Up in the sky, Helen 79 met up with Helens 15, 29, and 45. They all lined up, the four of them on the cumulonimbus like unstacked Russian dolls, and watched the wolf. The pup nursed from a hackberry knothole. She gnawed on what was left of Helen. She nosed Helen’s bones into a pile. While the bones bleached like birch branches in the sun, the she-wolf grew, right before their eyes, as long and blue as a cold steel blade.
“This is the best me yet,” Helen 15 said. “An honest-to-God wolf!”
Helen 29 snorted. “You can say that again. You were an awful version of me. So careless and loose.”
Helen 45 butted in: “Oh, shut up, 29. You were the worst of all of us. A complete sellout.”
“Takes one to know one,” Helen 29 said.
Helen 29 and Helen 45 went at it right there on the cloud. 45 called 29 “plastic.” 29 called 45 a “martyr.” 45 yanked off 29’s pearl choker. 29 mashed her hands against 45’s jowls. Neither of them noticed that below, the she-wolf was now being chased through the hackberry woods. A pack of he-wolves was on her trail. They nipped at her heels. Their noses knew what she had to give, what they had to take. She thundered through the underbrush. She panted, panicked, as Helen 15 had in the hospital parking lot, but there was no escaping her fate. Soon enough, the he-wolves overcame her. In a flurry of fangs and fur, they each had their way with her—mounting her, pinning her, teeth on her scruff, one after another—until she collapsed, limp and alone on the forest floor.
Helen 15 saw this happen. Helen 79 felt it happen. But the two Helens in between sparred, oblivious and hateful. Helen 15 nodded at Helen 79, and Helen 79 nodded back. They knew the time had come to turn back time, to be born again by never being born at all. Helen 15 climbed onto Helen 29. She stood on her thin and brittle shoulders until Helen 29 had no choice but to succumb and climb back inside Helen 15, from where she had originated, until all that remained was one ballerina foot emerging.
Helen 45 watched in horror. “Oh, no,” she said. “Not this.”
But Helen 79 was already on her knees, small and spry, crawling under Helen 45 and up inside her before 45 could resist. “Looks like it,” Helen 15 said.
Helen 15 and Helen 45, each with an older version of herself inside, stood and faced one another. Below, the she-wolf nursed her wounds and resigned herself to growing whatever sort of seed took. She could feel it inside her already, a thorn in her fur. It grew at a rapid pace. The two Helens could see the wolf’s belly expand before their eyes.
“We can do this the hard way,” Helen 15 said.
“Or the right way,” Helen 45 sighed.
The two Helens stepped forward and embraced. They held each other as the she-wolf went into labor. It was the most difficult of all the labors. More than 15 birthing 29. More than 29 birthing 45. More than 45 birthing 79. More than 79 birthing the pup. The wolf howled and paced. She made a bed of leaves and circled through them in one direction and then another.
The Helens didn’t dare look to see what might emerge, another wolf or another Helen. At last Helen 45 dropped to her knees and crawled inside Helen 15, and Helen 15 was all alone on the cloud, her three other selves stacked within her, unborn, once again. She watched as the dark slit beneath the she-wolf’s tail gave way to dark blood. The she-wolf birthed neither wolf nor woman, but parts. Male parts that hung and swung. Organs that didn’t invite or entice, but commanded, demanded.
“Thatta girl.” Helen 15 nodded in approval. “Now you’re thinking.”
Then, like a thrown stone, Helen 15 plummeted back to earth. She fell right into Collier’s Glen, past the sunlit birches and onto the plaid blanket. She looked and saw: there was the portable CD player. There was the Rumple Minze. There she was in her red hooded sweatshirt and soccer shorts. Inside her pocket, she felt the fresh plastic edge of her learner’s permit. Helen cocked her head and listened. Far off, there was rustling. It was heading in her direction. It might be Dustin Mulhouse coming to take all she had to give. But Helen hoped it was the he-wolf, hunting her down. The sixth version of herself could shred her and all the Helens inside to bits. He could scatter everything they had once been all over the forest. Their pleasure and power and purpose, their pearls and emeralds, their dumb ideas and blind faith. Helen was nearly in ecstasy at the thought. She lay back and waited, breathless. She would be her own lover, her own killer. She would be her own man.
DRAWERS
HALFWAY BETWEEN CLIFTON and Merona, the sun breaks through the colorless sky like a circle of light in an operating room. It bleaches the empty highway, exposing Lawrence’s car, which moves hot and solitary down the road, a loose ember blown. Here is where the gray lint of Spanish moss chokes the trees, where the soil fades from red to pink, where Lawrence knows he is most trapped, dead center, equally removed from his home and Susan’s. Here is the merciless heat, the Florida farmland where livestock move as if in quicksand, as if already stew meat.
On the roadside, a fence is being built. The workers, oily with sweat, set posts with shovels and hands instead of machines. Lawrence imagines a posthole, a man stumbling into it, a femur snapped in two. He imagines a tumbleweed of barbed wire, palms lacerated, flies swarming. He imagines flies, their larvae, multiplying by the billions, teeming dunes of white rice.
As he imagines this, Lawrence recalls something from his childhood. How once his father, on a rare day he was not on call, took Lawrence quail hunting. It was after Lawrence’s mother’s death and neither had anything to say, so they walked the Georgia pinewoods in silence. They had no luck with quail, but they came across a wild pig, a dead one, sliced from throat to tail by a hunter’s knife and left to rot. Its insides crawled with white worms so numerous and frothing that Lawrence thought at first the hog had been sprayed with a fire extinguisher or filled with shaving cream.
“Well,” his father said plainly. “There’s nature for you.”
His father found a stick and opened up the pig, angering the worms, horrifying Lawrence. He named the organs he could name. Liver, lung, pancreas. Lawrence hugged a tree to stay standing, eventually bent over and was sick, and his father pretended to notice none of it. They returned to the pickup truck the long way, his father calmly pointing out lichens and songbirds on the walk back. His father took his time, as if purposely prolonging Lawrence’s pain.
This, Lawrence had forgotten. And now, in remembering, he has lost track of where he is. His eyes have been in the old Georgia woods, on the pig, the worms, but here he is: back on the hot, white Florida highway. And there is the horse. Standing in the middle of the road, as if a movie backdrop has fallen, a looming, dun-colored roadblock coming up fast. For an instant, Lawrence thinks it must be a mirage, his imagination finally getting the best of him, and it’s then he barrels into it—a warm boulder dropped from the heavens. The car lurches like a seesaw. Lawrence pitches into the steering wheel. He pitches back against the headrest and glimpses the horse’s hide up close as it’s vaulted over the hood and windshield, a sudden show of wiry mane and golden dust released. Then there is a sound Lawrence knows he will never forget. A groan both mechanical and animal. It radiates to his core, as if his spine is a metal string, plucked by fate’s unforgiving finger.