Hand's Breadth

A house under the Penyagolosa, and the woods that want it back.

The fox came back in the night. I put my hand out in the dark and found the boy breathing, and at the window two low eyes waited, patient, for me to look away. Foxes used to run from us. This one held my stare and yawned.

There is a hand’s width of petrol left in the red can. Enough for the generator, or enough for the saw. Light, or the line. The meat in the dead fridge will turn by Thursday either way.

We cut the line at first light. The forest takes a hand’s breadth of the clearing every night while we sleep — broom and the first soft fingers of the holm oaks, reaching in. By morning the dark has crept closer to the house and we walk the edge with the saw and push it back. My palms are open now where the blisters were. I wrap them in a tea towel and grip below the splits.

Marta burns what we cut. Every evening the green goes on the fire and the smoke comes up thick and sweet — the resin of the holm oaks, and under all of it the smell of rain on hot stone, though no rain has fallen in weeks. I used to call it the smell of the mountain. I used to think it was ours.

In spring, men used to walk up the mountain barefoot and in silence to ask it for rain. It has not come since we did.

It isn’t bucolic. I know that now. It is incense.

We came up to the house under Penyagolosa to be away from the thing that was happening below, and the thing that was happening below stopped mattering, and now there is only the line. The car has not moved in months. There’s no road anymore. And even if there were, there’s no fuel to move it. The fuel is for the saw. The saw is for the line. The line is for — I had told myself it was for us. To keep something between the boy and the trees.

But the animals are not afraid anymore. The fox. The boar that came to the door and stood there like a guest. The owls that have stopped asking and simply arrive. They don’t behave like things near a thing they fear. They behave like the patient. Like a congregation that has been told the hour and is only waiting for the bells to announce it.

I understand the arrangement better than I let Marta see. We sweep the ground. We keep it clean. We burn the green at dusk and the smoke goes up and up.

And the rite is not for us.

This morning I made the choice. I poured what was left into the saw and not the generator. The meat will rot; we’ll be hungry; the dark fridge will stink for a week. I took the saw to the edge and cut back the night’s advance, my hands wet through the towel, and the smell came off the cut stems so strong it stung — rosemary, resin, the iron underneath.

The boy stood in the doorway in his pyjamas and watched me work. Six years old. He didn’t ask why I was crying. He’s learned not to ask. Nor to cry with me.

I am not keeping him safe. I see it plainly, the saw bucking in my ruined hands. I am keeping the altar clean. I am tending the place against the day it is owed what it is owed, and the smallest of us is the brightest thing in all this green, and they are not afraid anymore, and I cannot get him out, because there is no fuel, because the fuel is for the line.

I finished the edge. I banked the cuttings for tonight’s fire.

Tomorrow the forest will have taken another hand’s breadth, and I will push it back, and the smoke will go up sweet toward the mountain, and the eyes will wait at the window, patient as anything, for me to look away.

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Written for Ariadne’s Web, Ariadne Pautina‘s weekly image prompt. An offering, as asked.