In the morning, she finds her father in the garden and worries about the thinness of his clothes—the shirt that stretches over a protruding ribcage, the sleeves that rest an inch above his wrists. She knows the season is changing, that the rains will come soon and will come hard, and that the winds will be cold, but her father won’t get his winter clothes out of the attic, won’t let himself be touched. The grainy feeling of dirt on her fingers keeps her from insisting.

  I remember the days of falling men,

  of men picking up rocks and crushing their hands on them,

  so they could eke out another day’s existence, grunting prayers,

  until the mountain was a house of flesh and bone.

  I remember the mountain saying:

  How do you survive it? This dancing corpse.

  She was right about the weather. She’s repairing one of the walls in the attic, and as she’s putting the last nail in a plank of wood, a loud crack jolts her upright, and then, a deluge, as if months of held-back rain now poured down all at once, like an enormous bucket suddenly tipped over. She knows, in that moment, that her father will not live to see the winter through. My father, she thinks, like the mountain, a series of fragments and bones, a disordered sprawl that would take me years to put back together.

  The priest visits a few days of rain and hail later. Her father is resting in his room. She didn’t find it in her to ask him about the soil in his mouth, and she doesn’t tell the priest either. Gera looks too young to be a priest, but there’s also something heavy and serious about him; he looks strong, and girdled, like a fortress. The scent of frankincense hangs off his clothes. It makes her eyes water.

  “Philio,” he tells her as she kisses his hand and calls him Father. “I haven’t seen you in so long.” His palm feels smooth and warm; she presses it to her cheek and doesn’t want to let go.

  “Please,” she says after a while, releasing his hand. “Please sit down. There’s some coffee.” She feels dizzy. His hand’s warmth is still on her cheek.

  For a long moment, they sit in silence. The priest stares at the pictures on the wall. She places a cup of coffee before him and he takes small sips, blowing on the black liquid before each one.

  “How’s your father?” he finally asks, looking back at her. His eyes are glossy and kind.

  “He’s ill,” she tells him, though that’s not what he’s asking. “Better yesterday than today. He was in the garden—it was raining, he shouldn’t have been out. It’s my fault.” She pauses for breath, takes a silty sip of coffee. “But you know how it is. There’s so much to do, to repair. The rains have been very bad.”

  “Yes,” he says. “I know. I visited Mother Vassa last week. She told me about your trees.”

  She closes her eyes for a moment and thinks of the orchard, the rotting fruit on the ground, the bruised branches like broken arms above. She forces her eyes open again and fixates on the small sickle-shaped scar on Gera’s temple. She knows the stories about him well. When he was but a boy and the forest thick, Gera would walk into the forest to gather herbs and berries, wild onions and mushrooms, moss from the underside of the giant ferns. She knows about the one time he nearly got lost and kept walking until he reached the edge of the forest where there was just a line of trees and darkness. The clouds above were heavy and low and birds screeched unseen from the black branches. That’s the night he got his scar. She knows the stories of the people he has cured, the demons he has chased out of men and out of the village; she doesn’t believe them. She’s always wondered if he ever believed in any of it himself. He’s fond of berating people for their superstitions; aren’t demons one of them?

  An enormous crack of thunder stops her from asking and he, for better or for worse, changes the subject. “How was life in the city?”

  Such a difficult question to answer. She remembers the shock of city walls, their height, their curves, the jutting metal of guardrails, the constant hum of the streets. The city was like a living organism, a nest of pipes and wires and taut-faced men and women, the bewildering architecture of it all. It thrilled her to her core. Even arriving in the city with her mother and not knowing where to go, where they would sleep, what they would eat. They spent nights at the train station, lulled to sleep by the smell of people and garbage, woken roughly by police. She minded none of it; and when they finally found their way, a place to live, a job, money in their pockets and food on their table and people to call friends, she missed the uncertainty of those first days. Sought it in other experiences; driving her body to its limits, breaking her bones, marking it with the scars left behind by excitement. Now, she even misses the poorly paid job she had to leave to come here and tend to her father—stacking boxes and stocking shelves at the grocery store. She’s never been a particularly strong girl, but she enjoyed the effort of it, the ache it sunk into her muscles.

  Her chest tightens; she shifts in her chair. “It was different,” she says, finally. “It was all right.”

  “You seem angry.”

  The comment takes her aback, but he’s right. There was a blade in her words, even if she didn’t know she was wielding it. “It’s not that,” she says. “It’s just it takes everything I have to not run away from this village.”

  “Why?”

  She breathes. Looks away, at the forest, the mountain with its dark face and its hollow belly. She listens for her father’s cough from the back room. “Because it’s been the ruin of him, and it fills me with dread,” she says after a moment.

  The priest gets a severe look on his face that does not become his youthful features. He opens his mouth to say something but a tremor interrupts him with a chorus of creaks. The ground trembles like the beating of a great heart. The walls groan, and the picture of a lamb falls to the floor. The glass shatters. A dog barks, far away. Heartbeats later, the movement stops. Only the distant rumbling of the mountain remains. And then, voices from the village. Someone screaming.

  “I should go,” the priest says, shooting up from his seat.

  “Yes.”

  Before he leaves, she stops him with a light hand on his upper arm. “Father,” she says, unsure how to finish the phrase.

  “You never said why you came.” He looks at her, at the hand on his arm long enough that she’s forced to take it away. For a while, he looks down at his feet, waiting for her to reply, but she doesn’t. He takes a breath. “It’s not good to linger in the past,” he says finally. The corners of his mouth curve in a quick smile, and then he walks out the door into the cold and the dark, and is gone.

  She resists the urge to go after him. The priest, she’s heard people say, always had a way with animals. The dogs of the village would follow him into the forest, even when their owners called them back. The train of her own thought makes her laugh—a wild sound, hollow in the empty house.

  After he leaves, she sips her coffee, too cold now. She wants to bury her face in Melia’s hair, to watch dust swirl through the moonlight, to be where nothing can touch her. Empty house, she thought, but the house is not empty. It’s time to check on her father. As she walks in through the kitchen door, she can hear her father’s voice from the back of the house, the long hall, the closed doors. She brings her ear to the bedroom door and listens to him speaking elegies of soil.

  I remember the air saturated with the cries of men and dogs that came to worship my stone body

  as the earth screamed apart

  as the sky splintered open

  as ashes fell on men until they, too, were ash.

  She pushes the door open and lets herself in. Her father falls silent immediately, his gaze distant.

  She goes to him, sits on the bed next to her father’s body. “Did you feel the earthquake?” she asks. She strokes his face, palpating the bones of it, and his chest, lying flat, and underneath it, a heartbeat. He’s warm to her touch.

  He nods. “It’s waking,” he whispers.

  “What?”

  He looks at her, his eyes glazed with fever. “I loved her, you know.”

  She breathes in sharply. “Mother?”

  He takes a moment to respond. “Yes,” he says then. “Your mother.”

  She stands up and walks away, stares at the peeling wallpaper.

  Her father retches suddenly. He doubles over and empties his stomach on the floor. She rushes back to him and places a gentle hand on his back as spasms rack his body. She reaches for the glass of water on the bedstand and brings it to his lips. He chokes on it at first, but then manages a few sips. He wipes his mouth on the back of his hand.

  Philio goes to fetch paper towels and a mop. When she returns, her father’s leaning back, his eyes closed. Perhaps asleep. She kneels on the floor to wipe the sick. That loamy smell again, stronger than ever. And, despite the fading light, the substance that came out of her father, unmistakeable now: soil.

  She washes her father’s arms afterwards, his chest, the soft hair on his head. She strokes his cheek until his breathing evens out completely and she knows he’s asleep. She lifts the glass of water from his bedstand again and tips it to her own lips, letting the cool liquid run down her tongue. Empties the glass.

  In the morning, he remembers none of what happened the night before. They hear the earthquake caused a landslide that completely buried one of the houses near the entrance of the village. She has to get meat from the butcher shop, so she puts on her boots and heads out, leaving her father in his bed with a glass of fresh water and a promise to be back soon.

  Outside, the dogs whine into the air. A few people stop and ask her how her father’s doing. She tells them he’s fine, he’s fine, which is not true, but what is she supposed to say? Her father’s dying, she wants to tell them, her father is dying of soil, just like everyone else in the village. Sooner or later, the mountain will claim you, too.

  The butcher shop is a little ways down the road. It looks intact, but for a long hairline crack that runs down the side of its facade. Fragments of glass and chunks of flesh litter the gutter in front of the shop. She lingers by the door and breathes in the familiar smell of raw meat. It dislodges something inside her, a weak feeling in the chest. Marios comes out from the back of the shop carrying a pig’s severed head. His expression changes almost imperceptibly when he notices her, then changes again as soon as he recognizes her, a subtle tensing of the jaw, a hardness to the eye. “Philio,” he says. A photo of Christina sits on the counter next to the till. Philio walks up to it and can’t help but put her hand on the glass; the young face, unchanged, the thin limbs of her best and only friend. If she could see me now, she thinks to herself, would she recognize me? The dead have their certainties.

  The butcher places the pig’s head on the counter and wipes his hands before he reaches for his daughter’s photograph and puts it away. “I thought you’d come back,” he says.

  “You did? Why?”

  He hesitates. Starts to say something else, then changes his mind. “Your father’s not doing well.”

  “He’s dying.” This time she doesn’t lie. Shared loss breeds honesty between people, when you’re lucky. When it doesn’t breed its worst.

  He nods. “What can I get you?” he asks, his shoulders stiff, his voice cold.

  She doesn’t reply, just stares at the display of deep red cuts. There’s so much she wishes she could say, so much she wishes she could take back.

  The butcher sighs. He wraps an oxtail in brown paper and hands it to her. “Make him some soup,” he says. He doesn’t let her pay. “Let it go,” he tells her as she leaves. “It’s no use.”

  He’s right, isn’t he? No use at all.

  She takes the long way home so she can stop by the buried house. From afar, it looks part of the mountain, or perhaps like a stone quarry hastily covered up. A group of people fight the slope with shovels, unearthing what they can, as if a life buried by soil can ever be truly recovered. A woman is sitting on the ground, her head in her hands. “Everything slowly sinks into the earth,” she mutters, again and again.

  Philio used to know this woman’s name, but she no longer remembers it. No one speaks to her.

  It’s dusk by the time she returns home, the last of the light seeping beneath the horizon. Her father surprises her by being upright, sweeping the kitchen floor with slow, determined movements. She didn’t keep her promise to not be late, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He holds the back of her head gently, takes the meat from her hands and kisses her forehead.

  At night, she has a nightmare full of soil. It goes like this: She’s on the cold, hard ground. Dirt blankets everything around her, like snow. It enters her through her ears and mouth and through the hole where her heart used to be. She can feel it writhing in her belly, cutting into her organs. She’s so lonely, lonelier than anyone else in the world, and also isn’t. She’s a medium, an open passageway for the earth, and also the chains of something greater than herself. What enters her can never leave again; it will devour her as she contains it, until she’s nothing but soil.

  Then the perspective changes. She’s somewhere high up; the top of the mountain. She can see her house from here, the lonely eye of its window. Her father stands on the roof, looking at the stars.

  She sees something small and white fall from his body and drift away. Then she’s falling, too.

  She starts awake.

  She was in the ground, alone. She can still feel it now, the dusty air, the heavy earth, even in this pristine bed with its clean sheets, sheets not covered in dirt. She reaches for the lamp’s switch. The light it casts is small, an amber band across the room.

  She thinks of Melia, her comforting body in the small hours.

  The chill in the room grows stronger as the night wanes. For hours she tosses. It’s all right, she tells herself as the light breaks outside. You’ll find someone.

  In the morning, when she washes, she removes traces of dirt from the lines of her palm.

  Her father is upright again, sipping coffee at the kitchen table. She makes him toast and sits next to him.

  “Do you ever regret it?” she breaks the silence.

  He doesn’t insult her by pretending he doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

  “Do you?” he asks back.

  She shrugs. “It was never my choice,” she says. “I was only a child.”

  He munches his toast slowly.

  “She just wanted to live free,” she says. “As do I.”

  “Is love such a prison?”

  A thought intrudes. Clear, pristine. The mountain is a skeleton, she thinks. Something left over, pointing thoughtlessly to the sky.

  Her father looks at her blankly. Only the crease between his eyebrows betrays his alarm. “What did you just say?” he asks.

  She shakes her head, confused. “I didn’t say anything.”

  “You did. You said something about the mountain. About the soil. About her.”

  “Her who?”

  He sits back in his chair and shuts his eyes tight. “The mountain is stirring,” he says. “I know you see it, too. You feel it though you don’t say anything.”

  And why doesn’t she?

  Because what is she supposed to say about this birth of soil that has suddenly buried her life?

  “It shouldn’t be happening so fast,” he says. “I think it’s my fault.”

  “Tell me,” she says, begs, demands. Doesn’t want to threaten him with leaving. “Tell me what’s happening.” She fixes him with her eyes. “You owe me that much, don’t you think?”

  He tells her everything, then. The real reason he stayed in the village. The real reason her mother decided to leave.

  The story of the mountain, the fetters, the soil:

  The mountain is not a mountain, he says, but the corpse of a god, a very old one, from way back when the world still danced. The god’s corpse stirs once every generation, creating tremors and floods of soil. The only way to tie it down is to sacrifice someone. Their bones would be the mountain’s shackles, their flesh would be the mountain’s flesh, until the god grew too strong again and needed to be reined in.

  “How was the god killed?” she asks.

  And he says:

  The god was betrayed. He was betrayed by another god who wanted to own him as her lover. She tied him down, not knowing that it could kill him. Put too much stock in their immortality. She pierced his heart with a knife made of her own bones, so he would always be tied to her. But he surprised her: he chose to die.

  “So how, then, does he stir?”

  His body kept living. Some things are immortal, after all. It stirred and danced and destroyed the land around it, and the people who lived on it, her father says.

  So the people turned to the goddess for help. She’s the one who showed them how to keep the mountain imprisoned.

  “And then? Where is she?”

  He points to the valley at the foot of the mountain.

  There was a river there, he says. Philio remembers it, somehow, though she’s never seen it. It was gone long before she was born. Snaking around the base of the mountain. That was the goddess. She dried up and left, not bearing to gaze at her lover’s corpse every day.

  A river that moved away.

  Philio takes a drink of water from the tap. Swallows it down, together with her father’s words. The water carries the scent of soil.

  She remembers the tremors when she was small. The stories whispered in the half-dark, when her parents thought she was asleep. How the mountain was a mouth, how it would open, how it would devour. How it would consume everything from the mountain’s feet to its back to its neck, and to the people who had tried to bind it in chains. They would be made into soil, too, returned to that they had once tried to contain. And the god would roam the land again.

 

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