22 | Psychopomp Magazine
she remembered. She thought. She couldn’t be sure. I want to be sure I made the right choice.
The oak said, Well, if you didn’t, it’s too late now. He chuckled a robust, oaken chuckle. The tree-woman rustled her leaves, reflected that even here, she couldn’t escape the patriarchy.
She knew patriarchy better than she knew her own name. Before the change, she had been a radical poet. She wore her hair short and wrote about heartbreak and stillbirth and jutting hipbones. She dropped her own name (whatever it was) and went by unlikely nouns. For a while, though she did not remember this, her name had been Swamp. Once, Effigy Jones. She was a not-quite-failed poet, and sometimes she wished she’d been all-the-way-failed. There was a certain whiskey glory to failure. A raw edginess of just giving zero fucks, of writing the pure word and setting fire to the split-level ranches of anyone who didn’t get it. But instead she’d been accepted by the establishment, began filtering her word choice, becoming a tamed thing.
On the day she found herself hesitating over the word cunt in a piece, she said fuck it. She left everything behind: the typewriter, the three dresses, the chipped lemon teacup. She charged out into the woods to find a wise woman or a witch or worse.
A friend stopped her on the way. He was the kind of friend who was always there at the unlikeliest, most heart-broken moments: quietly appearing with umbrellas in the rain. He would have been easy to fall in love with. He stopped by the side of the wooded road, window down.
“Wait,” he said. “Don’t do something you can’t undo.”
She laughed and held out her empty hands, her slim wrists pale in the twilight.
“Reality is a prison,” she said. It didn’t mean anything, but she wanted something to say. And she hated that, too: feeling like she needed to have something to say. She was tired of words.
He just looked at her with old, sad eyes. “Come back with me,” he said. “We’ll get coffee and cinnamon rolls. We can throw eggs at rich people’s houses. We’ll get a cat.”