Becky Petterson

Wildling

The winds changed, oleander season, and the world crackled–Rue’s funeral pyre. I wore a
mask when walking the hills behind her house, a flimsy paper beak altering my vision,
landlocked sightlines. I left emptiness behind, waiting, patient as a clock with a mouthful of
hairpins. Her hairpins used to bury themselves everywhere, glinting secrets waiting for bare feet.
By the end they had nothing to hold on to.

I saw the eyes first but kept walking. The sound stopped me, that quiet murmuration of a
desperate, lonely heart. I turned, crouched. A shadow flicked under a low rock formation. I broke
a date and nut bar into pieces and laid them on the ground. First a furred arm, then nothing. A
tawny body emerged, small and scared as a lion cub with the pale face of a child. The weight in
my arms was familiar, like my body needed to carry someone.

He slept under the kitchen table pushed against the wall, Rue’s mother’s heavy blue linen
tablecloth pulled low. In the morning I offered to unzip his skin and wash it but he growled so I
drew a bath instead. I sat on the toilet with the lid down while the air filled with water. We sat
outside for him to dry on a limp towel. I wore a mask, he chewed on his.

He was hungry as an animal in fire season, searching for any little thing unscorched. But
he snarled at the macaroni and cheese and chased the squirrels in the yard, so I used the app on
my phone to purchase meat and eggs and milk, which the delivery driver left outside. He sniffed
the scrambled eggs and curled brown edges of the cooked beef, so I made steak tartare in one of
Rue’s blue ceramic bowls. His mouth and chin glistened.

The wind changed again. The rains came. The fires smoldered and settled. I taught him to
play gin and we sat at the table, still sheeted in the blue linen cloth, and played. The cards made
kissing noises in our hands. He started sleeping in the bed, on Rue’s side, rolling into the warmth
of my back like she used to. He was soft and golden in the sharp dark midnight.

I wondered who taught him to leave. I knew who taught me to stay. I was held in place by
the unfinished: unraveling sweaters; half-stitched quilts; words missing punctuations like cranes
scrawled across the white landscape; books balanced, smiling, on their spines. The detritus of a
life.

I didn’t love her as I did others, with their bodies, slippery and sauced, or as my blood. I
loved her as if she was the world—the earth, in awe and blind, with gratitude and guilt. I loved her
my entire life, living across the street and mowing lawns in the summers and shoveling wet
leaves from the gutters in the winters for enough money to take her to McDonald’s and a movie.
We practiced being adults until we thought we had become them, home from college and kissing
in my car by the river. When she resolutely turned away, slicing with the edges of her fear that if
she didn’t send me away what if would someday stretch beyond the edges of our days, I flung
myself apart. For years we lived with worlds between us. A tumbleweed, she’d call me
affectionately on Skype and in emails, except tumbleweeds actually put out their shallow roots
and took hold places, whereas I was always as slipskinned as a ripe Concord grape. Until the
screen flickered and instead of her face I saw someone else, a body sliding away from the world.
I came, straight as an arrow of birds slinging themselves at the sun and veering toward instinct.

Wildling, she called me when I first returned to her, prowling at dusk, searching for safety
in door locks and shuttered windows and collecting the small round leaves of thyme in the loud
clock face of my palm. So I called him my wildling, with his prowling at dusk and dawn, at the
beginnings and endings and the untamable place where they touched. Sometimes he had the
pointed ears and red tail of a fox, others the mane and paws of a lion. Sometimes he had the beak
and talons and eyes of an owl, and I found feathers in the corners when I swept. Sometimes he
was a small boy in a costume grayed and grubby and sagging at the knees. Once he seemed like
an old man, wrinkled and sad and alone in his house. They growled together, the wildling and
my grief, as we waited for flower season. Flowers follow the fire, Rue would remind me.

We are safe as houses, she used to say after a landslide or a fire or a fissure swallowed
swaths of them. We’re safe as churches, she’d say when another priest made the news. She used
to laugh like that at all the terrible things, especially after a round of chemo. Which is to say
we were never safe, no matter what we built for ourselves, the ending is the same for all of us.
The only good thief is death and even then it’s more necessity than goodness. Sometimes the
thief is our friend, she said, the cup of orange juice she requested still full and shivering in the
sunshine.

The night the blue ceramic bowl broke and I didn’t cry, thinking of the shape her perfect
white hands made on the glazed surface, we heard a sound circling outside as we played cards, a
cry as lost and lonely as I hadn’t been since I found him. He lifted his head and his teeth were
stone sharp and water bright. In the morning the door opened like a swing into the blue sky and the house was full of the wind, empty as a whistle. I had almost forgotten, he was a wildling after
all, and flowers follow fire.

—

Becky Petterson holds a BS in communication from Southern Oregon University. She was a finalist in Mslexia’s 2024 short fiction competition, and her work is forthcoming from or has appeared in The Pile Press Journal, Peach Fuzz Magazine, and Hoot. She has worked as an independent bookseller and for a small literary press.