You are asleep when the sound of the saw starts and then you are awake.

The first cut. The first tree. Whine of something wrong in a machine and then. No time to scream. No one would expect spikes here, the birch part of no great forest or preserve or endangered species, housing no extraordinary creatures, just common trees on private land. So no special mask or saw, no anticipation of anything. Wrong. Just a man doing a favor for a friend. Bending at the base of the birch. Say your prayers. The blade strikes the nail and the saw shatters, a piece of its chain sharper and faster than a sword in a hand spinning straight to the neck. Cutting one thing clean away from another. A body falling to the ground. A body falling in two parts.

Does a light come through the window, strike him on the forehead, call him to the half-cut tree. Or is it an absence of light that draws him. Life goes. Somewhere. When it goes. The man in the forest hanging just above or below his body for a moment, watching his own eyes wash red. Or is he evaporating along with his flesh. Forgetting he ever existed. You can imagine any number of things happening in this fragile pool of time. Silence where there should be sound. The birch cut half through at the base, brutal gape. Sap sorting itself around the wound. The soil drunk on blood. A body in a shape it was not meant to make. The sun pure and hard on the yellow plastic of the saw, the steel of its split chain. Xie steps backward, slow, until his heel hits the fender of the truck. Ragged sip of air. Hand against the hood, still warm. Every day before this one suddenly halcyon. It was so good. Not to see death coming.

There are woods beyond the birch, you know them, you will get to know them, you can. Disappear. No one will know for hours, yet, about the body by the truck, about you, what you are. You don’t think the word. The one that means: he who brings death. Mist of blood in the air. Over the dirt. Snap through the branches, the leaves, hands scraped raw, opening the old wounds. Air hard through the lungs, you can run and run and run. An animal from its cage, blind hurtle into the road. You keep the church to your left, you won’t go near it, you are headed for the highway, beyond which stand the ash and the gum trees, clustered at the base of the mountains. Don’t think of Erik. Of Karen. Of Leni. Of Jo. Peter’s sad eyes. Nova’s scars. The body you left behind. All your marks on the trunks. X after X after X. You run too fast to see them. The birch a white blur on either side, in front, behind, a sea, a sea of silver, then suddenly. Of gold. You stop. Are stopped. Hand out to touch the tree, which is no tree, but the body of the other. Enormous. Beloved. Only the sound of your breathing, of your blood. A crow twitching on its branch. Help me. P. pulling you down among the ferns. Shin on a stone. All you had to do was come here. To find him. If he was silent it was because you were silent; if he was far it was because you were far. But you were afraid. Still. Your face split by sobs, I didn’t know, I didn’t know. That the body in the woods would open up that way, irreversibly, you had not imagined what could happen to it, to you, how it might split you from life to take life. Fingers sunk into the dirt. Your head on his boot. Let me disappear. And his hand on your chin, pulling your head up to look at him, those eyes, black pools, Listen. There is no other world into which you might vanish. You must stay on the road. You must get on your knees. You must wait for the sword.