As I Slept
“At the close of our loop, we approached the road again and followed the fence line back to our starting point. Mid-step, my boyfriend startled, teetering for a moment as if at a cliff’s edge.
We’d stumbled right up to the border of a patch of charred ground roughly the size an adult would leave if he’d fallen into a snowdrift and made an angel. My throat convulsed in a hard, hydraulic action. Seeing the burned ground made the body real. Heat flared in my chest and eyes. With the pandemic shrinking my world by the day, the land left for me to walk had become an extension of my body. I did not want my body to feel the way that patch of ground looked, ruined and forgotten.
The next day I returned to the site and sat beside the ashes in hopes that my silent witnessing might fade the dark imprint of what had happened there. I poked a wild turkey feather into the ash along with a stick of lit incense. As I sat, afternoon sunlight crept over the charred ground, turning the smoke from the incense into dancers entwined. When I finally rose and walked away, I felt lighter, like my body had declared a kind of truce with itself.”