Jenny Irish

Puppet

In winter, to draw the milk from the heavy udder of a cow closed away against the sideways lashing of the sleet, a witch could stab a knife into her wall and hang from its handle four snips of string to act as puppet teats, which she could suck into her mouth and nurse from, nourishing her own wickedness.

In winter, the snow fell heavy and piled high, as high as a man’s shoulders, higher than a woman’s head. The earth could be whited out, the landscape a seeming wreck of ash. To look at it, one might think: nothing here will ever grow green again.

In a too-warm classroom, my students discuss the difference between want and need. Need is a word they know springs from nauti: the common root of exhaustion and death. Need’s roots, they know, tangle too, underground, with those for the words famine and corpse.

Need, they know, means necessary, as in a necessity, like nourishment for the body, like nourishment for the soul. Need, we learn together from a dictionary of etymology, is also rooted to death. Not literal death, but a euphemistic one, which a student thrills to share is called by the French la petite mort, the little death, a phrase which desires to evoke the deep disorientation of curl and spasm then the body and spirit leaping apart like teen lovers caught: the immediate aftermath of orgasm.

The story of a woman with strings in her mouth, sucking through them stolen fatted milk, is a story of a fear of starving.

This story, which is a story of a fear of starving, is also a story of the many kinds of hunger that wrack a body.

For example: Imagine that you love a man. Imagine he has withdrawn and gives you no sign of his love.

In this story the man is God.

In another story a she-goat is weighted with silver is driven into a desert.

In another story a poor man is feasted every night for a year then pummeled with stones.

In another story a tiny cake is placed on the breast of the dead to absorb their sins and be eaten by their closest blood-survivor.

In this story a woman with a knife and string, the most common of domestic supplies, will be made to bear blame for the beloved’s rejection, and she will be hung by the neck until dead.

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The Woods are Dangerous, Dark and Deep

I am the mystery made of the red hunting mastiff hauling his dog bulk onto the hackled back of the tawny wolf, the called merciless outcome of the red mastiff hitching high his forepaws and heaving his stiff, old hips against the hackled hindquarters of the tawny wolf separated from her pack and staving off starvation in the snow by stalking what threw shadows by lantern light—mother, man eater—made incoherent to her instincts by one specific instinct, though her hackles were raised, inviting the red mastiff, a dog hand-fed from the hand of a man, a dog dressed in boar skin armor bladed at the throat, a dog dressed smartly to survive the hunting of wolves, to mount her, to mash his body against her body to make a new body inside her with the lunge that lodged him there, and after the hunting party has loaded me, her consequence son, full with silver shot, when they cut my belly open, I mother-taught, return to them the perfect and pale hand of a missing girl as greased and blue as a baby at birth.

Hope is the word for the distortion allowing one man among the hunting party to see the small hand of a small girl spill from my belly—the blood slick slit, the belly of the beast— and believe she may be as whole inside me as a captive kept in the tower of a castle, cloistered above the treetops like a virgin princess, ringed and ringed by the safety of stones stacked upon stones.

Yes, this is how a man builds a wall—stone upon stone—and yes, this is how a man builds a cairn too.

The small hand, blue and greased, is whole, it is true, whole and attached to a wrist, and the wrist is attached to a thin, strong arm, but there the girl comes to an end, having met her life’s end when she was only just beginning. What one hunter thinks is the beginning of the girl, taking hold of her blue greased hand to guide her from the blood slick slit, my belly bared, reveals itself, when coaxed, as the evidence of her end, her whole hand attached to a wrist, the wrist attached to an arm, thin and strong, but that is all the whole of the girl that there is.

Dear whole hand, dear heartbroke hunter, dear hamstrung hope. I am part dog, part wolf, all dead.