I have a lot of time. She points to a bunch of kale and he pulls that up, too. She rubs her arms. What are these, she says, jutting her chin toward a purple petal near the fence. Hellebore, he says. Isn’t it early for flowers? Not these. They don’t mind the cold. They’re pretty, she says. Yeah. His sleeve touching hers. She pulls away, holding her arm to her chest. Hard mud climbing the sides of her shoes. Well, she says. She goes up the steps, opens the screen door. In the kitchen he puts the vegetables in a box, adds a jar of jam, a handful of mushrooms. She folds the blanket, takes her mug and plate to the sink. He carries the box to her car, sets it on the passenger seat. Karen waits at the other door, tucking a shredded tissue beneath her nose. Do you have the keys, she says. He takes them from his pocket, puts them in her hand. Thank you. Eyes never meeting his. Why would she come to the library if she. Didn’t want someone to find her. Him to find her. He goes into the house. His father not home until late so stay in bed. Chin on skull. Arm over rib. The body is never cold, never really warm. Will she make it home okay. Will she hate me for knowing. What do I know. That she is sad? That she is alone? That she started drinking and then couldn’t stop. At ten in the morning. Needing it that much. The way he needs the body, long fuck before the woods, no dinner, then out to the trees, three hours, then back in bed, sleepless, it hurts to touch the body but he does it anyway, again and again, and while he dreams of the body there are men dreaming of swallowing the woods.

He knows, through the nails, so much more about the birch. Their skin like the cortical layer of bone, hard but porous, rough and smooth, their white that is really gray, yellow, brown, black, full of all the pits and wounds a living thing sustains. The nail slicing though time, ring after ring, pinning the first moment to this, him to the heart. Sneakers soft in the undergrowth. The eyes of the wrens on him, the gray fox, the mule deer, barred owl, Appalachian cottontail, they all know him now, the sound of Xie, the sound of the hammer on the nail. Half foe. The most vital portion of the wood hidden underground, arterial, billions of miles of microscopic fungal filaments connecting each tree to its others, thousands of roots binding earth to stone. You walk right over it. It is what allows you to walk at all. One tree to the next. And between them an invisible net, mineral, chemical, aqueous, photonic, that binds them to one another, you to them. The wood is alive. It knows how to live.