Something hard in the grass, wooden, smelling of decay, of the life that fills its splits. A tassel of frayed rope: a swing, I think.

I watch a woodlouse crawl across rot, try to imagine the seat as it used to be, gliding into the sky.

~

I go towards the trees: it is night. I am crawling now, can feel my stomach brushing against the grass. Tiger belly, low, furred, being touched by the earth.

The greenness moves into me – the wet, the pathways, my hands in soil, the grass longer now, across my neck. It seeks my mouth.

The dark is not as thick as I would like: it is pattered by light, grazed and smashed by it.

Here, I think gravity will let me go at last. I will fall upwards and onwards: I will drop into the stars.

~

I am hungry, I suspect. It is more complicated now. I listen. How many different kinds of hunger there are: scraping, whining, reaching.

A thousand sensations, I see now, not just one.

~

I think my new hands will be good for picking berries, and they are; some are low enough for me to close my teeth straight onto, others make me stand and pluck, my mouth sour-­sweet with their coldness.

I lean against a stump, rest my head against my shoulder. I am not cold, although I should be, and I am not afraid, which is the best thing, the night a glowing darkness ahead of me, trees shifting in the gloom.

I can hide in my own body now. I can close my eyes.

~

I am woken by a bear, I think, or an earthquake. Something that takes the early morning and snaps it in two. There was before the noise – full belly, soft rest – and afterwards, a threat that looms, giant, over everything.

An engine. This is what it is, I realize, an engine not on the far-­away road but much closer. Outside the house.

Fear now, for the first time, clearer than anything else, a cool light that moves through me. I have to get away.

~

I am close to the house in only a few movements, almost weightless now, able to leap huge distances, as in dreams, excitement and terror a single thing. My head moves from side to side, seeing everything. Every leaf on every tree, moving like a chorus, a glistening crowd.

I know how to sneak around the corner so I am not seen, how to get to the road without any eyes on me. But something goes wrong. There are voices calling a name in the new day, this strain of a day, barely got going. It is too early: it is too soon.

They can’t see me – not like this.

The thought moves through my mind, whispered quietly, as though by someone else.

~