Now I see it all as I recede and become nothing but a pelt nailed to a wall. Now I see. I see, from so long ago, my mate, my children. I see them playful along the river’s edge. Watching them from a cool, flat stone. The play of water against rock. The dappled tree-tumbled sunlight of centuries ago. Worlds ago.

Feel the edges of the rough-cool burrow. Where I’ll dig deep and go to ground. Rest in the cool earth, in the comfortable dark. A fox knows how to hide. A fox, through the generations, knows how to wait.

And one day, finally, I will be free.

10. The Dead Astronaut

The compass that does not know its name. The map that does not know its borders. The journey in search of a destination.

The dead astronaut at the coast. Her legs are weary and her feet sore. She can see out of only one eye. The other sees things that aren’t there. She has pain in her shoulder and a constant ache in her knees.

It has taken years, not months. She has been waylaid by enemies she could not have known. From the sky, from beneath the earth. Thrown off course, although she has defeated everyone: killed or run or hid. Driven her blade deep or cowered in shadows as a great bulk prowled past. Her gun long since useless, discarded, a shadow on the sands behind her.

The ocean breeze broken by the sandy ridge ahead, rippling so gentle against her face it feels like a kindness offered up as cruelty. The sharp, sudden brine of it, which makes her want to salivate, though her mouth is desolate.

She is hollow, hollowed out, black skin tinged gray with ash, gray stubble of hair blackened by smoke. Her throat so dry, hands cracked and calloused. So close now that she weeps without tears from the relief of it. To come to an end. Some sort of ending. Her body trembles with emotion she can no longer identify.

The woman who trudges up the ridge, the dune, has been reduced and sharpened by lack. Of water of food of companionship. Reduced to talking to the dark birdlike drones that circle high above but hasten down to rule her out as threat. Sharpened by the collapse that makes the landscape a reflection of how she feels on the inside.

Sanded down to only what is required to move one foot and then the next ahead, toward the coast. Need narrowed to a point and want exiled to another country.

Only now did she know who she was.

Would her voice work? It would crackle, would seem like it issued forth from a mouth full of rust.

The limitless, searing blue blinds her for a moment.