And it is darker here, much darker, than it has ever been before.

He can hammer with both his left and his right hand; he can hit the nail with his eyes closed, can drive it to the head with a single blow. The trees gave him a new body, one devoted to them, a servant to the hard flesh of the birch. Don’t think. About P. You can do it alone; he showed you how. Erik is gone another night; you take the body from the attic, you lay it in the ferns. You cry without knowing you are crying. How uncanny that skull is, P. but not P., it cannot speak to you, cannot see what you have done, and now you feel such disgust, exposing it, exposing yourself, for what? Because you are lonely? Sad? Insane? The body is just as at home in your arms as it is in the dirt, it has no way of knowing. What you are doing or why. What is coming. How stupid to think you could live the way it does, gently, at rest; you are still flesh and the demands of the flesh are immense, not content with vegetables in a basket or flowers on a vine but an entire cathedral of being, which is what P. was, purely, directed at you, for you, the way nature never is, selfish to want it still but how to stop? In the woods with P. you were a god. Now you are just a boy. You take the body back to the attic. Put its hands on your face. You cannot say it, because it’s not your word: beloved.

You are at the last line of trees. The deer no longer mind the noise; they watch it happen, the moment when the final nail sinks into the final trunk. All the woods at your back, a deep presence, alert, wondering if you are done doing your damage. You thumb the dark eyes in the bark, the headless tips of the nails. Look at you. Beauty. The leaves twitching on their stems, faint breeze. They are exhausted, too. From wondering. What it means. He rests his forehead against the trunk. Drops the hammer in the dirt.