By Maria McLeod

Featured Art: “Reservoir” by Mateo Galvano

In the weeks and months preceding attempts to rescue me, I had become increasingly despondent. I had developed an urge to dig. It was a fantasy of detachment: asexual, dark, isolated. I took to it the way a person may take to a new job or a new house in a faraway state where they hope to reemerge unrecognizable. I wanted to burrow, to wriggle my way through the murky water table, to traverse the ruins of ancient civilizations, to eat through the slick layers of slate, granite, limestone, and, deeper still, to find the Earth’s hot core, to finally come to rest along the perimeter of that core and to fall into a deep sleep wrapped in ashes, to bake as if in a Dutch oven, a slow kind of smoldering, until my sleep turned into an endless coma, until my flesh melted away from the bones and the bones themselves, thoroughly stewed, went rubbery.

There was no exposed or available land surrounding my apartment, so I went to the lawn of the church next door and dug with my hands. I didn’t penetrate very deeply, but I did dig up enough to fill a rusty lunchbox. The smell of that dirt was the smell of a childhood lived outdoors. My stolen portion—special thanks to Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception—included a fragment of Styrofoam cup, countless dead insects of an indecipherable origin (at least to the naked eye), three live earthworms, and a bug which resembled, on a very small scale, an armadillo. And, of course, there was the dirt: black damp topsoil which, when pinched together, stuck. It was the type of soil gardeners of drier states might worship, but it was spring in Michigan, and this was the kind of soil one expected and didn’t think to celebrate.

I kept that dirt in an old Gallo wine jug next to my bed. Things grew, or tried to, but I thwarted their efforts by intermittently shaking the jug, turning the world upside down and back upon itself. I squashed what life I could and tried to keep the bottle out of the sun. Mostly, I used the dirt as an inspiration for my fantasies, as a portal to an unworld, the place I sought, without let up, at every opportunity. Prior to my fantasy sessions, which could be best described as a depressive brand of meditation, I eked a bit of that dirt out, and, like communion, took a dollop upon my tongue, careful not to chew. The first time was a bit shocking and not at all pleasant. I was careful not to include anything visibly living and tried not to think about the possibility of insect or worm excrement. Eventually, I let my saliva do its duty of breaking it down, dissolving and transforming it into a digestible form. That is, at some point, I swallowed it.

Initially my fantasies weren’t wild or wonderful, essentially because my geological imagination was limited by what I had learned—and mostly forgotten—from grade school. The first month or two I could only imagine traversing the outer layer, that hairy epidermis of the Earth from whence my jug of dirt had come. As fantasies go, mine were repetitive, usually dressed in the same clothing, carrying the same props. I was, at that time, working at a lab where we conducted urinalyses and a variety of blood tests for clinics all over the thumb of Michigan. The world of my skull was still largely comprised of rules, formulas, outcomes that could be tested and proven. Initially, I had a difficult time letting go of the parameters imposed upon me, but I got better at it.

My travels began with a sense of turning my back on the world, of leaving town for a third-world country where technology hadn’t yet taken over. I embarked almost without awareness of doing so. At night, lying in bed, lamenting my life, my job, my lack of lust, I wondered where I could go, and then I thought of it: in. I took the plunge. First, I had to overcome those distasteful components, such as worms. Faceless as they were, and two-ended, I found them untrustworthy. My solution: become them. Suckling my glob of dirt, I fantasized about my worm self with the dedication morticians give to corpses. Each night, and as much of the day as I could steal away, I pulled my knees to my chin, drew the covers over my head, and practiced the calm of dark, cramped spaces, eyes shut tight. It was a practice of erasure, of untying the knot of myself, thread by ropey thread, and letting myself disperse into particles. I longed for decomposition.

After too much time neglecting my personal and public responsibilities, such as bathing, paying my half of the rent, and keeping my job (I was fired for abuse of sick days), my roommate Martha, a pragmatic gal of German descent, rolled me up in a blanket, forced me into her rusting pickup, and drove me to her aunt and uncle’s farm to “get my head straight.”

When we arrived, Martha’s relatives, her Aunt Fern and Uncle Setter, were already outside waiting on the porch swing. Like most porch swings, theirs was for show, something I later came to realize. On the day Martha dropped me off, her aunt and uncle’s casual, Norman Rockwell appearance was, of course, staged. I sat in the truck, huddled in my blanket, a sorry sight. Martha got out of the truck while I stayed behind, barely aware of where I was, blinking at the dashboard. Fern and Setter looked up at Martha with concerned, concentrated faces, as though they were reading a section of Farmers’ Almanac that predicted an early frost. When Martha was done talking, all three of them looked toward the truck, hesitating before getting up and committing themselves. Martha trotted a bit ahead of her relatives, reaching me first.

“You’re here, Shannon,” she said, opening my door. I just looked straight ahead, hearing and not hearing, regarding her like I would an infomercial, my eyes glazed over. She put her hands on the sides of my head and turned my face toward hers: “You’ve got to come back to us. You’ve got to quit playing in the dirt.”

It seemed all her family’s ills—eczema, gout, grief, hyperactive fidgetiness— had been treated with farm work. Birthing calves, shearing sheep, or simply shoveling shit all had a therapeutic effect. If I climbed out of that truck, it would be because I understood farm life to be that much closer to the earth I was craving.

I wiggled my feet, and my legs followed. Martha climbed back into the cab behind the wheel and watched with knitted brow as her aunt attempted to make contact. Fern stuck out a hand, rough and worn. When I looked confused, she waved a hand in front of me—a quick swish in front of my eyes.

“This isn’t what you’d call a free ride, Miss Shannon,” she said. “We’ll expect your help around here.” I nodded my head. Setter caught my eyes and gave me a smile of support over her shoulder.

Setter, it turned out, was a no-nonsense farmer. He kept his operation small and didn’t cut corners to raise profits, risking quality. Once, after I had turned a bit more coherent, he showed me the deep brownish-red liver taken from one of his cows shortly after slaughter. “See this,” he said. “Now this is a liver. Go visit one of those factory farms, and you know what those livers look like? A glob of gray Jell-o. You don’t want to eat a cow after it’s been force-fed that factory gruel.”

In the mornings, as Setter plowed the fields, Fern sang along to the Andrews Sisters while scouring the house with lemon and baking soda. Between her chores in the house, she tended to the larger farm animals, such as the bull and the boar. She was a thick-legged woman with hands so big she could palm the top of my head as if it were a basketball. She didn’t believe in weakness, and she shunned people who showed it.

What happened during that period of my life was that my meditative state went through a transition brought on by Fern and the farm itself. One day, during my cloistered behavior, while I still practiced the eyes-closed ritual of worming, Fern marched into my room, snatched the cover off me, and went for the jug. A skirmish ensued. Knowing few self-defense moves, I ineffectively bit Fern below the elbow of her right arm and feebly tried to scratch her face. It took her about two minutes of my inanity to wrestle that old Gallo wine jug away from me, stating only that “dirt belongs with dirt.” According to Fern, that meant outside, which is where she dumped it. I watched, stone-faced and disbelieving, from the bedroom window.

It was only through her constant neglect during the early days that I decided to get up and make her take notice of me, to emerge from the wormhole as it were. Despite her feminist tendencies, Fern did most of the cooking. She was, as Martha referred to her, from the clan of “creamy salad people.” She used real mayonnaise made from freshly laid eggs. “From nature to the kitchen table” was her motto. She didn’t coddle, but she healed and loved through her meals, and, in sideways glances, made sure you looked satisfied when you were eating. If not, she’d get up and begin cooking something else. This was a kind of mothering I’d never known. One day, helping Setter haul hay into the barn, I started talking about why I envied his life. “You’re just so close to earth. You’re walking around on something that’s alive, in motion. Those people living in cities never touch the ground. It’s all asphalt, sidewalk, carpet, tile, linoleum. No grass, no dirt.”

“That’s so?” he said, heaving a bale over my head, “What do you make of that?” “I think it’s a travesty.”

He smiled, “So do I.”

I felt I could tell him anything and did. I told him about old boyfriends, my screwy mother, and my neurotic sister. After a while I even told him about my worming. He took it all in seamlessly. And the best thing about Setter was that he didn’t ask questions about the trances; he’d just sit back and nod.

The farm opened before me like a giant birthday cake I wanted to eat continuously. Unlike a large, automated factory farm, it was singular and honest with nine cows, a bull, five sows, a handful of goats, a chicken coop, and a temperamental boar who repeatedly got loose and threw the sows into hysterics. Setter gave me a tour of the farm the first day I made my way from my bed to the barn, showing a hint of curiosity, baby steps toward my return to the living. I have pictures of myself that day taken by Setter who said he always took photos when he introduced the animals to new people. He nailed the photos to a wall inside the barn, forming an eclectic collage. He said it helped keep continuity and reminded the animals not to bite the people they knew. It was his joke on the farm’s visitors. Although I remember being thrilled to hold the squealing piglets and chase the goats, in the photos I look comatose, and, at the same time, slightly bewildered.

Thinking back on it now, it was odd how we assembled ourselves into a little family: these people I hadn’t known, and I, their strangely obsessed and grown-up foster daughter. If Fern was a classic mother in some ways, Setter was an untraditional father, the kind of father adolescents long for. He never told me what to do exactly; yet, in his actions, he told me everything. He gave me my curiosity in hogs, which quickly translated into my tending to the sows, which, given the extent of my most recent obsession, may have been a bad idea. Hogs live their entire lives close to the earth—in the earth, to be exact. They’re rooters, and his sows were especially good at it. So good, in fact, that Setter eventually let them loose, all five, in the backyard where he was hoping to rid himself of the chronically shedding jack pines, sick with bud worms and destined to crash into the house during a storm. By that point, their piglets had been weaned and sold off. The sows were itching for something to do. One day I woke to the sound of chainsaws and two of Setter’s buddies cutting down those spindly pines, leaving nothing but a half acre of ugly stumps. Then he opened the gates and called in the sows. Their chore, which they took to naturally, was to root out stumps, till and fertilize the backyard in preparation for landscaping. Where Fern had put a dent in my escapist tendencies, she hadn’t rid me of them entirely. Instead of holing up in my dim bedroom with my jug of dirt, I’d move outside as quickly as possible: from biscuits and eggs to the mudroom where I’d put on my newly acquired green rubber boots, a present from Fern and Setter. Then I’d head off into the backyard. My transition was aided by my new chore. In following the dirt outside, I found my new charge, the sows, a more fascinating subject of my attentions. I had formed a secret mission: to join them. It was like my idea of becoming a worm, just less fantastical.

*

My own mother began her departure when I was young, locking me and my little sister out of the house before the little one knew how to walk, before I knew how to run. Alone, inside, our mother ate pinwheel cookies and pancakes with raspberry syrup. She watched soap opera after soap opera: As The World Turns, Days of Our Lives, The Edge of Night. When she opened the door for the Avon lady, my sister and I, tear-stained and half starved, crawled in behind her. A few years passed and my mother gave up mothering all together. She didn’t bother locking us out anymore; she just ignored us. She fell asleep on the couch, cigarette between her fingers, smoke spiraling up to the ceiling. I learned little survival techniques, like sliding that cigarette out, careful not to wake her, and resting it in the ashtray. I tiptoed around the kitchen, sneaking bread and marshmallows to create makeshift sandwiches for my sister and me. Too short to reach the kitchen spigot, we drank water from the hose outside.

Fern told me my troubles resulted from missing a mother. We were in the kitchen, cleaning up after dinner, and I began talking about giving my baby sister a bottle when I was five, how I knew to burp her when she began to squirm. Also, how I could change cloth diapers by the time I was six. “Little mother,” was what my father called me then. But that made Fern twitch. “It wasn’t just your baby sister who needed a mama, Shannon, you did, too.” I blinked at her abrupt diagnosis. I didn’t want her to be right. Unlike Setter, she dispensed her versions of the truth like an umpire making an unpopular, but necessary, call. She could, in a glance, blow wind through the cracks of my underground world.

My father was, in the early years, a black London Fog trenchcoat and a briefcase. He worked upriver at a salt mine. Both the trenchcoat and briefcase were superfluous, designed to fool the neighbors and my mother, who had vowed as a result of her impoverished girlhood to live a bourgeois adulthood. My father was my link to the outside world, a place that fascinated and excited me. Since we rarely ventured out as a family, I had little idea what that world looked like. In snippets of my mother’s soap operas, I caught glimpses of fancy houses where people dared to drink from glass (we were only allowed paper or plastic cups) and were always dressed to the nines. When I played dolls, they were soap opera characters. In my mind, my father lived in that world, while my sister and I suffered along with my mother inside that smoke-stained ranch house on the edge of town.

Fern was right about my desire for a mother. I had been my sister’s mother until she found herself a clod of a boyfriend who wouldn’t allow me back into the house. My mother was gone by that point, institutionalized by my father some years earlier, but that’s another story. The boyfriend locked me out, permanently, along with the Avon lady and whoever else was unfortunate enough to try to penetrate the fortress. My sister sided with him. Like a dog, she was good and obedient to her food source, sad to say. I believe I taught her that. I could take a hint. I used their united front as an excuse to get going, off to junior college armed with my crinkled copy of the periodic table. That was only a few years before joining Fern and Setter, but already that version of myself seemed like a character in a book: me, an against-all-odds, full-steam-ahead gal making sense of the senseless. Until I didn’t.

*

My new charge consisted of five sows whom Fern had named a couple years ago in a momentary fit of fondness for piglets: Ginger, Maryanne, Lu-Lu, Patsy Cline, and Rox, which was short for Roxanne. Rox, the most dominant sibling, served as an eldest sister matriarch of the bunch. They were small as pigs go, a somewhat delicate breed with swirled gray and pink markings on their skin; perky, attentive ears; sparse but coarse hairs; and sharply turned-up snouts. I took to them quickly, studying their every move.

Unlike what people like to say about pigs, they’re not, by nature, dirty animals. Their shit does stink, but whose doesn’t? Also, pigs are smart. They can plot and work together, signaling each other with differently pitched snorts and quick stamps of the feet. The “gals,” as Setter referred to them, efficiently arranged themselves into a powerful workforce, with Rox at the helm. I’d head out at daybreak with some old horse brushes I’d found in the barn. I set up my vantage point for observations on one of the stumps, and the gals would rouse themselves and come visit. Lu-Lu and Ginger were the early risers and would sashay over when I’d call. It didn’t take me long to learn a few hog words. Their vocabulary isn’t nearly as extensive as our own, and the verbs never change tense; it all remains conveniently in the present. I learned I’d gain their trust quicker if I spoke their language, so I tried my best, and they seemed to appreciate the effort.

When Lu-Lu and Ginger approached, I’d greet them with short feet stamps, more like toe stamps, since I hardly lifted my foot at all. This is the sensitive part of the communication. Too much foot power means “boar or inclement weather approaching,” too little means, “I’m tired, go away.” When they got near enough, I’d set out to combing them. This is what Setter usually caught me doing each morning as he made his way out of the house to the barn. He thought this was comic since pigs have so little hair. “Make sure you get their hairs going in the right direction” was his usual comment.

Maryanne and Patsy Cline were less enthusiastic regarding communications with me. I’m not sure if they thought I was too stupid to understand, or if they never realized I was so fluent. Only when they really wanted something special, like people leftovers, did they try to converse. Also, I think their reproductive cycles had something to do with their moods. It’s a subject that humans can be touchy about, this idea that we are controlled by our hormones. I’m not sure about people, but for pigs there was definitely something to that theory. At certain times, Maryanne would refuse to converse with any of them, but that only lasted for a day or two. Patsy Cline didn’t care to converse with me, but she conversed with the others naturally, as if she’d been a bird or something noisy in her past life. Then again, I think she had passed the age of birthing and hormone fluxes.

Rox, of course, was the worst. She didn’t want to let me in to her world or pig world. If she caught one of the others trying to talk to me, she’d turn her nose down and charge. Truly hateful. All she needed was tusks and testicles and she’d be her own nemesis, a boar. Fortunately, she slept a lot.

At night, when I pretended to be asleep in my room, I’d sometimes hear Fern and Setter talk about me, my silly fondness for their pigs, which I had revealed to them at the dinner table through stories about the gals’ daily antics. In their private conversations, they’d muse that my impulse to anthropomorphize the animals must have had something to do with my lack of family and an early childhood fascination with horse whisperers and Dr. Doolittle types. I, on the other hand, was never so self-reflexive. Pondering my talents only seemed to bring on a heap of psychoanalytic depression, a circuitous quandary. Instead, I entered what Martha had tried to take me away from, a fantasy world, only this time it was inhabited by living things, pigs, doing real work with the earth, rooting.

Combing their backs was only a starting point, a way to win their affections. As soon as Setter would enter the barn to milk the cows—all done with hands on udders, no stainless-steel machinery—I’d sneak off behind the pig pen and dig with my hands. I had studied the gals’ deft snout- and footwork. Rox, when she was awake and at it, was the most determined, leading the others in the practice of diligence and hard labor. The trick was in understanding root systems, which were different depending on the plant, or, in this case, trees. The pine roots spread wide and deep. Luckily one stump was situated directly behind the pig pen. We worked together or separately, depending on the weather. When it was cold, the gals—with the exception of Rox—joined me, shielded from the wind by the pen, gathering warmth by working huddled together. These were my favorite days. Unfortunately, it was an unseasonably warm fall for Michigan, so I typically worked alone.

While Setter left me relatively undisturbed, it was Fern I learned to watch for. One day, not long after I began, she caught me talking pig with Lu-Lu, my hands in the dirt.

“Lose something?” she offered. I startled, knowing I’d been caught in the act, then I collected myself. “Fern,” I said, “I’m missing a grooming brush.”

“You grooming the pork roast?” She raised an eyebrow, one hand on her hip.

Even my attempt at a cover-up sounded screwy. So, I went with the only thing that could have helped me: “Setter said I could.”

With that, Fern leaned forward and let out a deep laugh. “That Setter, he could fool Detroiters into thinking pigs could talk.” She was smiling by now, mood less suspicious, seemingly satisfied with my answer. “By the way, what was that stomping when I walked up?”

“Lu-Lu and I were making music.”

Fern cocked her head to the side. “You are an odd one, Miss Shannon.”

“That’s why I’m on the funny farm.”

“I take humor as a sign of healing. Glad to see you’re on your way back to us.” With that, she turned away, walking toward the house. She stopped and turned back to me. “You know Setter and I had a baby girl. Martha tell you that?”

“No, I don’t recall her mentioning a cousin.”

“We lost her to scarlet fever. Martha was too little then.” She kicked a root protruding out of the ground. “Anyway, you’re welcome to stay as long as you need. You know that.”

The wind was blowing at her back, lifting up the brim of her straw hat, filling her blouse with air and ballooning it out toward me. For an instant I thought I could see the shape of that pregnancy, the way she had grown forward, jutting into the world.

I nodded toward her, feeling a wave of emotion, unable to speak for fear my voice would suddenly crack. Fern turned back toward the house.

*

Pigs, I soon learned, take to rooting like some people do crossword puzzles, just difficult enough to remain interesting, yet simple enough to allow them success. Rox would begin with a few hoof scrapes near the bottom of a stump to get the feel for the direction of the roots, revealing knotted underground branches jutting out, then diving deep. Maryanne, Patsy Cline, Lu-Lu, and Ginger would fan out in the form of a circle and begin digging. The first scrapes would be with their hooves, then they’d drop to their front knees and use their turned-up snouts like shovels and leaf blowers, digging and blowing, digging and blowing. I hated not having a snout but made up for that fact with the use of my longer than average fingers and capable hands, something that made the gals jealous. Apart from Lu-Lu, the earliest riser and my favorite, they expressed their jealousy by turning their rumps toward me and passing gas—a trick of the trade I learned to imitate. I worked on my knees, with my own rump in the air. However, I had to adjust my position to suit my body, digging on an incline, facing up instead of down. That is, when I’d dug a big enough hole, I’d sit in it and dig around myself, following the direction of the roots, of course, making a wide burrow.

The work was murder on my hands, but I soon developed calluses, or what Setter referred to as “working hands.” The jack pine roots we uncovered were beauties: shiny inside, albino white, like oversized parsnips—a pig’s delicacy.

While we worked hard during the day, nighttime wasn’t especially active for the sows, or for me. Night was time for rest. But I was struggling to sleep in my bed, fluffy as the pillows were. I began noticing a distinct difference between outside smells and house smells. I longed to lay my body down in the ruts the gals and I had made out back, to have the smell of dirt against my face and body. When I stared at the ceiling, I stared at the underside of a lid. I was contained. If I left my bed for the earth, it was because my bed was dead. I pulled my overalls over my PJs and slipped into the night.

Outside was crisp, and sometimes cold, so I took hay from the barn. There were bats in there at night, and they flew in blind figure eights when I entered. Once one brushed against the back of my neck at supersonic speed. At first, I thought it was the hand of a ghost, even though I don’t believe in ghosts. It was the touch of impermanence, like a messenger from another dimension of space and time. It gave me shivers. But outside of that moment, I felt a calm come over me under the blanket of night.

As the evenings became cooler, the sows had begun clustering in the pen, keeping warm with their pudgy bodies pressed up against each other, but for me the pen was too confining. I took to the trenches, laying down a bed of hay and putting myself on top of that. The earth smelled like lusty aphrodisiacs, edible sins. My skin tingled, not just at the erogenous zones, but all over; my eyesight improved as did my sense of smell and direction.

What I didn’t consider was whose territory I had taken. I’d thought, more naively, the earth had taken me, but I had been disrupting it, digging into it like it was my destiny. As I continued my days outdoors, something shifted. I was losing touch with the gals, miscommunication. I’d stamp my feet and Rox would snort, blowing a bit of debris in my direction. Maryanne and Patsy Cline grew lethargic and disinvested in our collaborative project. Where they’d once been enthralled with their tasks, they now seemed to resent them, but something bigger was up. Lu-Lu was the one to warn me. She’d been whining, watching me with her eerily human eyes, Great Lakes blue. Despite the distracting beauty of those eyes, I could still see my reflection: hair sticking every which way, a detached yet determined expression on my face. Her communication with me wasn’t subtle, but it was gentle enough. She walked over and pushed my hand away from the dirt and stepped into my place. She was, at that point, the only one working besides me. All the others—Ginger, Patsy Cline, Rox, Maryanne—they all had quit, displaced by a maniacal human.

*

After my mother went into the bin, she tried to phone my sister and me, repeatedly. I didn’t find out until years later. In the few years before she left us for good, she seemed to be awakening from her deep and depressive sleep. We were, at first, hopeful she was sloughing it off like an old winter coat, that she’d emerge renewed and ready to re-enter the world. But that wasn’t to be. Instead, she began filling up the house with oddities, as if to rid herself of us once and for all through displacement. First, it was normal stuff she purchased in surplus— an abundance of toilet paper, candles, Christmas wrap, canned beans—way more than we had shelf-space for. The clutter of household goods quickly filled counters and tabletops. My father called it her “over shopping.” Then came the flea market and Goodwill items—vases and lamps and figurines, men’s ties, shoeboxes of old photos—castaways that filled up living room chairs and even the surfaces of our beds. She had a special fondness for out-of-proportion still lifes—paintings of grapes that were larger than the apples, vases dwarfed by the flowers they held, everything askew. These were displayed next to faux-gilded frames of spraypainted herons and waterfalls on black velvet.

After paintings, she began collecting children’s toys as if she expected to have 100 more babies or open an orphanage. After a honeymoon phase of Hot Rods and Hula Hoops, it seemed all she wanted was to collect dolls. If not the babies with bodies intact, she’d collect their heads, varieties of which eventually occupied every nook and cranny—piles atop piles of other junk lining the hallways, the top of the freezer chest, the back of the kitchen sink. They included hard plastic dolls that giggled when you cranked an arm and ballerina dolls that spun when you pumped the crown’s crest atop their heads. Some babies had permanently closed eyes and pursed lips with a tiny hole in the center for a fake baby bottle, forever in need of drink. Some dolls whimpered when spanked and others’ eyelids closed when they went from sitting to lying down. Our mother even lined the living room windowsill with dolls looking out at the world—unblinking babies. As chaotic as their placement appeared, we weren’t allowed to disturb them, not even to clear a spot to sit. She talked to them, too, and she claimed they talked back, which is when things got creepy. My father was afraid of the harm she could do if she no longer diffrentiated us from the dolls. What if she confused us with them? He feared her actions, but also her words, which may have been why he had blocked her calls when she was finally taken away. What she wanted to tell us was a mystery. To me, the puzzle was in her inconsistency, after all the years of shutting us out, she wanted us in?

*

The more the sows began to reject me, the more my family’s past seeped up from my memory banks. I tried to move away from that history by becoming a better rooter, digging my way through the backyard. I had been unable to sleep. It was too cold anyway, so I dug to keep moving and warm. I must have been working too closely to the pen, because eventually the gals came out. It was unusual to see them there, silhouetted in a halo of silver moonlight looking down upon me while I worked. I no longer tried to stamp out a message; that hadn’t worked in weeks.

When I hit a root and began to cut it out, Rox started to scream. I had seen her get ornery, but never so animated, or so loud. She plunged into the trench with me. I picked my head up, kneeling and facing her. She kicked dirt toward me with her right hoof, (“stop”) and made a growling sound, deep and low. I recognized the word—“boar.” She’d had a history of difficult pregnancies and mating. “Boar” was the strongest insult she knew. Ginger whined and shuffled her feet, indicating bad weather. I don’t know what prompted the impulse that came over me, but I took one last swipe at the dirt, indicating my irreverence for Rox’s wishes. She charged, headfirst, plowing into my chest, knocking me on my back, her teeth embedded in my cheek. We held in that position a moment or two, not making a sound. I had the wind knocked out of me, an instant of breathless panic. Rox was looking straight into my eyes, teeth clenched, waiting for the fog to lift, to see that I was leaving pig land, going back to where I had come from. Trying in vain to suck in air, I felt myself tumbling backward—my past catching up to my present.

Rox seemed to understand that my energies were misplaced, along with my intuition, my magical ability to hear unspoken languages. I don’t know how she knew. Initially, I’d thought she hated me, but I think she understood more than any human, certainly more than Martha, or Fern and Setter. I was tunneling and digging but going nowhere. I was out of context.

Rox released her bite and climbed off me. It wasn’t fear I felt as she slowly backed down the trench. It was an odd sensation—I was stunned, yes, but also I entered the beginnings of a kind of calm. I held my face where she had bit me and let myself feel it. My mother’s image came back to me. I sat up, held my cheek, and bled.

*

The time before my mother fell away from us, right before my sister was born, had been happy, peaceful. I was only four, so my memory is hazy, but I recall my mother humming as she moved through the house, or sometimes she sang, or picked me up and danced to music. We had just moved into the home that would someday become her fortress, her sarcophagus, but not yet. In those early days, countertops shined, the appliances hummed, the walls filled with my finger paintings. My mother took on that glow of newness, of hope. She was in the world then, not hiding from it. She moved through life in a fluid motion, as if she could swim without drawing in air, without needing to break the surface. I remember taking afternoon naps together. She let me put my small child hands through her dark, long hair. I loved getting lost there, pulling the fine hairs to my mouth. She smiled then, shutting her eyes with a satisfied look on her face, resting with one slender hand on my back. I’d try to stay awake as long as possible, watching her chest rise and fall, smelling her milky skin. At that time, she could still feel me next to her.

I had tried to contact her one last time just after I got hired at the lab. The nurse must have been new because she handed her the phone, saying, “It’s your daughter, Shannon.” I thought I heard her breathing at the other end of the line. “Mama?” I said, but she was already handing the phone back, which is when I heard her voice, slurry, only slightly familiar, “I don’t have a daughter.”

*

It was Fern who found me. She and Setter had come outside because Setter thought he heard an attempted getaway by the bull. This normally occurred only when cows were in heat, but it can happen for no reason just as easily. On the way to the barn, Fern had seen the straw I spilled glittering in the moon light, a trail leading to the back of the pigs’ pen. She and Setter split up the search. By the time she turned the corner, Rox had trotted off, her job done. I was slumped over, holding my face. Lu-Lu was at my side, her head hung low. Maryanne stayed back the farthest, hiding behind Ginger and Patsy Cline, full of disdain.

“Dear Lord and Martin Luther,” Fern said, quick to scramble in the trench with me. She took off her baby-blue, quilted bathrobe and wrapped me in it, dabbing my face with a corner. “Whoever did this to you is on her way to the slaughterhouse.”

Too embarrassed by my own actions, I wasn’t able to look her in the eye. Instead, I turned away. “It wasn’t her fault, Fern. It was mine.”

“Honey, you can’t be responsible for a farm animal attack. That charge belongs to one of them.” She gestured toward the pen. “Lord have mercy, little girl, you’re going to need stitches.”

I didn’t speak, but waited for Fern to realize what she was seeing, the trench, my bed, my dirt-caked hands, the fact that I was out there in the middle of the night. She may have been shocked, but she wasn’t stupid.

Setter came out of the dark. “Hell, looks like somebody went to battle and lost. What have we got here, Fern?”

She looked down at me, not answering him. “Bleeding is slowing a bit, but you’ll have to keep pressure on it while we ride to the clinic.”

“Okay,” I said. “I can do that, I think.”

She looked up at Setter, “We’ve got a wounded child, Setter.”

“I see,” he said. “Shannon, you need any help climbing out of there?”

I had started to cry by then, unable to respond, embarrassed and overwhelmed with what had become of me, the mess and trouble I’d caused for two kind people who’d taken me and my problems into their home, their lives.

“Alrighty,” he said, inspecting the back of his hands, averting his eyes as if he’d just walked in on me in the bathroom. “I’ll go warm up the truck.”

I put my head into Fern’s chest, crying louder. “I can’t get to her,” I whimpered, “just her stupid nurse. I hate talking to the nurse.”

Fern pushed my face back so she could look at me. She wiped my nose, dabbed my cut again. By this time tears were in the cut, the salt stinging me. She looked stern, took a breath. “When I lost my daughter, I started walking. I thought I’d never stop walking. I walked until my feet blistered and bled. It was the tugboat operator who caught up to me, just before Setter. Setter was lost in his own grief, mad as hell at the world.”

I stopped crying. I leaned back and looked at her. “How did he find you?”

“The tugboat operator? Listening to the scanner. The State Police in St. Clair had reported me, a crazy woman who’d jumped off the boardwalk into the river. I didn’t know my name. I hadn’t slept in days. I was hallucinating babies, dead baby girls, floating in the St. Clair River, wailing. I had thrown myself in.”

Rox circled back and was standing behind Fern, examining me, inspecting the damage she’d done.

“Shannon, all I know is if the thing you’re holding on to starts to pull you under, you’ve got to make a decision.”

I was about to tell her I understood, to thank her, when Rox caught my eye. Without warning, she dropped her head forward, making a gesture I’d seen from the others, but never Rox. Snout at ground level, she covered her eyes with her ears, a sign of contrition. Fern held me, narrowing her gaze at the hog as if she suspected a second charge. Then, abruptly, in classic Rox fashion, she turned her back to us, throwing her head up into the air and snorting the last phrase she’d ever speak to me. I wasn’t sure I understood it exactly. But whatever it was she tried to tell me, I was certain I already knew.

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Maria McLeod’s poetry and prose have been published by literary journals in the U.S., England, Scotland, and Germany. She won the Quarter After Eight Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Prize, the Indiana Review Poetry Prize, and has been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes. She authored two poetry chapbooks, Skin. Hair. Bones. and Mother Want. She lives in Washington where she works as a journalism professor for Western Washington University. Instagram: @mariapoempics.