The heaving, jerking motion of Arthur’s body, like a frog on hot stone; I did not feel nothing about this. But if my hands trembled they still did the work of being my hands, which was all they needed to do. I gathered his things. His phone and its charger, his shoes, his torn and bloody sock. Arthur watched me, or at least he turned his head in my direction, and his eyes rolled in their sockets like a horse’s eyes. He had been talking earlier, but wasn’t any longer, the wood under his cheek shining with his own sweat and spit and tears; his mouth opening and closing, his square white teeth. There are good poisons to die from; muscarine is not one of these. But we made do with what we had, and I would not be any crueler than Agnes had decided, and I would not be any kinder. At last, I went and opened our kitchen windows, so that the cool, sweet air poured in.

When he was done, I went and got Agnes up. She tilted her body to my hands on her shoulders, though she was still too far from me in the new morning light. “This could be a very bad thing we’ve done,” she said, and I nearly wept that she said we, instead of I.

“No.” I slipped my finger behind her ear and stroked her there. “No.”

Agnes took his feet, and I took his hands, and we took him off into the woods. We carried him to the damp places, where the leaves decay, and the mushrooms grow. We laid him in a clearing, at the center of it, with the woods growing up around him, with his eyes open. Open, and in perpetual observation of the sky. The woods know what to do with a body.

Only then, after we had walked away from him and started downhill, back toward our bike path, our clearing, our cottage, did Agnes start to cry. Her wet face in my shoulder, her body swaying to my body like a vine around a tree, she cried. I think it was from relief. Certainly I was relieved.

I stroked her hair. “Hush,” I said, and Agnes’s breath hitched, shuddered. A rising, irregular lump on the line of her jaw rubbed sweetly against my throat. “Oh hush. Listen.” She hushed, silent and shivering, in the moment of stillness right before a sob breaks. “Listen,” I repeated, and pointed up toward the sky, though we could see nothing there yet. “The crows are coming.”

And they were.

Endangered Animals

Endangered Animals

I drove Harry from L.A. to Michigan the same summer that California burned down.