It’s not grief I feel in this moment.
This is something else.
It’s the sound of a door slamming shut, leaving nothing but an echo in its quiet wake.
“You would’ve known how to do this,” I whisper, staring down into the half-dug grave. I know they would have—the others.The Wilde women who came before me. Who built this house and protected us all.
I can’t even dig a grave.
I sink onto the ground, dropping my face into my hands.
That’s when the wind shifts. I feel it first on the back of my neck. There’s a sudden breath, sharp and cold. The leaves on the ground around me shudder. The air seems to thicken, and I smell a storm coming, damp and metallic.
It comes on quickly.
Rain. And not just a drizzle. There is no warning. No gentle heads-up. There is only the storm.
It pours down as if the sky has been holding its breath all spring, waiting for this moment. Like it’s a bucket filled to the brim, suddenly tipped over.
The trees groan, flowers in the meadow whip this way and that. And right before my very eyes, the soil all around me, under me, turns soft.
I sit in disbelief, soaked to the bone as I watch the earth melt.
It’s impossible, but it’s real.
I know, but I don’t.
Foxglove is helping me in that way she does, a way I’ve only heard stories of until this moment.
Our land doesn’t speak to us, not in words, but it knows. It remembers. It remembers my mother’s warmth and my gran’s playful manner. It remembers their fire. It remembers our stories and our scars, the blood on the floor after each baby has come into this world. The whispered secrets floating to the rafters. The tears. The laughter. The love.
It remembers us, just like my gran told me all those years ago.
I don’t wait. I move.
I grab the shovel and begin to dig. The earth shifts easily now, yielding like warm dough. A better woman than I might say a prayer, but when the grave is deep enough, I just let him fall in.
I pour the dirt back over him in a hurry, in silence.
By the time I’m done, my hands are slick with mud. My dress is ruined by the act. One more thing he’ll take from me.
It doesn’t stop raining, even when I’m finished. Doesn’t stop taking him deeper into the earth, and for that, I am grateful.
Within minutes, the spot where his body rests has vanished, the ground unmarked. It doesn’t look like a grave, only dirt. Like nothing ever happened here.
He will disappear from this earth and no one will even realize he’s gone. Not a soul will miss him.
The storm begins to ease on my walk back to Foxglove, the thunder farther off in the distance. The woods are dark, but the moonlight leads me.
I don’t look back, only forward, though I move without haste.
When I get back to Foxglove, I will light the fire. I’ll wash the dirt and blood from my hands and change out of my dress, then toss it into the flames and watch it burn.
When there’s nothing left but ash, I will open the cellar and hand Nancy our daughter.
Herdaughter.
And I will make her swear to never, ever come back to Foxglove again.
