I Met My Wife in the Woods by Ash Vale
1300 words, ~6 minutes reading time
Issue 5 (Summer 2024)
I met my wife in the woods.
No, that's not right, I don't—I don't know why I said that.
I met my wife through a mutual friend at a party, years ago. Our friend said "you two have a lot in common" and we didn't, not really. She was willowy, and fierce, and bold; I was timid and fretful, a field mouse fawning over a great horned owl. What we did have in common, however, was a love of the wild and a distaste for crowded rooms. Her eyes were grey-blue like choppy waters, pulling me in like a fledgling sailor. She was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen, and I thought to myself: what a joy it might be to drown.
Before I met my wife, I was lonely. I talked to coworkers and sometimes the delivery driver and that was enough. It had to be enough. Besides, I liked my own company. Out of habit, I became a woman of solitude. I slept alone, I ate alone, I dreamt alone. I often hiked deep into the woods, beguiled by the promise of seclusion. I thought, if I disappeared, it would take people ages to find me, if they ever did. It was comforting to think about my sun-bleached bones easing their way into subsoil. Safe. Quiet.
My wife is anything but quiet. I love that about her. She laughs loud and blunt, sings wistful songs in languages I don't understand. Gaelic, she says, or sometimes French, depending on her mood. She tells me I'm beautiful and captivating and soft in tongues foreign to me. I want to believe her. I nearly do when we're wrapped around each other, her love spilling through the whispers she presses into my heated skin. The few people around me say that I had no colour in my life until I met her, and maybe that's true. I don't remember ever feeling this happy. Maybe I'd never really felt happy at all.
When we were introduced, our friend said "you two have a lot in common" and I smiled and held out my hand to shake. "May I have your name?" She asked.
She felt familiar, like a lost lover I'd give anything to meet once more. Her eyes were soot in the hearth, warm and littered with the bite of hidden embers.
Isolation and breathy whispers of trees used to call me to the forest again and again. I suffocated in the sparse foliage and dense crowds on the popular trails where I first ventured. Yet I was compelled to return, to go farther, always in search of unfrequented routes and the eerie calm of being alone in the thicket. Had our paths crossed on a hike?
I met my wife in the woods.
No, we—we first met at a party, like I said.
My wife is a terrible cook. I cook for the both of us, just one small way I try to repay her for all that she brings me. She longs for everything sweet; overripe berries, figs drenched in honey, sticky syrups and butter on crusted bread, things that make my teeth ache just looking at them. I tell her that all this sweetness has made her saccharine, that she sticks in my mouth like toffee. Her hair in the morning light is like inky spun sugar, tangled between our limbs and binding us together. When I tell her these things, her smile is secretive and sharp and only for me.
Sometimes, I think I dreamt her up. That the glittering gems and small rodent skulls and oddly shaped rocks that appear in our home are a kind of foci I collected to strengthen my delusion of her. That I summoned her image from my own insistent yearning. That I continue to project her here through a desperation to keep us both existing. That if I look closely at the strands of her Stygian hair trapped in our bedsheets, they might crumble to ash in my destructive hands.
If she is an illusion, she remains the best thing that's ever happened to me. I tell her that I'm obstinate and disquieted and she could fly so much further without me. She tells me instead that I am grounding and moored and keep her from floating away. She kisses me and kisses me and kisses me and I don't deserve it, and I can't tell her that for fear that she'll see me as I see myself. I don't tell her that where she is sweetness, I am salt, devastating the soil and butchering new growth. I am root rot and yet she grows like the ivies climbing our little house, up towards the sun and sky.
The day we met, she asked "May I have your name?"
The question left her lips like blight. The hairs on the backs of my arms stood without my permission as she observed me, unblinking. I felt myself teetering on a great precipice, unaware of what might lie below but aching to find out nonetheless. Perhaps my whole life I was falling, and only now was the ground rushing up to meet me.
Her eyes were the colour of aureate wheat fields in the early spring, parched and ready to ignite.
Was it so wrong to feel cherished by the heat of an imminent flame?
I met my wife in the woods.
I met my wife in…
Maybe there was never a party.
In the autumn, she looks at me with eyes alight and runs out the door of our home, silently asking me to pursue. The chase is a mockery when we both know I am always the hunted. I follow her through the tall dry grasses that tickle my face, and my skin prickles with the weight of her eyes on my form. The grass shifts. I know that she is nearby, hungry, waiting to devour me.
In the winter, she doesn't return for days. I track her prints through the mud and snow to find her curled up nude in a copse of trees. She is encased in hoarfrost and cold, her body pale and lax in my arms. I carry her back and wash away her violence, until she is gentled and mine once again. I pull the twigs and animal bones and guilt from her hair as she sips pine needle tea and shows me snowflakes she collected in her palms.
In the spring, she brings me wildflowers—fireweed, fleabane, crocuses, bergamot. They come to me in bouquets, or in her tangled hair, or in her bloodied teeth.
In the summer, I wake in the night, reaching for her and meeting empty space. On warm nights like these, I know I'll find her in the lake near our home, the glittering slits of her eyes watching me from the darkness until she's ready to take shape again. I throw rocks into the lake and watch something large and improbable follow their paths through the reeds and silt. My eyes slide over where she should be, as if my body is protecting me from something I cannot know.
Her eyes are verdant like broken sea glass, and I cut myself over and over again to hold her in my hands.
I met my wife in the woods.
In the end, it doesn't matter how we met. I know what is true, and it's this: my wife is a wild and frightening thing and she loves me.
She asked for my name, and I gave it to her. I gave her everything, and I never looked back.