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

down the slippery glass of the path to the lake, following the scrape to the salted shores of our beach, where we came upon some enormous mass the likes of which I had never imagined, all of its blubbered weight rent unrecognizable by claws and teeth some time before, then left to float, to bob up and down upon the waves until at last it had stranded there in the night, brought high onto the beach by the strange tides our two moons had wrought. What was it that so deeply hurt the bear, what was it that she had killed? For long minutes I stared, unable to make sense of what I saw. It shared no shape I already knew, was instead all shapelessness all over, made punished flesh or cracked mantle or torn appendages, and before its bloated stench all my guesses seemed wrong.
    And I wondered: What were the bounds of its shapelessness?
    Was it shapeless like a squid, or shapeless like a whale?

T HE NEXT TIME I STEPPED across the threshold of my house I shut the door behind me, locked it tight against the dirt. The door’s key swung chained from my neck, then went tucked inside my clothes, over my heart, cold among the hair and the gooseflesh. In haste, so that I might not lose my slight courage, I gathered the few provisions I thought I would need, a single satchel’s worth: only some salted and smoked fish, my gas-lamp and torches and flint, a soon-useless ball of string; the skinning blade; and also what the fight with the bear had won me, the writhing cub-fur with which I was to confront my wife, which I was to guilt her into again clothing the foundling inside.

M EMORY AS FIRST EXPLORATION OF the deep house, as this progression of rooms: To follow the many staircases down to the many landings, the many hallways branching out from behind progressively heavier doors.
    To open the first rooms and find the deep house made now a palace of memory, a series of rooms in which what I had forgotten had been curated, collected together with what I had tried to forget, and also with other moments that had occurred only in dreams, or else not at all, not for me.
    To find in each room some unadorned spectacle, my wife or me or us together, with or without those children we had failed to have, plus the one she had stolen, that she had passed off as our own. Or not passed off, but made true: It was in those passages that I saw how even if I had not accepted the foundling into my family, still my wife had accepted him into hers, put him at its center, a space I believed I had once occupied, and so our house was divided, and then divided again and again, because what house might stand against a child loved by only one parent, when the jealous other held that same child in suspicion and contempt?
    And how for me the fingerling remembered everything.
    How the fingerling saw even what I would have left undiscovered, what I did not want to share with him or any other child.
    How even then he rode most often in my belly, in my thigh, in my throat, so that he might always be close to the skin, soaking in the new airs I moved my body through. And so he was there too in each of those many rooms, where otherwise there would have been only me, always me, me lonely and me alone among the tiny domains of my wife, sung into being as she passed, echoed throughout the deepening dirt.
    In the first room I found piled the cargo we lost to the bear: Here again were the broken vases and cracked crystal, the shattered punch bowls, the punched-out platters.
    Here were the shredded rags of my wife’s dress, and beside them my boutonniere, meant to be preserved inside a translucent bubble, now freed from where it had been glassed.
    Here was the intricate mechanism of a handmade clock, gifted and then broken, stopped as all other clocks were eventually stopped.
    All these objects, seemingly each its own but merely parts of a whole, what in the cave we had lost.
    And in this room: her wedding ring, discarded. She had improved everything I had given her but not this,