Free In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods by Matt Bell Page A

grotesque, and yet how I would commit the same wrongs again, how I knew I would: The wants that had prompted me to break their bones and beaks, to rip their fur and feathers, to taste their oddest parts, none were resolved, and when I was remade I too might be less than I was.
    The bear knocked me flat with the heavy paddle of her paw, then held me against the soft-flipped dirt: With tooth and claw she undressed me until I was naked and then again until I was stripped of my nakedness. My wounds oozed, fed the roots below,and when I was empty of blood I took one more breath and then I was empty of that too, and as I suffered, the bear breathed herself into my unskinned body, filling me with her coughs and her wheezes and also her musk, her wild smell which ever after leaked from my pores.
    Within the bear’s heated speech, I heard her melody, like that of my wife’s but simpler, without proper words, and with that sound the bear scabbed each wound, filled each divot with song-made flesh, as my wife might have done to make her foundling. This new body, it was meant to last the long journey ahead, that departing beneath the dirt to which we had agreed, and with its completion the fingerling grew excited from his many perches—and in that moment I became something else, other than what I had been—some not-quite-husband, a dream of the bear, as the bear was perhaps the dream of the woods, of the cave beneath, set in motion toward what she wanted most, toward what I or the fingerling had agreed, a pact without which she would not have rebuilt this body upon my bones: I would enter the deep house, and there I would find my wife and convince her to give up the foundling and also to again skin him as a bear using his right and previous fur, which I would carry with me into the earth. In return we would not be punished for our crimes, neither me nor my wife, and so we might be free to leave the dirt, escape back around the lake, to our fathers’ country over the mountains, or else to some other distant land, like this one but also better emptied.
    We would be saved, the bear promised—but if my wife would not give up the foundling, then I was to take him by deception or blood, and then when I returned there would be other rewards, if I chose to remain to receive them.
    For this and less I betrayed our marriage, as slim threaded as it then was, and for this I am ashamed, and yet in my defensewhat can I say but this: Without that betrayal, how else would I have gained the strength to descend into the deep house, to seek the reunion that could only happen within those long halls, those strange chambers slung toward the bottom of those steepest stairs, spiraling down.

B UT FIRST WINTER CONTINUED UPON the dirt, and sunless days too, and as I watched, my wife’s moon dug hollow the night sky, so that what few stars existed must have lived only in the short margins of our steep-sloped horizons, starved of their long circuits, the vacuum they’d before been free to roam. All our atmosphere filled with clouds heavy with rain and snow and sleet and hail, their darkness above us, and yet it never rained or snowed or sleeted or hailed, the strained sky making nothing more than a terrible buzzing, heard whenever I looked up at its unturned arc, and for some time I did not see the bear again, but sometimes I saw her footprints, marked all over the rough dirt—and then, after she sickened further, not footprints but some new dragging, a scrape instead.
    The footprints led often past the house and toward the lake, but the scrape appeared motioned in the opposite direction, wet from the water, then from the blood leaking out of the bear from the shore to the dirt to the woods. I wondered if all I had to do to save my wife was to wait for the bear to die, but the fingerling denied even this hope: NO , he said, THE BEAR ’ S DEATH CHANGES NOTHING , AND STILL THERE WOULD BE THE FALLING MOON .
    The fingerling commanded me out of the house and