The Line

# Chapter 1: The Season

The thaw came three days too early and the soil knows it.

I can feel the wrongness through my boots as I climb the eastern hill in the grey half-light before dawn, the knowing that doesn't live in the head but somewhere lower, in the arches of the feet where the ground pushes back. February thaw should smell like promise. This one smells like wet bark and rotted leaves and something underneath both of those things that is not quite a smell at all. More like a pressure. The way the air feels before a storm, except there are no clouds and the sky is the pale bruised color of a healing wound.

Bramble stayed on the bench.

That is the thing I keep turning over as I walk. Three mornings now I've been back and three mornings she's claimed the stone bench outside the cottage as though she never left it, as though two years on the road were a dream she's decided not to discuss. She sleeps curled in her old divot, the one Cob shaped with a rasp when she was half her current size, and when I came out this morning with my hat in my hand and my breath fogging, she opened one amber eye, measured me, and closed it again.

She did not come down for breakfast yesterday either.