In The House Upon The Dirt Between The Lake And The Woods (2013) - Plot & Excerpts
I threaded together what we had meant for covering our floors and our walls and our bed, and when I was finished I draped myself tip to toe, then sewed my shape inside, made myself horrible, a beast meant to match the bear. My movements stiffened, thickened, I knelt before our hearth, wetted my fingers, dragged their tips through the cold ashes stilled there, then painted my face with what char stuck to those narrow bones, so that all that showed from within the fur was dark, cheeks and nostrils and ears and lips. Heaving beneath my burden, I tucked my skinning blade into its sheath, its sheath into the belt strained around my waist, and then I walked out the door, off the porch, around the house and into the garden, where sat my waiting traps, each wanting again for the woods. I put my hands into that pile, and when I saw my hands next they held the only weapon I had ever understood, the only one I had ever wielded against another: not spear or axe, not machete, not bow or sling. Instead, my hands had sought what they knew, and remembered into their grip the largest of my traps, like the others in everything but size, and never before used: on this end a steel jaw, ready to be pried open, set to collapse, and on the other a chain waiting to be wrapped around my wrist and forearm, then sewn deep into the fur of my armor—and then, at the fingerling’s suggestion, stitched deeper, into the arm below, so that no blow might rip it free.
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