Scratch. Steve Himmer
about her son or some other part of her life beyond this project, anything to turn the conversation away from himself and to find out more about her. But the half-formed question on the tip of his tongue is interrupted by the rumble of vehicles bumping onto the shoulder between the site and the road.
Members of the crew begin arriving in heavy trucks with doors that don’t match. The bulldozer operator rumbles up on the motorcycle he assembled himself from spare parts, or so Martin has heard. The crew is still small at the moment, just enough men run an excavator, a bulldozer, and a dump truck; this is their first day on the site, replacing the tree crew who finished on Friday.
The men park in the mud along the edge of the road, and Alison walks toward them, leaving Martin behind by the trailer. He watches as she speaks and gestures to the crew, giving instructions or telling a story, but he can’t make out what she’s saying over the chaos of further arrivals.
A shiny silver food truck parks on the soft shoulder, and its wall swings open in a burst of white steam. The crew crowds around to buy coffee, cigarettes, and pastries with no particular flavor. Construction on this scale doesn’t take place in these parts too often, so there isn’t much need for such a truck, but when one of the local farmers heard Martin’s plans in town meeting he took out a loan and bought it. He’s hoping this development will lead to more building in the near future, and his glistening steel gamble will pay for itself the way his farm hasn’t in so many years, the way his ancestors supplemented their farming with maple syrup and logging and furs, the way some of his neighbors craft handmade authentic antiques in their barns after dark and the way their grandfathers did, too.
The men mill around in the mud, smoking over foam cups of coffee. They greet Martin with nods and grunts and the occasional word, polite but impersonal. He tells the first few good morning, then tilts his head to the rest, suddenly exhausted and struggling to keep his eyes open. He was flush with adrenaline when he walked out of the woods but he’s coming down fast and all of his aches are turning to throbs and his clarity is becoming a cloud. The cuts sting again, Gil’s ointment and whiskey both wearing off, and he absentmindedly holds the buttons of his shirt away from his chest as if it’s the pressure of the fabric causing him pain. The skin he kept dry in the shower didn’t get washed, and now that the rest of his body is clean the itching in that area has grown even worse.
He feels every bruise as a weight on his body, as a tightness under his ribs, and he stretches his arms up behind his head to expand his lungs and relieve the pressure. He doesn’t feel like himself; he’s aware of muscles he doesn’t recall being aware of before, only noticing them now because they’re so sore. His head swirls with the flotsam and jetsam of exhaustion, images and phrases rising to the surface of his mind without order or purpose, as if they aren’t coming from Martin at all but are bubbling up from somewhere else.
His struggle may sound familiar, his mind and his body at odds for control. That’s probably about how you’re feeling right now in your borrowed coyote, pestering you with its canine urges and heightened senses. Wearing a new body is always a change. It takes time to get the sense of your shape.
A long time ago, before even the oldest tree rings in this forest had formed and the great-grandparents of today’s oldest trunks hadn’t grown, I had no shape at all. I hadn’t yet learned I could take one as I drifted across the still unseeded ground.
Drifted isn’t quite right—that sounds as if I was moving and I never moved, I never came and never went, because without a body to limit my range I was everywhere in these woods all at once. I occupied no space so I wasn’t limited by the size I took up in the world. I watched the first saplings grow, and the first humming insects rattle their wings before lifting off into the air, and I wondered how it must feel to be one of them. So I squeezed myself into the hard-shelled shape of a beetle and suddenly the world became smaller. After knowing everything there was to know in these woods, the grand scope of time and the intricacies of how each life and death fit together with every other from one year to the next, I became a finite, miniscule part. And I was shocked at how complicated the world can appear from that angle—I’d expected the opposite, that the confines of a limited life would be boring, constrictive, but the forest was as rich through the eyes of a beetle as it had ever been when I could see the whole world at once.
I didn’t stay in that first insect body for long; the compression of my consciousness was too shocking. But over time, across what you might measure out in millennia, I became more adept. I wasn’t as startled by how the world shifted from species to species. I grew used to having a body, any body, and it’s been ages now since I spent very much time in the shapelessness of myself.
I knew, before, what all the animals and trees in these woods were thinking, but I knew it the way you know the sky is up there and the ground is down here; I took all those momentary lives and flickering thoughts for granted, but when I put myself into that beetle—and the oak trees and foxes that followed—each individual life in the forest became a story I needed to know. And I needed to know each of them in their own voice. I’ve had a long time to listen to the stories of creatures you may not know ever existed. And that collection is the closest thing I have to a tale of my own—all those borrowed shapes and borrowed stories, one after the other, lives piled upon lives, almost add up to a shape that is mine.
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