The hole in the tree is full of stubs. It’s time for me to clear it out again. I sink onto my haunches, thighs burning, light up, and drag slowly on my single precious cigarette.

It’s asinine. That’s the only word for it. I hardly smoked before I got married. Just socially, and that was rare, because, let’s face it, I hardly ever socialized. I wasn’t addicted. But something about getting married, having children, deciding never to smoke, ever again, ate at me.

This feels like a little pocket of time that doesn’t belong to my family. It’s just mine, and if I want to kill myself a little for five minutes every day, it’s my goddamn right.

I think of the stone.

It’s a natural segue. All those people volunteering to die only a few steps from here. If they wanted to kill themselves, the people of Lute were only too willing to help.

My mouth goes mossy, the taste of the cigarette hitting me wrong today. I find myself quickly stubbing it out and wandering north through the wood to the center of the grove, the place I found Charlie just yesterday.

Dread sinks deeper and deeper into my bones, even as I keep going, but when I reach the little clearing, it dissipates like a lost sneeze. I’ve been here so many times before. I’ve been everywhere on Lute Island so many times before, apart from the dig site, and this spot has been the one I’ve felt drawn to most often. There’s the oak with one bough bent low as if in deference, there’s the glimmer of light peeking from between the branches, jumping from one inlet to the next, there’s the bit of maroon string someone tied to a trunk that nobody ever bothered to remove, and there, finally, the rock. The tithe stone.

There’s nothing remarkable about it. If it weren’t for the plaque, it would look like someone put it there last week, flat and long, dug deep into the bank of the hill, a makeshift table for a picnic. The dip in the center looks naturally formed. Maybe water pooled there from a falling rivulet, persistent over millennia. If it had been dug out with blood all this time, surely it should still be a little, I don’t know, rusty looking.

I touch it, the dip. I’ve never done that before. No chills ripple through me. Nothing to indicate that this was the spot where people gave up their lives in a barbaric ritual, the exact place where the sacrificial rock descended time and again, smashing through hair, scalp, skull, brain matter, orbital bones, all the way down to the tithe stone. And for what god? Nobody even seems to know.