Telling Tales 217

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Say What Now?

Ye’d not ken it ta look at him, but he’s a prince, he is, Conomor. Aye, Ah saw him back in tose days, saw his motter before he was born, and big as a house she was. Te queen, nature-ly. Now, tere ar hunderds af kingdoms on tese islands. Everyone’s settin up alliances wit tis oter king or tat oter king. Tryin to make sure tat tey’ve got friends where tey need tem.

So his parents, ye see, tey’re not parents in te way ye might tink af yer own parents. Tey didn’t love each other. It was political, ye understand. And tat meant tat te boy Conomor wasn’t so much af a beloved child as he was anoter piece af a political puzzle. So tat’s why what happened next happened at all.

I’ll tell ye my opinion. Never invite a fairy to a party. Tey got different standards, fairies do. Prideful creatures. Not made af eart, air, fire, and water like ye and me. Tey got teir own humors, too, none af tis melancholic, sanguine, bilious, choleric. Tey’re different as different can be, and tere’s no use tryin ta understand’em. Unpredictable tey are. Tey’re contrary creatures, see, and if one af’em likes a ting, anoter’s goin to want it. Got a queen af faerie cursed into lovin a donkey tat way, I tell ye, after she refused a king af faerie te human boy she’d stolen. Same ting wit invitations. Bring ten fairies to yer home fer a ceremony and sure one af’em’s goin ta be angry about someting tat ye done.

Tey all ken, te parents. I guess tey figure nine blessins is wort a single curse. Not me, but ten I’m a simple man who doesn’t need eiter blessins or curses, no matter.

Te boy is flush wit blessins at his christenin. He’ll be strong and smart and wise and all tose tings. He can use any weapon he lays his hands on, and if he can’t, his hands are nearly as good as any weapon anyhow. He’s brave. Strong as a bull, fast as an eagle, fierce as a lion. Got no obvious weaknesses. Eight fairies see ta tat. But te last fairy, aye, it’s always te last one. Maybe she’s upset she’s last, Ah don’t ken, but she’s te one ta say, Ach, young lad, it’s not goin to be all wine and roses and te blood af yer enemies. Nay.

She says to his parents, she says, on te boy’s sixteent birtday, he’s goin ta strike a devil wit a shovel and tat’s goin ta be te end af it. But ach, what happens ten? One af te fairies comes late and she can’t undo what’s been done, but she can change it just a bit. It won’t be a devil what he hits, she says, but a wizard.

Still has ta be powerful, after all.

Tey do everyting tey can, te parents. In te weeks leadin up ta his birtday, tey destroy all te shovels, all te spades, even te hoes and te rakes. Anyting ye might use fer diggin. But tere he is outside te castle walls, workin wit a sword and a spear and he digs tat spear inta te ground and he pulls up some dirt and he does it again and again, attackin te ground like an enemy.

Ah don’t ken why.

He hits a root, or what he tinks is a root, but it’s te foot af a wizard it is, and tat’s when all af te real problems begin.

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Telling Tales 216

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A Key to the Past

It was not the wedding she had dreamed of, nor was the marriage one she had imagined. They exchanged vows by themselves at the altar with not a single guest in sight and not even a priest to officiate. Belle thought it irregular and unlikely but she did not want to disrupt her fiancé’s promising mood by questioning his judgment. He refused to let her parents and sisters visit afterwards, although with time and cajoling he permitted her to send word of their union and their happiness, although he read the letter over himself several times to make sure that there was nothing in there that she had not told him about.

Belle knew that she had a great deal of work to overcome Conomor’s natural distrust. Entendtout helped her to track down information about her new husband and his family to the best of his ability. She was able to put together that, as long as he was able to convey only positive or, at worst, neutral information about the lord of the palace, he could assist her. In the months that followed, as she worked to calm her husband and gain his confidence, he would occasionally ask if she had gone into the room to which he had forbidden her, but the more time passed, the less he inquired.

“Milady,” said Entendtout one day, breaking into her reverie of cultivating the scream flowers around the remains of the cathedral, which had since stretched itself into a grand arboretum, “we have a visitor.” The steward recognized her confusion. “I have phrased it poorly,” he apologized with a bow. “The visitor in question is a tradesman.” Although the palace was not popular with any of the local populace, they paid both well and with remarkable goods, meaning they could always find someone to bring in any supply that the environs could not themselves supply. “He is a silversmith, which is why his skills may be useful to us here, but to your inquiries, he may have served or been in attendance at Lord Conomor’s previous court.”

Belle stripped her gloves from her hands, supple skin that spared her from her scream flowers’ stinging nettles, and followed Entendtout to the stalls behind the kitchen. The silversmith was an old man, bent at the shoulders and the waist. His ropy arms and thick hands belied his small, round belly, and his wrinkles cut deep into his leathered face.

” T’s going ta be expensive,” he warned without turning around. “Cost more than ye tink, most likely more tan ye want.”

“That will not be a problem, monsieur,” answered Entendtout.

“Who’ve you got wit ye, ten?” asked the smith in his turn, and only after speaking did he twist his gnarled body to examine the mistress of the house. His face went dark and he cursed the steward. “Blackguard! Ye should have warned me ye’d bring such like her here! Ah’m not one ta speak wit the better folk! Ah’m a simple man, no airs, no graces, sure ta disgrace te family name!”

Belle couldn’t place his accent, a rough brogue with no education or culture but assurance and confidence all the same. “I requested you,” she said. “My husband is Conomor, called the Accursed, and you knew him before.” She did not need to state her request and he did not have to say he would tell her.

He began.

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Weekend Links, 18 May, 2013

It’s amazing how fast time is passing right now. We’re already halfway through our time in Berlin and the next six weeks feel all too short. Our project is beginning to come together, we’ve got travel planned, we’re hoping to host a guest or two… We’ve had to make a list of the things we want to do and see in the city and make sure that we start knocking it out systematically, otherwise we’re going to run out of time.

Let’s be honest. We’re still going to run out of time.

It’s kind of amazing how time on the ground adjusts pace. If we were in this city for three days, I’d be pretty unimpressed. It is, after all, fairly dirty. There’s graffiti all over the place. It’s kind of run-down. Some Berliner friends at dinner last night were talking about how strapped for cash the city is. But being here for three months, we began with the thought that we were going to explore the nooks and crannies, and then we moved to a different neighborhood and and and… Once you get into nook-and-cranny territory, there’s an awful lot to explore.

So yeah. Time. Nooks and crannies. Filling one with the other (is time a container to be filled?).

With space in mind, the first link is to What Was There, an interactive mapping site that is, with users’ help, trying to create a geocoded visual history online. It’s pretty great – type in your map coordinates just the way you’d do on any mapping site and see what images have been uploaded in the region.

Next is travel/photography site Atlas Obscura, which looks very cool in general. Here, though, I wanted to link to this story about root bridges in northeast India. Yes. Bridges made from roots. Clicking on the picture will take you to a different site

More photography – this from a former dancer who left the art behind due to knee injuries. Carrying on, Ingrid Endel picked up a camera and started work. The story where I came across her work is here. Click on the picture to go to her Flickr page, which is full of goodness.

Ingrid Endel photography

These images are all pretty big, though, so to turn small, along the lines of nooks, here’s a 2008 link to photographic microscopy and artificially colored images. Danger!

Lastly, here’s a link to an excerpt of an essay by Susan Sontag, “On Photography.” A friend who’s been reading our Berlin Diary pointed this out to me after my post last week.

That’s it for the week. I may be a bit slow on the fairy tale this week – I know where I’m going, but carving out time these days is super, super hard. (Is time something that can be sculpted?)

Telling Tales 215

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Shared Perfection

The scream froze her face in an expression of deceptive calm. “Too perfect, my lord?” She clenched her jaw to keep it squarely in her throat and from coming no further. She had a great deal of practice, after all.

With a gentleness that she had only ever seen Conomor show toward the garden and the plants, he took her delicate hands in his massive, calloused, claw-like ones. “It is too perfect,” he said once more. “Too perfect to share with anyone besides ourselves.”

Belle swallowed the knot-like scream in her throat. “To share?” She knew that she was simply repeating his words, but that was all she could do without setting the scream free. She had worked so hard to reach this point, to have him show her this kindness, but now she found it so out of character that she didn’t know what to do. Out of character, she was discovering, was much more alarming than consistent anger.

Conomor nodded and his bristly blue beard shivered with the motion. His eyes bore into hers with an intensity she had never seen in him before.

Could this be love? she wondered. Or at least, love’s beginning? The scream settled in her chest and refused to move further back to the comfort of her stomach. “I do not understand your meaning,” she managed at last.

He knelt before her, although such was his height that he was only slightly below her own eye level. “We will be wed here, just the two of us.”

“But my family…”

He squeezed her hands. She didn’t know if he meant it to be comforting or a punishment. “Your family may come later. Let us not spoil our union’s happiness with the presence of others. I know what they think of me!” His mood turned dark with the suddenness of lightning.

“No, no, my lord, that is only because they do not know you as I have grown to know you,” she said. He did not release his grip on her, but his eyes begged her to go on. “You are brusque, but that is only because you do not wish to waste time on the polite fictions of society. You would call a tree by its proper name and ask for the thing you desire rather than dance in circles, hoping upon hope that the conventional rules of conversation will permit you to speak at all. You see such behavior as the cage that it is and you run free.”

His grateful smile made up for the fact that he was crushing her hands in his. “You understand me,” he said, his voice full of emotion.

“I am learning, my lord,” she answered with a smile.

His dark eyes fell to the rings of keys at her waist. “And you are learning the grounds?”

“I am.” Her answer said without words that she had not explored the door he had forbidden her to open.

“And there are no secrets between us?” he pressed.

“There are only things we do not know yet, but no secrets,” she said with the same smile.

Her scream stretched into her heart and lungs with those words, but especially with all of the unspoken ones, what he was hiding and what he did not yet know about her scream flowers.

Conomor smiled then, a broad, sharp-toothed smile that tried its best to look kind. It did not entirely succeed.

He left her with the promise that they would be wed within days, and, alone in the garden cathedral, Belle buried her latest scream under the altar.

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Telling Tales 214

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Seeking an Acceptable Solution

Although Conomor had been pleased with her idea for the pavilion, he picked at her first results. “The alabaster orchids don’t belong with the bone lilies.” It was only partly the colors that bothered him, which was a revelation to Belle. It was also that the plants had different properties, and while Belle was more than capable of picking out colors that went well in her clothing and dress, she did not have his expertise in the outdoors. Conomor seemed to treat those same properties in the same way she might have discussed a shawl that clashed with a dress’s lace.

“Could you show me the proper way it should be done?” she ventured.

“I have time neither to play the fool nor to teach you a second time what I have already told you once!” he swore as he stormed away.

She planted her screams in the growing patch beyond the hedge, just out of sight of the kitchen, and when she was free of them, she considered his actions.

I should never think that I can nurture him so quickly. This is the work of a lifetime, to be sure, she thought. Apparently, he considers our single tour to have been enough to have taught me all there is to know about the palace and its grounds, and her I thought it was only an introduction! His eyes must be a great deal more sensitive than mine. These are the things that I must learn. I must do them on my own and I must do them quickly for the sake of our marriage. 

Belle gathered the gardener and his assistants and explained the situation. “We have no time to make any more mistakes. The ceremony will be this Sunday, and I trust you to correct what I have done wrong. We will create a central aisle here, as though we are in a church that nature built. There should be seats on either side. Functioning seats upon which any of us could sit without fear of our cloths, skin, or bodies being harmed.” Without thinking, she twitched her still-red fingers and her palms echoed the pain. “Young saplings to suggest walls and flowering vines to suggest stained glass windows. We must at the same time pay heed to Lord Conomor’s needs and attend not only to the differences in coloration, but in what each different flower, tree, vine, and bush may do. This is your palette and you are the painters and carpenters in this garden. Find me if you have the least question, but believe me, I have every faith that you and this garden will be able to accomplish the task.”

On Friday she led Conomor out to show him what they had done. The plants had responded to the gardeners with joy. Green and brown walls of bark and leaves reached toward the sky. Branches stretched out above them, not connecting. The blue and white of the heavens above shone through the leafy skeleton of the floral cathedral. Her stained glass flowers were actually translucent and brightened with the sun. The servants had outdone themselves. On the four windows on each side they had cultivated portraits of their lord and lady, Belle in pure white, Conomor in shades of blue, looking as though he were in a noble suit. Roots from the wall-trees made enough seats for two hundred, and a dense bush at the front shaped the altar before which they would stand.

“Do you like it?” she asked, a scream curling around her stomach.

“It’s perfect. Too perfect,” he answered.

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Telling Tales 213

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The Moment of Epiphany

It was the garden and the plants that made her think she could save him. Her screams grew into patches of soft, small flowers, the faded faded blue of the sky’s horizon at midday. The gardener tried to warn her away from them, but she would have none of it. “I planted them and they are mine,” she said to him. It was the first time she had used the authority of her position and he flinched as if she’d struck him. It made her feel guilty but his action had made her angry. They were her flowers, after all.

She apologized to him later. Not while he wrapped her hands in thick leaves, no, not then. She was still in too much pain at that time. Later, when the swelling had gone down, although her fingers remained puffy, red, and tender, she sought him out and begged his forgiveness. By then her maid had dabbed her hands with mud, let it dry, and gently peeled the caked dirt off. For whatever reason, it helped the pain. “I did not understand what you meant. I should have trusted you. It was my mistake and my arrogance and I hope you will accept my apology.” He flushed then, gave her more plants and showed her how to use them, and excused himself from her presence.

The flowers of her screams had downy hairs covering the petals. They blended in almost perfectly against their pale background, but Belle did see them. She did not consider them, however. They were flowers and flowers are beautiful. She did not think that they were the flowers of a scream. She did not consider the nature of the scream, only the image of the flower.

Those downy hairs were nothing more or less than a kind of stinging nettle. Belle had pushed her hands into the middle of the flowers, reveling in their softness, before reaching past to uproot a small bunch to bring inside. She was still marveling that a scream could be as beautiful as this small bouquet when her hands went numb. Like fear building up in her stomach, slowly at first and then erupting, the pain in her hands was mild before it overtook and overcame her. Then came the treatments and the recovery.

Before the apology, while she lay in bed with her hands entombed in crushed aloe, Conomor came to see her. He was furious. How could the gardener have let this happen? From where had these flowers come? It took all of her persuasion to mollify him that the gardener had done his job and it was her own insistence that had led to her pain. He only truly settled when she suggested that she would create a pavilion for their wedding, one that would go with her dress (the dress would be done within the week, she promised him). “I can see how dear you hold the garden and the grounds. I would like you to be happy on the day that we join our lives together. It should be a celebration, should it not?”

He searched her eyes for insincerity and found none, because there was none to be found. Able to plant her screams and to think about her fate with a clear head, she had settled on the thought that it would be best to nurture her husband-to-be, to care for him, and to take care of him. He could be as wild as the maddest dog. There was good in him, nevertheless, and like a plant, pruned and watered, that good could be grown.

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Book Mulling – What Good Are the Arts?

Chapter 1 – What is a work of art?

Carey starts off this 28-page chapter with a disclaimer: he will not be operating from a religious perspective. Although he does not cite a philosopher directly, he could easily be pointing his finger at Leo Tolstoy, who, aside from writing epic-length Russian novels, also had quite a few things to say about art and its relation to the divine. His position is that without a relation, there is no art: art is by definition, not only its nature, holy. (The whole book is online here, or a simple search will get you a ton of commentary if you want something shorter).

The reason Carey mentions this at all is because so much language about art and aesthetics borrow from religious terms – paintings are “sublime” and music is “transformative.” We can extrapolate if you want to nitpick about the word religious and call it mystical or spiritual. That’s fine. I just wanted to let you know how I understand his approach.

The problem with defining art is, in a nutshell, the twentieth century, when an aggressive modernist agenda began to deconstruct nineteenth century understandings of the definition, which had been pretty clear.

If you read the abbreviated title aloud in French, you get something like “Elle a chaud au cul,” which means, “She has a hot ass.”

That deconstructing agenda, however, really opened up the possibilities. Is graffiti art, since it is taking place on someone else’s property and is often a criminalized behavior? Carey doesn’t bring up graffiti but he does address crime and art more generally with the horrific example of a murderer who pursues some theoretical artistic goal by homicidal means. He didn’t cite any action films villains who want to aestheticize death or dying, but he could have.

So the problem that any contemporary writer is faced with is that nearly anything can be a work of art, categorically speaking. It can be actions (performance art), silence (John Cage), and from any material (feces). Yes, art made from poop.

Thank you, twentieth century, and thank you, Italian artist Piero Manzoni.

Piero Manzoni’s “Artist’s Shit”

Carey notes a great deal of “artistic expression” is explicitly designed not for any primary aesthetic purpose at all, but instead to provoke a specific response, which raises all kinds of questions – namely about the purpose of art and the nature of its communication.

The central 20-some pages of the chapter serve as a historical précis of aesthetic theory, noting first the word “aesthetic” and its re-formulation in 1750 in the sense we currently understand it. He follows this with Kant, who, given the amount of time Carey spends on him, seems to be the primary voice that has shaped our understanding of artistic expression that Carey identifies. His intellectual descendents Hegel and Schopenhauer make their own contributions farther on, and Carey wraps up with the American art critic and philosopher, Arthur Danto. These are the folks against whom he is doing his main arguing.

I haven’t read the Germans, but I have read Danto, for what that’s worth. Danto argues that the artist’s intent is critical to understanding the success of a work of art, and concludes that art is essentially a teleological category. A typewriter can be art, depending on its context and placement by an artist, and a hamburger can as well. However, a typewriter can never be a hamburger.

My fry-handwriting is much better than my burger handwriting.

Kant sets the tone for this religiously-toned discussion of aesthetics – only the truly good is beautiful and so on. If for Kant art is not a reflection of the divine, it certainly has a moral component. Evil or badness cannot be artistic – literally cannot be. Carey, for his part, will have none of this. Logically it doesn’t hold up. Experientially it doesn’t hold up. The twentieth century took that all away from us.

In fact, it’s only in his last three pages of the chapter that Carey elects to answer his question: What is a work of art? His position, the logical consequence that he believes Danto shied away from, is that art is precisely and exactly anything we say it is as long as at least one person considers that thing to be a work of art.

Which is very egalitarian, rather broad, and dangerously close to saying that “art” has become a useless word.

Which is an interesting thought, really.

Comments? Responses? I’m going to post my own responses to Carey on Tuesday, I expect.

 

Weekend links, May 11, 2013

I had a great accidental connection from last week’s Berlin links, Berlin in Pictures. If you use the browser Chrome, it’ll translate the page for you, but really it’s all one-off pictures, so don’t worry if you’re on a different one. The images are all very, very lovely. It’s a distant kind of introduction to the city for me, and it’s already suggested some new places I’d like to visit.

Speaking of which, Lisa and I are beginning the process of listing some of the places we want to go in the city. There are many and we will not make it to them all. Last week we visited the decommissioned airport at Tempelhof, which was pretty amazing.

Its formal geometry is an architectural echo of the equally artificial (as in artifice) grounds at Sanssouci, which we visited again this week.

For a less formal exploration of nature, check out Hiking Photography. Although the most recent post is a bunch of B&W of dudes playing basketball in funny costumes, his nature photography is really, really fantastic. Explore. (Bonus! Camera tips!)

And as long as I’m talking about photography, how about a little photorealism? Kelvin Okafor‘s artwork is really, shockingly photographic. What’s particularly great about his site is that he sometimes shows the work in progress so that you can see it in varying steps, as with this post, Mana.

Next, and this is a bit older but it’s worth it if you haven’t seen it, is a high definition video of a guy walking on a tightrope in front of a moon rise at Cathedral Peak.

And I’m going to finish off this week’s five with another Berlin site, although note that it’s really a travel site – I’m only sending you to the Berlin section of it. It’s Europe-heavy and a bit flash, but there are a lot of interesting things and it’s certainly very, very pretty – Unlike Berlin.

Telling Tales 212

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The Good in Him

With her screams planted in the garden, Belle was able to focus on more than simply putting off her wedding date. She continued to draw out the process, but she no longer sought to avoid it altogether. Not that she looked forward to a marriage to Conomor, by no means. It would still be a forced marriage, one meant to save the lives of her family and one to which she had consented under duress. The difference was that she was able to think clearly and consider how she would approach their united lives as a couple.

She had Entendtout and Conomor give her new tours of the grounds – separately, never together, as Conomor’s patience for his perfect steward was fragile on the best of days. “Who comes to work her of his own accord? That old man has secrets,” he spat when Belle asked him about his visible dislike.

“We all have secrets,” she noted, thinking of the door he told her not to open and of her private garden of screams.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he bellowed into her face.

Belle froze her face in the moment, cool disregard, and raised the handkerchief that she kept for this purpose to wipe the stinking spittle from her face. She swallowed the lump in her throat that was only the latest scream to birth and felt it settle in her stomach, cool and tight. She shivered. Although Conomor did not raise his hand to her – he never raised a hand – his body shook with the effort not to do so. “My lord. You told me never to enter a certain door or it would bring bad luck upon us. You have not told me what is beyond nor have I asked. Whether or not you mean it to be a secret, to me it is a secret. I do not question your right to this one privacy. You have been so open and generous with everything else. That is all I meant.”

This was only a partial truth. The lord had indeed been open, but hardly generous. Belle suspected that the enchantment of the palace forced such “generosity” from him. Although calm and even passionate when talking about the miraculous and magical properties of the plants that shaped the palace’s grounds and walls, nearly any other topic of discussion only incensed him. In particular, he disliked talking about his neighbors, all of whom were, for one reason or another, enemies. “They slander my good name,” was all he would say, and not even Entendtout would elaborate other than to note a “fractious history” between the palace and the unenchanted people around it.

“Open!” snarled Conomor. His face twisted as though he saw her thoughts, and not for the first time he reminded her of a mad dog or a slavering wolf. “Bah! We will finish this another day when you are more polite. When we are married you will keep your snide thoughts out of your speech!”

The steward found her in the garden, kneeling deep over the earth, wiping her mouth. “Are you well, mademoiselle?”

“Quite well, now, thank you.” She considered her question. “Can you tell me, would my lord Conomor ever be a danger to me?”

“We are all capable of harm to one another, if that is what you are asking,” he said, avoiding her inquiry in one way and answering it in another.

“I have seen good in him,” she said, thinking of how gentle he could be with the plants.

“Indeed.”

She didn’t know if that meant he agreed with her or not.

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Telling Tales 211

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A Planted Scream

Over the following weeks, as she stalled her husband-to-be and sabotaged her own wedding clothes and watched his rage grow, her stomach swelled and her cheeks thinned. As delicious and succulent as it was, the taste of the marvelous foods of the palace became as ashes in her mouth. The scream grew, as though it fed upon her very body.

The steward found her one day as she walked with pain down one of the long, brilliant green corridors. “Lunch will be served in the garden today, mademoiselle.”

“I cannot, Entendtout. I swear I can put nothing past my lips. This place will be death of me.”

“I certainly hope that will not be the case,” he said with a chuckle that he meant to be comforting and warm, and because he was the way he was, the chuckle was exactly as he intended. “Of course, I may not insist, but I would implore you. Would you trust me?”

The curious phrasing did not strike Belle in her current condition, which was also the steward’s intent. It did, however, place a burden upon her – trust, of course, and its siblings, honor and propriety. With a grimace, she allowed him to slip his arm by hers and to guide her through the palace. In the distance, Conomor’s anger shook the walls and Belle trembled along with them. She did not let her fear appear on her face, but she could not stop the scream in her belly from moving, and its violence rippled throughout her body.

Entendtout, true to his perfect training and his curse, pretended not to notice. Instead, he told her an amusing and fantastical story about two brothers, one of whom lost his temper – quite literally! As though seeing herself from outside her body, Belle felt that in another life, even one a few short weeks ago, she would have laughed. As it was, she gave him a wan smile at all of the right moments. She knew he was only trying to make her feel better and that he was bound by his enchantment to speak no ill of the lord. He told more stories, the most memorable being one of a giant who had replaced his heart with a wasp’s nest. He was eventually slain by a young boy whom he had tricked earlier in the story. “How could he have removed his heart?” she asked as they emerged into the grounds.

He shrugged and told her about a hunter he had traveled with who banished his fear in a similar way. “He would plant it in the earth and through those means he would remove it from his own person. Perhaps the giant did something similar?” He looked around. “Ah, me. I have brought you too early. Please have a seat and I shall fetch the food.”

Entendtout sat her at a table next to a freshly dug patch of earth where the gardeners had been working that morning and assured her he would return at once with food she would surely find acceptable.

Conomor swept past, gave her a stiff bow, and left as quickly as he had appeared. His rank smell lingered in the garden, overcoming for a time even the scents of the grounds.

And quite suddenly, Belle believed she understood Entendtout’s intent. He could not say a critical word, but he could leave instructions in plain sight.

When he returned with a small plate of dried fruits, he found her calmer, her belly smaller. Behind her in the garden was a small, freshly packed down section of earth.

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