“Thanks, miss.”
“You really don’t need to call me that,” says the biographer for the seven thousandth time.
After school she stops at the Acme, grocery and hardware and drugstore combined. The pharmacist’s assistant is a boy—now a young man—she taught in her first year at Central Coast, and she hates the moment each month when he hands her the white bag with the little orange bottle. I know what this is for, his eyes say. Even if his eyes don’t actually say that, it’s hard to look at him. She brings other items to the counter (unsalted peanuts, Q‑tips) as if somehow to disguise the fertility medication. The biographer can’t recall his name but remembers admiring, in class, seven years ago, his long black lashes—they always looked a little wet.
Waiting on the hard little plastic chair, under elevator music and fluorescent glare, the biographer takes out her notebook. Everything in this notebook must be in list form, and any list is eligible. Items for next food shop. Kalbfleisch’s necktie designs. Countries with most lighthouses per capita.
She starts a new one: Accusations from the world.
1. You’re too old.
2. If you can’t have a child the natural way, you shouldn’t have one at all.
3. Every child needs two parents.
4. Children raised by single mothers are more liable to rape/murder/drug-take/score low on standardized tests.
5. You’re too old.
6. You should’ve thought of this earlier.
7. You’re selfish.
8. You’re doing something unnatural.
9. How is that child going to feel when she finds out her father is an anonymous masturbator?
10. Your body is a grizzled husk.
11. You’re too old, sad spinster!
12. Are you only doing this because you’re lonely?
“Miss? Prescription’s ready.”
“Thank you.” She signs the screen on the counter. “How’s your day been?”
Lashes turns up his palms at the ceiling.
“If it makes you feel any better,” says the biographer, “this medication is going to make me have a foul-smelling vaginal discharge.”
“At least it’s for a good cause.”
She clears her throat.
“That’ll be one hundred fifty-seven dollars and sixty-three cents,” he adds.
“Pardon me?”
“I’m really sorry.”
“A hundred and fifty-seven dollars? For ten pills?”
“Your insurance doesn’t cover it.”
“Why the eff not?”
Lashes shakes his head. “I wish I could, like, slip it to you, but they’ve got cameras on every inch of this bitch.”
The polar explorer Eivør Mínervudottír spent many hours, as a child, in the sea-washed lighthouse whose keeper was her uncle.
She knew not to talk while he was making entries in the record book.
Never to strike a match unsupervised.
Red sky at night, sailor’s delight.
To keep her head low in the lantern room.
To pee in the pot and leave it, and if she did caca, to wrap it in fish paper for the garbage box.
From the halt hen two eggs come down, one cracked, one sound. “Thank you,” the mender tells the hen, a Dark Brahma with a red wattle and brindled feathers. Because she limps badly—is not one of the winners—this hen is the mender’s favorite. A daily happiness to feed her, save her from foxes and rain.
Sound egg in her pocket, she pours the goats’ grain. Hans and Pinka are out rambling but will be home soon. They know she can’t protect them if they ramble too far. Three shingles have come off the goat-shed roof; she needs nails. Under the shed there used to sleep a varying hare. Brown in summer, white in winter. He hated carrots and loved apples, whose seeds, poisonous to rabbits, the mender made sure to remove. The hare was so cuddly she didn’t care that he stole alfalfa from the goats or strewed poo pellets on her bed when she let him inside. One morning she found his body ripped open, a sack of furry blood. Rage poured up her throat at the fox or coyote, the bobcat, you took him, but they were only feeding themselves, you shouldn’t have took him, prey is scarce in winter, but he was mine. She cried while digging. Laid the hare beside her aunt’s old cat, two small graves under the madrone.
In the cabin the mender stirs the egg with vinegar and shepherd’s purse for the client who’s coming later, an over-bleeder. The drink will staunch her clotty, aching flow. She’s got no job and no insurance. I can pay you with batteries, her note said. Vinegary egg screwed tight in a glass jar and tucked into the mini fridge, beside a foil-wrapped wedge of cheddar. The mender wants the cheese right now, this minute, but cheese is only for Fridays. Black licorice nibs are for Sundays.
She mostly eats from the forest. Watercress and bitter cress, dandelion, plantain. Glasswort and chickweed. Bear grass, delicious when grilled. Burdock root to mash and fry. Miner’s lettuce and stinging nettle and, in small quantities, ghost pipe. (She loves the white stalks boiled with lemon and salt, but too much ghost pipe can kill you.) And she gleans from orchards and fields: hazelnuts, apples, cranberries, pears. If she could live off the land alone, without person-made things, she would. She hasn’t figured out how yet, but that doesn’t mean she won’t. Show them how Percivals do.
Her mother was a Percival. Her aunt was a Percival. The mender has been a Percival since age six, when her mother left her father. Which was because her father went away most Friday afternoons and didn’t come back until Monday and never said why. “A woman wants to know why,” said the mender’s mother. “At least give me that, fuckermo. Names and places! Ages and occupations!” They drove west across Oregon’s high desert, over the Cascade Mountains, mother smoking and daughter spitting out the window, to the coast, where the mender’s aunt ran a shop that sold candles, runes, and tarot packs. On the first night, the mender asked what that noise was and learned it was the ocean. “But when does it stop?” “Never,” said her aunt. “It’s perpetual, though impermanent.” And the mender’s mother said, “Pretentious much?”
The mender would take pretentious any day over high.
She lies naked with the cat by the stove’s heat, hard steady rain on the roof and the woods black and the foxes quiet, owlets asleep in their nest box. Malky leaps from her lap, paws at the door. “You want to get soaked, little fuckermo?” Gold-splashed eyes watch her solemnly. Gray flanks tremble. “You have a girlfriend you need to meet?” She shakes off the blanket and opens the door, and he flashes out.
Whenever Lola came over, Malky hid; she thought the mender lived in the cabin alone. “Don’t you get frightened,” said Lola, “all the way up here in the middle of nothing?”
Silly bitch, trees are not nothing. Nor are cats, goats, chickens, owls, foxes, bobcats, black-tailed deer, long-eared bats, red-tailed hawks, dark-eyed juncos, bald-faced hornets, varying hares, mourning cloak butterflies, black vine weevils, and souls fled from their mortal casings.
Alone human-wise.
She