“How is your body doing?”
It took May a long time to answer. His feet, hands, tips of his bent ears and nose had been numb since he first pushed himself off the damp ground that morning. But in some soft place deep inside him, his guts cramped around hot new life.
“It’s good to be full,” he said.
Bex felt her own stomach inflame to enclose the precious bits–thread root, stem strings, heads of mushrooms, tufts of seeds.
The field was a fairy ring closed in from the roaming dogs by towering petals made of worn stone the color of good soil (or so one of Bex’s aunts had once said.) The same color as the eyes she held wide to take in the parts of the bounty her stretched belly couldn’t yet. Despite all the newfound rest, she still could not feel her bloody feet, her hands with skin swelled by sun and joints fixed by cold. She watched the beads of pollen drift past, coloring even the quiet sky with the fluorescent green-orange-yellow of new growth.
The sea of grass moved with the wind too, enough amber-colored fiber for 10,000 new shoes. On either side of her hips, blossoming from the earth; like milk teeth, morning wood, blisters, rising all around and spreading their own powdery life. She watched families of little shining things racing about, collecting the mushrooms’ offerings on the fine down covering their gloriously round bodies.
Bex slept like the ground that night, dreaming of newly woven baskets overflowing with dried stock foods, a lifetime of root broth cooked in her own windproof home by a clear stream. She awoke under her stone awning to her heart pounding from her ears to her cracked fingertips. Her goddamn incompetent companion now a baby grub curled in his own earthen crib, snoring in the pink-blue light of dawn.
Over the next week their stomachs stretched enough to be hungry. One day they realized that they hadn’t replaced sleep with worry in many nights, now they had long uninterrupted unconsciousness filled with dreams they no longer cared to put words to. And anyway, their attempts failed to pass their ever-drier lips and painlessly rotting teeth. May and Bex stumbled hand in hand through the glowing meadow that rose to meet their feet and sank to cradle them when they dropped. They were resplendent now in found treasures, their eyes echoed in a ring of empty sockets so they would never have to stop looking at the joy of it all. May laughed his first belly laugh and choke-screamed to Bex: “‘’mpollenting!” And he was, his own specks of sunlight drifted on the breeze. The shell of scars that he had once needed was no more–could return as payment to this perfect place. Bex giggled as she saw that she too was vulnerable–the first time, the first time! Years of wrinkles floating away on the breath of the field.
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