I stir. It feels like the opening and closing of a mouth, the sigh of an underground cave. The girls with pierced hearts whisper to the mountain. They desire to keep it calm. I hear them, still. They don’t remember why they whisper, why they desire. But it remembers. It recalls the stench of the fire, the warmth of blood, the chains go taut.

The mountain remembers.

I remember.

The mountain looms over the village; a titan of old, slain and turned to black stone in defeat. The cave at its base always reminded Philio of a mouth, or, on days when the rays of the sun turned it a soft pink, of a single, infected eye. She never wanted these thoughts of hers, not now, and not when she was a child. But here they were. Here they are. The steering wheel is warmed beneath her hands. It feels like skin, something with pulse. Another unwelcome thought. She hasn’t gone back to the village in years, yet the road has remained familiar. The kind of thing that cannot be forsaken, no matter how hard you try. Philio gives herself up to the faltering trust of this knowledge and lets the road drive the car. Besides, how could she ever get lost, even if she tried? Even though she tried? The mountain shows her the way, inevitably, always. A beacon. 

Her father waits in the front yard. He waves at her, and she has to struggle not to turn the car around and go back to the city, to her mother, to her desk job, to her lover who won’t speak to her. Her father waves again; a soft gesture of the hand, as if to say everything’s alright, everything is as it should and will always be, what are you running from? Stop running, child. Look at me, I’m already dead. Come home. 

So she parks the car and steps out and hugs her father. He’s so thin now she can wrap her arms all the way around him. There’s a loamy smell about him that threatens to make her gag. “Come inside,” he says. “It’s getting cold.” When he smiles, the skin around his mouth goes flat, like leather stretched across a drum. 

The inside of the house surprises her with warmth. She expected something dark, cold, and damp, something abandoned as her father has been abandoned. She catches herself almost disappointed, or maybe annoyed that the place her father lives in is so well-preserved; as if his lonely living should have taken a greater toll on him, her and her mother’s absence a greater blow than this meticulously maintained nest suggests. Does that make her a horrible person? A horrible daughter? 

What kind of father does it make him?

Everything feels fuller than she remembers; the cabinets filled with trinkets—glasses, crystal figurines, small sculptures of squirrels and trees and things she has no name for—the walls covered in photographs: weddings of people she doesn’t know, all black and white, the people dressed in clothes that have been out of fashion for decades. There are photographs of children and adults, images of meat and vegetables, bottles of wine in wooden crates and flasks made of animal skin, and the wide sunburnt faces of farmers’ wives standing just beyond a window with the mountain in the background. She recognizes the window, too; it’s the one opposite where she’s standing right now in the living room, suggesting the photograph was taken from inside the house—by her father, perhaps? He’d never been interested in photography—not as far as she knew, anyway. There are photographs of everything but the house itself, seen from angles that imply it as a point of view. An eye. 

Her father seats her at the kitchen table, puts a pristine china cup filled with tea in front of her, then adds a plate of butter biscuits covered in strawberry jam. “Anthi made these for you,” he says, and she wonders, is this the quiet life you so craved? Is this what you stayed behind for? 

“I don’t remember her,” she says instead.

“Ah.” He covers his mouth with his hand and coughs, a wet gurgle. “It was a long time ago.” 

In truth, she does remember her. She remembers everyone: Anthi, the baker’s wife, who lives at the edge of the village, and Solon and Petros, the brothers who owned most of the farmland at the foot of the mountain, bordered by thick forest, and Gerasimos, the young priest whom people call Gera, and Marios the butcher who was the father of her best friend. The name brings the smell with it, vivid as ever. Philio loved the smell of the butcher shop, that mixture of blood and bone, hair and offal. She would linger near it as long as she could, claiming she was there to see Christina. She learned to keep that affinity of hers a secret when she noticed how it horrified other people, and knew that it would have her shunned or at least branded with some kind of invisible letter that would always mark her for something other and different. And then, later, when Christina was gone, she learned that she would be marked no matter what. Still a shunning, but this time performed with a sad shake of the head and the sign of the cross. The girl who saw it happen, poor thing. The girl the mountain spared. 

“How’s your mother?” he asks. 

In love with the city, she thinks. With everything this is not, you are not. 

A cold draft floats in from some unseen opening in the house. Outside, the sky is grey and ridged, like the roof of a mouth. “She’s fine.” The answer feels inadequate, a lie by omission. She wants to tell him how she is, how they both are, but she can’t find the words to say it or anything at all. Sometimes, her mother disappears for the entire day and comes back elated, lit too-bright from wandering the city for hours, meeting friends she didn’t know yesterday, her clothes smelling like flowers and exhaust. She’s fine. She’s fine. 

“Are you seeing anyone?” he asks. 

“Jesus, Dad.” She laughs nervously. “I’m not a teenager.”

“No, really,” he says. “I want to know. It’s important for you to have people close to you.” 

She looks at him, then takes another sugar cube and drops it into her cup, watches the crystals dissolve slowly. “No,” she says finally. “Not anymore.” She glances at him. “She left me. Or just left, I suppose. Went back to her own country.”

Her father’s gaze drifts off to a corner of the room. A photograph hangs on the wall there. The picture of a small, wooden box. Lid closed. He smiles. “I’m sorry, my love,” he says. “But you’ll find someone. I’m sure.” 

“Why are you sure? You didn’t find someone.” 

He doesn’t reply. He only nods, still smiling with his mouth closed. 

As the day melts into evening, her need to call Melia becomes a bright coal in her palm. She closes her fist around it, breathing in the dried flower smell of the house. She imagines Melia frowning, saying stop that—doesn’t it hurt? and Philio replying, yes, it does, as it should. She paces the rooms, her feet bare on the rough hardwood floor, takes stock of the little witnesses to her father’s lonely life: the single pair of slippers by his bed, the single pillow, the single glass of water on the bedstand. Her father’s smell is everywhere, that scent of soil permeating the rooms and the furniture and the walls, or perhaps it’s the house’s smell that has seeped into him, claimed him bit by bit. 

Her own bed has been made, floral bedspread on top, sheets yellowed but clean and pressed underneath. She leans in and smells her pillow, the scent of soil faint but present in the folds of the fabric. She lies on top of the bedspread and stares at the cracks in the ceiling and the window across the room and the mountain in the distance. Melia always said she wanted to visit the village where Philio grew up one day, but Philio hesitated, came up with excuses that now seem transparent and dull. The truth is she didn’t want to see Melia in this house, as if having her walk these rooms and breathe this air would steal something from her that could never be retrieved—a will to stay in the world, the real world of the city, a will to be, to live. She tried not to wonder if that thought of hers meant Philio herself had lost that will as well, long ago, or if she never had it at all. 

When she wakes, it’s dark outside. She can hear her father’s cough, far away. “Are you all right?” she calls, but no answer comes, and the cough continues. She peeks through the open bedroom door to check on him. Her father kneels at the far side of the bed, his head lolling forward. The loose flesh of his exposed neck seems spoiled, covered in a layer of something wet, like meat left out in the rain. He seals his mouth with his hand as he coughs, then inspects his palm between bouts and wipes it on the sheets, leaving behind long, brown smears. 

“Is that blood?” Philio asks, startled, startling him. 

He staggers to his feet, and shakes his head, tries to smile. “It’s nothing, it’s nothing,” he keeps repeating, coming towards her to herd her out of the room. He touches her shoulders, but it’s too dim for her to make out the dark substance that stains the corners of his lips. “Go back to bed, it’s late. We have an early morning tomorrow.” 

Her limbs fill with a sudden weight. She’s tired, it’s true. She allows herself to be led back to her childhood bedroom and be put to bed by her father. He pulls the door behind him as he exits but doesn’t close it, leaves it a crack open, just like he did when she was small. She focuses on the vacant ceiling, tugging at the skein of her mind. She marvels at illness, at how she can tell the night-time cough from the daytime one, and at the idea that she can fix something, anything. She hears the bathroom door creak open and imagines him going to wash the brown from his mouth, to perform the necessary rituals that will send him back to sleep, until another coughing fit seizes him. The squeak of his lonely slippers on the floorboards as he walks back to his bed. 

That first night in the village, she dreams of the offal in Marios’s butcher shop. She sees herself buying an armful of pigs’ trotters. Then she digs a hole in the garden and buries them in the melancholy soil.

In the morning, Philio helps her father harvest the olive trees, as she’d promised to do when he used that as an excuse to get her here. They both knew that was never the reason. For either of them.

They work silently, her father moving slowly from tree to tree, gripping the ladder to steady himself, the net spread underneath to catch the falling fruit. She notices the small bones of her father’s hand, the tendons pulling them beneath the thin, translucent skin. She imagines burying them in the earth like the trotters from her dream. She looks down at her own hands and takes comfort in the smoothness of the skin. How foreign to soil, still, she thinks. The sun beats down on her shoulders and neck, a new sensation. She searches her memory for the sunburns of childhood but comes up empty. As if the mountain’s shadow had always shaded her, no matter where she stood. 

She tries to focus, not let her father’s coughing weaken her resolve to see this task through. There’s much to do. All the fruit needs to be picked before it ripens too much. But after his fifth coughing fit, she forces him home to eat a lunch of heavy bread, cheese, and blood-red tomatoes the likes of which she’s never found in the city. The magnitude of her need to see Melia feels like the mountain, enormous and oppressive, but the thought of leaving this place seems already as impossible and absurd as that of going back to the village once did. 

That evening, olive-picking now indefinitely postponed, she helps her father to the dinner table where he eats, more slowly than he did that morning but with greater enjoyment, and without coughing. “I don’t understand,” she’d said earlier, between his fits. “Is there something I can give you?” 

“No,” he’d said, “It’s nothing. It’s nothing.” 

His hand trembled as he raised it to his mouth. There was that dark brown on his lips again. She wanted to reach out and touch him, to feel his body warm under her hand. She didn’t. 

Now she leans back in her chair and studies the forest, the mountain beyond. She doesn’t know how she hadn’t realized it when she was growing up, but, today, she can see it clearly: The mountain is not a single thing, but a series of peaks. Long, split in half by valleys, shaped like a giant claw, or maybe a spine. If she looks hard enough, she thinks, she’ll be able to see all of it: the whittled scraps of its jaws, the cave under its eye socket, the stair of its ribs, the curve of its tail, the elegant sweep of its legs.

Later, when they sit on the couch and stare at the fire, her father starts hacking again. He reaches for his handkerchief to wipe his lips, then spits in it. 

Something hot rises up Philio’s throat. “Is that blood?” she asks again and this time she reaches for him. He flinches away from her at first but then thinks better of it. His face settles into a calm she hasn’t seen since childhood. Her fingers brush the corners of her father’s lips and come away dirty, covered in something like grainy, dark soil.

My mind perforated, laced with interludes of soil. The whispers of a god who chose a death over a prison. And a girl’s need that matches mine. I think: it is not the need to live. 

The whispering girls try to tell me the mountain’s name, but I will not name it or allow it to be named. I am as the mountain is, holy unto itself, like a large stone or a small flame. It remembers the fires that fell from the sky and charred its bones. The mountain asks me what I have done in the long years of my dreaming, its voice the low, unhurried rumble of black pebbles. It bleeds into my hands. Its blood is tainted with the stories of those who should

—worship at my feet—

be worshipping at its feet. 

But it remembers its betrayal. I remember its fetters and weep.

Before sleep grips her, Philio thumbs the scars from her most recent accident—the stitches, the broken bone in her arm—and thinks of their last night together, of Melia’s fragility before Philio’s wounds. Her luminous eyes as she begged Philio to stay safe, to be rid of this need for danger—because she always did misunderstand what the need was. The look Melia wore after their love-making—as if something had been shattered and hastily repaired, then repaired again, ugly veins of glue spiderwebbing their relationship. “I can’t do this anymore,” Melia had told her, and Philio could not bring herself to ask what “this” meant. Was it worth it, she wonders, the daring? The jump, the fall? That wide palm of sky she was sure would catch her, eventually, always? People often describe it as the feeling of being alive, but she knows it to be something else. She was always so meticulous about everything, perceiving even the most extreme experiences as a series of identifiable, tightly controlled steps. When, rarely, the experience managed to so absorb her that she forgot who she was, the feeling was neither relief nor excitement, but numbness, and, for that, she was briefly and immensely grateful. That was her kink: Feeling nothing, being consumed by something larger than herself. Totally dissolved, and secure in the totality of her disappearance. 

In the morning, she finds her father in the garden and worries about the thinness of his clothes—the shirt that stretches over a protruding ribcage, the sleeves that rest an inch above his wrists. She knows the season is changing, that the rains will come soon and will come hard, and that the winds will be cold, but her father won’t get his winter clothes out of the attic, won’t let himself be touched. The grainy feeling of dirt on her fingers keeps her from insisting. 

I remember the days of falling men,
of men picking up rocks and crushing their hands on them,
so they could eke out another day’s existence, grunting prayers,
until the mountain was a house of flesh and bone.
I remember the mountain saying:
How do you survive it? This dancing corpse.

She was right about the weather. She’s repairing one of the walls in the attic, and as she’s putting the last nail in a plank of wood, a loud crack jolts her upright, and then, a deluge, as if months of held-back rain now poured down all at once, like an enormous bucket suddenly tipped over. She knows, in that moment, that her father will not live to see the winter through. My father, she thinks, like the mountain, a series of fragments and bones, a disordered sprawl that would take me years to put back together. 

The priest visits a few days of rain and hail later. Her father is resting in his room. She didn’t find it in her to ask him about the soil in his mouth, and she doesn’t tell the priest either. Gera looks too young to be a priest, but there’s also something heavy and serious about him; he looks strong, and girdled, like a fortress. The scent of frankincense hangs off his clothes. It makes her eyes water. 

“Philio,” he tells her as she kisses his hand and calls him Father. “I haven’t seen you in so long.” His palm feels smooth and warm; she presses it to her cheek and doesn’t want to let go. 

“Please,” she says after a while, releasing his hand. “Please sit down. There’s some coffee.” She feels dizzy. His hand’s warmth is still on her cheek. 

For a long moment, they sit in silence. The priest stares at the pictures on the wall. She places a cup of coffee before him and he takes small sips, blowing on the black liquid before each one. 

“How’s your father?” he finally asks, looking back at her. His eyes are glossy and kind. 

“He’s ill,” she tells him, though that’s not what he’s asking. “Better yesterday than today. He was in the garden—it was raining, he shouldn’t have been out. It’s my fault.” She pauses for breath, takes a silty sip of coffee. “But you know how it is. There’s so much to do, to repair. The rains have been very bad.”

“Yes,” he says. “I know. I visited Mother Vassa last week. She told me about your trees.”

She closes her eyes for a moment and thinks of the orchard, the rotting fruit on the ground, the bruised branches like broken arms above. She forces her eyes open again and fixates on the small sickle-shaped scar on Gera’s temple. She knows the stories about him well. When he was but a boy and the forest thick, Gera would walk into the forest to gather herbs and berries, wild onions and mushrooms, moss from the underside of the giant ferns. She knows about the one time he nearly got lost and kept walking until he reached the edge of the forest where there was just a line of trees and darkness. The clouds above were heavy and low and birds screeched unseen from the black branches. That’s the night he got his scar. She knows the stories of the people he has cured, the demons he has chased out of men and out of the village; she doesn’t believe them. She’s always wondered if he ever believed in any of it himself. He’s fond of berating people for their superstitions; aren’t demons one of them? 

An enormous crack of thunder stops her from asking and he, for better or for worse, changes the subject. “How was life in the city?”

Such a difficult question to answer. She remembers the shock of city walls, their height, their curves, the jutting metal of guardrails, the constant hum of the streets. The city was like a living organism, a nest of pipes and wires and taut-faced men and women, the bewildering architecture of it all. It thrilled her to her core. Even arriving in the city with her mother and not knowing where to go, where they would sleep, what they would eat. They spent nights at the train station, lulled to sleep by the smell of people and garbage, woken roughly by police. She minded none of it; and when they finally found their way, a place to live, a job, money in their pockets and food on their table and people to call friends, she missed the uncertainty of those first days. Sought it in other experiences; driving her body to its limits, breaking her bones, marking it with the scars left behind by excitement. Now, she even misses the poorly paid job she had to leave to come here and tend to her father—stacking boxes and stocking shelves at the grocery store. She’s never been a particularly strong girl, but she enjoyed the effort of it, the ache it sunk into her muscles. 

Her chest tightens; she shifts in her chair. “It was different,” she says, finally. “It was all right.” 

“You seem angry.” 

The comment takes her aback, but he’s right. There was a blade in her words, even if she didn’t know she was wielding it. “It’s not that,” she says. “It’s just it takes everything I have to not run away from this village.” 

“Why?”

She breathes. Looks away, at the forest, the mountain with its dark face and its hollow belly. She listens for her father’s cough from the back room. “Because it’s been the ruin of him, and it fills me with dread,” she says after a moment. 

The priest gets a severe look on his face that does not become his youthful features. He opens his mouth to say something but a tremor interrupts him with a chorus of creaks. The ground trembles like the beating of a great heart. The walls groan, and the picture of a lamb falls to the floor. The glass shatters. A dog barks, far away. Heartbeats later, the movement stops. Only the distant rumbling of the mountain remains. And then, voices from the village. Someone screaming. 

“I should go,” the priest says, shooting up from his seat. 

“Yes.” 

Before he leaves, she stops him with a light hand on his upper arm. “Father,” she says, unsure how to finish the phrase.

“You never said why you came.” He looks at her, at the hand on his arm long enough that she’s forced to take it away. For a while, he looks down at his feet, waiting for her to reply, but she doesn’t. He takes a breath. “It’s not good to linger in the past,” he says finally. The corners of his mouth curve in a quick smile, and then he walks out the door into the cold and the dark, and is gone. 

She resists the urge to go after him. The priest, she’s heard people say, always had a way with animals. The dogs of the village would follow him into the forest, even when their owners called them back. The train of her own thought makes her laugh—a wild sound, hollow in the empty house. 

After he leaves, she sips her coffee, too cold now. She wants to bury her face in Melia’s hair, to watch dust swirl through the moonlight, to be where nothing can touch her. Empty house, she thought, but the house is not empty. It’s time to check on her father. As she walks in through the kitchen door, she can hear her father’s voice from the back of the house, the long hall, the closed doors. She brings her ear to the bedroom door and listens to him speaking elegies of soil.

I remember the air saturated with the cries of men and dogs that came to worship my stone body
as the earth screamed apart
as the sky splintered open
as ashes fell on men until they, too, were ash.

She pushes the door open and lets herself in. Her father falls silent immediately, his gaze distant. 

She goes to him, sits on the bed next to her father’s body. “Did you feel the earthquake?” she asks. She strokes his face, palpating the bones of it, and his chest, lying flat, and underneath it, a heartbeat. He’s warm to her touch. 

He nods. “It’s waking,” he whispers. 

“What?” 

He looks at her, his eyes glazed with fever. “I loved her, you know.” 

She breathes in sharply. “Mother?”

He takes a moment to respond. “Yes,” he says then. “Your mother.” 

She stands up and walks away, stares at the peeling wallpaper. 

Her father retches suddenly. He doubles over and empties his stomach on the floor. She rushes back to him and places a gentle hand on his back as spasms rack his body. She reaches for the glass of water on the bedstand and brings it to his lips. He chokes on it at first, but then manages a few sips. He wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. 

Philio goes to fetch paper towels and a mop. When she returns, her father’s leaning back, his eyes closed. Perhaps asleep. She kneels on the floor to wipe the sick. That loamy smell again, stronger than ever. And, despite the fading light, the substance that came out of her father, unmistakeable now: soil.

She washes her father’s arms afterwards, his chest, the soft hair on his head. She strokes his cheek until his breathing evens out completely and she knows he’s asleep. She lifts the glass of water from his bedstand again and tips it to her own lips, letting the cool liquid run down her tongue. Empties the glass. 

In the morning, he remembers none of what happened the night before. They hear the earthquake caused a landslide that completely buried one of the houses near the entrance of the village. She has to get meat from the butcher shop, so she puts on her boots and heads out, leaving her father in his bed with a glass of fresh water and a promise to be back soon. 

Outside, the dogs whine into the air. A few people stop and ask her how her father’s doing. She tells them he’s fine, he’s fine, which is not true, but what is she supposed to say? Her father’s dying, she wants to tell them, her father is dying of soil, just like everyone else in the village. Sooner or later, the mountain will claim you, too. 

The butcher shop is a little ways down the road. It looks intact, but for a long hairline crack that runs down the side of its facade. Fragments of glass and chunks of flesh litter the gutter in front of the shop. She lingers by the door and breathes in the familiar smell of raw meat. It dislodges something inside her, a weak feeling in the chest. Marios comes out from the back of the shop carrying a pig’s severed head. His expression changes almost imperceptibly when he notices her, then changes again as soon as he recognizes her, a subtle tensing of the jaw, a hardness to the eye. “Philio,” he says. A photo of Christina sits on the counter next to the till. Philio walks up to it and can’t help but put her hand on the glass; the young face, unchanged, the thin limbs of her best and only friend. If she could see me now, she thinks to herself, would she recognize me? The dead have their certainties. 

The butcher places the pig’s head on the counter and wipes his hands before he reaches for his daughter’s photograph and puts it away. “I thought you’d come back,” he says. 

“You did? Why?”

He hesitates. Starts to say something else, then changes his mind. “Your father’s not doing well.” 

“He’s dying.” This time she doesn’t lie. Shared loss breeds honesty between people, when you’re lucky. When it doesn’t breed its worst. 

He nods. “What can I get you?” he asks, his shoulders stiff, his voice cold. 

She doesn’t reply, just stares at the display of deep red cuts. There’s so much she wishes she could say, so much she wishes she could take back. 

The butcher sighs. He wraps an oxtail in brown paper and hands it to her. “Make him some soup,” he says. He doesn’t let her pay. “Let it go,” he tells her as she leaves. “It’s no use.” 

He’s right, isn’t he? No use at all. 

She takes the long way home so she can stop by the buried house. From afar, it looks part of the mountain, or perhaps like a stone quarry hastily covered up. A group of people fight the slope with shovels, unearthing what they can, as if a life buried by soil can ever be truly recovered. A woman is sitting on the ground, her head in her hands. “Everything slowly sinks into the earth,” she mutters, again and again. 

Philio used to know this woman’s name, but she no longer remembers it. No one speaks to her. 

It’s dusk by the time she returns home, the last of the light seeping beneath the horizon. Her father surprises her by being upright, sweeping the kitchen floor with slow, determined movements. She didn’t keep her promise to not be late, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He holds the back of her head gently, takes the meat from her hands and kisses her forehead. 

At night, she has a nightmare full of soil. It goes like this: She’s on the cold, hard ground. Dirt blankets everything around her, like snow. It enters her through her ears and mouth and through the hole where her heart used to be. She can feel it writhing in her belly, cutting into her organs. She’s so lonely, lonelier than anyone else in the world, and also isn’t. She’s a medium, an open passageway for the earth, and also the chains of something greater than herself. What enters her can never leave again; it will devour her as she contains it, until she’s nothing but soil. 

Then the perspective changes. She’s somewhere high up; the top of the mountain. She can see her house from here, the lonely eye of its window. Her father stands on the roof, looking at the stars. 

She sees something small and white fall from his body and drift away. Then she’s falling, too. 

She starts awake. 

She was in the ground, alone. She can still feel it now, the dusty air, the heavy earth, even in this pristine bed with its clean sheets, sheets not covered in dirt. She reaches for the lamp’s switch. The light it casts is small, an amber band across the room. 

She thinks of Melia, her comforting body in the small hours. 

The chill in the room grows stronger as the night wanes. For hours she tosses. It’s all right, she tells herself as the light breaks outside. You’ll find someone.

In the morning, when she washes, she removes traces of dirt from the lines of her palm. 

Her father is upright again, sipping coffee at the kitchen table. She makes him toast and sits next to him. 

“Do you ever regret it?” she breaks the silence. 

He doesn’t insult her by pretending he doesn’t know what she’s talking about. 

“Do you?” he asks back. 

She shrugs. “It was never my choice,” she says. “I was only a child.” 

He munches his toast slowly.

“She just wanted to live free,” she says. “As do I.” 

“Is love such a prison?” 

A thought intrudes. Clear, pristine. The mountain is a skeleton, she thinks. Something left over, pointing thoughtlessly to the sky. 

Her father looks at her blankly. Only the crease between his eyebrows betrays his alarm. “What did you just say?” he asks. 

She shakes her head, confused. “I didn’t say anything.” 

“You did. You said something about the mountain. About the soil. About her.” 

“Her who?” 

He sits back in his chair and shuts his eyes tight. “The mountain is stirring,” he says. “I know you see it, too. You feel it though you don’t say anything.” 

And why doesn’t she? 

Because what is she supposed to say about this birth of soil that has suddenly buried her life? 

“It shouldn’t be happening so fast,” he says. “I think it’s my fault.” 

“Tell me,” she says, begs, demands. Doesn’t want to threaten him with leaving. “Tell me what’s happening.” She fixes him with her eyes. “You owe me that much, don’t you think?” 

He tells her everything, then. The real reason he stayed in the village. The real reason her mother decided to leave. 

The story of the mountain, the fetters, the soil:

The mountain is not a mountain, he says, but the corpse of a god, a very old one, from way back when the world still danced. The god’s corpse stirs once every generation, creating tremors and floods of soil. The only way to tie it down is to sacrifice someone. Their bones would be the mountain’s shackles, their flesh would be the mountain’s flesh, until the god grew too strong again and needed to be reined in. 

“How was the god killed?” she asks. 

And he says: 

The god was betrayed. He was betrayed by another god who wanted to own him as her lover. She tied him down, not knowing that it could kill him. Put too much stock in their immortality. She pierced his heart with a knife made of her own bones, so he would always be tied to her. But he surprised her: he chose to die. 

“So how, then, does he stir?”

His body kept living. Some things are immortal, after all. It stirred and danced and destroyed the land around it, and the people who lived on it, her father says. 

So the people turned to the goddess for help. She’s the one who showed them how to keep the mountain imprisoned. 

“And then? Where is she?” 

He points to the valley at the foot of the mountain. 

There was a river there, he says. Philio remembers it, somehow, though she’s never seen it. It was gone long before she was born. Snaking around the base of the mountain. That was the goddess. She dried up and left, not bearing to gaze at her lover’s corpse every day. 

A river that moved away. 

Philio takes a drink of water from the tap. Swallows it down, together with her father’s words. The water carries the scent of soil. 

She remembers the tremors when she was small. The stories whispered in the half-dark, when her parents thought she was asleep. How the mountain was a mouth, how it would open, how it would devour. How it would consume everything from the mountain’s feet to its back to its neck, and to the people who had tried to bind it in chains. They would be made into soil, too, returned to that they had once tried to contain. And the god would roam the land again.

“I remember,” she says. “I remember.” 

He tells her, then, of how they chose the woman that would become a sacrifice that would become soil. How her bones were to be the mountain’s fetters. Her pierced, immortal heart, the mountain’s prison. 

Philio stares, the words untethered in her mind. She can almost imagine a woman, bent like a willow, making her way up the mountain, the rocks cutting into her feet. But she knows the image is wrong. This is not what happened. The woman did not make her way up the mountain on her own. She was dragged. Held down. 

Did she know the people who imprisoned her? Philio wonders. Did she consider them friends or loved ones or parents? 

Everybody knew. The whole village. Do they still remember? They must, Philio thinks. How could they not? 

She accepted it, he says, eventually. She went willingly, she chose it. It was her choice. 

I don’t believe you, Philio wants to say. I don’t believe you for a minute. “What has that got to do with you?” she asks instead. “With why you stayed?” 

He smiles. It’s a terrible image. “I loved the girl,” he says. 

“The girl you people sacrificed?” she asks. 

In his dreams, he says, sometimes he visited the place where the god was killed and wished he were not a coward, wished someone would tie him down there as well. He nods at the floor, his eyes faraway. He says, my dreams became so real, I thought I was there. One night I woke up to find her sitting by my bed. I thought it was a dream. I reached for her hand.

“What did you do?” she asks, meaning What did you do that you might deserve this?

Her father lifts his eyes to her. “A mistake,” he says.

She looks at him, her jaw tight, her mouth refusing to speak. 

“I kept the heart,” he confesses with a breath. He bites his lips, brings his fingers to his mouth, but she’s not sure whether he’s intent on keeping himself from speaking, or whether he wants to damage his own flesh. “I stole it, took it elsewhere, away from the bones,” he says. “Guarded it. For years. Guard it still.”

Was the heart still beating? she wants to ask but doesn’t. Did he hear it for years in his dreams? Did he see the veins in the ground pulse with blood? 

“If it’s revenge she seeks,” he says, “she should do well to seek it from me. I held on to her when I should have let her go. Made her sacrifice meaningless, a mockery. I was just like the men who took her life.” He buries his face in his hands. Philio can hardly make out his next words. “Worse, even, for I took so much more.” 

Bile rises in her throat. No wonder her mother wanted to leave. No wonder she couldn’t bear it here; this village, its deeds and its secrets. This man. 

She stands up so fast she knocks her chair back; it lands on the floor with a dull thud. She flees outside, to the cold air and the night. The birds keep eerily quiet. She runs towards the mountain. Runs and runs. 

When she stops to catch her breath, she’s standing at the foot of the mountain, in the thick forest. The blood hums, same as it ever was. She thinks she sees a woman between the trees. A glimpse of inky hair. A pair of shining eyes. 

“Melia?” she calls, thinking this is her lover, returned to find her, be with her. Take her in her arms and tell her everything is going to be okay. The dark hair, the burning eyes, they fit. But not just them. The affinity. One skin that knows another. What is a wrist too bony, a chest too small, a belly too hollow, compared to the depth of that knowledge? 

When she moves to approach, the woman’s gone.

I remember the bounty of the trees and buried things that once lived.
The world is a knife that cut mouths into everything.
Something coalesces. Things that were torn apart come together again. A mind. A tongue. I remember myself, too, as I once was, as I once had a mouth and a life. And I say:
Open. Open, open me. Open for me.

“Do you regret it?” she asks when she’s back. Her father looks haggard, eyes sunken in their sockets. He coughs, wipes his mouth on the back of his hand and doesn’t need to check for what it leaves behind. “The way you spent your life?” 

“No,” he says. “It’s not the right choice for everyone, but it was for me.” Then, he adds: “I know it’s not the right choice for you.” As if he knows anything about her. 

“I wish you’d told me sooner,” she says. 

He nods. Then he smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “I wanted to protect you.” 

“Did you ever tell my mother about the heart? Your part?” 

He looks away from her. “She knew,” he says. “She knew from the start.”

She imagines it, her mother consumed by the knowledge of her husband’s love for that girl, her anger neutered in the horror of that sacrifice. Her mother, watching as he snuck into the place of that girl’s death to steal her heart. As he hid it away, kept it, cherished it.

Did she know where he kept it? 

Did she visit it sometimes, before she left him? Did she gloat over the dead girl’s heart? 

Another secret, then, another lie. Another conversation Philio is not looking forward to having. 

She stays up until morning, watching the day billow across the mountain’s wide back, thinking of a heart, somewhere, beating in the ground.

The next day it rains so hard they have to stay inside. They sit at the kitchen table, her father marking the minutes with his cough, Philio drinking bitter tea. She cracks open the window to let in the humid breath of the rain. 

At noon, a bird flies in through the window. It lands on the floor, its wings flapping frantically. A swallow. Philio palms it, and it lets her, abandoning itself to her hands. It doesn’t look wounded, though it’s clearly sick. The rain continues to pour down, deafening. The bird smells faintly of rotting meat. 

When it dies, hours later, her father says, “Cut it open.” 

To her surprise, she does. Takes a knife to the soft white underside and she doesn’t even flinch. She tears the bird open to find it full of soil. “As if it was already buried, inside,” she mutters. A monument to the girl’s wasted heart. Then she remembers being a child and playing happy around in the dirt of the mountain, the dead god’s guts. I’ve always been filled with soil, she thinks.

“Philio,” her father says and she goes to him. “We have to destroy the heart,” but when she asks where it is he presses his lips together and refuses to speak. His head hangs low, a man admitting defeat and yet refusing to lose. His hair brushes the curve of his shoulder. When did his hair get so long? Philio’s mind struggles with the thought of her father’s long hair as she holds the dead bird, staring at the funeral inside it. She listens to what he’s saying as if through layers and layers of earth. Destroy the heart? Yes, that’s it, isn’t it? Release the spirit, like they do in the movies she used to watch with Melia. She always fell asleep before the ghosts exacted their vengeance, left the theatre with a bitter aftertaste clinging to the back of her throat. 

She lets the bird drop into the sink, dirt splattering the cracked porcelain. Then she walks to the living room, feels the thick carpet under the soles of her feet, between her toes, fights to ground herself. 

This changes nothing, she thinks. She collapses on the armchair and lets her breath pool in the bottom of her stomach. And what should we do with the bird? Dig a trench in the earth, in the garden, and lay it there, bury it along with everything else. 

The pictures on the wall stare at her with their black-and-white eyes. She sinks her fingernails into the armrest of the chair, a softness that feels like rotting flesh. 

Hours later, she finds herself still sitting in that armchair, half covered by a blanket, briefly and mercifully lost to sleep. Her neck has grown stiff from staying too long in one position, her hair matted with sweat, her mind filled with internal buryings, funerals of the heart, esoteric cremations. 

She fetches the bird from the sink and finds a shovel. The ground is hard, dense with clay, but she doesn’t feel the effort of the work. The rain is still coming down, a foreign thing, a thing of sky unknown to creatures like them. Drops splash from her hair into the dark of the hole and it feels wrong, like a desecration. As she digs, she thinks one version of her life is over, and another version begins, takes hold. Perhaps she doesn’t have to go along with any of this. Perhaps she can turn to her mother, call her, tell her she was right to try to talk her out of going back, tell her everything that happened and let her reassure her that none of it is real. But what if she doesn’t? What if her mother confirms this incredible story and her father’s guilt-drenched tales? Perhaps she can go to the police, or to a doctor, have her father taken care of, herself, too, for the hallucinations. 

And yet, she keeps shovelling. Makes a small wound into the ground and lays the little bird inside it. There’s no moon. The night is pitch-black, yet she feels someone looking at her from the forest. She peers into the darkness, her eyes fighting to adjust to the low light, her ears trying to decipher every rustle of leaf and vernal breath of air, every animal call echoing off the face of the mountain, every negligible movement of branch. She can’t see a thing. Finally, she turns back to the bird in its bed of soil. A bad time to give things to the earth, she thinks. What will grow? She packs dirt on top of the planted bird, stamps her foot on the little grave, tries to ignore the hollow sound of the earth. Then she grabs the shovel and turns back. 

The door to the house is open. The voices come soft and faint but undeniable: her father’s and a woman’s, from the kitchen. She drops the shovel by the entrance and grasps the cold metal of the doorknob, rushes in towards the voices. For an instant, she wants to turn back, to run away into the night, not face whatever’s waiting for her in the house. But nothing, she knows, can save her from this. 

The voices grow louder as she steps into the kitchen, then stop abruptly. Her father is kneeling by the window, facing out; she can’t see his face. He has his hands clasped in front of him—in prayer or supplication, she can’t say. There’s no one there with him, nor can she see anyone outside the window. And yet, he was addressing someone, and someone spoke back. She’s sure of it. 

He’s in terrible shape; she can no longer deny it. His once-thick hair is now thin and uneven, and she can smell sour sweat on him, like someone who hasn’t bathed or changed clothes in days, though she’s made sure he’s done just that today, and yesterday, and the day before. 

He knows she’s there now, and turns abruptly towards her, as if caught doing something he shouldn’t. She walks towards him, maintaining a sure gait, an air of confidence. A step that says: I know what I heard. I know what I’m doing. And now you’re going to tell me what I need to know. “Who was there with you?” she asks. 

He turns away, hides his face in his palms. In shame? Maybe. In guilt. He doesn’t reply. 

“You have to show me where the heart is,” she says. “I’m going to stop this.”

He tells her the heart is in the ossuary of the old cemetery, kept in a box, preserved against the ravages of time by the mountain’s will, its hope for release. 

Philio imagines him sneaking into the ossuary at night, tipping out the bones of some relative whose name had been long forgotten, making room for the heart of the girl he loved. Was it wrapped in cloth? A handkerchief, perhaps, embroidered with their initials, stained red with blood? 

He stares beyond Philio, over her shoulder, at the mountain in the distance. “I shouldn’t have done it,” he says. “I should have pierced the heart, completed the binding, buried it with the rest of her, over there in the belly of the mountain.” He’s shaking a little. His lips tremble with swallowed sobs. “But I couldn’t.” He bunches the bottom of his shirt in his hands and twists it. “Coward. Selfish coward.”

She doesn’t try to comfort him. Leaves him there, alone with his regret. 

She makes her way to the cemetery at night. Her father insisted on following her, but he was too frail and knew it. He finally gave up when another coughing fit knocked him to his knees as he was getting dressed. 

Outside, the world is quiet, the moon young. She uses the torch from her phone as a light, but after a while finds that she doesn’t need it, yet keeps it on for comfort. The cemetery is on a small hillock just outside the village, reached by an old dusty road that passes briefly through the forest. The tall gate is wide open, the graves shining white as bone in the pale light. She pauses a moment at the threshold, then walks in with one breath held in her mouth. 

She makes her way through the graves with the beam of the torch cutting a narrow path ahead, past rows of headstones buried in weeds. This is the old cemetery, filled to capacity and threatened by the strange churnings of the ground, the earth belching up the bones of the dead unexpectedly. They no longer bury people here. The one that will one day hold the still-breathing is on the other side, in the newer part of the village. She feels watched; though, she supposes, people always feel like that in cemeteries. She clutches the phone tighter, as if it can function as a weapon, if need be, or at least as an anchor, tethering her to the world of the living. Still, she can’t stop herself from glancing over her shoulder now and then, or from eyeing the shadows of the cypress trees that line the cemetery like black spearheads, piercing the sky. She fights the urge to turn around, to go back to her father’s house, crawl under the covers of her bed and hope she doesn’t find soil there. Sleep it off, wait for morning. Wish that none of it is real. Climb into her car in the morning and drive back to the city, this other life that she made for herself, away from the mountain. 

She keeps walking. She doesn’t even stop by Christina’s grave, though she does notice it. She knows where it is, and finds that she never forgot: somewhere at the back of her mind, she’s always known the exact location of her best friend’s grave. She could be bungee jumping from a cliff, or rowing down a wild river, or driving a fast car, and the knowledge would always be there, tucked away somewhere just beneath her surface: where her friend is. Where her bones can be found, like a promise that can never be broken. Something to depend on. A word that cannot but be kept. 

She follows the trail uphill, always uphill; the ossuary stands at the top of the hillock, on a plateau, as if the bones of the dead are meant to overlook a kingdom of graves. It’s a small, squat building; smaller than you’d expect from the size of the cemetery, as if to say, this. This is what it all comes to, in the end. A tiny, unassuming box. A small building can accommodate you all, the whole vast multitudes of you.

The walls of the ossuary are uneven, a hasty limewash job concealing the marks of neglect. She pushes through the narrow wooden door; it’s not locked. 

The inside is lit by fake candles whose batteries should have died years ago. The light they cast is soft and yellow, making everything around her seem overgrown, insubstantial, like a forest of shadows. Her footfalls on the stone slabs make little sound; as if the space absorbs sound, holds it there only to return it later, a ghostly echo to haunt you, eventually, always. Nothing in the ossuary is ornate; the furniture is spare, unadorned, the boxes stacked with little ceremony and no pomp. 

Gently, as in a caress, she brushes her fingers across the dusty surfaces, tracing names and numbers. Her father told her which number to look for, and, at first, she can’t find it. She panics briefly, thinking perhaps he meant to deceive her, or perhaps none of it was real at all but merely the ramblings of an old, sick man. She does find it, though, in the end: a box identical to all the others, a name on it that she knows does not correspond to its contents. 

She retrieves it, hands as steady as she can. She places it on top of a table gently, almost reverently. Then she opens it.

In my stirrings, there is grief. Don’t think there isn’t. I mean to set myself free, and what happens to the mountain or to the village, or to the people within is not my concern. But don’t think there isn’t grief. 

I saw you coming, you know, walking up my hill, the curve of my back. I feel you close to my heart, now, what’s left of it, feel your eyes peer into my ashes that you think are nothing. How foolish, those guarded hearts of ours.

I know you’ve been plagued by spirits in the night, by hauntings inside your chest and under your tongue and behind your eyes. I’ve seen the dead girls in the night, too, have been haunted by the leaking bodies darting in and out of my forest soil, my forest heart. 

And I think, can it be? 

And I think, perhaps. 

There is a heart, of course, inside the heart. Crude and virginal, criss-crossed with red. A heart in a box, a heart in a cage, can it ever be the only one? 

In my stirrings, I reach for you, open-mouthed. Can you feel it, this grief at things forever lost? There are other things we can retrieve, lurking beneath the skin of this world. 

Can you see, now?

She doesn’t know what she expected, exactly. A beating heart, perhaps, something bloody and nested, something beautiful. A furious exhalation as she opened the box, the imprisoned, murdered air forcing its way out like a sigh finally released. 

Instead, the box holds nothing but ashes. Not even a great amount; just a tiny heap, barely more than a teaspoon, sitting in the middle of the empty box, prone to scatter at the slightest breath of wind. And she thinks, what a way to end. What a thing for a life to become.

She sifts through them, regardless—just in case. They feel soft, powdery. The ash smudges her fingers, works its way under her nails and into the lines of her palm. She finds nothing else inside the box, not even a little grit, a shard of bone. Her father spent his life guarding a handful of dust.

Exiting the ossuary, she feels sick. She doubles over, arms clasped against her middle, and empties her stomach. She opens her eyes, eventually, and finds herself stumbling among the graves of the countless many that are neither forgotten nor missed, anymore. She follows her torch’s light to Christina’s grave. She studies it, this time, with her eyes and with her hands, pressing her palms against the cold marble, tracing her friend’s name, the date of birth and death. There are no toys in the small window, no trinkets or fake flowers, only a photograph of Christina and a vigil lamp, burning faintly, the oil in it almost run out. She wonders, irrationally, if it was her own father who took that photo. She remembers the day Christina died, the accident that took her friend and spared her—she’ll never forget, how could she? Both of them on the mountain, daring each other to get closer, closer, closer to the edge of the cliff. Christina, stumbling on the wet grass. A flash of white, a streak of nothing—some unexpected ray of sun, maybe, or something else, some object vanishing into thin air. A slip of the feet. Christina’s hand reaching out for help, unsure and shaking and so, so thin. There was a second, perhaps, where she could have caught her, a moment where she could have reached out and touched her, could have held her, held on. But she didn’t. She still asks herself why.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, but only the grave hears. Her friend’s bones, hidden somewhere deep under the stone, beneath layers upon layers of dirt, offer no rebuttal. Her father spent his life guarding nothing but ashes, and yet there’s no way to stop the mountain from waking. And I? she asks herself. What have I spent my life doing? Running from this? Atoning, for this? And still, there’s no way to stop loss that has already taken root.

Back home, her father is waiting eagerly in the kitchen, his eyes round and staring, his chest ravaged by the cough, the soil caught in his lungs fighting to come out. “Did you find it?” he asks, hopeful. 

She doesn’t have the heart to tell him the truth. “Yes.” 

He closes his eyes tight, takes a deep breath in, and she’s not sure if it’s in relief or he’s steeling himself for what will follow. “Did you do it?”

“Yes,” she says again. It’s so much easier to lie in monosyllables. He crumbles on his chair; whatever force was holding his body upright has left him. She carries him to his bed and deposits him there, under the covers, a heap of skin and bone. Lets him imagine what it must have felt like to handle the heart; to lift if from the box, to heft it, to pierce it with a knife or a sharpened bone. The way the muscle would resist the puncture, first, and then how it would give. Did it writhe in her hands? Did it scream, did it weep? Or was it silent; a much harsher sentence than anything ever uttered.

And yet, he must know, deep inside, that she was not truthful. He must know the girl’s heart had already crumbled to dust, that there’s nothing to contain anymore, nothing to use or imprison, nothing to pierce with a bone. Because more earthquakes shake the village over the next week, and the murmurs reach them constantly. Soil turns up in places it shouldn’t: in animals, in people, in the water. There is talk of a new sacrifice demanded by the mountain, though Philio knows that’s not it at all. The mountain asks for so very little. 

At night, she dreams of her father coughing up dirt in his sleep. She knows, now, what he’s coughing up: The darkened bones of his daughter. The bones of his wife. The bones of the woman he loved.

Eventually, Philio visits Gera again, leaving her father behind in the house, coughing and coughing, his bones rattling with each persistent exhalation. She finds the priest in the church and walks into it with light, guarded steps, her breath shallow, as if trying not to take in any of the thick, frankincensed atmosphere. The gaunt figures of saints look down on her from their golden perches, hollow-cheeked and harsh-eyed. Above them, the angels bear arms they grip with white-knuckled force. Do they hold their breaths, too, inside the infinitesimal cages of their chests? Do they listen for the quiet confession of her small sins? 

Except, not small. Not small at all. 

The priest greets her on this side of the templon. He must detect some upset in her because he takes her hands and guides her to one of the many rows of wooden chairs, seats her there almost by force and places himself beside her. Her mind is flooded by the tortured saints above, their dying moments, their eyes staring, unable to hold back the damage done to their open chests. She feels their gaze inspecting every corner of her heart, every dark space and crevice inside. She tries to hide from them, avoid them, but they are everywhere, watching in their quiet way, their statuesque way. She doesn’t know what else to do but keep her own gaze fixed rigidly downwards. Perhaps, if she’s lucky, the priest might mistake it for reverence and god-fear. 

“What’s wrong?” he asks in his soft, velvet voice. “Is it your father?” 

She shakes her head and thinks she’ll be unable to utter a single word, her tongue a lazy mollusc in her mouth. But then it all pours out of her. She tells him what she knows of the mountain, the god, the other god, the sacrifice. The forfeit heart, her father’s mistake, his life, her own. She watches the priest’s face now as she speaks, the kind wrinkles deepening in his forehead and around his mouth.

And then, just like that, she’s done talking. 

He’s silent for a long time after she finishes, and she thinks she’s failed. There’s no help to be found here, nothing to be done; he’ll think she simply wasted his time with her silly superstitions. 

When finally he speaks, he confirms her fear. He knows the stories, he says, of course he does. But he doesn’t believe in sacrifice or the pagan fears of his flock. 

“And what about the ashes?” she asks him, desperate to make him see, hear, believe. If she could, if he let her, she’d press his fingers into the ash, smudge his face with them so he could see what they feel like, how real they are. 

He shrugs. “How do you know there was ever a heart there? Or that it would be preserved, after all this time?” he asks, trying not to sound condescending and failing. “Your father is a very sick man. Are you sure you can trust anything he says?” Especially after all this time, is the implied tail end of that question, mercifully left unsaid. Do you know your father at all? 

She stands up, intent on leaving, but perhaps it’s the frankincense or her own sleepless exhaustion or the oppressive saints above. Whatever it is, it defeats her; the ground rushes to meet her.

She’s in an unfamiliar house. For a moment, there’s only darkness, and then a fire flickering to life somewhere near. She turns around and tries to find its source, but she can only see its shadows trembling on the walls. Something dry and unsettling waits in her mouth, a bitter film coats her tongue. Her muscles ache when she tries to move, screaming in protest, as if days-long disuse has turned them to marble. Still, she manages to get out of bed, and the floor is smooth beneath her feet, cold to the touch. 

“You’re awake,” a voice says. Gera’s. He hands her a glass of water, which she takes gratefully, ignoring the shaking of her hands. The water is cool but doesn’t wash away the bitterness. 

“What happened?” she rasps. 

The priest’s voice is smooth and cool like the water she just drank. “You fainted,” he says. “I carried you. You slept for many hours. You must have been exhausted.”

She inspects him, his face, his young beard, something suspicious and familiar rising in her. She imagines his strong arms under her body, her skin chafing against the black of his cassock. “This your house?” she asks. 

He nods. The place feels abandoned, or borrowed; like a house encountered in the woods, empty, in which a wanderer might find refuge for a night. “It’s not much,” he says, spreading his arms to encompass the small room, the low ceiling, the bare walls. “But I thought it’d do. For me, it’d do.” 

She feels faint again, so she grabs the bedpost to steady herself. He rushes to support her and guides her back to the mattress. She sits. Places her palms demurely on her lap and almost laughs: the church or the cemetery or the priest, one of them has finally infected her with reverence. 

Gera wants to speak but hesitates. “Do you remember what you told me?” he asks carefully. 

He’s trying not to make me uncomfortable, she realizes. He’s being kind to me. He’s being kind to me and I don’t deserve it. An instinctive response she doesn’t wish to interrogate.

Yesterday comes back to her then: the empty box, the ashes, her mad ramblings about the pierced heart. Gods and sacrifices. 

Her cheeks burn. She’s not sure if it’s from shame or if she’s running a fever. Perhaps both. 

And is it from kindness again that he changes the subject? He stands and walks to the single window of the room. He draws the crocheted curtain open to let in the poor evening light. It’s dusk now, the woods outside thick with shadows. 

He leans against the wall, supporting his weight on his arm, and gazes out the window. From where she sits, all she can see is a mass of fir trees, grown thickly, too thickly, as if huddled together. 

“I remember you, you know,” he says. “From way back. Your friend, too.” 

“Christina,” she says. 

“Yes.” 

“We knew each other as children?” She already thought him too young to be a priest, but now, for the first time, she realizes he’s not much older than she is. Perhaps they’re the same age, even. 

“I was already with the parish, so we only crossed paths on holy days and feasts. You never paid any attention to me.” It sounds a little bitter, with an edge to it. 

She stands up, carefully this time, and walks to the window. The forest crowds the dark. She pictures herself slipping through the window, flying on silent wings. She leans against the wall on the opposite side, so their bodies mirror each other. And then, a connection. A boy kicking his ball against her legs when she was little, here in these woods. Yes, she remembers him now, the way he seemed to move in long, loping strides, so unlike everything else about him. 

He looks at her now, his eyes a dark forest green, like the trees. 

“You know what happened, then?” she asks. 

He takes a moment before nodding, with an expression that says, doesn’t everyone?

“Perhaps it’s why I’m the way I am,” she says. “Isn’t that what you think?”

“Which way is that?” he asks, his voice mild, the kind he must use to coax his little lambs to confess. 

She shrugs. “Daring,” she says. “Eager to try new things, dangerous things. My friend died so I thought, I might as well live.” 

“Court death,” he corrects. 

Her lip curls at the corner despite herself. “I guess.” 

She expects the conversation to peter out at that, but he says, “I don’t think that’s it.” Surprises her by contradicting her. Who does that? When you share something about your understanding of the deeper workings of your psyche, people are supposed to accept it, aren’t they?

“What do you think it is, then, Father?” she asks, not attempting to hide her irritation. 

He keeps those green eyes on her, not unkindly. “I think some people are just born that way,” he says. He looks away, rubs his beard. “With a terrible need for things they cannot name.” As if he knows anything about it. About wanting. About the lengths you’d go to, despite knowing you can never have what you want. 

“Why did you become a priest?” she asks, her voice harsh. She wants it to sound like a dare, and it does. 

“My mother died having me,” he answers, slicing right through the dare. He doesn’t look angry. “They tell me my father couldn’t even look at me. Pained him too much. He didn’t know what to do with me. So I never got to know him.” A small shrug. “He left me to the parish.” 

She’s heard about it, the monastery outside the village, the rumours that surrounded it, gloomy stories of violence and misplaced shame. She doesn’t ask if they’re true. But she does imagine him: a young boy kneeling in prayer, bringing the chalice to his lips. Quenching a thirst.

“You grew into it, then,” she says. 

“Not quite,” he says. “In fact, I had decided to leave the village, move to Athens, work as a mechanic.” 

She laughs. “You? A mechanic.” 

A fleeting smile crosses his eyes, then dissipates quickly. “Yes.” He holds his hands out in front of him, palms up. She notices them for the first time: big palms, thick fingers, ghosts of cuts. The hands of a working man. Not a priest’s hands. 

“What happened?” 

He shifts his weight and looks away. “I felt something in the forest one day,” he says. “I liked taking walks there, alone, away from everyone. Talking to the mountain.” 

“To the mountain?” 

He points skywards. “I thought I was talking to God.” 

“And weren’t you?” she asks. 

“No one is,” he says. 

A pause. 

“What was it you felt?” she presses. 

He glances at her, then away again. “A presence. A longing. A loneliness.” 

“And yet you think what people say about the forest, the mountain, the sacrifices, it’s all superstitious nonsense.” 

“Yes,” he replies. “It’s not fear that brought me to God.” 

“But?” 

“I thought, if there were a way I could bring solace to that terrible feeling in other people, to assuage it in some way, there’s nothing in the world I’d like more.”

She looks out the window, too, at that fearful forest and that terrible mountain, and thinks about the priest’s need to heal the entire world. Would she try to do the same, if she believed in God?

“And did you find a way to do that? With your saints and your God?” She takes his silence as a yes. “Don’t you think that makes you as superstitious as everyone else?” 

He pushes himself away from the window. “Perhaps,” he says. It sounds final, somehow, like he’s done talking. “You should rest some more,” he says. “I’ll bring you dinner later.” 

“No. I should go back to my father.” 

He shakes his head. “You’re too weak. I’ve asked our deacon to check in on him.” She begins to protest but he hushes her. “He’ll be fine,” he says. “It’s just one night. Tomorrow morning, you’ll be back home with him.” 

He’s right. And this fever, she feels it rising again, scorching her cheeks. Her mouth is dry as dust.

She returns to the bed and finds the half-empty glass she left on the bedstand. She brings it to her lips and drinks, but her thirst does not subside. 

The mattress is soft, at least. She sleeps.

She’s caught in the flashes of a fever dream. There’s her father, half-buried in the ground, groaning. There’s the mountain, its stony face still and inscrutable. There’s the caged angels and their hollow chests. But then the shape of the mountain begins to change, and the grass darkens and turns into ash, and from the ashes rises an ungainly tumour that towers above her, watching her without a face.

Then the tumour turns into a woman. She has narrow shoulders and a wide waist and strong legs. She wears nothing but doesn’t seem naked; she’s smeared all over with soil, and her long black hair covers her torso. Or “naked” is simply a concept that does not apply to her. 

Philio stares at her without shame.

“Why did you come here?” the woman asks. Her mouth is full of soil; a worm climbs out of the corner of her lips and falls to the ground. Philio doesn’t recoil; she draws closer. The ground is soft under her bare feet. Her toes sink into freshly turned soil. 

“My father needed me,” Philio says. 

The woman’s lips draw upwards a bit. She scoffs, but the words, when they come, are not harsh. “Tell the truth.” 

“I wanted to see you,” Philio whispers. 

“Did you know me?” The woman’s expression is difficult to read. It throws Philio out of balance. 

And yet she knows the answer to this. She found a name for a feeling she’s had all her life, coming back here. Every jump from every cliff, every swelling river travelling down a rocky back, every fall was a seeking of the mountain’s embrace. What was coming back here, after all, if not another one of her dares, her brushes with death? “Yes,” she says. There’s no need to explain anything else. 

The woman’s eyes are like tunnels leading to a place much deeper than the surface. “Come then,” she says.

Philio steps towards her and their bodies touch. “Why now?” she asks. 

The woman is warm as flesh. She wraps her arms around Philio’s hips and pulls her in. Philio lets her. Her own fingers trace paths through the soil on the woman’s breasts, up to her neck. Her blood courses through unfamiliar vessels. She traces the line of her jawbone, the gash of her mouth. 

The woman releases her and pushes her slightly away. “What lies were you told about me?” she asks. 

“You were supposed to save the village, way back. You went willingly.” 

She laughs, a sound like stones crashed in a mighty palm. “Who told you them?”

“My father,” she says, finally. “Though he’s been wrong about so many things.”

“Your father? What sort of father tells his daughter lies?” She smiles broadly and the dream quivers. How can she smile, with no face? “Did he tell you what he did to me?” 

“He spared your heart.” 

“Did he now?” 

“He loved you.” 

“He bound me. His weakness didn’t just shorten the mountain’s imprisonment. It kept me tethered to this world. To this.” She moves her hand along her torso, over her thighs, as if to indicate her flesh. She looks at Philio. “Did he tell you he did it himself? He didn’t just keep the heart they tore from my dead body. He was the one who cut it out.”

Philio can see it: Her father, little more than a boy then, cutting the heart out of the girl’s open chest. Lifting it up with hands that trembled, yes, and yet they held onto the heart with strong fingers. Put it in a box. 

The woman nods, as if she can see what’s in Philio’s mind. “You see now?” she asks. 

“Yes.” 

“And is that love?” 

“He loves you still.” 

“And is that love?” the woman repeats. Her expression darkens, and a flash of anger lights the hollows of her eyes. “What kind of love is it to pluck out another’s heart? To lock it in a box and let it crumble?” She brings a hand to her face, as if to wipe away a tear she never shed. “Your father, that fool.” 

Philio feels something in her mind slip, like someone losing purchase. Something bruised. Her mouth is dry, so dry, but this is not thirst. Something else—what did the priest say? A need, a terrible need. 

“What do you need?” the woman asks. 

“What do you need?” Philio echoes.

“They took from me something that I was always told I didn’t have. A will. A freedom. A strength.” The woman’s eyes are hidden, but Philio stares into them nevertheless. “And yet it was there, deep inside me, behind my heart.” 

“But it was not your heart.” 

“But it was not my heart.” 

“And now you want it back.” 

The woman shakes her head. 

“What then?” 

And the woman reaches out a hand. And then the woman’s chest opens, monstrous and flawless, and in it is a mess of twigs and pieces of cloth, like shreds torn from a shroud. What will nest in it? Not birds, Philio thinks. Birds nest in soil, now. 

Philio wakes. She doesn’t know what time it is, but the light in the room has changed. Night. The sweat on her body is cold now, and there’s an emptiness in her belly, a deep hunger, that she knows food won’t sate. Her stomach rumbles, her mouth hurts, her lungs scream for night air. 

She rolls out of bed and finds her way by feel. Her fingers grasp the edge of the door. It swings open with a push and she stops for a minute, listening for the priest’s breath. It comes from the only other room in the house, calm and steady. He’s asleep.

She carries on in the dark until she’s out of the house, feeling herself with air by the lungful. The night is chill on her damp clothes. She remembers the texture of her dream, the touch of soil on her skin, that need, that need. She wanders off towards the trees she saw from the tiny window of the room. Her feet are bare, the soil soft underneath. She falls to her knees and pushes her hands into the dirt, then clutches it, closes her fingers around it, brings it to her lips, the rich scent of it making her eyes water. She stuffs her mouth with soil, handful after handful. Her throat aches. Out of the corner of her eyes she sees a girl in the distance, covered in dirt. She’s seen her before. It’s not Melia. It was never Melia.

This girl. She’s still flesh, so soft. What am I to her? And she to me? 

A sacrifice, yes, but what else? A mirror, a proxy, a what-could-have-been. So, perhaps, not a sacrifice at all.

And why must it always be the girls that are sacrificed? 

Girls with dead hearts, see-through girls made of dust, their bones the fetters of the world. I won’t be anyone’s shackles. 

Why now? this girl asks and I want to tell her: Because that’s how long it took for my heart to crumble to dust. There’s freedom in the crumbling, you see? 

And what’s left for us but this dancing mountain? 

She returns to the priest’s house and finds her way to the bathroom. She washes out her mouth, spitting lumps of soil into the sink. She watches them travel down to the drain in ugly brown swirls. There’s no mirror, but she does her best to clean her face and rinse her hair and hands. Then she wipes down the surfaces and peeks into the priest’s bedroom, watches him breathe in and out calmly, his face wan and childish in the pale light. She leaves before he wakes up. 

Back home, everything is quiet. Dawn is just cracking in the distance, a silvery blue over the mountain, and she craves to be outside, but instead she shuffles to the kitchen. Her feet kick something soft and loose, so she turns on the lights. She sees it then: everything is covered in a film of earth, as if her nightmare has spilled over and swallowed her entire life. There’s dirt everywhere, in the whole house: in the kitchen sink, in the bathtub, on the bed and inside the mattress, inside bread, in the water that runs from the tap. She remembers the bird stuffed with soil, that burial in the flesh, and wonders what’s been inside the dead animals they’ve been cooking and eating all this time, always, what’s been in their water and in their mouths and in their dreams.

She looks for her father and finds him in bed, the sheets pulled up to his shoulders, tucked neatly under his arms. He wakes at her touch. His gaze is clear; he smiles. So sweetly she feels a calmness and a tenderness spread through her. It’s fine, it’s all fine. 

“You must be hungry,” she says, running her palm over his damp temple, his sparse hair. Fine, fine. Dreams are only dreams, soil only soil. 

“I’m not,” he replies. 

“Have you eaten?” 

He shakes his head. She lets her hand drop to the mattress, something tightening in her lungs. “Was the deacon here?” she asks. 

“Yes.” 

She lets out a sigh but feels no relief. Gera kept his promise, but there’s still so much wrong in this house, so much soil not even a river could wash it away. 

“And then what happened?” she asks. 

He smiles with his teeth and lifts a hand to point at the window, or, perhaps, at the mountain beyond. “She came,” he says. His eyes glisten and his face is calm. 

He looks happy, Philio realizes with a start. 

“Who?” she asks, redundantly. 

“She,” he says, as if it’s self-evident, the most natural thing in the world, and it is. “She was complete. Beautiful, clutching her dirty heart.” 

Philio’s chest widens like a cavern, and inside is nothing but a crumbling, a dusty room full of dull ache.

Her father is dead by the following morning. 

The priest comes. She didn’t call him and doesn’t know how he knew, but he does. Together, they enter her father’s bedroom. The priest looks at him, his face serious, and she catches herself wishing to know what he’s thinking. Then he puts on his gold-threaded vestments and does the sign of the cross. He says some words she doesn’t listen to. She runs her palm over her skin and finds it dry. The room feels smaller than it is. “I can’t stay here tonight,” she blurts out. 

Only when he pauses does she realize she’s interrupted some kind of prayer. He glances at her and nods, then hurries through the rest of his little ritual. He removes the golden vestments again and folds them carefully before placing them in his large leather bag. Then he puts his arms around her shoulders. “It’s okay,” he says. “You can stay with me, if you wish.” 

She steps back to look up at him. “Are you sure that’s all right?” 

He takes a moment to respond, but she can see it’s not hesitation that stops him. Something else. His gaze flicks away from her, his lips tighten, and he wets them, as if to say something important, something poignant, maybe even a confession of some sort, she thinks, but words don’t come. “Yes,” he says at last. 

And she knows he’s lying. 

He takes her home again; his small house is starting to feel like a home she could live in. He ushers her in with a gentle palm on her back and then he serves her a breakfast of bread, strong coffee, and apricot preserve. He reaches over the table to put his hand on her own. They touch; it feels strange and intimate—his skin is soft as silk where it’s not calloused over—and when he asks God to send His angels to watch over her father until he enters His kingdom in heaven, she feels tears gather in the corners of her eyes. She hasn’t cried yet; it’s too early for that. And yet there’s no denying that this is real: their hands touching, the presence of someone who has come from a world where death has been dealt with before. “Thank you,” she tells him. 

She washes the dishes afterwards and dries them with a towel she finds hanging from a hook. It fits her hands. The kitchen smells familiar, as if she’s been in here for thousands of hours, cooking and cleaning and tidying and overhearing this man’s prayful muttering from the other room. She fancies herself the wife of this house, a priest’s wife. For the first time in her life, she flirts with the possibility of settling down with a man, let alone a man like him, of claiming for herself a quiet life with him, maybe not in this village and maybe not the next, but somewhere else, a flat land, without a mountain. 

Except. She shakes her head. 

Except her fancies have always been short-lived, and her father’s corpse is getting cold in the other house.

Until nightfall, she makes the arrangements for her father’s funeral. She calls people to let them know, accepts their condolences. When she pauses to cry briefly between calls, Gera puts his hands on her shoulders from behind and kisses the top of her head, like a priest. 

She thinks of calling Melia but calls her mother instead. She takes the news dispassionately. 

“When will you be coming back?” her mother asks, voice unaffected and flat. 

“I don’t know,” Philio replies. “After the funeral, I suppose.” She pauses. “Or maybe I’ll stay a while longer.”

Her mother makes a choking sound—half scoff, half cough. “How can you stand this house—I’ll never understand it.” 

“It’s not so bad here,” she says. 

“Yes, it is. That house is full of damp and rot; it killed your father after all, didn’t it?” 

Philio shifts in her seat. “I’m not in the house, actually.” 

She can almost sense her mother sit up in her chair by the little table that holds her old-fashioned telephone. “Where are you?” 

She tells her, and her mother explodes. “You’ll be shackled to this village,” she says. “Don’t make the same mistakes I did.” The connection stutters. Her mother says she should have left much earlier than she did. Her voice sounds more and more distant, muffled, as if her mouth is stuffed with soil. 

“Will you come? For the funeral?” Philio asks before the connection’s lost. All she can hear is the silence across the line, the dead static. As she hangs up, she thinks she hears her mother say, “You should never have gone back there,” but she probably imagined it. 

When she closes her eyes, she sees a girl, her mouth full of soil, speaking to her of her heart. Whose heart? she wants to ask, as if it matters. 

On the morning of the funeral, the mountain seems to her larger, closer, and she can almost hear it now, speaking to her its elegies of soil. Philio keeps waiting for her mother to show up, even though she won’t and doesn’t. The earth rumbles; a low, guttural sound that echoes through Philio’s bones and clings like sediment to her lungs. The mountain could play her like a flute, if she wanted. 

Her father’s body is already laid out in the coffin in the church; she finds, mildly ashamed and deeply grateful, that someone dressed him. They picked a grey suit with a black tie that makes his skin look even sallower. 

She hardly pays attention to the service. Everyone attends: Solon and Anthi and Marios and people whose names she doesn’t recall. They keep their distance from her and from each other; their eyes remain dry, but some of them dab at their lips with handkerchiefs they keep crumpled in their hands. Her chest feels compressed, crushed under some unnameable weight. She doesn’t notice when the priest calls for the final kiss; people take her hands gently and guide her to the coffin, place her palms on her father’s chest so that she has to bend very close to his face. He smells of nothing. She takes her hands and puts them on her father’s head, almost flinches from the cold, the scalding cold of his skin. She kisses him on the lips. 

When the service is over, Gera walks with her to the grave: a long horizontal cut into the black earth. He talks of a greener place, of dust and soil. Her father’s face is covered by a cloth printed with the face of Christ, the lid placed on top of him, the coffin then lowered into the grave. The people who followed them to the cemetery clutch her shoulders and her hands and tell her he’s gone, but she knows he’s not. They talk about his body as if he was something other than it, something other that animated it, but his body is still there and so is he, part of the world always and forever, forever given to the soil.

The mountain is quiet now, but as the evening progresses, a biting cold settles in. Back at her home, the priest breaks bread and talks of her father and of heaven. But, she tells him, in the end, it is the earth that receives the dead, cradles their bones, plucks the flesh from their bones and leaves these empty husks to rest on soil. It is the earth that remembers the sky and what it’s like to be drenched in light. It feels the hunger that drives us, it dries our lips and turns our bodies into paler shades of dust. The earth still knows. She knows.

Philio remembers the face of her father in the coffin just before it was covered. Pale, serious. His lips pressed together as if he’d just apologized. She realizes this is how she’ll always remember him now. A sorry man who couldn’t tell apart shackles and love. 

Her father, that fool. 

Night comes and the body is still buried, and then morning comes and the body is still buried. She imagines the mountain taking it into the bottomless pit of its belly. For the rest of the day, Philio is drawn to the windows of the house. She can hear the mountain’s heartbeat. And she thinks, what does that make her? A wind gathers and the clouds start to bend to its whims and stand in front of the sun. Philio is startled to find her father’s new garden is already overrun with weeds.

She has a standing arrangement with the priest that he’ll come over with supper every evening and stay the night. She still calls him “the priest,” most of the time, even though she knows by now the texture of his hands, the afterscent of his breath when he leans close. 

At the door, he greets her as if they have not seen each other for weeks, as if they didn’t put her father to the earth together just days ago, so warm and eager to show her his affection it makes her self-conscious about her own sudden interest in him. Maybe, she thinks, I’m not a person at all, but something empty; a box you can fill with anything you wish. 

Gera touches her hand and she jerks away, a ghost of the scalding coldness of her father’s body briefly haunting the moment. She chases it away by imagining Melia at the door in his place. She ushers him in, ushers her in with him. 

She spent the whole day cleaning the house, fighting with the dirt and only managing to banish it to the corners, under the mattresses and rugs, behind books and coming away in lumps, occasionally, from the photographs on the walls or, once, her hair. The priest makes no comment on this. Does he not see it? she wonders. They sit at the kitchen table, facing each other like a couple. He’s brought wine, bread, olives again. He makes her feel as if tending to her needs is the only task that matters in his world now. The wine is only for her; he doesn’t touch it, outside of communion, but she fills her own glass and drains it quickly, then fills it again. 

“I can’t get the feeling of that coldness away from me,” she says between glasses. 

He doesn’t need to ask what coldness; he knows. 

“What do you like to do in your free time?” she asks. 

“I like to walk in the forest, listen to the trees,” he answers. “All the places God is.” 

She makes a face. “I don’t like it when you talk about God,” she says. 

“I’m sorry,” he replies. Not the answer she expected.

She leaves her chair and walks over to his side of the table, leans over him and pours some wine in his empty glass. She returns to her seat and studies him studying the glass, the redness within. “What are you doing?” he asks her. 

“Tempting you,” she says. “Isn’t that what God does, in his free time?” 

He holds her gaze for a few moments, the corners of his lips twisted in a half-smile, half-frown. He starts to say something but stops abruptly. 

She becomes aware, then, of the screaming. They both rush out onto the street. People are running, fleeing the village. The houses opposite her own are covered with earth; not falling from the mountain, not a landslide, but welling up from the ground. It’s happening again, they say. It’s happening and we did nothing to stop it. 

Gera moves to leave, but she reaches for his hand. “Don’t leave me,” she says, and his eyes are the eyes of a man conflicted, torn between who knows what. Responsibility is a strange, self-inflicted thing. 

A woman runs by, yelling that someone’s vomiting soil. They need to be taken to a hospital—though, Philio wonders, what are hospitals supposed to do in cases like these, when a mountain is the infection in your lungs, when the earth claims her due while you’re still alive? “Let’s go back inside,” she tells him, pulling him, gently at first and then with more force and with her need, this new need for a world without soil, without falls, without monsters.

He relents. He lets her take him inside and close the door behind them and then lead him upstairs to the bedroom where she has him sit on the bed and climbs on top of him, feeling the rough texture of his jeans with her hands. “What are you doing?” he asks her and she says, “What do you think?” More voices come from outside, pleading, desperate. 

He pushes her away and stands up. He has to help them, he says, torn, desperate. He’s going to cry if she fights him now, if she doesn’t let him leave, Philio realizes as he runs out of the room. 

She follows him downstairs, but as he goes through the front door, out into the street, she leaves through the back, into the garden and the forest and the soil. 

There, she finds a moment of calm. Even the screaming sounds far away now. 

She stands there barefoot, feeling the comforting loam between her toes when rough hands grab her and pull her away, her dirty feet in the air. 

Rough hands handle her, a binding embrace that keeps her arms at her sides, her legs kicking at nothing in front of her as she’s being dragged back to the house. “Stop struggling,” someone barks at her. She bites down on a forearm and is struck across the cheek, something hot and bright radiating up from her cheekbone to her eyes. 

When they finally get to the house, they put her down, press her hands together at the wrists behind her back and turn her around. A small crowd meets her in her father’s garden. The priest is among them; he’s changed into his cassock again. They seem deep in argument, but Philio cannot understand the words they’re saying, and she’s not sure if it’s because she’s still dizzy from the blow to her head, or panicked from being grabbed, or because they’re all shouting at the same time, or simply because they’re saying things that make no sense. 

Finally, a voice rises above the knot of argument. “The mountain demands a sacrifice.” As if the mountain would ever ask for its own chains. It’s Marios, the butcher, who says it. Christina’s father. Of course it’s him, Philio thinks. It was always going to be him; and isn’t that fitting?

A few others agree, Solon and Anthi among them. The mountain wants its blood, the corpse needs the shackles that will bind it again for another generation, until our children forget and make the same mistakes we did. 

The priest watches silently as Marios points his finger at Philio. “Should be her,” he says. “It’s her father’s fault, after all, isn’t it?” They know, then. How did they find out? 

Did Gera tell them?

Regardless, it feels right. “It’s right,” she mumbles, and then, louder, “he’s right. It should be me.” 

Marios overcomes his surprise quickly and gives her a curt nod, the hardness not gone at all from his eyes but at least now there’s something else there, too, something vindicated, not vindictive. He turns to the priest. He should give his consent, Philio realizes. They’re hoping he consents, absolves them of this sin before they even commit it. 

The priest looks slowly from Marios to the others and then to Philio. He rests his gaze on her for a few moments, but she fails to divine what goes on behind his creased forehead, behind his eyes that are of the forest. 

“All right,” the priest says finally. “But it has to be me. I have to be the one to do it.” 

Placated, the crowd disperses slowly. Only Marios lingers, to make sure the deed gets done. 

Once inside, the priest closes the door behind him and draws the curtains. He speaks in a low voice. “You have to be quick,” he whispers. 

She realizes her hands have been shaking, but she searches her heart and finds no fear in it at all, only a worm of excitement, eating away at her empty chest. She grabs his hands, perhaps to steady her own. “I’m glad it will be you,” she says. 

He looks at her quizzically. “What are you talking about?” 

She squeezes his hands, the worm squirming, giddy and fearful of its meal. “You meant what you said, didn’t you? You’ll be the one to do it? The sacrifice?” 

He lets her hands go and takes a step back. “Of course not.” His voice is cold and she senses in it the sharp notes of mocking. Derision. 

She matches his backward step. “You lied.” 

He spreads his arms, points at the man pacing her father’s yard. “Were you expecting me to murder you because of the insane beliefs of some villagers? Everyone’s gone mad.” 

“And what about the soil?” she shouts, pained by how inadequate words are. 

He shakes his head but doesn’t reply.

She thinks of her mother then, her father, the pink eye of the mountain at dusk. She thinks of lying in bed as a little girl, her mother’s voice from the foot of the bed, telling her not to go outside. Thinks of her father’s photographs. Not of villagers and animals and wives and all the people he’d doomed, she knows now, but of the mountain in its many angles. His father’s camera another eye to stare the mountain down. 

She takes another step back. “But you said it yourself. You understood. The terrible need.” 

“What need?” he shouts, exasperated. “What need could ever justify this cruelty?” 

He looks down on them, she realizes. 

He will never understand. 

“The mountain’s,” she says, redundantly, remembering the softness of the small of his back. “My own. I thought I could set her free.” 

He lets his arms drop to his sides. Resigned, now. “How naive,” he says. “How selfish, to think you could save anyone.” 

He doesn’t try to stop her when she runs out, and besides, why would he? She runs past a startled Marios who tries to chase her but she’s too fast for him now. She’s too fast for all of them.

Her feet or the wind or the sounds of the forest lead her to the place where that first sacrifice happened and each subsequent one echoed, that cavernous mouth which was itself the place where the goddess struck her lover dead, where this corpse of a mountain was born. She recognizes the smell of it, the soil of it. She digs her hands through its richness, lets it creep under her nails. Worms slither up from the earth and spell their strange words in the glossary of soil. The quiet life is a lie, they say. No one has it, because the heart is a turbulent place, a terrible ravine lined with flesh-threshing rocks. That you can’t be loved is a lie, too. We love you, the worms say. We love indiscriminately here. 

She prostrates herself on the earth, lets her entire body connect with the soil. She feels the mountain pulsate underneath, the soil breathe and sigh and work its way into her. And then, under her and next to her, purring, satisfied: the last sacrificed girl, the girl with the stolen heart. 

“My father’s dead,” Philio says. “There’s no one to punish now. No way to take your revenge.” 

“What revenge?” the girl asks. 

The question stumps Philio, and she’s forced to take a deep breath in. The soil in her throat makes her hack. Grit lines her mouth. 

“If I were a usual horror I would have you release my bones now, to unite them with my heart of dust, and you’d do it, for me,” the girl says with her mountain voice. “Wouldn’t you?”

Philio would, yes. She’d do anything. 

“But I don’t need you to,” the girl says. “I took my bones myself. Broke the mountain’s fetters.” She stirs, there on the dirt next to Philio. She wraps an arm around Philio’s back and pushes her gently until they’re both sitting up on the soil. “I will be no one’s shackles. I don’t intend to chain this mountain. I intend to ride it. To let it dance, take me where it will.” 

The god’s corpse shudders underneath them. It arches its great back and the trees on its skin stand on end. 

“So what do you want from me?” Philio asks, and thinks, maybe if I love her, I’ll get what I deserve. Maybe, this way, everything will change.

“No, what do you want? You summoned me here, did you not?” The girl tilts her dark head to the side and regards Philio with her empty eyes. When she doesn’t reply, the girl adds, in explanation: “You ate the soil.” 

Philio touches her belly, traces her stomach. 

“Yes,” Philio says. “I chose you. But you chose me, too.” A pause. “Why did you choose me?” 

The girl inches closer to Philio from behind, so that their pelvises fit together. She wraps her arms around Philio’s torso and places a gentle hand over her chest. “Because your heart has also crumbled,” she says. “A camaraderie of dust.”

“Yes,” Philio says, and she thinks, again: Perhaps, if I love her better than I loved anyone else. Perhaps, if I love her well, the dust will be enough.

The girl’s embrace grows tighter, and Philio can smell the soil on her skin, on her hair, on her breath. “Tell me, what does this feel like?” the girl asks. 

Like falling into a ravine, Philio wants to say, but her throat is full of earth, her voice a burial. 

She feels the girl nod behind her. She takes Philio’s hands and places them on the ground. She pushes them into the soft soil until her hands connect with something cold and leathery. 

“Pull,” the girl instructs. 

She does. She tightens her hands around them and pulls the reins from the ground. She tightens her grip on them and knows: They’re not for steering, not for restraining. Only for hanging on. 

“Now what?” Philio asks, her mouth a mouth of soil.

“You don’t have to love me,” the girl replies to what Philio didn’t ask. “You longed for a monster to match you in your need.” She wraps her palm around Philio’s hand that holds the reins. “I’ll do nicely,” the girl says.

Philio thinks, then, of her heart, that turbulent place, that crumbling place. Her wrists burn from the leather rubbing against them. The earth keens, kneads. “So will I,” she replies. 

The mountain dances beneath them as they ride.

 

(Editors’ Note: Natalia Theodoridou is interviewed by Caroline M. Yoachim in this issue.)

© 2024 Natalia Theodoridou