“When existing self-representations are rendered inadequate by explicit conflict that requires resolution, the individual may draw on a range of rhetorical strategies, either regressive and defensive, or integrating and creative, in an effort to adapt to the new situation.”
— Katherine P. Ewing, “The Illusion of Wholeness: Culture, Self, and the Experience of Inconsistency,” Ethos (1990)

I found you by the roadside, your pieces scattered beneath a lilac tree. I was drawn there for some reason, to the dizzy fragrance and cool shade. Dappled light on pale skin first appeared as fallen flowers, but then I drew nearer and understood. Your girlish face was now featureless as though smeared by a painter’s thumb. Your limbs, tangled and strange. I found an old trash bag blown among bushes. I gathered you into it and continued down the road.

People passed on bicycles and glanced with narrowed muskrat eyes. I couldn’t tell if they knew. I stumbled into quiet streets, lurked along fences, in the static green haze of trees. The rush of leaves and tender late sun were the same as they’d ever been.

For a moment I was safe. Outside of time.

At the back of a house, a sliding glass door like a dark mirror. Then a sliver of interior light. A yellow tomcat slipping out. Into the garden. Soundless. How lightly he skated through the yard, belly low among papery weeds. How he paused, forepaw dangling, to sniff a dandelion. Did he not know the world had ended? I rustled dead leaves with my hand, and he came and plunked down, purring and writhing in the dirt. But when I reached to stroke his neck, he startled with the full voltage of sudden knowing. His eyes flew wide. He sniffed at my hand, then veered to the bag. What do we have here? What? What?

I fled. I moved furtively, erratically through life, resting briefly in cobwebbed utility sheds or curled behind hedges with ants, before I was discovered and running again.

◆

I tried to piece it together. Pieces of you. Pieces of me.

A brown station wagon approaching on an empty road. A distant tinny sound like a fly, expanding, deepening to a growl. A car window descends: a man with a familiar face.

In the tree’s shadow lay fallen flowers, pale as stars. Dark and light making shapes, bodies embracing.

I left you alone with him. I knew better. Then I wanted to go back and speak in a thundering voice, but you were already gone.

◆

Years passed.

I saw a poster stapled to a power pole:

Missing.

Your face was smeared in the photo too, though only from sun and rain.

◆

A silver-haired woman found me asleep in her garden, among the tomatillos, and after the initial panic asked if I needed help. With my filthy dress and battered trash bag, it was clear something was wrong. I could not speak. I simply turned to her with what must have been a strange and unsettled look.

◆

I had a plan. I would chance upon a mountain spring. Glacial. Immaculate. I would wash your crumpled flesh and matted hair, taking care to preserve the original shapes. I would adorn you with wildflowers, river rocks, sprigs of red berries. I would bury you in the cool, loamy earth. I would emerge from the forest purified and new. I would take a new name. Begin a new story. I would find friends and maybe a husband. It almost seemed possible, but I knew eventually some wholesome young couple, hiking with their baby, would discover your remains. With DNA forensics you can’t get away with things now.

And I couldn’t just dump you like trash and walk away, even with the berries and flowers. After all you’d been through.

If the police questioned me, I could say I mistook you for lilacs. Then when I saw what had been done to you, I was afraid. I was ashamed. I hid you from the world.

But that’s not what I would say. The world would demand a reasonable story, so that it might continue turning, turning. The way it always had.

I had believed myself innocent, that circumstances along with my puzzling behavior led us all to believe otherwise. I question that now. So much time has passed since I found you beneath the lilac tree. I can’t be certain to recall things as they were.

◆

I walked to the edge of town, past the cemetery to the tilled fields of black soil, the ash groves and the muddy streams. Civilization yielding to raw earth.

I caught my reflection in the window of an abandoned farmhouse and stepped closer. I was prepared for the shock of hair and twigs, dingy eyes and ravaged skin. Instead I saw you, looking back from some lost wilderness. The buoyant face. Gold freckled eyes. Peeping. Blinking.

They were my eyes. Mine.

I remember you.

That shimmering electric field. Young animal shaping its way to the light.

The window before me was dirty and cracked, streaked by old rain. There was no reflection. Only a faint blur. Hovering. Waiting.

I opened the trash bag and peered inside. It was empty. Just a jumble of shadows and starlight. I shook it out in a vigorous motion. Once. Twice. Three times. The bag hung in the air like a sky lantern—billowy and filmy and white. Then slowly collapsed, drifting.