Diorama 1871 (prelude)

Catie Rosemurgy


 

An old settler woman lived with her son on a plot of land she cleared herself. 

Every summer, sores spread up her arms as she widened the clearing, but nothing ever hurt or marked him. While he ran loose in the woods until morning, she kept herself from going after him by tying herself to the bed with the lines from her own face. 

Eventually he came home and untied her so she could cook the birds that he'd killed. She accepted anything he learned from the damp nighttime materials and asked very few questions. While he ate, she reminisced:

he'd been a shadow when he was born. 

She'd cleaned out his mouth and laid him in the middle of the moonlit field she'd created for exactly this purpose. She rubbed the luster into him, and it became his bones. No one was surprised. There's nothing you can't do here once you've cleared a field.