TALE OF CUSTOM

As is custom in the world, that which one can never have will be hung before them like a skinned rabbit to tempt them, to see if the balance of life is right within them. In the winter of her twenty-third year Talle encountered a traveler carrying a sack of shame to her hut. When she saw him she began to quiver. She knew that she would fail. 

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As the traveler approached the hut with his wares to hawk, Talle saw that he was slight and beautiful. The wind leaned into him with every movement he made. He crushed the snow into gory blossoms and closed the distance between the two of them. When she caught his scent on the wrist of the breeze that had followed him, she nearly lunged forward to devour his heart. Solitude promised to render her hands from her body. If she violated its laws, it would curse her as she bled out into the snow around her hollow house and was eaten by the soil. When one has so much power, the world must own something of them, too, both here and in the realm of the dead. Talle and the traveler haggled briefly over the price of his shame. When dawn came, his teeth had stripped her of her integument. 

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Lighting strikes gashed the withering sky on the eve of Talle’s birth. They were sufficient enough to tell of her growth in time into a woman of peculiar and swallowing power. One night some years after her first breath, swept up in the throes of monsoon season, her mother caught a nightmare in her eye. The hateful insect burrowed its way through the blood vessels of her face and plagued her with hallucinations of spiny fish and the sweet-smelling blood of miscarriages until she could not wake for fear of death. Wailing for hours, Talle scratched at her mother’s face and begged her to wake, toddled around the brambled yard and finally fell down senseless next to her quivering body. After some time, the rain began in full. In a single moment a thousand drops caressed Talle’s arms and legs, gentling her and urging her to stand. She pressed her four-year-old’s hands to her mother’s cheeks until they turned purple with the leached ailment. Her mother soon woke and realized who she had created, and her stomach wept acid bitterness. She knew that this innocent kitling of a child would never know companionship from the day she reached adulthood, and that she would be followed by hungry loam destined for her flesh until the day she died. 

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Within days Talle’s tongue began to exhibit the signs of her difference. For example, on each third morning she took a different word from her voice-box and crumbled it until it was small enough to sprinkle in the stew pot. She would eat her spiced breakfast ravenously and spend the rest of the day plumbing the depths of the dissolved word until she knew it as well as she knew the skin circling her fingernails. Under this action words became like bottled sauces, and her mother disapproved. She remembered only too well her own childhood a hundred years before when words had balanced precariously on the precipice of extinction. But this venture pleased Talle, and her mother put up with it and allowed her daughter all of the breakfast and none for herself until she could slip away and eat an apple behind the house. 

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Soon enough Talle had bathed enough in the broken pieces of her own tongue to know that she had reached the cusp of adulthood. From then on she knew her task: to journey away from her mother’s house and become a night-wanderer and bird-harvester, traveling to and from the wood in which she would build her hut and drink concoctions of chickadee down and the dreams of trees to keep up her strength. She would bring knowledge to travelers in wicker cages and drink the disease from their bones and spit it back out again into jars to use later at a price to curse the unfaithful. She would be alive but never living: obtaining the power of the world demanded that she hang one of her fingers from a yew tree as a sign of her contract. This finger would never be returned to her. Her only sense of uneasiness originated from the knowledge that she had not chosen this life; it had kidnapped her. 

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From the moment the traveler lays Talle down on her own bed of furs, her hut is battered with wind and earth from the inside out. When she and the traveler speak, though they speak little, they reassure one another that they have not killed themselves by falling into companionship. Her furs are warm again and when she wakes in the middle of the night she listens with growing recognition to the traveler’s dreams as they gallop through his veins. Chickadee down and tree-dreams; they eat and drink wantonly. Rain rattles against the hut; they shut themselves into each other, and he has hands the color of a sun hundreds of years away. But, like all impossible fables, Talle acquires love like a pox. The boy cannot not see her in the nighttime, and so her sleepful days are soon replaced with a thrumming movement that agitates the loam hovering under the turned-up edges of her life. Her passion and desire are like appalling explosions that burst wetly out of her mouth, and soon she cannot not ignore the diminishing state of her solitude.

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In time the traveler realizes he is gorging himself at Talle’s expense and fasting at his own. Leaving her hollow house at the first sign of dusk he sloughs his shame from his shoulders like a cloak. When he first appeared at her door his shame was small and soft, the last remnants of some nearly-forgotten fever dream; now, the cloak he wears at sunset whips like a thousand willow trees in the wind. When he peels it apart at the market he smells the ghost of Talle’s skin and notices fearfully that the scent changes day by day. His constant return thumbprints her more and more. His shame grows more and more. In this way the traveler finds the means to remain with Talle. In this way he dooms her. 

As is custom in Talle’s world, joy and bitterness are bound and one cannot exist without the other. The traveler sees his eyes reflected in hers. The loam reaches out a tongue to taste-test her bare feet. The machinations of the forest: they become second nature to him. The earth rises where she walks. Her world, of which the traveler carries so little knowledge and affection, has become his own. Her hut of caged birds and bottled sicknesses calls to him-- how strange it was, at first, but now how dangerously familiar, so close he is to recognizing it as home. Each coin he uses to survive in Talle’s world reminds him that the hollow reserved for him in her bed is, in a way, purchased with his shame, and the natural consequence of this is her death. Each morning he comes and strips her of her clothes and redresses her with breathless wind, a garment of devotion, its cloying odor drenching them both with its capacity to destroy. Helplessly he makes his living of her solitude. His hands shake. 

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On their last day Talle will sense the loam beginning to nibble at her. It will be this, more than her knowledge of laws, that lights a candle in the darkness to reveal her fast-approaching death. When a woman of power condemns her task of solitude no act of expiation will save her. And so, knowing oblivion is upon her, Talle will send a kestrel to call the traveler to her. He will come to her in panic, having smelled his fault mixed with hers on his most recent wares. She will draw him close to her at once and whisper quietly, licking his weeping palms and blowing the light of her fire into his heart like a squirming nest of worms. He will bury himself in her furs and cover his ears to deafen himself from her rendering, knowing himself to be bound forever in this world without mercy. Then, feeling the first cold bite of the loam upon her heel, Talle will flee into the woods to the tree bearing her finger, placing it in her mouth so that when she dies she will not remain fettered to the earth. She will bite her tongue. The sharp release of blood will strike the dead leaves under her and set the loam loose. Then, her spite lying cold between her teeth, the loam will gorge itself on Talle’s hands, skin, and stomach until nothing survives of her on the plant litter but a single, crumbled word.