Moving Among Them

It takes a few steps to get used to the way his new body moves. He bumps against trees with his shoulders and trips on oversized feet, then decides to move on all fours and the motion is instantly natural. Peepers sing his way through the forest, fireflies light up a path, and he knows without knowing what everything is, where everyone’s going, and what they will do when they get there. All the creatures and plants of the forest are doing what they know to do, and Un-Martin is moving among them.

He is surprised by the force in his arms and his legs. When he pushes at the ground there’s a thunder, a power that swells to his shoulders and shivers his hips. He feels like he could, if he wanted to, punch his hands into the ground and fell every tree in the forest with the rumbling vibration of that impact. He lets his body gain speed as it rolls through the woods. The surer he becomes of these unknown legs the faster he lets them run, the longer the strides they may take. Smaller shadows and shapes scuttle out of his way. Squirrels dash up trees, birds hide their heads under wings, even crickets fall quiet as Un-Martin passes.

As quiet as they become, stone-still as they hold, he knows where each one of them is. He smells every starling and chipmunk and fox, every lichen and fern and touch-me-not bursting up through dead leaves on his trail. His nose knows the difference between a skunk cabbage half-furled and one a single day past its prime, between a stump claimed by a wolf and one marked by a mere family dog.

His breathing gets heavy and hot and he hangs his mouth open so his tongue can roll out to swing in the air as he runs. A breeze rills the ridge of his back, and seized by an urge he can’t explain or control he drops to one side in a patch of soft moss, rolls onto his shoulders and writhes so the ends of his body sway through green velvet leaves and midnight dew soaks into his skin.

Then he’s up again and he’s rumbling, plowing into saplings because he knows that he can, that they’ll give but not break as they bend to his will and his weight.

It feels like miles and hours of running until the trees thin, until Un-Martin stands on a ledge where the moon hangs just feet from his face. He sits on his haunches and roars, but his is an inexperienced, unconfident roar that sounds like more of a moan. And though they are not wont to do so, not without the influence of the strange, daylight dreams they’ve woken from, Un-Martin’s call is now answered by other animals on other ledges, atop other hills in this forest.

Buoyed by these answers he wasn’t expecting, by these nocturnal harmonies to his low tone, he fills his lungs to near-bursting and lets the roar swirl up his throat once again, his song spiraling into the air so much surer this time, so much louder, a voice that knows what it’s saying and knows that it’s being heard.

Then his body is off down the ridge, running again toward the lights of back porches and the high fences of yards. Toward spotlights peeking like mushrooms from the grass of the square, casting their beams at the flag as it cracks and snaps on its pole. Toward the neon flickering Closed in the window of Claudia’s Café where, a few hours from now, the town will ingest its eggs and digest its morning news.

He slides past white picket fences and stonewalls without mortar, past nightblooming flowers that fill his nose with their scent and beehives abuzz with soft sleeping-songs that hum from the trees where they hang.

This body, this Martin, climbs over a fence and into a yard, a long rectangle rolling away from a house where all the windows are dark. A child-sized bicycle lies on its side beneath the back porch. A swimming pool crumples collapsed and uninflated in a patch of dead grass, with a visible tear in its vinyl. Beneath a crossbar, striped like a barbershop pole, a single swing sways with its chains creaking, and the rest of the world holds its breath. There’s no reason the swing should be moving, no wind in the air and the weight of no body upon it, no reason for such a cinematic cliché except that this is Martin’s dream and sometimes clichés are the way that he sees the world.

He lies down in the grass now, tired. His chest heaves and his tongue stretches to its limit out the side of his mouth like a dowsing rod searching out water. He lies in the dark with mosquitoes and flies colonizing his back, with dew soaking his legs, until a fine orange thread is pulled through the sky where night is sewn to the ground. The seam starts to fray, the backdrop shows through, and the round edge of the sun appears over the hills to the east.

A light comes on in the house, a window is suddenly flooded with gold, and a shadow hardly shows as it crosses the low edge of the sill. Then bare, padding feet—too quiet for Martin’s usual hearing but thunder in tonight’s ears—make their creeping way down the stairs and through the kitchen where sweaty skin squeaks on linoleum in need of wax. The glass door slides open a few steps above on the porch, sheer white curtains are pushed to one side, and the shape of a man—only smaller—stands in silhouette between the house and the yard, between asleep and a dream or the town and the woods or whatever you would like these two poles to be. This yard is the border between them.

A Martin of sorts, an out-of-sorts body, crouches close to the grass where moisture melts into air. He lingers on the ground near the swing that sways empty, and waits for the body in the house to come near.