Dogs of the Solar Steppe

Ari Braverman writes about a woman exiled to the countryside, in a short story from LARB Quarterly no. 46: “Alien.”

By Ari BravermanOctober 11, 2025

• LARB Lit

• Fiction

This story is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 46: Alien. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

¤

WHEN THE VAN stopped and the doors opened, I could see that we’d left the city. A corridor of trees lined the road. I remember thinking “This is their version of a suburb,” and it was rougher and more countrified than what I’d expected. My traveler’s guide had mentioned a coffee service in a suburb like this one, reachable by a “short and charming train ride.” Homesteads dotted a tufted, light brown landscape beneath a close sky.

I had quite recently gone from being a tourist to being a criminal.

A woman came through the metal security door of a low house, ramshackle but broad-spreading. With a hard edge that was just as likely his phone as it was a gun or a baton, my escort pushed me to stand in front of her. The woman and I were the same height, and we looked into each other’s eyes.

She said something to my escort, who shrugged, then smacked me on top of the head with his phone hard enough to make my teeth clack together. The woman put her hands inside my shirt, feeling my collarbones, my shoulders, my sternum, and against my throat to count my heartbeat. She pushed her fingers into my stomach and palpated my breasts, jiggled my hips and knees, used her pinky finger to press my gums, then wiped it on my cheek.

She and my escort said a few final words, exchanged no money, and then he got into the passenger seat of the van and it drove off. A pair of dark shapes raced along the neighboring fence line after it. When it turned with a curve in the road and disappeared, they took a wide arc and were coming back, getting bigger in my eye but not more distinct. Dogs. They stopped at the wire fence that separated the properties and stood huffing, bristled with energy. The woman picked up a rock from the driveway and threw it. She caught one right on the flank and it woofed and then the pair startled and flew away.

The woman pushed me into the house. Her touch was soft but totally assured. She was giving off the sense that I was a guest on the level of a child’s friend. She led me into a low-ceilinged living room made hot by a remote-controlled fireplace. The woman took me by the hand and led me to stand in front of the ottoman of a big sectional. She sat down, first pulling a basket out from under the couch. Now I was looking onto the top of her head; her roots were gray.

A few weeks earlier, I would’ve been able to say whether she had a good or bad haircut, whether the style of the furniture was to my taste or not. I’d been a traveler sightseeing in her country’s biggest city. Spending money, moving freely on the streets, jutting into the air with my body and its version of my own national personality—well intentioned, informal, and socially muscular.

I hadn’t meant to steal the figurine. It was just that I’d loved its blue, velvet-textured stone and carved inscrutable expression. I’d pressed my thumb on its elongated muzzle as I tried to determine if it was a bird, or a human being in a mask, or some other kind of mammal on two legs. A dog-person, I’d decided. With its closed eyes and gaping mouth, it had seemed to me like an artifact that had seen the future and rejected its inevitable premise. Then another piece in the exhibit had caught my attention and somehow the figurine had wandered into my pocket.

My advocate—a short and slender bald man with a port-wine stain atop his left eye—told me there was no legal translation for how I meant the word “accident.” I didn’t get it, I said. If the figurine wasn’t for handling, why the plinth? Why the red cushion with its hand-perfect dimensions?

He’d pointed to the mural above the bench where we were sitting together waiting to enter the judge’s chambers. It depicted a group of tawny young men, one in the foreground pretty enough to be likable and angular enough to take seriously. His friends were running towards the painting’s strip of horizon, brandishing flowered branches like flags, having a wonderful time, trailing petals. But this boy stood, fingers interlaced placidly before the denuded bush with one remaining flowerhead painted the same purple as a wad of the country’s cash. A wreath of yellow and white paint surrounded him, symbolizing light. My lawyer translated:

“Virtue can only exist when darkened into action by the shadow of temptation.”

And what about the benefit of the doubt?

The wine stain moved downward as he frowned at me.

“That is not part of our legal framework.”

The judge hadn’t liked me either. After a perfunctory trial, he assigned me ten years’ domestic service, and after that came the back of the van and my bouncing up and down with my hands zip-tied between my knees and my own personal escort playing Tetris on his phone and now this strange woman whose big head and physical assuredness made her seem tall.

She whistled and another woman came into the room. Younger than me and worse-looking. The only thing about her that was clear was how much she loved the big-headed woman, like a big mother. Her body tilted forward with the sheer force of her attention, her eagerness to serve. She seemed about to start panting.

“This is Marie. My daughter named her. It’s not very imaginative, but what can you expect from a five-year-old, yes?” She looked around at the room, then briefly at my face. “I think we’ll call you—So Shy. I don’t like your confidence,” she said with her tangy vowels, and patted her knee. “Give me your foot.”

I was so afraid that the edges of my vision were blurry.

“Now there’s one little thing we must get out of the way. We do this with all new friends who come to us like you have. Hurry-hurry, So Shy girl.” She patted her knee again. “Put the little foot right here.” She held a hammer. The basket, now open at her feet, contained a thicket of black nails, each one about four inches long. By now my ears were ringing with fear, my scalp prickled as though a cap of wires had been shoved onto my head.

“Give me the little foot,” said the Big Mother. In the background, Marie stood with her rigid body under her little white face. Even with my mind larded up by fear, I hated her.

“The shoes they gave me don’t really fit,” I said. Stalling. This was the first time I’d spoken in several days, and at the sound of my voice in that room my eyes filled with tears. The idea of finding a phone or computer fluttered around my skull, so concrete I could see it bumping against the ceiling, little devices on rosy little angel wings. As though salvation were possible and barely out of reach.

“Yes I know. This will help.” She patted her knee again. I understood immediately that patience was one of her talents. She could wait forever and she wanted to grind me against that patience until I turned into powder.

Marie was not so patient. She wobbled from foot to foot. She pretended to dust but mostly was casting stricken glances over the top of her Big Mother’s head. The longer I took, the more pinched and distraught she got.

Now there was nothing left for me: I put my foot on the knee. In the infinite fatty present of my terror, I noted that the trouser fabric beneath my shoe was very fine. Tan and fine, probably silk.

“They’re archival,” said the Big Mother with a benign smile, and named a brand I’d never heard of. Then, in a quick and practiced movement, she drove a nail through the top of my shoe, precisely between my big toe and the next one.

I felt the metal hard and cold against the cleft. It forced my foot backwards against the inner heel of the shoe that had gone so easily from being too big to just a bit too tight. So the material world wouldn’t do anything for me, I thought. I was alone.

Being hobbled.

In the time it took me to comprehend this, the Big Mother had grabbed my other foot and repeated the process.

“Now these are really your shoes,” she said. “Try them out.”

I did as she commanded. I discovered that unless I took tiny steps—the steps of a piglet or, in some other universe, a special little boy—the nails pushed me, hard, on the flesh between my toes. I looked at Marie.

“No, no, no,” said the Big Mother. “Now that’s just how she walks. She hasn’t needed her shoes for years. I tried to make her run last week! You should have seen it!” She laughed with her whole mouth, not bothering to cover her bad teeth.

I saw that Marie was barefoot. Her arches had collapsed, and her feet were so callused they looked like the footpads of an animal.

“They used to look like the feet of a child bride,” the Big Mother said. “It was disgusting.”

We went out. The country was a golden quilt beneath an equally padded, equally yellow sky. There was a crack of light between the horizon and the clouds. I could see far out but only breadth, no depth, the sheer wall of air right up in front of my face, preventing any sense of distance.

“So Shy, what do you think?”

“It’s very beautiful here,” I managed. Already I could feel my capacity for analysis leaking out of me like fluid from a head wound, carrying little flecks of personality with it.

“Yes I know. Like someone’s eyeful of heaven.” The Big Mother was quoting from something, probably a popular song I didn’t recognize.

We walked a few yards along a footpath to a cluster of outbuildings. As I went, the nails pushed between my toes and forced me to mince along, just like Marie, who moved skittishly along her own arc through the yard like the dog she was, off-leash but at hand. The grounds were scattered with playground and sports equipment.

“My children are too old to play out here anymore, but we keep these things just in case, and someday they’ll give me lots and lots of grandbabies to spoil. I know you’ll like that too. I can tell you like children.” She was beaming, impossibly huge against the golden landscape. She had a big head and big hands for her size. Her narrow shoulders did nothing to make her any smaller.

“I’ve never spent much time around them,” I said. The Big Mother smiled indulgently.

“I can tell you like children,” she said again.

“I have nothing against them, I just—”

The blow caught me just below my left ear, surprising as a miracle, and I dropped to all fours in the yellow grass. Between my hands, I saw an ant carrying a small piece of something from right to left. When I lifted my head, I saw Marie framed by a distant hillside and a fluffy cloud, looking relieved. Everywhere little birds were making their sounds, and I heard an airplane splicing the sky, because this apocalypse was mine and no one and nothing else’s.

After putting the blackjack back into the pocket of her archival pants, the Big Mother cupped my swollen jaw and used it to pull me to my feet.

“I can tell you like children.” She didn’t seem angry at all. Instead, she seemed a little bored, like this part was something she’d rather get over with so we could all move on, together, to different things.

“I think they’re great.” And though pain thundered over my whole head, and my jaw clicked in a way that has never quite disappeared, I was less afraid.

¤

The children never came to visit, or they didn’t exist. It was just as likely that they’d grown up and now lived somewhere else as it was that the ad-hoc playground had been built by a previous resident. I learned quickly that just because the Big Mother said something about her life or the people in it, it didn’t mean there was any fact in what she was saying. She spoke according to the feeling that moved her and that was it. She’d mentioned the children because it occurred to her, and probably because she wanted an excuse to hit me for the first time, which my response had given her. She lived alone in the house except for me and Marie, though sometimes she talked about a husband making money somewhere out there in the world, beyond the steppe that was our neighborhood.

My hatred for Marie was immediate and complete. At night we slept together in a twin bed in one room, though there were other rooms on our hallway. We were locked in every night, and I fell asleep with her hot breath in my hair and the calluses on her feet scraping against my legs. She never said a single word to me and probably hated me too. She was her Mother’s creature, all the way through.

I learned my work and how to do it. One of my main jobs was to do the household laundry. Among the outbuildings, the laundry room was the biggest. It was a whitewashed cube with a doorway but no door and no windows and a peaked roof that shunted precipitation efficiently onto the gravel surrounding its foundation.

I went from room to room on my bruised feet, gathering dirty clothes, rags, towels, linens, rugs, et cetera, and putting them into a nylon bag that I hoisted over my shoulder. The house was bigger inside than it looked. Rooms had been added haphazardly, probably as they were needed. The walls were very thick, matte white, and I couldn’t identify their material. As I went, I tried to figure out where a phone or a computer might be. I didn’t know who I could call, and I had no one’s phone number memorized. And in truth there wasn’t anyone to call. I was in a ferocious countryside, a bad place, the sum total of my tourist’s arrogance and bad planning. The guidebooks and websites had all spelled it out: only the cities had a police force. In the country, the big families jostled with each other for power and position and property, and were always killing off various members in complicated, gruesome ways. Curiosity about this was one of the things that had made me want to visit so badly.

So self-recrimination mixed with my terror as I mixed the detergent and borax, soaked the grease stains and the foundation stains and the collar-rings on the Big Mother’s things and the little bloodstains that were almost always present on the sheets of the bed I shared with Marie. I often thought about something I’d seen in the small courtroom: a branch extending like a cupped skeletal hand outside the window. A sparrow landed and took off; I even saw light glinting off the top of a passing taxi. At that dire hour, I’d interpreted these things as signs that my freedom would be restored.

During this time, I also learned how to receive and metabolize pain, because inevitably I made mistakes, or the Big Mother would decide that I’d moved too decisively through the space of a room. The most sensitive parts of a human being are its genital area, its temples, its fingertips, the inside of its nose, its airway, and its ego.

I learned that nothing separated me from Marie except a random number of incarceration years and a fluke of personality that I called by the cliché of “a will to live” and that the Big Mother called my “confidence,” and that nothing separated Marie from an animal besides her thumbs and the faces she was still capable of making at me when I made a mistake. I never heard her speak, though my initial haplessness sometimes made her clap her hands with frustration, or pound them on a nearby surface.

There I was, struggling in our room with a fitted sheet, and she appeared. She looked at the wad in my hands and clapped. Clap clap.

“What? Is this wrong?” I’d been trying to fold it, and had succeeded in making an ovoid bundle.

Clap clap clap.

“It’s clean. I don’t know what you’re saying to me right now.”

Clap clap clap clap.

“It doesn’t matter. This is just going to go—” I couldn’t bring myself to call it our bed. “On that.” I pointed with my chin.

Clap clap clap clap clap. Clap clap.

“If it’s so important, you do it.” I tossed the egg at her feet. This made her pound. First she pounded the bed, driving up spurts of dust from the skinny pillows, and then she pounded the frame. Soon she was pounding the tops of her own thighs, and I stood there as she filled the room with the dull, soft sound of her human body.

The Big Mother’s sudden arrival was how I learned that the thick walls of the house were infested with surveillance. Later I saw Marie with a black eye and bandage over one ear and decided my own negligible beating had been worth it.

Besides laundry, my other jobs included raking the gravel and making sure the wire fence that separated the Big Mother’s property from the neighbors’ was always repaired. She hated the dogs that lived there, and believed they were always on the verge of breaking through to run amok on her land. Whenever she had the opportunity, she came out to tease and abuse them. At first I only encountered them as a pair of velvet spots in the distance, usually together but sometimes separated by their investigations into territorial disturbances, like a passing car out on the poplar avenue, or a ground rodent at the far edge of their property.

The wire was electric.

¤

After a period of violent barking that I ignored, the dogs got enough used to me to come and watch me work, and I was glad for their company. Two huge gray mastiffs, one male, one female. Siblings, I thought. Each time I saw them, I gave them different names: Up and Down, Boy and Girl, Black and White, North and South, Thick and Thin, Happy and Sad, Day and Night, Open and Shut. Doing this reminded me I was still capable of using my brain to make categories, so the habit became important to me. I never touched them, and they never regarded me with anything but a wary appraisal, but being looked at as though I were alive and unpredictable felt good.

I was driving a stake into the dirt. I imagined the top of the stake was Marie’s skull as I bounced the post-rammer on top of it. By this time, the country’s unchanging golden atmosphere didn’t bother me. I’d started calling it “the solar steppe.” This, plus nursing my hatred for Marie, was another way I used my mind to identify myself to myself in the absence of any other self-determination—and because my body was such a miserable place to be.

Before, I’d liked feeling things, physically. I’d used lotion and had sex, often actively sought out the trickle of air through an open window. I’d liked soft clothes and at times had even shifted my contours with diet and exercise. But now everything was exercise, and I was very tired. My back and hands and feet hurt constantly. That day, a blood blister developed under one of my new calluses and I worked through the pain, climbing a staircase of perspective with each heave of the post-rammer until I was looking down at the world and everything in it from the top of a tower inside my head. Sensation became just a little red bubble of a word, there on my palm. Ouch.

It was almost cute.

High and Low had come to watch me, and were reclining quietly side by side, a pair of sphinxes. It was the closest we’d ever gotten, and I paused my work to admire them. That feeling itself was strange: the luxury of admiration. I guzzled their clipped pointed ears and docked tails, pink and runny eyelids, the series of rectangles that comprised the shape of their bodies. Along the road, poplars stretched away to my right and left, disappearing in both directions. The neighborhood was a collection of dumpy estates like the Big Mother’s, and every driveway led to this main road. The trees were beautiful, and in this single moment I could extend my appreciation to them, touching something benevolent and rustling that I’d been forced to leave behind.

The Big Mother came at me down the driveway. As she moved, she seemed to get larger, not closer. When she was within arm’s reach, I laid the tool down at my feet and faced her with my hands folded, as I’d been taught. By this point I’d finally lost count of the weeks, but the air was warmer, and the pockets of dirty snow on the low yellow hills were gone.

She looked at the dogs and looked at me.

“Someday, that confidence is going to get you into more trouble than it already has,” she said. “It’s like your name hasn’t helped at all.”

Being outside required direct forms of coercion, hence the blackjack and taser that the Big Mother always had in one pocket and the small pistol she had in another. She went to the fence and poked the blackjack through it and the dogs went for her, bringing their sensitive muzzles in contact with the electric wire. Their white teeth flashed but soon they both yipped pitifully and loped away, shaking their heads.

¤

I lived this way for another series of months or maybe years. Marie stopped squinting whenever she looked at me, so I knew my appearance had changed. My hips and spine pushed into our thin mattress at night. But it was also true that I’d gotten strong from my work in a low, thrumming way that I knew I needed to hide.

For a while I tried to get Marie to talk to me. I hated her but she was familiar, and my exercises with Yes and No had helped me remember that everything contains its opposite, so if I hated her, I must also love her a little. And my constant internal narration was building up inside me into a fountain of language that needed to come out. And tormenting her felt good; it was another thing to do that reminded me I was a person. In a TV show or a bad novel, she and I would have become accomplices, maybe friends, maybe even circumstantial lovers. But we were living in this rambling house on a solar steppe filled with eyes and I hated her.

Whenever we were alone, I’d ask her about her past, and about her real name, and I told her my own over and over and over again. As she stood over the electric range with only one working burner, I whispered in her ear:

“When is your birthday?”

When she brought me the used kitchen rags at the end of a week:

“In the house I grew up in, we had one of those big gas stoves with red knobs, because we were so rich. My parents only cooked when they wanted to. For fun.”

“My mattress was so comfortable; it had a pillow-topper. And in the morning, I went to school and had sports practice at night on a field with real green grass and bright silver lights, and after that I’d take a twenty- minute shower. Have you ever taken a shower?”

“My sister and I used to call each other on our phones at night to talk through the walls, without getting out of bed. Do you remember talking?”

“Back home I have my own place. That means my own bed, and a toilet. It’s in a neighborhood that’s famous for its big trees and its restaurants. Have you ever been to a restaurant?”

My previous life had a sheen of fantasy that made it impossible to touch with any real deep feeling, and I was grateful for that. After the first few months, I’d stopped thinking about some impending rescue. It was like my projection of those computers and phones on their dusky little wings from the first day: it no longer applied.

Most of what I told Marie wasn’t true, but it felt true. I wanted to get the scope of my feeling right, and to make it real by saying it out loud. I figured that once another person heard it, it would become real. Even if that person was nothing but Marie.

One day the Big Mother came to me in the laundry house. It was the first time I’d seen her angry. It looked to me like she’d been drawn with a squiggly line: she was vibrating with fury. She came up to me and put the mouth of her pistol against my forehead.

“Knees.”

I knew immediately that Marie had told her Mother that I’d been talking to her. I’d often seen them communicating with a set of simple but oblique hand gestures that only years of intimacy could have developed.

She handed me two small red pills.

“Eat them.”

The pills sat on my tongue like two seeds. I held them there because I was afraid of what would happen when I swallowed them and also because of their bitter, acrid taste after so many months of the Big Mother’s tan leftovers. But she pinched my nose as hard as she could.

“Swallow.”

She marched me through the yard and back into the house and down a hall I’d never seen before and brought me into a room with a massage table.

“Down.”

I lay down with the back of my head in the donut.

She sat in a chair in the corner, pointing the gun at me. I stared at the low ceiling and tried to feel what the pills were doing inside me. I knew she couldn’t kill me—that wasn’t part of my sentence—but she had told me a thousand times that otherwise my body was hers.

Soon my head wobbled in the donut and the ceiling descended in a curtain of static, or snow, and I was out.

I came back to consciousness slowly. The Big Mother was gone, and there was a white rag in a plastic bowl on the floor. My mouth was stuffed with gauze and I pulled some out and put it into the bowl. There were two firmer packs of material under my front lip, and I left those in place. I leaned over the tableside and drooled into the bowl, and threw up a little, then slid off the table and, slowly, brought the bowl into the greasy kitchen where I cleaned it, then sat on the floor trying not to throw up again. The lower half of my face had become a snout of pain, and I cupped my hand over it protectively. It was hot to the touch.

Marie was in our room, getting ready for bed in her ragged underwear and overused body. She was so surprised by my appearance that she just sat herself on the bed, on top of her red hands. I brandished my swollen face.

“Thee pulledth my fthont theeth.” Talking made my mouth fill with blood and drool. “Thidh you know thasth would happm?” I pushed my snout right up in front of her, let my bloody mix land across her little face. “You thell on me agaimn?” My tongue was almost immobilized by the gauze. “YOU THELL ON ME AGAIMN?” She shook her head, and I released her. “Thleep on duh fthloor.”

I threw her a blanket and wondered if this was how it had felt to have a sibling.

¤

After that, it was hard labor for me all the time. I didn’t do the laundry anymore, and was outside from dawn until sundown. The weather was getting better and the Big Mother wanted a pool; I dug it out with a rusty pickax and a wobbly old shovel. After that was done, she wanted a foundation for a new outbuilding; I dug it out. The gravel driveway suddenly needed raking twice a day, once in the morning and once at night. None of the new tasks ever required any additional skills because she didn’t want me developing any further. It was digging and raking and keeping the property free of trash, which was impossible because the whole neighborhood dumped along the poplar road.

I dug holes and moved garbage and tracked my healing process with my tongue. In the morning and at night, the Big Mother watched while I held a mouthful of salt water for five minutes to prevent any infection. Soon I had a nubby slick slot where my teeth had been. When I closed my mouth, my tongue went right through it.

Even so, I talked to myself while I worked.

“Yethterday. Thaturday. Thank you. Thorry; I’m thorry. Thath’s OK. You’re thorry. Thut up. Thath’s OK. Yeth. Yeth, pleathe. Yeth I am.”

“Hi guyth,” I said. “Fatht and Thlow.” They looked at me, and the male sat down, pointed a hind leg to the sky, and began to lick his scrotum. His sister—Fast, in this case—stood sniffing the air.

The Big Mother approached. I wanted to lie on the ground and cover my head with my arms; I wanted to laugh in her face. When she reached speaking range, the dogs retreated and watched us from a safe distance.

“Tell me something,” she said.

“I fixth thith fthenth every thday.” There wasn’t a way for me to tell her that doing my tasks well had become important to me; I myself hadn’t realized it until that moment.

“I know you fix this fence every day.” She talked to me as a stranger would talk to an underdeveloped child.

The Big Mother led me down the driveway to the gate, where the gravel fanned out deltaically onto the road. I went slowly because I could no longer keep up with a normal gait. A breeze in the dry leaves made the trees whisper. This stretch of gravel, this portal onto the poplar avenue, this canine audience: They all felt like mine. I’d laced them together into a zone with my work and my sweat and with my altered language and with my admiration. She had entered my domain, I thought.

“I came out to tell you that all these branches need to go. They could come down at any time. Maybe right onto this wire. I don’t want a fire. Do you?” She looked into my eyes.

As if by saying this out loud the Big Mother had called up her own trouble, wind and rain came at dusk. Through the tiny window in the bedroom, I could see that the plain had disappeared. Water swung from the sky in vast and conflicting layers; everything was gray. We weren’t prepared and neither was anyone else in the district. It was every household with itself against the weather.

The Big Mother talked while Marie and I stood watching her mash her dinner from one side of the plate to the other.

“This has never happened before,” she said, muffled by the noise of the storm. “We have no rainy season. It shouldn’t be happening.” She’d predicted fire but received water.

We discovered that the roof was leaking. Marie and I set out buckets and pots and bowls and soon had a system for emptying them every hour. Rain tumbled in through a gap in the casement in the Big Mother’s room, soaking the pile of dirty laundry that she always let accumulate below it. When the power went out, we lit candles, and the Big Mother became paranoid in the dark.

“If they get in here, I disappear,” she said. Her voice was a heavier drone under the drone of the rain. I couldn’t see her face in the low light. “I need to have eyes on you both all night. They could get in at any time.” Marie and I pushed the couches together into a lifeboat in the middle of the living room for the Big Mother and then lay next to her on the floor.

I could smell the damp house around us, and the damp warmth of our bodies in the room together. The smell of the Big Mother’s moisturizer, the smell of Marie’s scalp and hair, the smell of my own arm beneath my mouth and nose. The smell of early mildew, wet carpet that we’d have to pry up and throw away. The smell of work, more work, wet work under that low ceiling. I wondered how many others were lying awake in their masters’ houses, under the beating rain, praying for a microburst to take the roof.

Sometime in the night, the rain stopped. I woke up in my nest and my ears pinged with the quiet. I heard none of the whirring sounds that meant any central systems of the house were active. I just heard the Big Mother’s apneic breathing, and the sound of Marie’s mental leftovers as they continued to disintegrate, flake by flake. I didn’t even hear wind or birds.

Soon fingers of morning light stretched into the room. They crept across the Big Mother’s sleeping face and around her wrinkly neck and I willed them to strangle her. But she just blinked her eyes open and smacked her lips over those rotten teeth. She threw one of her shoes at the wall above Marie’s head, who bolted upright. By now I was sitting cross-legged with my hands in my lap, awaiting instruction.

“Marie, you’re with me in the house. So Shy, outside for cleanup. What do you say to me?”

“Yeth ma’am.”

Her bravery had returned and she laughed with delight. “Perfect.”

¤

The yard was spotted with debris from the road and from my poor trees. A lightning strike had slashed a low-hanging poplar in two, and the bigger piece had demolished the transformer that serviced the Big Mother’s property. There would be no power until the state agency came and replaced it, and she would be furious every day until that happened. I stood thinking about the fact and certainty of my punishment.

I decided to hedge my vulnerability with good behavior, starting now. I raked piles until I could hardly stand, hands protected by their calluses. Inevitably, the Big Mother came out to see about my progress because she couldn’t watch me on the CCTV bank in the room she called her study. And of course she caught me standing at ease, leaning on my rake like someone’s idea of a farmer at rest.

There was just enough time for me to tell her: “You were right about that tree.” And we marveled at my clarity, and at my nerve. She opened her mouth, raised the blackjack.

And then—contingency. A miracle. Even with her big hands and big head and all her implements, the Big Mother had no chance. Yes and No were too fast. They surged through the inactive fence in a wave of muscular force, opposites melded into a single body of purpose. They were a sub-finger of the universe, reaching down to graze this little patch of earth to level it and make it new.

They had her on the ground in less time than it took me to exhale. They were so loud that I couldn’t hear the Big Mother over their animal sounds. They shook her like they were playing tug-of-war with a scrap of fabric. When I remember it, I like to think that it was Sister who went for the head and neck and Brother who went for the feet and ankles and calves. My satisfaction at this began in my own sore feet, around the nails of the hobble shoes, and worked its way up to my head with its depleted mouth.

When they were done and sitting off some way from the body, looking distracted with their own satisfaction—or was it relief?—I took off the Big Mother’s shoes and put them on my cramped, aching feet.

And lo: a perfect fit.

But Marie was now coming toward the scene down the driveway. It took me some moments to remember her, as full-up as I was with satisfaction. The Big Mother had become just a limp raggedy object. There wasn’t even much blood, considering how she’d gone. I looked at the sky, where the sun was as usual not a disk but a crease of yellow light on the horizon. For the first time, I understood how someone might look that way, out over this space-burdened yellow countryside, and feel like opportunity called.

Marie came up and stood.

The dogs were sitting by the body. I knew that probably their owners would take over this property. Contingency had worked out for them too.

But Marie, Marie, Marie.

“Ifth you thtay, dey’ll thake you thoo.”

Marie understood me perfectly. Her face was wrenched, wretched. She was opening her mouth and closing it again, like a guppy. Like talking. But nothing came out.

I became afraid, suddenly, that as soon as she set foot onto the poplar avenue, she’d start to disintegrate. I went up and put my hands on her shoulders to steady her. She crumpled to the ground and I went down with her.

We sat like that for a long time. I hated her, I held her. I wanted to kill her; she wanted me to kill her. I couldn’t tell the difference.

“I thon’t know how,” I said, and kept saying it as I held her against me. Even her crying had no sound. I had long since wondered if the Big Mother had cut her vocal cords, but there was no scar.

Over the top of her head, I looked at the dogs licking their paws. One became O; one became K.

“OK, OK,” I said, kept saying it. OK OK OK OK—dividing everything in two. Before and After. The easy slippage between one state and another; I knew it well. Seated and Standing. My head moved upward against the sky; my hand slid oilily into the Big Mother’s front pocket, which was miraculously intact.

At the big sound, the dogs spooked. They spooked with a jerk of their huge rectangular bodies, in unison, and then were off over the unified plain.

¤

Featured image: Charels G. Leland, “Glooskap Setting His Dogs on the Witches,” from The Algonquin Legends of New England: or, Myths and Folk Lore of the Micmac, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot Tribes, 1884, is in the public domain. Accessed October 3, 2025. Image has been cropped.