Surfacing - Margaret Atwood [79]
The animals have no need for speech, why talk when you are a word
I lean against a tree, I am a tree leaning
I break out again into the bright sun and crumple, head against the ground
I am not an animal or a tree, I am the thing in which the trees and animals move and grow, I am a place
I have to get up, I get up. Through the ground, break surface, I’m standing now; separate again. I pull the blanket over my shoulders, head forward.
I can hear the jays, crying and crying as if they’ve found an enemy or food. They are near the cabin, I walk towards them up the hill. I see them in the trees and swooping between the trees, the air forming itself into birds, they continue to call.
Then I see her. She is standing in front of the cabin, her hand stretched out, she is wearing her grey leather jacket; her hair is long, down to her shoulders in the style of thirty years ago, before I was born; she is turned half away from me, I can see only the side of her face. She doesn’t move, she is feeding them: one perches on her wrist, another on her shoulder.
I’ve stopped walking. At first I feel nothing except a lack of surprise: that is where she would be, she has been standing there all along. Then as I watch and it doesn’t change I’m afraid, I’m cold with fear, I’m afraid it isn’t real, paper doll cut by my eyes, burnt picture, if I blink she will vanish.
She must have sensed it, my fear. She turns her head quietly and looks at me, past me, as though she knows something is there but she can’t quite see it. The jays cry again, they fly up from her, the shadows of their wings ripple over the ground and she’s gone.
I go up to where she was. The jays are there in the trees, cawing at me; there are a few scraps on the feeding tray still, they’ve knocked some to the ground. I squint up at them, trying to see her, trying to see which one she is; they hop, twitch their feathers, turn their heads, fixing me first with one eye, then the other.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
It’s day again, my body jumps out of sleep. What I heard was a powerboat, attacking. It’s almost too late, they were pulling around into the bay and slowing and nearly to the dock when I woke up. I scramble on hands and knees out of my den, blanket over me, brown plaid camouflage, and run stooping further back among the trees and flatten, worming into a thicket, hazel bushes, where I can see.
They may have been sent to hunt for me, perhaps the others asked them to, they may be the police; or they may be sightseers, curious tourists. Evans will have told at the store, the whole village will know. Or the war may have started, the invasion, they are Americans.
They can’t be trusted. They’ll mistake me for a human being, a naked woman wrapped in a blanket: possibly that’s what they’ve come here for, if it’s running around loose, ownerless, why not take it. They won’t be able to tell what I really am. But if they guess my true form, identity, they will shoot me or bludgeon in my skull and hang me up by the feet from a tree.
They’re hulking out of the boat now, four or five of them. I can’t see them clearly, their faces, the stems and leaves are in the way; but I can smell them and the scent brings nausea, it’s stale air, bus stations and nicotine smoke, mouths lined with soiled plush, acid taste of copper wiring or money. Their skins are red, green in squares, blue in lines, and it’s a minute before I remember that these are fake skins, flags. Their real skins above the collars are white and plucked, with tufts of hair on top, piebald blend of fur and no fur like mouldy sausages or the rumps of baboons. They are evolving, they are halfway to machine, the leftover flesh atrophied and diseased, porous like an appendix.
Two of them climb the hill to the cabin. They are talking, their voices are distinct but they penetrate my ears as sounds only, foreign radio. It must be either English or French but I can’t recognize