1943
Maria had already died twice, but only succeeded the third time.
Everyone waited anxiously until her chest, which resembled a frame clad in thin skin under which the creator had forgotten to place muscles, stopped rising and falling. The eyes under her closed eyelids twitched, as if she searched for something in a fever dream. The crowd held its breath — only the few whispers of curious children broke the grave silence. The forest clearing that Maria had chosen six months ago, in full strength and complete health, as her final resting place, now seemed too small to accommodate the entire village, gathered to celebrate the first saint born before their eyes. This time everything was supposed to be different. This time the forest had to give something back.
People pushed through to stand as close as possible to the frail, half-lying figure, with its head resting on a pillow that someone had brought from home. The mangled letters on its surface formed the names of those who came close enough to write them there, and intentions written in small print so that only careful observers could read them. The floral motif that once covered the pillow had faded, leaving only a memory of bright colors. Maria's head rested on it amidst dried patches of sweat, saliva, and soil, jostling from time to time as if to chase away the nightmare playing out in her dreaming mind.
"She's saying something!" — a shout rang out, cut off in the middle as the excited observer met the chastening gaze of the rest of the onlookers. The news spread through the clearing amid a murmur of excited whispers.
Indeed, Maria's shriveled, cracked lips seemed to move. What at first resembled nothing more than rough breathing of slowly yielding, tired lungs, began to form into barely distinguishable words as everyone strained their hearing, not wanting to miss a single sentence — before Maria left, taking her voice with her, and with it the wisdom about which rumors, and speculation had circulated among the villagers throughout the future saint's life. It has happened before, but never in such an obvious way. Only a few could boast of having heard her speak: everyone told a different story about the incredible feeling that came over them as soon as the sound, coming simultaneously from the depths of the earth and forming in the air, almost tangible, reached their ears. The stories grew to the size of local legends, all the more intriguing and improbable the more people became convinced that Maria never spoke. Those who lived in the neighborhood even before her birth maintained that they had not heard a baby cry once since her mother delivered her — alone, without the help of local women, unlike most of those giving birth.
Voices of discontent rang out from the back of the crowd, demanding to know what the lying figure said. The stronger ones tried to forcibly get closer, disregarding the voices of protest from those they pushed. Somewhere on the outskirts of the clearing a fleeting brawl ensued, interrupted by the echo of a sudden cough coming from Maria's side. All bodies froze again in tense anticipation. A snarling voice broke through the series of coughs, for the first time gaining enough momentum to reach the ears of the audience. Someone handed Maria a small glass bottle, from which she took a sip without opening her eyes or raising her head. Most of the water ran down her face, creating a bright crack in the dirt covering it, and soaked into the pillow. The chill of the wet fabric made Maria squirm, but she did not have enough strength to turn her frail neck and move to the dry area of the pillow. She twitched under the faded blanket, covered with letters even denser than the pillow. Her lips didn’t move. They resembled the mouth of a stranded, dying fish, defenseless against the forces of an alien element.
Someone took out a crumpled piece of paper and a pencil, which he brought with him in anticipation of this moment. Someone else, crouching down and closing their eyes, tried to remember as much as possible of what the saint was saying — before she passed away forever, without leaving the mystical message, the description of the insight they had all been waiting for: some had been visiting her clearing every day for six months, dreaming of this moment. They brought her food and water. Sometimes they also smuggled in Mass wine and hosts, though at first the priest disowned her, calling her an impostor (“don’t you remember what happened the last time?” — he shouted from the altar) who dissuades people from the church and drags them into the woods for them to never come back. The word "witch" (just like all the others before her — he thought, remembering every person the villagers called a saint, when a more proper word would be: “sacrifice”; a calf put on the altar of the unknown) hung on the tip of his tongue, but by now he knew how to restrain himself, seeing the newly kindled religious verve in the people — his doubts seemed to diminish every time more and more money landed on the tray with which he walked among the faithful every Sunday. After a while, he began giving communion to Maria himself, becoming one of the most zealous visitors to her clearing. After two months, he succumbed to pressure and collective amnesia, and agreed to call her a saint, perceiving among his parishioners an irrefutable conviction that canonization was only a matter of time — this time, for sure. After three months, in all his sermons he talked about the miracle God had sent to the village — the miracle of martyrdom and the miracle of protection, because, according to a rumor circulating among the villagers, since Maria began her asceticism in the clearing, no airplane had flown over the area, giving the impression that war bypassed the abode of the divinely blessed. The priest thus became a kind of voice for the hitherto silent Maria. Until now, when sounds began to emanate from the half-alive woman’s body, and color returned to her face for a moment. It was happening again. He couldn’t stop it. The more he tried every time, the more painful the failure felt.
In the forest surrounding the community, the previously shrieking birds had stopped singing, and the wind rustling the leaves seemed to avoid Maria's clearing. The silence thickened as the voice of the lying woman gained strength. Time seemed to slow down more and more with each passing second. The movements of those gathered stopped — they resembled stone statues left in the forest by a bygone civilization. They looked around, as if, for a moment frozen in time, they had forgotten where they were and why they had come here. The two boys who had climbed the branches of the tree hanging directly above Maria clung to them, as if a sudden drowsiness had seized them. The man holding the pen hung it over the paper, moving it in the air. No words hit the page, and when it seemed he intended to write something down, he stopped moving altogether, breathing shallowly and loudly. He fixed his glassy gaze on an indeterminate point between the trees growing around him. He wobbled in place and sat down on the ground, damp from the recent rain. The words of Maria, accompanying his behavior, seemed to stretch into infinity, blending, overlapping in an unearthly harmony whose component parts the human ear cannot distinguish. They permeated bodies like living beings, becoming part of them — synchronizing the movements of people sitting down on the ground, one by one, until finally no one remained standing. The children stopped exchanging whispers with each other. Maria's voice became the wind and birdsong it had previously displaced — it seemed to vibrate in the warm light of the rays of the autumn sun emerging from behind the clouds. The hour no longer mattered: the early October evening, due to arrive any moment, forgot to appear. The orange light shimmered in the droplets of sweat that ascended Maria's focused, serious face. The man listening with closed eyes to her words, rustling among the leaves and rumbling underground, involuntarily opened his mouth, unable to grasp the meaning of the sounds entering forcibly into his body.
Many later repeated the same story in countless versions; various sentences they thought Maria had formulated before her death. At that moment, however, the seated bodies of those gathered seemed completely immersed in a trance. As one person rolled over, resting his head on the thigh of another, others followed suit, laying on the ground, on top of others, curled up in a ball on the damp ground. The overlapping bodies resembled a mosaic from a distance, the intricate elements of which no artist could have planned. Immersed in the almost palpable, vibrating snarl of Maria's voice, the village seemed to fall asleep. The clearing became the center of a communal dream dictated by unintelligible words in a nonexistent language: the note-taker, even before the melody coming out of the depths of the lungs tucked beneath a collapsed chest stunned him, realized that he couldn't write down, let alone understand a single word, as if Maria — having never left the village and, living, as long as they remained alive, with parents who knew only Polish and Russian — used words flowing straight from her soul, like divine inspiration with a palpable sweet taste as they spread through the air (this is exactly how he described it a few days later, as he came to his senses, and the echoes of the mysterious, sonorous language seemed to resonate in his head more and more quietly — though others looked on with a mixture of pity and hostility at his attempts to erase from their description the sight that followed, as the trance passed and the sweetness of the sounds and the feeling of divine inspiration gave way to a deafening silence that preceded the bewildered whispers of the waking participants in the event when, still half-conscious, they noticed what remained of Maria).
The words simultaneously attracted and wounded, flowing in through the ears like molten gold. The heat, unprecedented in October, seeped under their clothes — those lying down tore them off clumsily, with slowed movements, as if their surfaces burned their skin. Not a word uttered during the entire scene: all present surrendered to the imposing presence of Maria's voice, which trailed and tangled, biting into soil and flesh. It resounded as if from several places at once — from throats, gripping vocal cords like a brutal, rough, overpowering hand, with a sure gesture taking away the autonomy of its limbs. It tore through closed mouths, until at last there remained no one who did not accompany with all their muscles the mosaics of sound arranged in ever-new patterns. The voice, penetrating the bodies, caused shivers. Goosebumps appeared on the sweaty skin. Sweat-sticky hair entered the opening and closing mouths, possessed by the mysterious power of the unearthly voice, which, taking control of the crowd, bent Maria's body into ever-increasing tremors. In a final convulsive shudder, the reclining woman opened her eyes, wandering with unseeing eyes through the trance-stricken crowd. An expression of horror flashed across her face for a fraction of a second as she realized that the mysterious sound emanated from her — piercing outward regardless of her will, even when she didn't move her lips and the residual air left her lungs too slowly to produce even a word. Her body resonated with the trembling of the entire forest and the silhouettes suspended in time within it. Something had taken possession of her. Despite living with it her whole life, she seemed unprepared to receive the mysterious force.
Since childhood, Maria has dreaded every reunion with the force giving her a voice — ever since she died the first time, thirty-nine years earlier, having fallen suddenly in the middle of the street connecting the edge of the forest with the center of the village, when a blissful warmth enveloped her and her limbs refused to obey — as if by magic. Holding her mother's hand, she collapsed and, if you believe the stories, did not breathe for several minutes, pale and limp, then opened her eyes, taking air into her mouth with the brutal spasm of a body fighting for life. Those present recalled hearing a violent gust of wind and a sound coming from the forest — something between the howl of an anguished animal and the reverberation of a mighty church bell. A sound that the oldest villagers greeted with the sign of the cross, saying that it was a bad omen; that the forest had chosen its next victim. Hearing the sound, they would hang scraps of burnt wood in their homes, an amulet to protect against whatever periodically woke up among the trees.
"I had a dream. I had a strange dream," she wanted to say, smiling broadly, unaware that she had just broken free from the snare of death, but the words stuck in her larynx like a thick, sticky mass. No one paid any attention to her struggle. Everyone seemed preoccupied with the girl's sudden awakening and the hysteria into which her mother had fallen, alternately choking on her tears and screaming with the terror that only a parent who has violently lost a child can feel; if only for a few minutes. A crowd of curious and worried people gathered around them — as well as car drivers, whom the incident forced to stop. A few dozen meters away, a carriage driver smacked an annoyed horse with a whip.
That day, Maria returned home, barely dragging her feet, stunned by what she saw in a fleeting — though long from her perspective — vision. Her lungs drew air in and out, and her heart distributed blood as if nothing had happened, but the girl felt the presence of something else inside, something that had crept in there unnoticed, taking up space between the organs; hiding behind their tissues. At home, Maria refused to eat and went to her room, much to the displeasure of her mother, who still trembled with emotion after the unexpected event — two thoughts clashed in her head: what will people say when the rumor spreads? and what happened to my daughter? Maria threw herself on the bed in her clothes, suddenly deprived of the remnants of strength that allowed her to return home on her own two feet. Sleep, however, never came. It hid behind the veil of darkness of closed eyelids, where the girl could not reach. Lying motionless, she tried to think about what she had seen, dying on the dirty street, as the ambient sounds slowly turned into a uniform mass, stretching and slowing down like a scratched vinyl record. She heard her mother's voice last, sounding alien, as if someone mimicked her way of speaking. The words "come back to me" echoed in her fading mind.
In her dream on the street, which she now tried to return to, Maria sat in her room. She heard a voice calling her outside, but each time she approached the window, she saw only a thicket of unfamiliar plants, nothing like the ones she knew, growing larger when she stopped looking. At one point, it obscured everything else — the houses of neighbors and the tops of mountains several kilometers away from the village. The vegetation grew thicker as it approached the window, until finally it began to creep inside through gaps in the wooden structure; through microscopic cracks between the frame and the window; through the chimney and the door. It crawled into the house in thin tendrils. They arranged themselves into a mosaic full of shapes just on the verge of recognition. Whenever Maria thought she spotted a word or a face in any of them, they would change position, rearranging themselves. Finally, there remained not a single spot in the house uncovered by vegetation — except for the girl's body. The shoots moved toward her, wrapping around her feet, and climbing up her legs, until Maria became just a silhouette hidden under the green and brown. She could not fight back. Her muscles refused to obey her. Her voice grew louder and louder as the shoots of the plants broke forcibly into her mouth and crept further, passing her throat, and filling her from the inside. The words calling her name began to flow from within her, as if for the first time in her life she had managed to speak.
Since then, the voice has never left her, emerging occasionally from gusts of wind, or thundering in a storm. Occasionally, it came out of her mouth when she slept and dreamed of how the vegetation she carries within her spreads once again through the house, consuming everything it meets on the way. In moments of deepest sleep, she happened to wake up outside, standing barefoot on the cool street. If anyone saw her, they never came closer, hiding in the shadows cast by nearby houses and sneaking further away, hoping the strange girl wouldn't follow. "I saw her. I feel sorry for the mother," they later told household members. "This child needs God. You can see from her that she is so close to him, and yet neither she nor her mother has ever been seen in church," someone else replied, expressing an opinion common among villagers. Maria would return home and go to bed. In the morning, she wondered why there were traces of earth on her feet.
The moment of awakening passed unnoticed. Those gathered paid no attention to Maria, completely absorbed in the voice that, radiating from her body, spread throughout the forest, giving the impression that all the elements of the landscape produced sounds that made up a conglomerate of microtonal harmonies that even the most skilled, experienced musician would fail to describe. The low, rumbling sounds melted under the feet of those gathered, while the high ones stung their ears, escaping into the sky and swirling above their heads and inside their bodies — their coolness passing into the warmth of the bass tones, before becoming an element of the autumn air again. Evening approached, but the ground still remained warmed by the exceptionally brightly shining sun. It absorbed the crowd-snatching sounds and amplified them, emanating the heat of moving silhouettes. The forest and the people within it functioned like an instrument that a musician not from this world had carved out of space, magically giving it acoustic properties and tuning it according to a scale known only to themselves. No one tried to understand Maria's words anymore. Those gathered let their meaning dissolve into the rhythm of the human and non-human surroundings plunged into a religious trance.
Some later claimed that Maria said nothing — she merely spun a melody, capturing the breaths of the other congregants, sipping the rustle of the wind and the sound of raindrops dripping from the treetops as they fell before the sun, suspended in time, cast its ever-redder light on the clearing, dying down under the weight of the evening, as if it knew it had just experienced the birth of a saint — this time. Some maintained that the fiery disc turned for a split second into a blazing, all-seeing eye, facing Maria. Others could be found in whom fear prevailed and, making the sign of the cross every time they spoke of her, uncertainly talked about the spells and evil powers that had taken possession of the entire village. Others said their imagination played tricks on them. But they all agreed that the moment in the forest clearing had changed something in them — though they couldn't say what. Reality seemed fluid, unstable. Conversations about Maria's clearing took place amidst the rustling of whispers, as if the speakers shared something intimate or as if they felt ashamed of how few words they knew — too few to convey what had happened to them in the forest. In trying to recall the details of the incident, they encountered resistance. Memory prevented them from grasping what had lodged in it. The improbability of the situation fought against the fortress of rationality.
Or at least that's what they said, agreeing unanimously on one version of events when two police officers from the district town visited the village in connection with a report from Maria's daughter, who hadn't seen her mother for six months. She lost contact with her after Maria decided to leave the house and go to the clearing. She then called her neighbor, whose number she knew by heart — it surprised her to recall the entire sequence of digits unerringly even years later — begging him to stop whatever should happen next. Mom didn't have a phone. Perhaps she didn't consider it necessary, since she didn't utter a word beyond those on which local myths — most of them completely made up — grew while she still lived. "She's completely fucked up. You're all fucked up if you let her kill herself. You know something is wrong with her!" — she said, then hung up with the intention of not getting involved in her mother's suicide plans. Not this time. She was not going to seek an explanation or ask the silent woman for any reason. So she managed to put the situation out of her mind — until a strong premonition prompted her to visit her home village, the day before a neighbor informed her in a trembling voice what had happened.
Maria died for the second time in 1924 — at the age of twenty-three, exactly twenty years after her first encounter with the being who lived inside her. The hope of a postwar regeneration made her dare to marry a boy who spoke as little as she did. She had known him since childhood. Sometimes they played together, in silence, understanding each other without words or simply giving in to the pressure of the barrier that divided them, which paradoxically brought them closer together. His body knew her body better than anyone. When he came to her with the intention of asking for her hand, he didn't have to utter a word. She nodded, smiling slightly — somewhere in her heart she had always expected this moment. She wished her mother could have been there for it.
Maria's mother had died of typhoid fever three years earlier, leaving her suddenly alone and terrified, responsible for the life she had hitherto shared with someone who had served as a bridge between the world of people and the world in which she had unwittingly found herself twenty years earlier. She had to learn from scratch to exist among people; to communicate with them when words could not pass her lips, despite her sincerest intentions. She invented her own set of gestures, unable to learn sign language. Some memorized what the various hand movements meant and tried to imitate them. Most, however, preferred to banish Maria's existence from their consciousness — they were gripped by anxiety when she appeared nearby.
Not long after she married, another creature appeared next to the one living inside her — this time a human one, growing slowly over nine months until it was born, a birth that Maria could not later recall. When she thought back to the moment when the excruciating pain disappeared in a split second, all she saw was a thicket of plants moving like living animal tissues, hiding muscles, blood and bones under brown, wooden skin. They looked like fingers, ready to grab her by the throat, picking through the air, savoring the power they had over other bodies — they could crush them in the blink of an eye. The weight of the plant-like creature caused the walls of the room to become covered with tiny cracks, as if they slowly cracked under the pressure of the intruder drilling into them. Their whispers turned into screams, full of aggression. They filled her ears with a shriek coming from her own mouth — an alien voice capturing all thoughts.
She was awakened by the sound of hospital life and the sting in her stomach when she saw not a single person around her. Distant voices drifted slowly into the room — too quiet for her to make out. She lay motionless, feeling the memories of the physical sensations of a few hours ago return to her body, though she couldn't recall an image of what had happened. Every time she tried, her thoughts got seized by the spreading thicket of plants: it came out of her instead of the baby and crept swiftly across the floor and walls of the hospital room, climbing up the legs of the staff and wrapping itself around helpless bodies. She could picture — with her imagination's eyes — how one by one they fell to the ground. Their blue faces were adorned with eyes that glared in her direction. The vegetation burst out of the room to take over the rest of the hospital. It meandered through the corridors, giving no thought to what direction to take — seizing everything in a frenzy of unsatisfied desire. With each meter it traveled, it began to act more and more human. Its movements no longer resembled vegetation. They became hundreds of human bodies, entangled with growing roots and strong, thin strands that bound them into a single mass, placing them in a moving prison. The skin appeared covered with bark and leaves, under whose surface one could see pulsating veins. The light reflecting on the surface of the sweat-wet leaves gave the impression that the creatures looked around with thousands of shining eyes. Bodies intertwined with each other, composed of countless fragments. They opened their large mouths wide and devoured those who didn't run away fast enough.
Although, when Maria woke up on her hospital bed, and all seemed to work in proper order around her, she couldn't help feeling that the vegetation that emerged from her had lurked somewhere, waiting for the right moment to attack again. She heard a voice calling out to her — a barely perceptible whisper, extremely easy to mistake for the sounds of life happening in other parts of the hospital. It grew louder as sleep began to overtake her again. The entity living inside her refused to let her go. With each attempt to shake off the recent vision, its elements gained more reality. They marked their presence: Maria felt them without seeing them. Even when a nurse entered the room and looked at her, smiling gently, she had the feeling that in a moment she would get attacked by what came out of her — inhuman, dangerous and unpredictable. She could feel the creature's hunger; how its tissues would constrict in anticipation as it sensed the presence of another body. The creature was still beside her. It remained only a matter of time when it would appear again.
"You're awake," — remarked the nurse. "That's good. Very good. I'll change your IV. Are you alright? I saw your baby. A lovely one. She's lying safely with the other children, so don't worry about anything. We were afraid we would lose you. There was no pulse for a good few minutes, but by some miracle, before you drifted off, you managed to give birth to a healthy baby girl. Miracles do happen! Let's hope for more of them. Things don't always go well in this job. Sometimes I wonder if I believe in God, because sometimes who survives and who doesn't seems terribly random. Not everyone makes it. When I was in the war, I experienced this kind of crisis too. Now and in the war. Always too many good people die. You are really very lucky."
Maria watched her skilled hands as the woman expertly inserted a new IV and checked the contents of the catheter hanging by the bed. She saw something soothing in her movements, though she let her words pass her ears, letting them blend in with the background sound. She felt gratitude for the other person's presence, even though the thought still lingered in her mind that in a moment the nurse would become a victim of what Maria had brought with her — with which she endangered everyone she interacted with. She wanted to convey to her with her eyes, her facial expression, that danger awaited her, but the nurse became lost in the flow of her own thoughts, talking about her family, her other patients, her plans for the future. Maria could only wait for the inevitable, which did not come the longer her anxiety grew.
"You have high blood pressure," the words emerged from the mass of sound, this time addressed directly to Maria. "And a strong heart. Listen to how it beats." The nurse pressed the earpieces of the stethoscope to the patient's ears. Maria twitched when, beneath the surface of her ribs, amidst the rumbling of her heart, she heard the rustling of whatever was alive inside her. It hadn't gone anywhere. It waited inside to tear her apart. The nurse saw the horror on her face and took the stethoscope away. "Not everyone likes to hear what they have inside," — she said with a smile, trying to turn Maria's fears into a joke. "I'm around if you need me," she murmured, leaving the room. As soon as she left, the voice returned in full force. Maria closed her eyes and covered her ears with her hands, though the bones of her skull resonated with the insistent sound of unintelligible speech.
As sleep engulfed Maria's body again, before she plunged into total darkness, she thought of her father, for the first time in years. His indistinct silhouette appeared in her thoughts for a moment, only to disappear under the weight of time, obliterating every feature. Her father had disappeared even before she died the first time, in the middle of the street. His body was discovered months later deep in the woods, wrapped in the scratchy arms of bushes. An autopsy showed neither signs of a struggle nor the presence of any poisonous substances in his body. He did not survive a heart attack or become ill, having spent several months in the forest. The final verdict was that he died of starvation. This is how he survived in the memory of the villagers. The marks on his body — on what was left of him — showed that he had not moved for at least a month, waiting docilely for death. Thinking of his face, all she could see was a blurry photo taken by the search team with the only camera in the village. The sketch that the boy, not much older than Maria, had scrawled on a scrap of paper, hiding behind trees so the search team wouldn't send him back home, looked much better. Pale skin was punctuated by a gray line of thin lips. His eyes, half-open, stared at a single point — frozen in that position, forever keeping to themselves the mystery of what they saw last. Most of its body was taken over by vegetation. It grew into the shape of a human torso and replaced one of his arms, arranging itself into a caricature of a human being. His head was covered with moss and tiny threads of fungi entering his nose and ears. The deformed, swollen face barely resembled its owner. Only the eyes remained, as if the predatory vegetation was slowly savoring the decomposition and gradual replacement of body members. Another moment, and no one would have succeeded in finding the corpse. People who came upon them later told that they were led by an eerie voice, telling them to stray from the path.
Whatever tormented her father — whatever came out of the woods to draw him into its snares — passed on to her as well. Stories circulating in the village over the next few years resurfaced as it became increasingly obvious that Maria had followed in his footsteps. According to one story, her father, while hanging out in a bar, would start telling people that something lived inside him when he happened to drink too much. People listened with a mixture of amusement and concern, repeating in their minds that this was alcohol talking. There is no reason to worry. After all, he behaves completely normally when sober. He told the story of how the stems of an unknown plant surrounded his heart — and how they came out to claim the voice of his newborn baby, just after her head slipped out of the birth canal. The lone home birth turned into a battle against the panic into which the father had fallen. The mother, having delivered the baby, had to put down the silent infant, looking around, and calm the terrified man. "There are no plants here. You can't even name them. They certainly don't exist." — She repeated these words like a mantra and fought the pain piercing her entire body. She sat on the blankets spread on the bed, soaked with her own blood, and wandered with her eyes over the walls of the room. "Do you see them? They are nowhere to be found. Look at our daughter. I need to rest," she whispered in his ear as he trembled in her arms. "They will come for all of us!" — he repeated. "We can't escape. We can't. This forest is alive. It will come for us and take us away. Plants are growing inside me that came out of it. It's like a virus. I don't know how to get rid of it. It eats me from the inside and I hear it calling others, I hear it calling my baby. I'm the one who gave it to her. She will never be safe as long as this forest is here. It will devour her as it is devouring me now. It lives, it thinks, it breathes like some kind of creature. I don't understand it, but I can feel it. I can feel it; I can feel how these plants grow and squeeze everything inside me. As if their roots are drilling into my heart. I can feel them moving. You can't help me. Take her and run." The more fear gathered in his body, the louder the forest on the edge of which they lived seemed to get.
Many of the participants in the incident in the clearing complained about the fog that had surrounded their minds since they had woken up in the thicket of bodies and were horrified to find that there was not a trace left of Maria, as if she had never existed, and that their skin was covered with shreds of clothes torn off in the trance. There was an intense scent of flowering plants and young spruce shoots in the air, although time had returned to its normal rhythm — all around, October continued unabated, and the sun slowly disappeared behind the horizon, covering the world with an intense orange glow. The fresh smell mingled with the scent of moisture accompanying the mushroom communities. Birds regained their voices, and the wind again brushed the blades of grass and yellowed leaves lying on the ground, accentuating the silence of the half-awakened, terrified people. The body of the frail woman, stripped of the remnants of flesh that hung from her skeleton when she was alive, had disappeared almost completely, leaving behind only a mysterious smell that was never to fade from the clearing again. Barely awakened observers stared in horror at the dismembered corpse, scattered around a torn blanket and pillow.
Someone burst into hysterical laughter, causing the mood in the clearing to change. There were sounds of weeping and whispers of surprise amid the rustling of rising bodies. People began to gather their clothes from the ground, while looking around surreptitiously to see if the real Maria was standing somewhere nearby, awake and full of strength, just as they remembered her from six months ago.
"Look!" — cried the boy, who had woken up on a tree branch from which he had managed not to fall despite delving into a trance. He pointed his finger at something below him. The gaze of the assembled people rested on what they first recognized as a mere tangle of bushes, not noticing that it appeared exactly where Maria was lying just a moment ago. The plants took the shape of her body, mapping her small, emaciated limbs in their weaves. The murmur of the wind moving them sounded like a whisper — a distant echo of the strong, mesmerizing voice everyone had heard just moments before. The expected ascension had not occurred; the miracle had not happened. Maria became another person swallowed up by the place, disappointing everyone's expectations. The forest seemed to grow quieter and quieter. Until it becomes hungry once more, the villagers will do their best to forget about it again.
Bonus for paying subscribers: some reflections on the story
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Machinic Specters to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.