Content note: rape and violence against women

 

Part 1: The Dirt Hole & Its Variations

Avie Thornaby is digging a hole. Beside him the victrola plays, the vinyl warped, the music woozy. Behind him leans a sign, knocked to a chaotic angle, paint faded so the words “LOST LAKE” are barely visible. It’s dark in the woods. Many small eyes watch him from beneath the trees.

Avie Thornaby is a ferrety man of indeterminate age. He doesn’t look young, but there’s something unformed about him. He is medium height, skinny, with lank shoulder-length hair and a droopy moustache that he often runs his tongue over. His eyes never stay still. He has one pair of filthy jeans, two work shirts, and an infinite number of squashed second-hand hats.

He hears something under the music: a snorting and a hissing.

“Hello?” he calls. From the dark, an owl.

Avie Thornaby leans on his shovel. Fiddles with his cap, leaving dirty fingermarks on the brim. Hears nothing but animal sounds, muffled.

The song finishes and the needle catches on a crackling silence. He hears it more clearly now. Not an animal. The sound is elegant and strange, a distant singing, just a whisper above a sigh.

“Who’s there?” he calls into the trees. “This is private property. I will shoot you.”

He doesn’t have a gun, and he doesn’t own the lake. He lifts a shovel and flips another clod of dirt behind him. That’s when he realises. “The fuck?” he says. The sound is coming from the hole.

He tosses the shovel aside, then thinks better and brandishes it at the hole. “You come on out now.”

The woods, the night, the victrola crackle. Even the owl holds its breath.

A white hand bursts from the hole and grabs the earthen side. Another hand emerges and holds tight to Avie’s boot.

“You found me,” gasps the woman, using the last of her strength to pull herself out of the hole. “Thank you. Oh, thank you.”

 

Avie Thornaby carries the woman through the woods over his shoulders, like a shot steer. She doesn’t weigh much. He likes how she smells.

His cabin has smoke coming from the chimney and tarpaper over all the windows. It has “YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED” painted on it in six-foot-high letters.

In the cabin, his friend Omri Glass is boiling coffee. He looks up when Avie and his burden enter.

“What’s this?” he asks, a little surprised, a little envious.

Avie Thornaby deposits the woman on the kitchen chair, where she sits with her hands in her lap, eyes downcast.

“This is my wife,” he says. “Nola. I’ll call you No for short. Do you like that?”

She looks up at him and smiles shyly. “No.”

“That’s right.”

Omri pours coffee thick as treacle and adds sugar. They all drink it together in the half-light of the smoky cabin. There are only two chairs, so Avie stands. After a few sips the sugar hits, and he feels his heart thrash. He rubs his eyes, but the woman doesn’t disappear. He takes her cup.

“Come to bed,” he says, and she does.

 

He wakes in the night. The air feels heavy and there’s a pressure on his legs. From another room, he thinks he hears something: a wordless singing, the sound rising and falling. He turns over and goes back to sleep. In the morning, she’s in the bed beside him. He reaches out to her and holds one soft, heavy breast in his hand. He squeezes it, testing, though he doesn’t know what for.

 

Part 2: An Expert’s Guide to Snaring Methods

Avie Thornaby changes her name to Nora, then Nona. A girl in his school was named something similar. Nona makes runny eggs and coffee for breakfast, potatoes in gravy for dinner, a hot and dark meat stew for supper.

She sings as she cooks, the same tune he heard her sing from the hole, though this time he can hear the words. “In the ground, in the ground, I was lost and now I’m found. I’ll shiver my whole life through.”

He doesn’t like the song and tells her to stop. She smiles at him and hums it instead.

He waits until the second night to fuck her. He considers this gentlemanly. He does have to fuck her, though. What else is she there for? A man only needs to eat three times a day and she’s here all the time.

The next night he invites Omri Glass for supper and for her. He wants Omri to be envious of his good fortune, but also the men have been through a lot together. Avie knows to share when times are good, so he can get by when times are bad.

 

The next day, Avie and Omri go out with their traps. She uses the kitchen knife to check her reflection, tilting the scratched blade so it catches the light. She finds a loose edge beneath her left ear and presses it back into place. She lifts her hair and repositions it. It’s come in the wrong texture, more like moss, or the silvery fronds of a fern. The sharp, brown tips of thorns are beginning to press up beneath her fingernails. She squats over the knife to check between her legs. It’s red and swollen, so she squashes the flesh between her fingers a few times to make it stay that way.

She’s finished her beauty routine and goes to explore the cabin. In the roof space she finds a chest. She’s found such chests before, containing a stolen wolfskin or a sealskin. She opens the chest and paws through it. It’s full of long braids of hair: blonde, black, brown, red. Maybe fifteen of them. They’re all tied with elastic bands. He could at least have tied them with ribbons, woven in baby’s breath or rose petals, made them pretty. The hair smells old.

She starts to wonder: when he dug her up, what was he burying?

 

Part 3: Adjustment of Leg-Hold Traps for Greater Profit

He changes her name to Nova, then forgets and calls her Nola again. It doesn’t matter. She makes eggs and lies in his bed.

“No,” she says, smiling, always smiling.

He accuses her of petty treacheries for which she is blameless. He drinks himself into a stupor, cries, then beats her for witnessing it. He tries to trick her into revealing herself. He wakes in the night and hears something from another room.

“In the earth, in the earth, where I waited for my birth. I’ll shiver when I come to you.”

There’s something wrong with her. He should have known it. What kind of woman would be out there in the woods alone? Not a good one. Not a wife.

“No,” she says, smiling, always smiling.

He makes her open her mouth wide, wider. He checks under her tongue and in the cavities of her cheeks. He lights a match and holds it close to her eyes to watch her pupils change. He holds the soles of her feet to the stove to check that they blister.

He knows there’s something. She lies, every night, between heaven and the dirt floor: that endlessly mysterious thing in bed beside him. How can a woman hide something from a man? Why must they always be so secretive, so sneaky? He knows she’s a thing from the woods. She can’t hide anything from him. He will make her change back.

“Show me,” he demands, then requests, then wheedles. “Show me what you’re hiding.”

“No,” she says.

He can’t trust her any more. He needs to sleep, but he has to be safe from her.

There in the wooden chest, gagged, blindfolded, hogtied, she admits defeat. She’s tried, but this just isn’t working out for her. She thought she’d wanted this life: a plain existence in the woods, a neat little cabin, cooking beans and birthing babies, no underwear and only two dresses so she could wear one while washing the other. A simple trapper’s wife, with only a trapper’s wife problems. Even if he was a poacher or bootlegger, that still had a certain purity. As easy as falling off a log. As easy as pie.

She shakes off her bonds and opens the chest.

She stands by the bed, looking down at Avie Thornaby. There are so many things she could have been. She’s screamed war cries from the prow of her husband’s fleet. She’s poisoned her husband’s entire dynasty. She’s been draped in perfumed furs and gleamed like a trophy at her doomed husband’s side. She’s been splashed in blood from her husband’s assassination. She can be all of it, everything, and all she needs is a man with a little imagination.

And what did this man choose? A hole.

Poor Avie Thornaby, who dug up a woman and never asked who buried her.

 

Part 4: Evaluation of Lures, Baits, & Urines

In the cabin, Avie Thornaby and Omri Glass and three other men whose names she never heard are laid out in a line, side by side. They are naked. There are very few marks on their bodies. They lie on their backs, mouths and eyes wide open, hungry for nothing, peeping up the skirts of nothing. She’s eaten the part she likes and leaves the rest for the other animals.

No, they’d all said as their final word. She quite likes that name and might keep it for next time. It feels lucky, the fact that they all remembered her name right to the end.

It’s easy to feel fond of them like this. Helpless and kind of silly. Their little dicks flopped to the side like worms. Their tobacco-stained teeth, cavities visible. Avie and Omri’s hands are almost touching. Did they ever touch in life? When they both put their little dicks in her, did their eyes meet over her shoulder? Did they smell one another’s sweat and semen? Was that the whole point of it?

She drinks off the water butt to the last drop, the rainfall cold and sweet. She can still taste them a little, but it will pass. She takes the shovel and nothing else.

She’ll try the other side of the lake. She doesn’t want to get too close to the water; last time she ended up with a fishhook caught in the roof of her mouth. She didn’t like having salt crusted around her eyes or wrinkled fingertips.

This side of the lake is closer to the city. The earth here is harder and lighter, and most of the prey animals have been spooked off. It might be a while until someone comes by. But she knows there are subterranean wells, and there might be scouts for new housing developments. Someone always comes eventually.

She digs a hole, then squats beside it. She urinates into the rich earth, then takes some leaves and wipes around her vagina. She could buy a scent spray with the correct pheromones, but she prefers to do it this way. Since she’s fed, from the divot in her lower back she’s sprouted a peacock tail of ferns which she can open and close at will. It’s a shame to lose that, but we’re all born naked.

She slides into the hole and pulls at the earth, letting it collapse onto her. The soil is the colour of biscuit crumbs, studded with seeds, tasting of woodlice and malt. She breathes it in, letting it fill her. Her eyes close and she lets herself sleep.

She waits to transform; waits to see who will unbury her.

© 2025 Kirsty Logan