Free A Gentle Hell by Autumn Christian Page A

to the meadow, past the woods and the spring, to the edge of the singing grass that I hadn’t been to since I was a child. It was just as I remembered. The O-ring around the mountain dissipated, and the side of the sheer rock reached down toward the meadow like a drinking crane.
    Don’t ask me why I came back. The answer wouldn’t satisfy you. Just know that someone must’ve seen it coming, because the place had been prepared for me.
    On the edge of the singing grass sat an upholstered chair from my living room. And next to the chair, my floor lamp.
    If I didn’t know what I was doing as a writer I would say, “as if in a dream.” Because that’s what writers say when they don’t want to take the time to explain things in a logical way, or they’ve forgotten the reason why. But sometimes, in real life, there is no causal explanation for the actions that we take. And so, as if in a dream I crossed to the edge of the grass and I sat down in my chair.
    When I turned on the lamp, though there was no way it should’ve turned on, the deer grazing in the middle of the singing grass looked up at me. Her eyes gleamed in the light. Behind her I saw the shape of the cougar, almost amorphous, crouching in the grass.
    This time I didn’t look   away from what was about to happen. Blame the intoxication, the particulars of the circumstance, the moonlight striking the grass just so like the bad mood lighting for a budget horror movie. I tensed in my chair and dug my nails into the arms until they bent, but I didn’t run.
    When the cougar pounced, the deer turned around and struck him. He hit the grass, stunned, and she bent down and ripped out his heart.
    The deer glanced up at me, saw me looking at her, and fled.
    I crawled through the grass as it keened. I knelt in front of the body of the cougar and watched its heart, still quivering, lit by my lamp that had somehow ended up on the side of a mountain. I tasted its pulse on the tip of my tongue.
    My hands shook as I reached out for the heart. It was warm and textured like a tongue, and as I cupped it in my palms it spit out the last of its convulsions and lay still. I brought the heart to my mouth and drew a deep breath. Its viscous, copper smell touched the back of my throat.
    I ate the heart.
    I think that’s when I realized this was never my story.
    One day out in the meadow he started to paint her. Even before her outline took shape on the canvas, I knew he was painting her. I could tell by the colors he mixed. That snake green. Moth brown. The sick gray of her skin. I watched from the trees, my usual hiding place. My chair and lamp had disappeared from the meadow long ago, to be replaced by the artist and his accouterments. The grass shifted its song when he worked here, no longer a keen but a hollow rustle. It drank him in and waited for the time when it could spit him back out.
    “What are you working on?” I asked him one night. I’d go over to his house most nights, climb through his open window and onto his bed. I told him at first it was so my boyfriend, who was one of his friends, wouldn’t catch me here. But we broke up soon enough and I still went through the same routine. In truth, I just liked climbing through the window.
    Instead of responding, he asked me, “have you ever heard of quantum entanglement?”
    “What?” I asked him.
    “Do you know anything about quantum physics?” he asked me.
    “Yeah,” I said, “you put a cat in a box and it’s dead and alive at the same time.
    Schrödinger’s cat.”
    “Quantum entanglement. Two particles can have a relationship even when they’re separated by miles. Even time. Change the state of one particle, and the other one knows what’s happening.”
    “So you could use quantum entanglement to time travel?”
    “Sort of,” he said, “yes. But maybe not in the way that you know it.”
    “What do you mean?” I asked.
    He lapsed into silence, outstretched one of his arms so that I could huddle