Lu has a disease where she cannot touch other people’s skin, so she leaves early each morning to hunt beavers because beaver fur, like all animal fur, is the only sort of tenderness she can bear. She takes her rifle and paring knife to the river as the sun rises.
Today, Lu will have a visitor.
She shoots, then cuts from the tail up the belly to the lower lip, chops off the feet and hands, rolls the stubs between her fingers and thumbs until the fur loosens, then small strokes to cut away the eyes. She rubs the loosed fur along her jaw and neck, then scrubs it hard along her hairline. She wouldn’t do this if she weren’t alone, but she is always alone out here in her woods, alone in the cabin, and so she rubs. It can’t feel so different from a hand or a back. The back, she imagines, is expansive and scarred, hatch marks maybe, a back that could lie on the ground and she could fold herself up onto so that none of her body stretched outside the limits of skin and muscle.
Lu touches the letter in her pocket. It came a few weeks before and announced that a second cousin named Jared, who Lu has never met, is coming to stay a night with her on his way into the mountains to be a fire-lookout, a fine job, the letter said, devastatingly crucial, Lu knows. Jared is working off his community service, he’s a good boy, it said, he’s a musician in a rock band. He is coming today.
At home, Lu walks into the bedroom and opens the closet door. Inside hang dozens of furs, all animals, all shades, all lengths. She runs her hands along the fur and shivers. Later. She’ll save it for later. She’ll need it later. There is a second cousin coming. Two years alone in this cabin, two years and today this.
She imagines how it will happen. Lu will be inside boiling potatoes or looking at her collection of feathers and there will be a knock. Firm, three pounds. Lu will straighten her skirt and answer the door. Rain hard and slanted outside. Jared the musician will be standing on the porch with a gentleman’s hat, gloves, trapping equipment and an old guitar strung over his shoulder.
“Hello, Lu,” Jared will say.
“Please, come in,” Lu will say. He walks inside and turns his head slowly around the room, taking in the sort of woman that she is: the leather couch and chairs, the hanging mobiles of painted bones, the throws she has stitched from hide. Wild smell.
“You must be a skilled hunter,” Jared says. Lu blushes. She doesn’t know if she’s particularly skilled. There are things she does because she has to do them.
“You don’t have to worry,” Jared says, “I’ve been told about your unique condition. I’m not scared of you. In fact, I think you’re beautiful.” And he doesn’t try to shake her hand or wipe a fallen hair from her face, but instead, collects each mounting moment and holds them in his eyes. It might be that his back broadens as he stands taller, it might be tips of fur swelling under his skin. Her bosom heaves, beads of sweat forming in the valley between her rounds. Their eyes lock and the pirate shirt he has loosely tied falls away as he steps toward her to reveal his muscled chest, moles like small mountain stones across his pecks.
Lu knows this is how it will happen. She subscribes to a club that mails her novels by Jeanette Clementine or Laura Hungerford each month and Lu dog-ears all the important pages.
“This might sound crazy,” Jared will say, “but I have the feeling I’ve been waiting for you my whole life.”
“We can’t be together,” Lu answers, turning away. Her dress is made of strewn rabbits and petals carved from a twelve gauge, her lips are glistening with the bulbs of beaver fat she crushed with red berries and smeared onto her mouth.
“But-”
“Hush. You can stay with me for a while,” Lu will say. “But I am a stone and you are the river moving around it.”
Lu tacks the hide across a board and staples it in place. She salts it, making sure to massage the crystals into tissue pockets and flaps, tilts and drains the skin, then salts again, it’s what her fingers would feel like on somebody. In a pickle jar, she mixes denatured alcohol with water to cure the fur and let it soak for two days, then she will wash it tenderly, like snake skin, like a baby, in detergent and water, press, dry, smooth, and scud. The back of her knife rubbing away the fat and glandular tissue is how she would take her lover, hard and focused, then soft, a rubbing, as she would swaddle him in mink oil.
The porch is filled with flats and racks for curing. Antlers, old boots, wooden rails readied to splinter and the cloven hooves she’s stacked heel toe in the center of the floor into a perfect heart.
It’s noon, now. The day’s halfway gone and Jared isn’t here yet. Lu watches the trees outside. When he comes, his skin will be mostly see-through like an embryonic sac, like the skin holding his body together is too new. Lu will be able to see his veins and arteries on his arms and legs, but he will not say be careful with me. He will walk in.
“I’ve brought you fox from the woods,” he will say.
“I can gather them myself,” she says, washing knives in the sink.
“Why can’t you accept my gifts?”
“I don’t need help from anyone else.”
“I can hear your lonely heart,” he says, picking up a knife beside the sink and wiping the beads of water against his pants. “It sounds like an empty forest.”
Lu drops the knife she’s washing into the sink with a clatter and reaches down, swiftly, toward it as Jared reaches into the sink at the same moment, her hand gripping the wooden handle and picking it up just as his hand comes down on the metal edge and there is blood. Jared pulls his hand out and to his mouth, lips cupping the slit in his palm. Lu is stunned. Staring. She watches the way his lips redden with their force against his hand and the texture of small lines in skin against skin. She sets down the knife. Picks up two of the fox he has dropped on the kitchen floor and holds them by the base of their tails. Brings the fox up close to his face. The tails burnt-orange and grey, white-tipped. They extend out from her fingers another half-foot, and she strokes the sides of his jaw with the fur. The evening crickets will be beginning their song. Lu is stone he is chiseling into statue.
Outside, the evening crickets are beginning their song and Lu is letting stones fall between her fingers as she picks them up in handfuls from a jar she keeps on the table. These are the only sounds. Animals are burrowing in or waking outside. What needs killing has been killed, drying is drying, salting is salted. The stones are moving faster in her fingers, lifting and falling back to the pile. Jared is not here and this remains the same as it was yesterday and the day before and before that, all leading to today, but if he is not here and it is tomorrow, then what was forever the same will suddenly be different. She squeezes the stones until they dent her finger pads. Closes her eyes.
It will happen like this: Jared, hand bandaged, will be cutting around the fox eyes, gently, not nicking the lids, and slicing the lips loose. He will hear her coming by the swish of rabbit skin against her legs. She carries a fur from the closet upstairs and holds it evenly draped across her arms. He turns to her. She stops a few steps away and holds her face still so he may not look away from it, he cannot look away, he’s falling so fast. Inch by inch, Jared spreads his arms toward her, his brow tortured by how much he wants all of her, only her, forever. He peels off the pirate shirt, leather pants and boots. She can see every one of his organs through his skin, she watches his big heart pump fistfuls of blood into every part of his body. He’s swelling.
He lies flat on the bear-skin rug near her fireplace. She places the deer hide across his body so it covers everything from feet to crown, even his face, which she keeps near her by cutting slits into the fur for his eyes and breathing holes for his nose. Lu removes her clothes. She readies for skin that won’t revolt against her as she lies on top of the fur and presses her hills and valleys against the peaks and rivers of his body. Yes, she thinks again, my hills and valleys with his peaks and rivers. Her lips part and tremble against the skin. She feels a quaking. She’ll ask him to roll over underneath the fur so she can fold onto his expansive back which, entirely covered, will feel like sewing herself into a bear.
Lu looks out her window into the dark air. She hears the animals outside wearing their animal jackets. She’s inside with feathers and pelts. The door remains unknocked, all human skin in the cabin is thick. What hurts, helps.
The moon takes up half the sky and is doubling in size each time she blinks. It’s the biggest thing she’s ever seen. It will be night for weeks now. Long dandelion stalks will grow thicker than trees from the ground up against the moon like a beanstalk.
Tweet