No Net Ensnares Her
Written by Cait Theroux
She stood in white and wished she wore widow’s weeds instead of this snowy dress. Not three months before she had run through the fields and waded in ponds and let her hair knot itself into a nest. She filled her sketchbook so that her pencils wore down to stubs, and birds danced and called from the pages. Insects skittered in jars hastily labeled, and finally the foxes in the birch grove had begun to trust her.
Now she stood in white. Her hair tucked neatly into its bun begged for her to pull out each pin and shake it free. The scoop of lace around her neck weighed on her as though a rope from a gallows. Before her father had sat her down, she worked as though bewitched in noting the springtime habits of the common frog, the painted turtle, the piping plover in all its fuzzy newly hatched glory. She hiked up her skirts and took to wearing pants on the days especially humid. Butterfly weed sprouted across the fields, and she reveled in the brilliant fire of its orange heads.
She looked terrible in white. Her dark hair became a veil of mourning, her pale face a death’s head. Her father, to his burning embarrassment, had failed to reign in what he called “her wild and unrestrained ways.” It made sense now why he insisted that the neighbor’s son walk with her to check the horses or bring in the cows, even though the neighbor’s son slowed her down and complained of the smell and got tired halfway there. The scolding she received from her father when she leapt upon the swiftest of the horses and rode away without her burden—and the burden waving frantically behind her—had been worth every minute of suffering the lecture.
The parson accepted with gusto the wild grapes she picked for his communion wine. The florist appreciated the help with balancing soil and water for optimal growth. The farmers gladly taught her the quick wits of their Border collies, the proper path of shears on a heavy-laden sheep. The wives had shown her how to knead bread and mend anything and work simple yarn into a work of art. And here was her father saying she must cease her wandering, she must tie up her hair, she must she must she must.
The neighbor’s son knew history and academics, could give a man’s handshake, and fell upon an account book like a consuming wave. Sitting still made her itch. The books and cigar-smoke-filled room that were his predilection were, to her, what dandelions and milkweed were to him. Vagaries. Allergens. He said he liked her best. She said, while he bemoaned having stepped in the stream, he didn’t even know her. He asked if that was really so bad, couldn’t they pretend. She said she wouldn’t lie for his or anyone’s benefit.
Their fathers announced their engagement the next day.
She’d picked out the apple-basket-sized lemon cake because her father hated both excess and citrus, but beyond that, her father had arranged every decoration, invitation, and party favor. The wrist-length dress sleeves made her skin creep and sweat. The slip ran against her like clammy palms. The veil pressed against the tip of her nose with as much pressure as an alighting butterfly, and she wanted nothing more than to rip it off her head and tear it in half.
The neighbor’s son had assured her she could still see her friends, but that they would need to spend time together, too, just the two of them. They had to get to know each other at some point. She said they didn’t need rings to do that, and he picked the grass bare in his frustration. She said that running toward the endless horizon made her blood rush and her heart continue beating, and still he couldn’t understand it, even when she’d shown him how to dig for chicory root and use it if he ever ran out of coffee. Why did it not amaze him how such a bounty existed mere feet from their homes? How could he not know how to descale a fish? What was so gross about isopods?
She watched one as it bumped and scuttled its merry way across a pew behind the parson. Slowly, she felt a smile beyond her control stretch from one corner of her mouth to the other, revealing cheeks like apples and depthless dimples. The isopod’s legs clicked and skittered as it bumbled along unbothered. Its shiny black segments all undulated in the tiniest river of movement, and she wondered again where her good magnifying glass had gone. To watch for hours the journey of the isopod! The crumbs it devoured, the antennae it used to search and prod and explore each step of its expedition. To where would it return? A nest in a log softened by time and rain? Floorboards under the feet of the butcher? Or maybe the parson’s hat box? She needed a book on isopods, and this instant.
The parson asked her something. Her eyes snapped to focus on him, and she asked him to repeat the question. He wanted to know if she vowed to cherish the neighbor’s son for better or worse, richer or poorer, in spite of whether or not he would allow the robins to nest in the eaves. Did she? She paused. The neighbor’s son cleared his throat and said that she did.
“I don’t,” she said. A charge like lightning filled the sanctuary. Her groom-to-have-been blanched. She said it again, “I don’t. We’re strangers. You’re a bog body, and I’m a bird.”
Inside the marrow of her bones, a scurrying desire pulled her around to stare at the congregation. Her father’s red face pleased her, and she declared that they should stay and eat whatever they wanted, the cake was certainly large enough. She bent to untie her boots and kick them away, gathered the voluminous, frothy skirts in her calloused hands, and marched back down the aisle. The heavy church doors yielded to her well-worked muscles and across the field she saw the dart of an orange flame in the underbrush. Her feet took her forward, walking, jogging, then sprinting in a burst of warm ecstasy flooding her chest and mouth. In the stand of birches, the family of foxes waited for her. She stared breathless until they danced around the fabric torn to shreds, yelping and barking and nipping at her train. They were her dowry, this wild forest her inheritance.
A rabbit broke from the sedge, and the fiery canids gave chase. She followed close behind, reveling in the sweet air turning to autumn around her. Her lungs sustained the pumping of her legs and arms, and she stopped to rest a mile from the church on the cool craggy surface of a boulder breaching the field. Feathers sheathed her body and lined her arms up to the elbows, ran along her triceps to her shoulder blades. With a leap, she broke from the earth and caught the wind. Stretched out her arms. Unfolded great white feathers from horizon to horizon which caught the sun and gleamed like silk. Her golden beak reflected the sun back to it as if to outmatch its brilliance. She turned her wings north, doubled back across the swelling fields and orchards below her, and sailed over the waves crashing against the breakwater. For a breath she stopped to perch atop the lighthouse, and from her vantage point the mountains rolled westward, older than the trees themselves.
Her cry was a roll of laughter, a shriek of joy, unstoppable and full chested and vibrating through her hollow-boned body. The foamy gray waves thundered against the shore she wheeled down upon. She waded through the tide pools and relished the briny mist encrusting her beak and sliding off her oiled back. The crabs scattered before her, but she simply turned her head to watch. And oh, how she watched. The feathery arms of barnacles danced in the microcurrents between ridges of rock. A small civilization opened itself up to her, periwinkles and infant lobsters and starfish and hermit crabs and golden minnows darting in the dappled light.
In the forest her limbs grew supple and lithe, and she left nothing to be seen except the flash of silver fur between trees. Her bottle-brush tail gave her balance, and she hurried over leaning trees still clinging to both the soil and their lives. She scratched out dens in the earth, gnawed on roots and bugs and berries, dove headfirst into the snow at the quick heartbeats and scurrying paws just under the surface. She let her raucous barking fly in wild echoes in the deep woods. And she knew with every calculated placement of her paws, that she would teach her daughters—and her daughters’ daughters—to chase shadows through bramble pathways, to grow their fur thick and fearsome, to sharpen their teeth on the jagged edges of shattered expectations, to throw back their heads and laugh. To be tempests.
Sweet breezes caressed her snout, pointing her toward the boundless fields. Unshackled, unburdened, she turned on quick fox feet and gave chase.
Bio:
Cait Theroux writes and lives on the coast of Maine between a saltwater marsh and a set of steep foothills and mountains. She has been published in Vial of Bones zine. Currently she is working towards her MFA in creative writing through USM’s Stonecoast Program.