Shadows & Tall Trees Read Online Free PDF Page A

twitched on the paper.
Sleep in the dirt under the floor. Dream and remember. Hear the sound of your mother loping over roads and creeks and up into the mountains. From my dry and waiting mouth the proboscis emerges.
    The fire ate it all and in the last corner he read,
Stars swell in their bed. You reach over the mountains for them as a child for Mother’s jewels. A moth or a magpie. I am come and you will be my son.
    Heat reached his fingers and he dropped the pages. Charring bits swirled into the yard and winked out. The skin on his fingertips blistered. He put his head in his hands and bit his tongue. Dark fell at last and he burned “Amanda” and “Dronning.” He pulled the battery from his phone and lay in the bed and stared up into the corner.

    Honeybees coated the hill the tired leaves the new earth

    A heavy thump out on the porch woke him and he looked at the windows. Each seemed as though a face had just pulled away. He went outside into the muddled stillness and walked around the cabin twice. The stars were sprayed everywhere. The place had no foundation and he dug his way beneath it in a moment. There was a crawlspace of sorts and he wriggled inside and lay down. Black as absence. He felt something curl up beside him and he slept in its warmth, grateful.

    A finger jabbed him in the ribs. The girl lay pressed against him, her face an inch from his. She licked his mouth with something too stiff to be a tongue.
    He tried to scoot away and knocked his head against the underside of the cabin floor. Sunlight pried in nearly all the way around. He watched as Meli pawed at the dirt and plucked things out of it. “Hey,” she said, her face streaked with filth, “open your hand.”
    “What do you want?”
    “Just do it, open your hand.”
    He held his palm out and she poured a stream of small objects onto it. Human teeth. He wasn’t about to count them but he thought there could be thirty or more. A full set.
    “What the hell are these?” he said. “Why did you want me up here?” He tried to look away but couldn’t. His mouth watered at the smell of her.
    Meli smiled and he saw she had no teeth of her own. “You don’t get it, do you?” she said, and laughed. Her speech was as strong and clear as his mother’s. “What do you think you’ve been reading? Come on, you’re a writer, we reached out to you in your own language. And in case you’re a visual learner, I hoped those pictures I took would help you along a little quicker. I had to come up here just because you’re so slow.”
    “Are these yours?” He shook the teeth in his hand.
    “Look, I know you had trouble with the stories.” She paused and inched toward him. Pushed her hand into his crotch. “Her style is a bit abstract, I guess. You do get that they were from Amanda, right? Dronning? Your mother is ready to make you in her image. Those are her teeth, remember? This is where she lived when she was a girl fresh across the ocean. She buried them here later. When she stopped needing them.”
    “You don’t know me. That’s what I remember.” It was difficult not to push her down and climb onto her.
    “Haven’t you ever wondered about your mom? I would’ve thought up a hundred stories in all these years. Did you know she got out of the home last night? They’re looking for her right now. If you put your battery back in you can listen to the voicemail.”
    “My mom’s practically catatonic. She gave up on herself a long time ago and now she can hardly walk or string together a sentence.” He reached to slap away her hand but she started kneading him through his jeans.
    “Call it sleeping, what she’s been doing all this time. It’s what the Queen does until the petals open. Where’d she go when you were a kid? It’s in the stories, dummy. Home to the old country, where she found her true husbands, her drones, and they fucked in fjords and fields beneath mountains different from these. She’d yearned for so long. Maybe