to think before the thinking itself becomes its own kind of labor. So I didn't think about it any further than that. I simply let myself sleep, beside her, under gold light, and let the tree above us go on doing what it always does at that hour — nothing at all, simply standing, ancient and patient, keeping watch over both of us until morning decided, in its own unhurried way, to arrive.

— End of Chapter —