Found Wanting

Despite the socks hand-knit by his mother and the worn leather work boots passed down by his brother, Bronagh’s toes throbbed in warning. His ears stung in the wind, and his nose ran freely, and his chest shuddered involuntarily. He should have been miserable in the winter air. He should’ve fled the oak savannah at the outskirts of the family farm to huddle by the woodstove. He should be inside reading an almanac or practicing cutting dovetail joints by hand or even just listening to the radio, but Bronagh’s mind barely registered the cold. His synapses were chock-full of misery already, thank you very much, misery from the urgent serrated knife twist in his miserable bowel. He had no nerve endings available for freezing.

The ever-present pain spiked, lancing up his rectum, reaching almost to his ribcage. His diaphragm and lungs spasmed in response, and he moaned quietly. He wouldn’t make it to her without a chance to relieve himself. He should go before he was in sight of her, anyways. Shitting on the snowy ground near her would be profane, somehow. He knew how ridiculous that was (it’s not like she could care), but it was how he felt all the same. He completely removed his trousers, underpants, boots, and the socks lovingly handknit by his mother to squat in the icy leaf litter, holding a palm flat against the frigid bark of an old oak so he wouldn’t collapse from the pain. Stripping from the waist down made him colder, of course, and he would’ve worried about frostbite, but he was distracted by the agonizing hot diarrhea coursing out of him. He didn’t want it to get on his clothes. He was sweating from a low-grade fever, anyways. Maybe the cold would help with that.

When the worst had passed, he cleaned himself off passably well with snow that melted against his burning skin. As he redressed with shaking fingers (shaking from the cold or from the trauma of the bowel movement, he wasn’t certain) he cursed himself and his pitiable body. It had taken almost everything he could’ve had. The farm would’ve always been passed down to his older brother Cathal, of course; that was only fair, Cathal was older, and he was tall and strong, built like an ox like their father, more than capable of sowing and reaping the corn and taking care of their aging parents. But Bronagh could’ve done well in school, maybe even gone to college like his best friend John, but he missed so many days due his gut he couldn’t graduate. Even then Bronagh, clever Bronagh, so good with his hands, had been able to convince a local carpenter to take him on as an apprentice. It would’ve been alright; he could work for himself and make a living and maybe even find a wife who wouldn’t mind his scrawny frame and stunted height.

But you can lose an apprenticeship the same way you can get kicked out of school. Too many absences from someone so young, someone who looks healthy, someone who should be reliable, and they won’t believe that you’re sick. They didn’t believe Bronagh was sick, at least. He was lazy, a delinquent, a ne’er-do-well. He had blown too many chances. They don’t want his kind, not in this earnest town full of hard-working folk. That’s what the carpenter told him earlier today, when he was fired.

Yes, his broken-down, leaking, shivering, wrenching, groveling husk of a body had taken almost everything from him. Almost. It hadn’t managed to take her. He would always find a way back to her.

He’d started on her months ago, last spring, after the tallest oak in the savannah got struck by lightning. The top of the great tree had tumbled, taking down lesser trees with it, leaving carnage in its wake. Carnage, and most of the trunk, which remained steadfastly upright. It was nearly six feet tall with a beautiful black crack shooting through it, and when he found it, he found she was inside, wanting to be freed. He was surprised he hadn’t noticed her in there before the lightning struck the tree, but perhaps that was the way of it: he could recognize her only after she had felt pain like his. Once he had seen her, all he’d had to do was remove all the wood that wasn’t her.

He had planned on leaving her unfinished until the spring. The only bits left to work on were detail-work: her hands were still vague mitten-shapes and her face was just an ill-defined smudge in the wood. These delicate features would be more difficult in the winter, with cold-clumsy fingers and brittle materials, but he wanted to finish her tonight. He wanted to be useful, wanted to be wanted, and he knew she wanted him to finish her. It was the only thing he could think to do, other than drown himself in whiskey.

Bronagh reached the depths of the oak savannah, and there she stood in the clearing that the great tree had made when it has fallen. Moonlight reflected off the snow-covered wreckage of branches and brambles, so she was softly lit from all sides. A pillar of gentle beauty without shadows, she glowed separate from the looming trees that kept respectful distance from her. She was carved from bur oak, of course, as that was the dominant tree in the oak savannah, so her flesh was a toasted color with variation, buttery pale in some areas and dark as wheat bread in others. She had a fairly coarse grain, though Bronagh had patiently sanded down the areas he had finished so her body was smooth to the touch. The base of the trunk, which served as the stage she stood upon, had distinct growth rings and large, visible rays, so it seemed that her feet in the center were the source of a ripple of magical energy. Her unfinished face tilted upwards to the heavens and her unfinished hands reached out tenderly from her sides; if she hadn’t been nude, she could’ve been mistaken for a carving of a saint, so generous was her countenance.

The only thing that might be considered to mar her beauty was the great strike that crossed from her left shoulder to her right hip. It was dark and irregular in shape, wild and untamed, a half-inch deep crevice of a burn scar. If Bronagh put his fingers into the wound to touch the rough wood inside her, he could feel her warmth. He was imagining the warmth, of course. She was just a carving of a woman, standing in the icy air. Still, it made him feel safe, made his gut hurt less and his heart swell pleasantly, to touch her pain so intimately.

He sighed as he finished admiring her and pulled his wood carving knife and spoon knife out from his pocket. He would start on her face before his hands got any colder, he decided. He wanted to see her beauty realized. He didn’t have an exact plan of what shape her face would take, but he didn’t need to. She was already in the wood, and she would guide his hand the same way she did when he shaped her long neck or her strong calves.

He started with the nose, broad and slightly upturned at the tip. It was a proud nose, but seemed more suited to laughter than sneering. Bronagh pulled out a bit of sandpaper and delicately buffed away any roughness, embracing her for stability with his left arm as he sanded with his right. As bits of sawdust pirouetted into the evening air, he noticed that they seemed to be dancing towards her nostrils slightly before skittering away into the night, repeating this pattern every few seconds. Strange. He put his right palm under her nose to feel for breath, but there was nothing, of course. She was a wooden carving.

Still, he stepped back off her platform stump and looked at her from a yard or so away, watching her breasts for the telltale rise. Barely a minute had passed, though, before his bowel kinked agonizingly. The steak stew, he thought, feeling a sweat break out on his brow despite the frigid air. He had a theory that steak stew set him off, but he had still eaten it for dinner tonight. He thought maybe he was imagining its effect on him. He was imagining nothing. As he stumbled towards a thicket of trees a few hundred yards away to try to clear out his gut, from the corner of his eye he saw her chest rise and fall dramatically, as if she had been holding her breath. No, he didn’t. She was a wood carving, and he was feverish.

When he returned to her a quarter of an hour later, all thoughts of a statue breathing had fled his mind. He was feeling hollowed out and nauseous, and he resumed his carving with less fervor than before. Maybe he would only finish her face tonight, Bronagh thought, and leave her hands for tomorrow. It’s not like she was going anywhere. But he had so badly wanted to see her done tonight. He hemmed and hawed and resumed his work, figuring he could stop whenever he wanted.

Her lips took shape as readily as her nose had, full and rich, pouting out further than was fashionable. He had carved them so they were barely shut, as if she were about to speak, or maybe as if she were about to kiss a lover. He ran a finger across the plush wood, checking that no splinters remained, and her mouth opened slightly more, her tongue quickly licking his fingertip with a coarse, unsanded surface before darting back into her mouth. He felt the wood and a sharp jolt of electric desire, and drew his hand back to his chest. He hadn’t carved a tongue into her mouth; her mouth was barely open. He peered at her face, holding his palm under her nose again to feel for exhalation, and then tried to force open her mouth with his two hands. He couldn’t pry her jaws apart, of course. She didn’t have jaws. She was a wood carving in a forest.

He patted his cold, stiff hands across his face and the back of neck, trying to determine what his temperature might be. After his last bout of diarrhea, he felt scrubbed raw and exhausted, but also less feverish. It must’ve been the winter air that was keeping him from feeling burning on his flesh. His mysterious illness was giving him hallucinations.

He’d finish her eyes and be done. He’d come back when he’s feeling better, in the daylight, when he wouldn’t be so prone to flights of fancy. He nodded to himself and started on her left eye, gently scraping with the spoon knife. The wood urged him to carve her eye open, so she would be staring at the heavens, but he decided to not follow her direction for once. He carved the almond eye shut, serene and unknowing, long eyelashes curving out from the lid. He began to shape the right eye to match, and was so focused on the task he didn’t notice when the left fluttered open.

The eyeball rolled violently in its socket, overcome with its own existence and the scorching bright soft moonlight. It settled on the curved earlobe of its creator, vibrant pink from the cold, and the plush lips smiled. She sighed deliciously, contented by Bronagh’s attentions. He felt the fall of her chest under his elbow, felt the flit of her facial muscles against his left hand, and studiously focused only on the right eye that was beginning to take shape. He was imagining things. He has always had an overactive imagination.

Fibrous vocal cords thrummed experimentally. Her stiff diaphragm tensed and relaxed, drawing in and forcing out puffs of breath. She tried out humming, and a round, cavernous sound emanated from her torso. She opened her lips, tightened her throat, and forced frozen air through. “Buh,” she vocalized.

Bronagh stiffened, ceasing his work on the suggestion of a right eye, but remained rooted in place.

She tried again, this time clenching her teeth together right as she parted her lips. “Bruh.” Closer, that time.

Bronagh pulled his hands off her head and looked into her face, finally realizing that a pupil he never shaped was dilating to take in every detail of his appearance. Her lips curved and parted indulgently, revealing butterscotch-colored wood teeth he never carved. “Brough.” She sputtered and cleared her throat with a creaking sound before trying again.

“Bronagh,” she managed. Her triumphant smile reached the corner of her single eye, crinkling it.

Bronagh jerked back in alarm and fell off the stump. His hands broke his fall, delivering a sharp shockwave of pain through his wrists as they plunged through the three inches of icy snow. He skittered backwards like a crayfish, faster than his body should’ve allowed. Her smile faltered, and her head crackcrackcracked downwards in three distinct snaps to be tilted towards him.

“Bronagh?” she rasped from her new throat. Fresh sentience and the scar crossing her front and his rejection all hurt her. She wanted him. That was the point of her. How could he not want her back?

She needed to remind him, that’s all. She smiled again, understanding what she was meant to do. “Bronagh,” she repeated, with finality, and began the arduous task of ripping her feet off of her platform.

Bronagh watched as her right heel lifted from the stump, the bottom of her foot jagged and splintered since she was never meant to walk. He scrambled upright and shoved the wood carving knife into his trouser pocket (the spoon knife lay where it was dropped, by the base of the stump) and began to back up towards the other trees. Hallucinating, he told himself, imagining. He had a fever. He was very sick. He needed to go home.

She finished separating her right foot and rolled the ankle, enjoying the freedom of the motion. She started to pull with her incomplete mitten hands at her left leg, confident in her wrenching. “Bronagh,” she cheerily rasped in a sing-song grackle call.

The threat of her freeing herself was enough to make him scurry. He turned away from her wretched, mottled face with one unfinished eye and fled into the woods, heavy work boots clomping his frozen-numb feet through the snow. He heard a groaning rip that he feared was her left foot sectioning itself off and ran faster, letting branches and rip at his face and jacket and trouser legs. Mercifully, his gut cooperated with him as he escaped.

He reached the end of the trees and didn’t look back, barreling into the fields that were barren but in six months’ time would be an impenetrable maze of corn. As he ran through the snowy expanse, his eyes burned and welled up from frigid wind. Tears froze to his eyelashes as soon as they arose, making his vision cloudy. He ran on towards the farmhouse and turned to see if she followed once he reached the back door. Through his frozen eyes, he could only see a field that lay fallow and a smattering of looming trees beyond. The night was empty.

Relieved, he opened the door and went inside. He locked it behind him, even though he had been imagining her coming to life. He had a fever—a bad one, it seemed—and needed rest. If it made him feel better to lock the door, he would lock the door.

He pulled off his cold boots and left them on a rag by the door, so he wouldn’t track sludge across the floorboards. His socks were wet as well, something he hadn’t realized with his numb feet, so he left those on the rag too. He shrugged off his coat and draped it over a chair, feeling his way through the dark kitchen. He slumped onto the hired man’s bed in the living room, electing not to wake his brother in the bedroom they shared, and closed his eyes. He would finish her tomorrow, when he felt better. She wasn’t going anywhere.

There was a gentle scrape on the bay window next to him. His heart quickened but he forced himself to not sit upright. It was a tree, just a tree, it was a tree brushing against the window. Never mind that there were no trees that grew near that window.

A sharper rap on the glass now, testing its solidity. Bronagh squeezed his eyes shut tight, and felt a familiar agonizing roiling raise in his gut. A raccoon maybe, trying to get into the house. Or a bird, that was it, one of those stupid mourning doves flew into the glass in the dark.

A solid hit landed on the glass, sounding for all the world like a wooden mallet striking confidently. Bronagh finally jolted away, tumbling out of the hired man’s bed and onto the rug, staring up into the beatific single eye of his creation as she pounded a wooden club hand against the window again and again. A crack appeared. A crack spread. A crack spiderwebbed across the glass, and then with one final blow, shattered apart.

Shards rained down onto Bronagh and his statue, causing his flesh to bleed and hers to slightly pock. She climbed through the window with disjointed movements like a marionette, and Bronagh saw the raw and splintered soles of her feet catch and rip on the quilt of the daybed. Before she reached him, sprawled out on the floor, he cried out, “What do you want?”

“Bronagh,” she answered in earnest good faith. She generously offered him a rough-hewn palm. When he didn’t accept, she raised her mallet arm and struck him across the skull.

As she dragged him, bootless, sockless, coatless, through the frozen field and forest, he didn’t feel himself. He was confused and disoriented. Who was dragging him? How did it happen? It was like being drunk, he decided, except scarier. When you were drunk, you knew you were drunk. You remembered drinking. He didn’t remember much. Other than losing his apprenticeship.

“Hey,” he whimpered. The person dragging him didn’t answer. He tried to struggle, but he was feeble and cold to the bone. He couldn’t sit up or wrench himself from the rough, hardwood grip.

“Hey,” he called louder, and tried to get his bearings. He was in the oak savannah, nearly at the clearing where he had his sculpture. Didn’t he work on that tonight? He vaguely recalled carving a nose.

They reached the clearing and he saw the bare platform on which his statue was meant to stand. He remembered. Adrenaline pulsed through him and he jerked his body with strength he didn’t know he had, but she was made of oak and lightning and her hold remained firm. She dragged him to the platform and stepped onto it herself, then hauled up his body and embraced him tightly so his face was pressed against her neck, the crown of his head lovingly tucked under her chin. She turned her face up to the heavens and closed her eyes, just the way he had wanted, in exactly the position he had carved her in. Apart from her arms, of course. She needed to use her arms to hold him to her. She needed him to feel how much she wanted him.

With his upper arms pinned to his sides, Bronagh couldn’t push free. He writhed in her grasp but she was a statue once more. He went limp, shivering in his soaked and freezing clothes, not feeling his feet. He wondered if he would lose toes to frostbite, and then realized he stood to lose more than toes to the midwestern winter. He wanted to live. Even if he didn’t know what he’d do with his life, even if nobody else wanted him, Bronagh wanted himself.

He searched deep in himself for warmth, for the determination to make it through the harsh night, and he was surprised to find a seam of heat running across his torso. Or more accurately, across her torso. From where the lightning had struck her when she was still a tree, where the deep fissure ran burnt and black down her, Bronagh felt heat emanating. He wiggled his frozen right hand towards the wound, sticking his fingers inside to thaw them, and hesitantly flexed them a few minutes later once they had loosened. He slipped the hand to his trouser pocket and felt for the wood carving knife. A tiny thing, the handle significantly longer than the blade, but sharp and comfortable to hold. He scraped his fingertips in the pocket and felt the edge of the hilt. He maneuvered it between the pads of his thumb and forefinger and slowly drew it out.

Careful, frightened of waking her, not certain if she could even be considered awake or asleep, he edged his hand and the knife back towards the fissure. He could feel the sharp blade scoring her belly and sucked in his own stomach so he wouldn’t cut himself in the process. For once, he was glad to be underweight. He didn’t have much stomach to cut.

Finally, the blade slipped neatly into the blackened crevice. He braced his knees against hers and pushed back to make enough room to stand the knife perpendicular to her wound. He took both of his hands and felt for the handle, pushing into her hard belly with all of his strength. The knife sunk a bit, but she remained steady and immobile. He tried again and got the knife in a millimeter or two further but struggled beyond that. He brought his numb feet back to the stump and rested his stomach against his forearms and hands, still gripping the hilt. He used the strength of his abs and the weight of his body to help his arms. He felt the handle of the knife dig into his long-suffering gut but persevered. The knife began to sink steadily, until the blade was buried entirely into her.

He pushed hard against the handle of the knife with his right hand, glad that it was full tang, with steel running the entire length of the hilt and unlikely to break. As the blade jerked to the side, she creaked.

He pushed the knife’s handle again, this time in the opposite direction. She moaned.

Sweating in the night air, feeling warmer from the exertion but shivering as the perspiration froze on his flesh, he continued to jimmy the knife further and further into his masterpiece. She remained a perfect statue, doing her best to be what he wanted, until a final gunshot crack echoed through the trees. The deep wound she had been made with had been ripped open. Her torso, from the left shoulder down to her right hip, separated and fell into the snow.

Freed from her embrace, Bronagh collapsed. He found his wood carving knife and his spoon knife and pocketed them before standing on leaden feet to stumble home. Tomorrow, when he felt better, he would buy a bus ticket. He would find the people who wanted him. If he didn’t, he would want himself.

Maybe he would go to Chicago. There must be plenty of artists in a city that big. He could make a living selling carvings.

Or maybe he would choose San Francisco. He heard it never snowed there.