FICTION BY JAY CASELBERG

Jay Caselberg is an Australian author and poet whose work has appeared around the world and been translated into several languages. He currently resides in Germany.

DECIDUOUS
By Jay Caselberg

At first, all she could remember was the leaf stuck in her hair.

Somehow, she’d lost the sweatband holding her long dark tresses in place, leaving it to fall in lank and sweaty rattails around her face. It wasn’t even a full leaf. Just most of one.

She could see it now, in intricate detail, the veins, the almost green that hadn’t completely faded, the slick damp from the forest floor; all captured there, up close, swinging with her hair as if it had simply caught a ride. She could almost smell it, even now, that deep, rich scent of woodland decay. She remembered a motion, a rocking, but there was something else, something elusive…a sound? A smell? Perhaps it had been both, but she couldn’t be sure.

Something had happened, but she wasn’t entirely sure what it was. It had been something terrible. She knew that much. Or at least she thought she did. And with that realization, Marion tried to swallow back the chill dread that made her feel as if she was plummeting through the earth.

Why couldn’t she remember? She didn’t have blackouts or lost time. Ever.

She stood leaning against the countertop, staring out of the kitchen window, cold water splashing into the sink, half forgotten. Something had happened. She knew that much.

She dreaded what it was, but at the same time, she was apprehensive about giving it a name. Taking a deep breath, she closed her eyes and willed it away. That’s how you dealt with unpleasantness. Like an unwanted wedding gift, you shoved it away, out of sight, only dragging it out if you really had to when the elderly maiden aunt made her annual visit. It wasn’t right, she knew, but she just didn’t have the strength right now, and whatever it had been, she doubted that there was any reason to drag it forth at all. Morning coffee, a bowl of cereal, her green, cleansing shake and then school. John was already long gone, but then, he had always been an early starter. Not that it meant he came home any earlier because of it.

See, there were other things to think about after all.

His lateness meant that she usually had time for an early evening run through the woods that wandered out from the back of their place. They were lucky in that regard. And the twilit trees had their own presence in the golden gray light; something almost ethereal. Rarely would she ever encounter anyone on her forest runs; it was as if she was alone in another world, another reality. Always calming, the whole experience managed to take her out of herself. She liked that. A couple of times she had tried explaining the feeling to John, but he didn’t really seem to get it.

Her eyes tracked the treeline and then finally she dragged her gaze away once again. She nodded to herself and then winced. Her neck was tender—bruised perhaps. She moved her head from side to side. It wasn’t muscular. Something deeper, but not sharp.

There was a hard, dull discomfort as if something was not properly in its place. Marion grimaced then and worked her shoulders a little. The pain—for pain it was—ran deeper, traced a path down her neck all the way to the inside of her chest. Perhaps she’d slept awkwardly. If it didn’t get any better, she’d take something later, but better to see how it went in the meantime. She didn’t believe in over-medicating, despite how easy it might be. In fact, she preferred not to ingest chemicals at all, if she could possibly help it.

She took a deep breath and reached over to turn the tap off, and then, catching her lower lip between her teeth, she ran her hand back and forth over the countertop edge. She turned and nodded to herself, almost as a reassurance. She would go to the woods today; it was like she absolutely needed the forest. But she had other things to do first.

She’d get the rest of her things together, and head out for the day. She had a comparatively light schedule ahead, only three classes, and she’d planned to spend the rest of the time marking student papers if Bill Jackson didn’t interrupt her with his thinly disguised attempts to hit on her. He knew she was married, had even met John at one of the school social events, but that didn’t seem to deter him at all. He taught history, but he was one of those outdoorsy types: a neat stubble—good looking enough, she supposed, but there was something forced about it, as if he were playacting what he was rather than being it. An image to aspire to, or something like that.

Anyway, he wasn’t her type, even if she had been tempted. Not that she’d even consider getting tangled up in something at work. That way led disaster. Besides, if she ever did, it was hardly going to be with Bill.

As she closed the front door and wandered over to the pale blue VW bug she used to commute back and forth to the school, she suppressed a sigh. What was it that book said? All men are rapists? She didn’t know if she’d go quite that far, but there was something a little threatening about Bill’s persistence despite her carefully crafted rebuffs.

That thought started her mind wandering in other directions, but she didn’t want to go there. Not at all. She opened the car door, worked her neck a little and grimaced. It was still not feeling right. She couldn’t afford to think about that now, though, about the implications.

She looked up at the sky, pale, noticing that the trees at the edge of the wood were just beginning to lose their leaves. It was that time of year again. She allowed her gaze to wander over the treeline, but then a sudden chill washed over her, and she looked away. The school awaited.

The remainder of the day passed without incident. She had her handful of classes, some idle conversations in the common room, managed to get some marking finished, ready to hand back the following day. She bumped into Bill a couple of times, but for some reason, he made no attempt to touch her; even looking like he was avoiding her. She even sniffed at her armpits, staring after his retreating back, but then she simply noted it, not spending too much time on the analysis.

She felt detached, removed from the day-to-day. She found it difficult to pay attention to her students. Once, she had to swim to the surface when called to break up an argument between two of the girls that had become physical. Boys fought, naturally, part of their rituals of posturing and dominance, but when girls fought, that was something else entirely. Eventually, she had managed to tear the flailing banshees one from the other with minimum bleeding in evidence, though at least one clump of hair and a ripped top.

When everything had settled down, and she found her way back to the common room, the fight had left her thinking. It was that animal rage, the passion of the attack. What made that well up inside a person, no matter what age? It had been a long time since she’d lost her temper herself, but still…

She was missing something important. Why couldn’t she remember?

It was still nagging at her. The more she poked at this inability to recall, the more it sat like a cold stone deep within her belly, a wound that wouldn’t heal. Something had happened, she knew, but at the same time, she didn’t want to know.

She bit her lip and looked out the window at the gray sky, clouds scudding across the view like hands made fists. Her attention wandered away from her job. Her thoughts were consumed with the forest outside of her house.

She could only think about that when she got home, she’d get out her running gear out and head out into the woods. She had a vivid image of tree trunks, crinkled bark, greening at the edges from moss, gray-green light filtering through vegetation.

It had been in the woods, hadn’t it? The thing that happened? She shook her head and grimaced. Now she was just imagining things, she was sure.

On the way home, she had the radio on, loud, listening to a string of rock anthems. She belted them out, shouting the lyrics at the tempered glass in front of her, at the traffic passing on the street.

And then she was home. She killed the engine and the radio died. For a few moments, she simply sat there, staring at the garage door ahead of her, thinking nothing. Nothing at all. Just feeling the blood coursing through her veins and singing in her ears. It could have been the after echo of the rock blaring from the radio, but she didn’t think so.

Her nostrils flared as she sat there, breathing in and out…in and out. And then she closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and reached for the keys.

Once inside her house, Marion barely even considered wondering when John might be home this evening. She ached to be out there—out among the trees, pounding through the shafts of light and shadows, breathing deeply the scent of raw and old vegetation as it gently decayed beneath the leaf litter that would lend an extra spring to her step.

She wasted no time dumping her things, shedding her work clothes until they were strewn in a trail towards and through the bedroom door and then she stood there, almost naked, scanning for her running gear, unable to remember quite where she’d left it. She could see the shoes she’d spent a fortune on last year, but of her sports bra, top, leggings, she could see no sign. She poked her head into the en-suite, but they weren’t there either. She pulled out a couple of drawers, but no sign there.

This was unusual. Normally, she was far better organized than this. Finally, she lifted the lid off the clothes basket, fossicked around inside and then, after lifting a still damp towel, discovered what she was looking for. She lifted them, sniffed, wrinkled her nose a little. They weren’t too ripe yet. She’d be sweating into them anyway, and these were the ones she wanted to wear. She pulled them on, relishing the firmness of their fit, the way they gripped her body, holding everything in place. She spent a couple of minutes searching for her phone, strapping it to her arm and then headed down the stairs and to the back door.

Outside, she peered up at the sky as she settled her earbuds in place and chose a good running track. Something with a steady beat. There was still plenty of light. Would be for a couple of hours.

Sometimes, in winter, it started getting a little dark too early and she’d need to wear her headlamp, not that the trails were treacherous, but you never knew when a root or branch might leap out to surprise you in the gloom. In fact, she couldn’t quite remember the last time she’d worn her lamp.

Giving her head a little shake, she winced a bit at the pain in her neck as she headed towards the woodland path that emerged right near the back end of their yard. Of course, they had a gate and fence there, not that they really needed it. In some ways, psychologically, it separated one life from the other. She stopped mid-step, frowning. Now what had made her think that?

Again, a little shake of her head, and she resumed, heading towards the yard’s right-hand corner where the gate lay. The steady beat from the ear buds was thumping in her ears now, and as she reached the gate, she tapped the phone with one hand to stop it. Maybe she should be listening to the woods as well as seeing and smelling them. How long had it been since she and John had gone running together? She couldn’t really recall, not clearly and she stood there, with one hand on the gate, puzzling over it. One life from the other.

Slowly, she looked back over her shoulder at the house, blinked a couple of times and then turned back to look at the tree line. Some of the trunks were further in, barely visible from here; ancient forms. One life from the other.

Suddenly, she lost all desire to open the gate and head out for her run. Taking a deep breath, she turned and walked slowly back to the house.

When John finally arrived home, she didn’t talk to him about what had happened, what she was feeling, the strangeness that had descended upon her. Instead, they talked about his day as together they sipped a glass of wine.

The next day was the same, and the day after that. She just couldn’t bring herself to open that gate, to enter the woods, each time, reluctantly returning to the house with heavy steps, to strip off her running gear again and shower. With each of those passing days, it felt as if the season was drawing in, getting closer, and with the gradual change of weather, though it was almost imperceptible, she found a sense of claustrophobia, as if the very air had become cloying, thick. The sheer firmness of her running gear felt restrictive, uncomfortable, and there, then, in the back of her head came that image again, the fallen leaf, too large in her vision, in her mind’s eye, the dangling tresses, the scent of something…rot, animal, she couldn’t tell what.

Marion knew she had to do something to break through this, even if it meant forcing herself to take those extra few steps through the gate and into the shadowed trees. She would brace herself, push past that resistance. Whatever had happened, had taken place deep within those woods, she knew that, but whatever it was, she simply couldn’t give it a shape or a name. If anything—that suspicion, that doubt—only served to strengthen her resolve to get the bottom of whatever it was that was troubling her. One last try. And still she hadn’t discussed it with John. She just didn’t feel ready for that.

A weekend passed, and then a few days. Back to the routine of the morning commute and the school day, but still that lingering something stayed with her. It wasn’t going away. She had not yet been able to run, to even broach the boundary represented by the back fence and the gate, nor had she been able to bring herself to formulate the words that would express what she was feeling and share them with John. The middle of the week came, and it was only then that Marion felt equipped to give it one more try.

Up in the bedroom, with slow deliberation, she pulled on a fresh set of running gear, though any set would have been fresh by now, washed and neatly put away. It had been nearly ten days.

She picked up her phone, and then thought better of it. She needed to be in touch with her surroundings, closer to that which was causing her such angst and such avoidance. Taking a deep breath, she nodded to herself and then slowly, step by step, descended and walked out to the back door and across the yard to the gate.

A slight breeze stirred across the grass blades, bringing the scent of leaves and bark, ruffling them, passing across the leaves at the edge of the woods like a mirage, something invisible, full of a gentle life, but unseen and barely sensed. She hesitated then, pausing two-thirds of the way to the gate. What was it that was holding her back?

Right, she said to herself quietly and stepped the rest of the way over to the gate, placed on hand upon the top and swung it open. There was the sound of metal turning within metal, a smell like old oil, and then it was as if the world exhaled around her. She took one step, then another.

Let’s do this…

At first, she started with a gentle jog, feeling her feet spring against the earth, hearing the leaves around her, a bird somewhere deeper within the trees, and insects. Something flew past her face. Gently she picked up the pace. What on earth had been stopping her?

Gradually, gently, she fell into the familiar rhythm, her feet pounding against the sod, her arms lifted and beginning to pump at her sides. She took a deep breath, then another as she ran, filling her lungs with the scent of loam and trees and other things unseen, stirring within the woods.

With each step, her uncertainty, her fear—for it had been fear—trickled away. She took a sharp turn onto a divergent path to the right. A low branch whipped at her as she cut the corner too tight, ripping at her top and raking across her skin. She ignored it; kept pounding along the path. She was getting into the rhythm now, feeling the energy rushing through her, drinking in the taste and sound of the wood. She could feel the trees around her, the life coursing through them. With every step, she felt taller, stronger.

Another branch whipped out from the other side, tearing along her pants, ripping the fabric, and yet still she continued, one leg pounding after the other. There was something different about the light: a watery veil flowing across everything, marking the lines of power and life; she could see it and yet not see it.

Yessss, she whispered to herself.

Four more paces and another branch descended, tearing her top clean away. Twigs reached, groping for her, raking her clothing, her flesh, slicing through the fabric and discarding it.

She was naked now, and still she ran, the sense of power coursing through her, the wind, cooling and fresh against her skin. She could feel her legs strengthening, growing, muscles, sinews working around each other, forming knots, hardening. The steps were growing harder now, and yet still the branches reached, clawing at her flesh, dropping shreds of forgotten skin and sinew and muscle along the pathway.

She was so much taller now. She was taller than most of her brethren, her siblings and she looked out across their leaves and branches. She could see the fence and the little yard. She could feel the boundary, the place that marked the distinction, the separation of one life from the other.

She could run no more. She stood very still.

John would be home later. He would come through the door, find her gone, but he would know.

She remembered then. That leaf, those rattails of falling hair. That rocking as she had huddled in upon herself. And that scent. That scent of life and of decay at the same time. That’s why she remembered it so vividly.

That leaf.

That leaf. She saw it now.

It had been her own, falling from her limbs.