Contributions to the Terror

 I

At 7:29 p.m. on Friday, May 8, in an instant that fell like fire, setting her chest, her life, aflame with animal fear and ungovernable purpose, Donna suddenly knew: it is real. It is inescapable as reality, inescapable as death, she knew then true as she knew anything that it is the sum of all consequence and is as well the end to which all consequence will come, a heat more doubtless than flame.

She noted the time because she realized in that instant that the electric clock was itself a contribution to the terror. As well her breath may be. She wasn’t sure. What feeds it? A glance around the room confirmed that that that, naming every object guilty, then sundialing down the apocalypse she turned round to the hanging mirror and, that, named herself object, guilty, just another signatory of the vainglorious murder-suicide pact underwritten again with every passing moment. She held her breath by instinct and by the newly kindled realization that only acts of extraordinary courage were fit to meet this moment.

She passed out onto the floor.

Waking, she resolved to breathe, only because she must. Yet how many indulgences had she already justified in her life with the cowardly carte blanche of must? All luxury is sociopathic, all pleasure perilous. She knew now. She knew before; everyone knew; but now she believed. Stare into the sun, eyes wide, and swear it doesn’t hurt. Truth insists itself no more than does the world: you either choose to live in it, or you don’t. Pushing herself up from her back onto her elbow, propping her head on her arm, she found she was too dizzy to stand so took a moment to catch her breath, to breathe deeply—like a glutton, she thought. Maybe breathing doesn’t contribute. She couldn’t remember what she had read. Ignorance of evil is no excuse for unwitting acts of it, though, and so she began to draw only shallow breaths in fearful compromise.

Should I kill myself? There on the kitchen floor? The question twitched involuntarily to mind. Frightened as she was at the prospect, Donna knew it had to be confronted while the truth was still young in her. Suicide seemed a less than insensible response to the now doubtless fact that the world, in every intimate sense, was mortally imperiled, and the persistence of any one person hastened by increment that eventual end. If there were anything she could do, if anything might soften her contribution, forestall fate an hour, then the civic conscience of a decent soul could bear it, no matter how rash or grim the decision. No matter how bestially she loved her daughter.

Had anyone seen her collapsed to the corner of the kitchen island, limbs knotted arthritic-like, stomach tight as a readied garrote, they might have thought her stroked or comical. Imagine this, guilty observer: God is made known, unequivocally established by scientific fact, His hand—as proven by the consensus of the best minds of the age—confirmed to be real and reaching directly into the unfolding drama of the world. It would be insensible not to take that hand. It would be madness to cling to anything thought sensible before its appearance.

God is not real. Science knows. But the devil is, as was acknowledged by Donna at 7:29 p.m.

And so, as if possessed equally by demon and revelation, Donna, without humor or hysteria but steadied by terrible fear, considered the knives within reach, the roof that was high. There, on the floor, in the iron maiden cocoon of her newfound certainty, she knew that she would do whatever had to be done and knew too that that conviction was morally sound to a pitch and degree that transcended her own fear of death. Therefore, nauseated and prostrate, spine and skull luminous with throbbing from where her head hit the floor a moment ago, she considered, panicked but quite rationally, whether it might be helpful, in some small way, to kill herself. What does a body do when it dies? She tried to remember. It tenders something into the air and into earth, and was it good or did it contribute? She decided that she would have to satisfy herself on this question before committing to any action. But then to breathe was to act, and she had performed only the most selfish cost-benefit analysis before deciding to continue in that potentially reckless contribution. She knew that if she resolved to stand she would never again consider suicide. Some feelings present themselves with the full force of fact. This was one of them. And it was foolish at this early hour of reckoning to reject any solution. So she kept to the floor.

There were many thoughts to think, many courses to weigh, and time was worsening poison. Aware that she did not know what needed to be done and, worse, fearing there was no productive response to her sudden knowledge, that all actions were either infinitesimally small, accidentally contributory, or else useless, she breathed and cried and thought of her daughter.

As everyone knew but ignored, the world had sunk to this. It was not as though, it was actually true, that a blade hung over Donna’s head and the head of all things and would creep from its perch by degrees perceptible through signs and intimations until it sank into the soft of her skull and ravaged all living matter of the world. Everything—or almost everything, and this was the critical distinction she was trying to make on the freshly polished brick floor of the newly renovated kitchen—that anyone did would hasten the fall. Donna thought if only the blade were actual steel—it was made of more cunning death—then everyone would acknowledge and profess and fear and from that fellowship of fear would come decisive, moral action. But symbols are subject to interpretation, which is how she herself, an educated person with a well-developed sense of empathy, had successfully placated the terror for so long. It is not so bad, Donna had thought. Someone will invent something. She had prevaricated in conversations, calling it the troublesome, the fretful, or, grotesquely, the great opportunity. It was much like, Donna thought then, trying to sit up straight—her head swimming, movements slow—how we choose to celebrate the life of a dead parent rather than stare down the corpse to confirm that nothing stares back. What goodness comes from dwelling on awful truth laid out plainly before you? Better to dissemble, drink wine, remember fondly and dream.

Everything invisible, Donna began to think, trying to articulate this moment—her sudden realization, her previous heedlessness, the grand benightedness of the doomed mass of the earth—but words, being made of matter no more fast than longing, neither relieved nor contributed, and so were useless, unless spoken, in which case, Donna suspected, they might slightly contribute.

I should get Mary, Donna mouthed to herself. Donna’s cousin, Mary, was professionally studied in cycles, prognostication, in beginnings and in a few, specific ends. Mary had data. Daily, Mary poured over figures that adumbrated the shape and rate and assuredness of certain small consequences of the terror. Yet even living with this knowledge, Mary was unflappable, radiated calm and knowing. Surely, Mary could get Donna up from the floor.

Relieved at the prospect of unburdening her realization, of learning, thank God, what ought to be done in the charge of this unbearable knowledge, Donna rose, hurried across the room, respired heavily and was guilty of gulping air. She picked up her phone. No. calls contributed. She put down the phone. As might speech. She pushed the phone away.

Breathe shallowly, she told herself, sit still, hunger after as little energy as is required to soberly think through this moment, through the rest of the night, the rest of your life, and through what course mankind should take in this penultimate spell of history to try to ameliorate the fallout from our own epochal predation.

Realizing that she was now upright, that she had stood a moment ago to reach the phone from the counter, she abandoned the notion of suicide, if only for the pleasure of decisively choosing one uncertain action over another, which seemed at that moment the last acceptable luxury. Is life a luxury? Probably, but she was sticking with it.

What could she do that did not contribute? Quickly the question took on a menacing, rhetorical aspect. What did not contribute? Didn’t everything?

She could write to Mary. But no, the computer contributed. She could write a letter. The delivery cars contributed, and the cutting of the trees for the paper, and the manufacture of the pen. Surely a text didn’t contribute much, but what position did she hold so high above the illiterate, damned creatures of the earth that she should judge what contribution to the terror weighed lightly against her frivolous human desire to communicate, to ease her racing mind?

She steadied herself against the kitchen island, reframed the question: what can I do that might tip the balance of my being towards the ultimate good of subtraction? Shake loose seeds and pollen from the trees in the yard? Did trees help or contribute? She had read that the answer was math and that the math suggested something subtler than the human instinct to unburden our responsibility onto the mute passivity of plants. Donna’s instincts were paralyzing: she wanted both to perform many, frantic actions and to avoid action at all cost. And as each interminable, poisoned, poisoning moment slogged past towards a catastrophe made more certain with the slogging past of each compounding moment, she felt less capable of action, much less capable of weighing the relative merits of many actions, yet not at all less frantic.

To flee knowledge as a child flees a hollering mother, Donna threw open the back door to escape into the yard, but then slammed the door hard realizing the cool air inside should not seep into the warm air without. It was terrible for the two to mix, she thought she had read.

She thought, I should have read more carefully.

“Donna!”

Back pressed to the door, breathing fast but shallow still, she searched the room for an exculpatory something, an anyplace safe to begin her new life of knowledge, but saw instead a stove, a fridge, foodstuffs, outlets, brick flooring, all of which—windowpanes, faucet, molecules—contributed by functioning properly, by being well-made, by simply being.

Were God made real, it would be just our luck to know His wrath but never His will, to therefore worship poorly, profane accidentally, and in our eagerness to fall righteously before Him, simply sink further into the muck.

Dizzied by consideration of the infinite, erroneous paths serpenting between her and certain failure, Donna passed out again onto the floor.

The party continued in the next room.

II

“You can’t know—hang on, let me qualify—if it isn’t—isn’t, wait—” The table erupted in laughter. Steven, the professor, their paragon of articulation, was drunk.

“Somebody get Steve another glass! I might win an argument with him for once!”

This too was funny. Fluted glasses, ribbed tumblers were struck with silver and made to sing. 

“Hear, hear!” the sentiment, merriment was seconded, squared.

Seven were gathered around the dinner table, the Friday dinner-party seven—married all, and all laughing, cheering, except Donna, who had wandered off into the kitchen more than a few minutes ago.

“Donna!” her husband, Martin, called out, hearing the back door slam. “All right in there! Sometimes, I swear, she gets lost in the kitchen, just gets turned around and can’t find which drawer is—you mix up the salt and the sugar again?” he shouted. “We just redid the kitchen, and the other day she really did mix up the salt and the, uh, the sugar.” Martin was a little drunk too.

For the occasion, though, really, it was no occasion, the cohort banded together nearly every Friday, at someone’s house, around someone’s table, Martin planned to open his St. Dogaine ’73. Though he knew he would be asked, he hesitated to tell the story of how he had come into possession of such a storied vintage, not wanting to brag about the provenance of the bottle, nor about how, well, dashing and all, he came off when the story was properly told.

“So it’s,” Steven, the professor, continued, “what I was saying was—”

“What were you saying?” Daniel, Daniel Faster, new to the group, recently married to Linda, the second marriage for each and for each the one that promised to stick, quipped, already comfortable with the group on this, his fifth Friday out.

Steven laughed. He laughed hard and at himself. He was able to laugh hard at himself because he was, in fact, a little drunk, but also because he was a genuine, gentle soul, who loved what he loved and so cared little if he caught guff for it from his friends. Guff’s always good for a laugh. Steven was a classicist at a Georgetown. He held a Chair.

“I was saying,” Steven said, still chuckling to himself, “or I was trying to say, I don’t think any amount of scholarship, or wine, can illuminate, can really force a person to embody, a way of thinking. A culture’s, I mean. A foreign culture’s way of thinking.”

“He hated Italy!” Martin broke in.

“Just couldn’t understand all those damn Italians,” said Linda. “What were they speaking? Italian?”

“No, no, no,” Steven smiled drunkenly hangdog into his oxford cloth, swimmy-headed, eyes retiring, “that’s not what I—”

“You didn’t have a good time in Italy, dear?” Daphne, Steven’s wife, asked. “That’s odd. I seem to recall having actually a very wonderful time.” She reached over the table—they were seated across from one another—and squeezed Martin’s hand. He lifted his head from his shirt. His face was flushed and red and really very happy.

“I’m getting this out!” Steven hollered, laughing, panning across the others’ faces, staring them down with his glassy, luminous eyes. “The Romans!’

“The Romans!” The whole table erupted in cheers and hand hammering. “The Romans! The Romans!”

“You see?” Martin delighted. “I knew this was about the Italians! Donna, did you hear! I knew it! Hey, you were telling Steven,” Martin shouted into the kitchen, “Donna! Just a minute ago you were telling Steven that if he kept his face buried in a book—what did you say? ‘Reading history ain’t making history?’ But then, I mean, to Donna’s point, when are any you going to have some children?” There wasn’t a child among the group except Martin and Donna’s daughter Evie.

“When there’s time!” Daniel shouted.

“There’s never time!” Linda seconded.

“No, but, anyway, I’m sorry,” Martin said. “Go on. Speak! Tell us about those Roman Italians, Steve. Unburden us of your—onto us of your great learnedness, and let us know what it was about those damned Roman Italians!”

Steve composed himself. He was getting this out. It was, after all, very interesting.

“So all right then, so, around 218 BC—"

“Phenomenal vintage that year,” Martin interrupted, twisting the unopened, still unintroduced St. Dogaine ’73 at a tilt on the tabletop, “but continue, continue.”

“Yes, okay, 218 BC, the Romans, at the, uh, the behest of their Senate, plus the pontiffs and flamens, the important Roman clergy—well, no, actually, on the advice…”

As Steven spoke, Martin began to rehearse the story of the St. Dogaine ‘73 in his head. The wine itself was a modest-bodied Bordeaux, vanilla-forward, balanced by ‘rueful’—this is how Martin had first heard the flavor described, by a heavily accented Provençal sommelier, minutes before winning the bottle from an Australian sports broadcaster in an honest-to-god wrestling match right there on the tasting room floor—rueful notes of oily leather hide, brightened by angelica, finishing with rich minerality and a touch of autumnal tuber, sweet potato, Japanese yam. Not being an oenophile at the time, young Martin had rolled his eyes at the pretension of the tasting notes, but now, all these years later, in a single sip, he could taste each one as if the ingredient were cooked, steaming and set before him. The bottle he was preparing to serve was in fact his third bottle of St. Dogaine ’73, but the thing to know was how he had won that first bottle, not how much he had paid for the second and third.

“…they did all this, I mean, on the advice of the Oracle at Delphi, who was Greek, actually, and in conjunction with a consultation of the Sibylline Books—those are a sort of collection of prophesies, of a sort—they began, the Romans did, began worshipping Magna Mater, who was a Phrygian goddess, the only Phrygian goddess, in fact. Phrygia is—was—in what’s today, what do I want to say, in Turkey.”

“That’s interesting,” David said and meant it, leaning forward imperceptibly to himself.

“Steven’s always interesting,” Daphne boasted. She had yet to let go of his hand.

“Yes, so, I have always found this very interesting, this period in Roman theology, history. I have always found it somewhat troubling. The Romans, often, all the time, in fact, imported gods from other cultures. You remember from school: Neptune for Rome, Poseidon for Greece, Zeus for Greece, Jupiter for the Romans, and most of the time, the Greek god came first with the Roman one being a somewhat, you could say, poorer facsimile. Roman officials, for whatever particular political reasons, often found it advantageous to, you know, plump up the pantheon with foreign deities. And that’s fine. But Magna Mater was different. The Roman people hated her. Most of them did, anyway. Cults formed around her, just small ones, and the Romans who weren’t in the cults, which was practically everyone, they thought the people in the cults were, how can I say, effeminate, which was not the way to behave in ancient Rome. Quite the opposite. And so most of the Roman people hated her because they thought she was a, you know, sort of a bad influence. A real wimpy goddess.”

What conspires to make a wine so lovely? Martin had been listening to his friend but was wondering as well. Factors such as the weather and soil composition contribute to the quality of a finished wine. Martin knew that and knew something about that, too, such as which climates were good and which were not. But, you know, it occurs to me that we talk about the weather as if it were a thing, when really it is many things. Martin makes this mistake. I do as well. We all do, I think. And we talk about plants, too, as though they were inert and perfectly acquiescent, their health and qualities depending entirely on what is done to them, rather than what they themselves do. Let me ask you: when you think of a grape vine, does it eat, or does it absorb nutrients? Is it a creature with agency flexing its muscles, reaching for food in the struggle to survive, or a long lump that’s only ever made to move by the invisible will of nature? Is anything made to move by the invisible will of nature? Does nature have a will, or is nature a word we use to describe the totality of the interplay of the physical forces that underlie what we experience as existence? The only thing I’m sure of is that nature is not a thing. It is too many things to name. Here’s a thought: being is agency, and matter is perfect proof of that. Nothing exists without its own consent. It may not be true, but it’s only a thought.

I’d like to keep talking with you, if that’s all right.

When I tell you that Martin is holding the bottle of wine, that he spins it on the table, you see it, don’t you? You know that he grasps the neck of the bottle with his hand and that he spins the bottle by twisting his fingers. You know how the base of the bottle rests at an angle against the table. I don’t need to explain to you how a person holds and spins a bottle in order for you to correctly picture it: you have seen it in life, and so you can picture it in stories. Now let me say this. Nitrate is a form of nitrogen, and it is food to grape vines. Nitrogen combines with oxygen, carbon and hydrogen, among other elements, to form amino acids, which are the basic structure of protein and are integral to leaves much as they are to human muscle. You do not know what an amino acid looks like. Neither do I. Imagine seeing oxygen combine with nitrogen as clearly as you picture Martin spinning the bottle of wine. I’m trying to now. But I don’t know the shapes. I don’t know what it would sound like, or whether the fusion of oxygen and nitrogen produces a smell. Humans are made of oxygen more than we are made of anything. We can speak poetically. We can say we are made of memories and of the past. That may be true. But even if it is, memory and the past are also made of something, perhaps carbon. What does carbon look like? Are its molecules spherical or hexagonal? If a grape vine fails to absorb enough nitrogen, its leaves will yellow because nitrogen is a component of chlorophyll. You know the color of chlorophyll. Me too. What shape is chlorophyll, and what does it smell like? How does it form? I can see how a new building forms, but I can’t even imagine how the component parts of chlorophyll gather together. Martin spins the bottle. A grape vine stretches a root into the soil. Nitrate molecules float free in the soil and in the water that soaks the soil because nitrate molecules are negatively charged and so do not bind to the other molecules around them. Would this charge feel like static electricity were our hands small enough to enter its field? I don’t have any information about that. What I can say is that far from sticking to anything, nitrate molecules, in fact, repel the soil, that is, all of the many things that, when they are pressed close together, we call in aggregate the soil. Have you noticed that we tend to name many things a single thing when, as far as we’re concerned, all those things function as a unit? Soil. Weather. Nature. Life. Donna. These are old considerations. The weather is so complicated, involves so many variables, that if we tried to talk about weather in total, the true sum of weather, we would lose the thread of the inquiry, which, when we are talking about the weather day to day, is almost always do I need to wear a coat this morning. What I mean is, we don’t ask what is weather, what is nature because, well, on any given Tuesday, who cares what they are. I mean, what does it matter to me whether nitrogen smells like banana when it combines with oxygen, and also because we couldn’t hold in mind these enormous answers, even if we cared enough to investigate. Martin loves his St. Dogaine ’73, but—and I mean this respectfully to Martin, who’s really a wonderful man—he doesn’t know what it is. He doesn’t know what wine is. “It is fermented grape juice. This wine comes from the so-and-so region. The ’73 vintage is especially prized because of the notes of vegetables and so forth that were brought out by heavy rain in the region that year.” It's like asking what is the human soul and being told, “It is the part of us that seeks truth and reads stories and is sad when loved things die.” Grape vines thrive when the right amount of nitrogen is available to them: too little, and they starve, too much, and they grow sick. Plants are like humans in this regard, who are like all animals: appropriate things must be in appropriate balance, or else we die. Nitrogen comes in three forms. It is abundant as ammonium. But ammonium is positively charged and so sticks to the soil: the grape vine roots can’t break it free to eat it. However, all ammonium is acted on by ammonia-oxidizing bacteria and nitrogen-oxidizing bacteria, and I don’t know how they act on it, whether they spray it with something, batter it with tendrils, chomp on it, but whatever it is they do, in time it converts the ammonium to nitrite. Climactic conditions affect how quickly and when ammonium is converted into nitrite. In cold, wet, acidic areas like peatlands, microbial activity slows down, and there isn’t much oxygen available in the soil, which the microbes need to convert ammonium to nitrate. Nitrite becomes nitrate when the nitrogen-oxidizing bacteria do to it whatever it is they do to it (I wish I knew). Nitrate becomes nitrogen gas because of things done by bacteria. Some of the nitrogen gas finds vents in the soil, slips up, and escapes into the atmosphere. Nitrogen gas is a potent greenhouse emitter.

What I’m saying is, I’d like to understand what’s going on. There are, moment to moment, countless happenings in nature, and like anything that happens, we would understand them best through sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch, but we can’t see nitrite become nitrate, and we don’t know whether nitrite tastes better or worse than nitrate, and so it’s effortless to imagine that it isn’t happening, or that it’s happening by magic, by some process entirely different from the one that frames, composes, and compels Martin to spin a bottle of St. Dogaine ’73 on the hickory-plank table of his dining room. There must be a single story that features every atom as leading player and plots in full the manifold drama of being. And there is, of course, but that story is life, and it’s much too grand a story to tell.

Anyhow, Martin thought the weather, the soil and such, that’s what makes this wine so lovely.

“But the thing,” Steven was still speaking, “the thing that’s always troubled me is, no one ever questioned her divinity. You do, I mean, all right, have to keep in mind that there are only a few written records of this period of history—Livy, Ovid, Cicero, a few others—so, okay, maybe some people privately complained, grumbled a bit about should we recognize this goddess or not, but on the whole, it seems, no one really questioned whether this hated import was in fact a goddess. They were told ‘this is a goddess,’ and they hated her, but for the most part, they just said ‘okay.’ And it isn’t as though this goddess appeared to them. No one had visions of her. The only physical sort of manifestation of Magna Mater was a rock, a bit of meteor, that the Romans brought back from Greece. I don’t know why they thought this rock was the body of a goddess, but that’s a different complaint. And it’s just always struck me as the oddest thing. It’s troubling, isn’t it, how easily people can be manipulated? Or maybe that’s not the story. Maybe the story is that it’s troubling how accepting people writ large are of just, you know, ridiculous things. But we do that too, right? So that’s what I meant: I don’t think we can fully inhabit, fully understand, really, you know, another culture’s way of thinking. In the past people thought differently. You can say that for certain. Thought itself was different, or reason was, anyway. What constitutes a reasonable argument changes more with shifts in culture than with advancements in thinking. I think that’s probably true. And so looking back, even though you could pick out anything, really, almost anything and say, ‘Well, we know better now. We would have done better ourselves if we had been there,’ I don’t think we can actually know what we would have done. I think,” he paused to think, “I think that when you aren’t a part of a people it’s very difficult to understand why they are the way they are and why they do what they do. It makes me wonder, and worry: what do we, what does our culture, unthinkingly accept? What embarrassing, just, ridiculousness do we shrug at and then get on with? Something, for sure. There must be some just enormous mistake we’re completely comfortable ignoring.”

It would be humbler, Martin decided, and sweeter somehow to keep the story between himself and Donna, wherever she got off to, and so without any preamble, he popped the cork to the legendary wine and said unceremoniously to the table, “Wonderful story. Another bottle?”

III

Fallen to fester, the yard weedy, putrid with rotting unraked leaves, stinkbug carapaces littering the windowpanes, and inside, drained bean cans stuffed under stained couch cushions, rinds melting into mold the colors of aquamarine and cancer, feces, the smell of feces, the horror of knowing it is there, nearby, in the open and may be touched or stepped on, this is how Mary found the place when she was dispatched there in late fall. Horror stormed her spine, rushed her head as she opened the front door, drew her first gingivitised breath. Donna hadn’t called or returned a call in months. Then Martin had written to Donna’s mother, had written strange, frightening things. Martin lived in a hotel now. And so Mary, who taught at the state university an hour away, was sent by the family to investigate what had befallen their cousin, friend, wife, and daughter.

Waste had overcome every surface as if deliberately spread or else as if it were the rightful sovereign of this place come to reclaim what civilization had sterilized. Breath tasted of every smell and others. Chunks of the floor had been sledgehammered. Plants took root in the hollows. Walls exposed their undercarriages where mold grew monstrous and sentient. 

Mary did not know what to think. Her every thought was unthinkable. Donna had died and this had been done by animals. But then who had opened the cans? Donna had died and this had been done by squatters. Mary noticed a pattern to the piles of dross, excrement, that they were arranged, spaced apart by a few, deliberate feet. This had been done by cultists, under the thrall of drugs, and a belief in dark magic. Fresh living green sprouted from the fetid heaps. Mary taught botany. She knew plants. She knew and saw there in the waste heaps snake plants, tulsi, parsley. She knew wheatgrass, which, grown long as a neglected buzzcut, textured a hillock of bricks and human evacuation; she reached out a hand, fearful and astonished, crushed a healthy fistful, and then her fist was sweet. A heroically sized pothos vined an entitled arm down a knoll of torn carpet, ripped t-shirts, spinach and broccoli softened to ooze. Piles rose higher than her head. Others threatened her shins, her waist, with sickness no shower could address. Leaves spiraled towards the cathedral ceiling of the entryway, the dull pressed tin ceiling of the kitchen, waxy green philodendron hearts, neon-red-lined technocolor-green Maranta, serrated aloe vera massive as an oar. The largest mess pile was emblazoned with a riot of gerbera daisies, festooned pink and yellow, red and orange, bursting, beaming, rapture on parade. A label-less wine bottle crowned the display, caught golden the strong light of the afternoon. Everywhere, across every pile, baby shoots nuzzled out from the dirt, promising color and life.

Outside, the day was warm. It was beautiful weather for November, when this part of the world was wont to shrivel and freeze.

The human lexicon employed to describe the sensations of scent is unillustratively self-referential. To say it smells of sweat, we say only that it is sweaty. Mary would later tell Martin that the house smelled gutty. She could have said instead that antiquity impregnated the air a perfume, that the house smelled of ten thousand years previous, groin, dung, stem, the exhilaration of being prey. She could have said it smelled as if death had been abolished by its perpetual nearness, that his home was now a charnel house. There were so many things she could have said, but Mary was a botanist, and Mary held her breath.

Creaks and footfall sounded from upstairs. Impossible to move, it was, impossible to think. It would be a devil, Mary knew, an actual skulking hellthing. She would not go up to it. She would not wait for it. She would leave but could not move. She loved her cousin but would not search. Donna was dead. She must be dead. Nothing human could live in this indignity.

The sounds continued—shuffle, plop, groaning of the floor. The stairs were wet with slime, the rail unthinkable to grasp.

Unthinkable as everything was in that place. By instinct, she had surveyed the wreck of the bottom floor. Compulsion, not curiosity, drove her onward, farther inward, feelings animal, thoughtless, governing her marionette body. She did not want to know what was in that place. She did not want to learn what had happened to Donna. She wanted to be gone; she wanted to be clean and home. Espresso-colored crust blistered along an edge of the kitchen island. She reached out, horrified that she was reaching out, cracked off a shard, unwillingly smelled it. It smelled like foot and rainwater. She pocketed it and did not know why.

Her chest clenched, lungs burned. She had not been breathing, had been holding her breath. She drew in air like unwelcome news. The air was so robust with life, its bloom, decay, that to breathe was to taste in an instant the splendor and terror of nature’s full gourmet.

She made for the stairs, took them upwards and did not know why.

At the top of the landing, naked, smiling kindly, dripping globules of thickly applied putrefaction, stood Donna, a back-swept crown of chives encircling her scalp.

At the paralyzing sight of this primordial golem, who was not her cousin, was not Donna or human any longer, Mary stammered involuntarily, “Alive?” Overjoyed at the sight of her cousin, Donna bared her mossy teeth in an enormous smile, revealing baby’s breath vased between her incisors. Donna walked over, quite plainly, as if nothing horrible were happening all around them, negotiating her way around an ankle-high pile of potting soil soaked in, the scent was unmistakable, human urine. Donna stood before Mary. A spongy bolus of mushed peas and baby’s breath slopped from Donna’s mouth to the floor. Mary did not, could not, move, flee, respond. Donna leaned her oozing mouth to Mary’s ear. Her teeth were tree bark, her smell ungovernable, and her throat raised but the slightest whisper.

“I was hoping to ask you about that.”

Tearing down the stairs, out the house, Mary slipped, recovered, was covered in yolk-color mucus, stepped, distracted, knee-deep into a pile, losing her left shoe to a mealy substance cankering orchid purple. From the window of the second-story library, or what had been the second-story library, Donna watched Mary stagger across the front lawn, throw herself into her car and speed, one shoe down, away. Mary breathed heavily as she ran. Her shoes were leather. Mary opened the door to the outside and drove away in a manufactured car.

Donna lingered at the window in the room she no longer thought of as the library. Nothing within the house was separate. Everything aspired to a single purpose. The books had all been shorn, their pages planted, decayed to sludge, their records degraded to sludge. Something new was being written, a great work without author.

Or was it a supplication?

A catastrophe?

Pressing her hand to the windowpane, Donna left behind a print as thick as mud. The topography of her palm’s folds and deep furrows, the swirls at the tips of her fingers, a permanent indent from twelve years of marriage.

Trace fossils.

Come back, Mary. We have so many questions.

Austin Adams is a writer from Tennessee. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Prelude, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Offing, minor literature[s], and The Millions, among other outlets.

Published April 15 2025