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In a distant way she noted that she couldn’t see any car, that there was no obvious way the Corner had arrived.
You never do the right thing, you left them—left them! Should’ve run for the keys, the car, the gun.
Ahead were the graves, off kilter and snowcapped.
Yes, yes! The trail. Almost there. The trail will be easier.
Her feet were perforated by a thousand cuts, each step requiring she fully will it into reality. The cold penetrated her calves, crawled up her inner thighs, grabbed at her privates in a way that made her think someone had skimmed a blade from knee to groin and was pulling out the lace of arteries and veins through her muscles the way she might pull a weed, lift the stringy tangle of roots from dirt.
Unbearable! You need to stop, you need to warm your feet.
No. If you stop, you’ll never get up again.
She reached the graves, picked through them by memory, most just lumps in the snow, completely covered.
Don’t trip, don’t trip on them!
But she already had. She fell over the smallest one, hidden under a snowdrift. The headstone of the eight-month-old, date of death just prior to the Civil War.
She caught herself, hand clutching the snow-dusted winged skull on the tallest stone.
“Mother, Father, I will meet you in heaven,” read the epitaph of the grave she’d stumbled over.
She remembered it. Had read it many times, her brows knit as she stood over that tiny marker, imagining what that must have been like for that particular mother and father.
See? This is nothing. Nothing compared to that. You have to get through this. So that doesn’t happen. No little graves.
Her legs were ripped apart. Her feet were useless.
All those stories, all those movies, lies. Lies and more lies about what people could take. What a mother could do. How much pain the human body could live with. The final girl beating down armed men, outrunning monsters.
It’s like childbirth. No choice.
That’s right. And women die in childbirth. And you’ll die, too, if you don’t move.
She stood, moved forward, her progress slower after her stumble. Some part of her had twisted such that pain traveled from her ankle up to her back teeth.
Her feet were nothing but pained stumps. Her body shook such that the cold seemed to penetrate her marrow, curling to make a home there.
Shouldn’t your feet be numb by now? When will they go numb? How can you hardly control them, yet still feel every little bit of awfulness?
Her hand was wet in her left pocket. She pulled it out, looked at it. In the darkness her blood was black.
It’s just a cut. A cut from catching yourself on the gravestone.
The amount of blood disturbed her. The cut slashed across the round part of her whitened palm. Blood pulsed out of it, thick over her wrist where the pearlescent marking met pigmented skin. The blood slickened the fur of the coat.
She stuffed her hand back into her pocket. Closed her wet fist in the lining, sticky warm in the middle but quickly chilling to freeze at the edges.
Don’t look, it’s not that much blood.
Hurry—hurry! It’s been too long since you left them. How long has it been?
She kept moving, eyes on the trail ahead. The trees bent over it, heavy with snow. It looked like a tunnel dug by some great creature, round and dark. The home of devils and unknowable things.
Stop it! The devil is what’s behind you. The woods are just the woods.
There was a scratching in the air.
