With a knife as sharp as love she cut branches from the rose. The rose sighed, but bowed to her mistress’s desire. With a knife as sharp as hate she cut branches from the rowan. Petals rained across the ground, red and white. The wind blew the petals, the rain tore them, but the man of wicker rose taller and taller. Passersby stared, but she sat on her porch, indifferent, weaving the man. The thorns pricked her fingers, her blood smeared the wilting rose buds, but she knew it would only give the man more power, and she wove on and on.
***
He turned his head slowly toward home. He was stunned by the scream of rockets overhead and the screams of dying men, so stunned that he could hardly remember the cottage he called his own and the woman he called his wife. Where did the once familiar scent of rowan and rose blossoms come from in this field of mud and dying men? Why did he feel that he had no choice but to follow it?
***
She set a trap and captured a young robin. Its still-beating heart the wicker man wore on his chest like a medal. She set a trap and captured a crow. Its bright seeing eyes the wicker man held in his hands.
***
Metal fragments destroyed his arm. He found a severed arm lying in the muck, and pressed it to the stump. Her call was for a man complete, and he obeyed. Machine gun fire tore his leg away, and he found a German leg in no-man’s-land and made it his own. Bullets ripped his stomach out, and he reached deep into a dying horse and pulled out what he found there. The horse’s shrieks were drowned by the shriek of the rockets and shrieks of men. The glistening mass in his hands filled the gap in his middle well. The call became more insistent, and he lifted his head and sniffed the air.
***
Late into the night she sang a song her mother had taught her. Owls landed on her outstretched hands and dropped to the ground, dead. When the sun rose she gathered the bodies and threaded a string through each feathered throat. When the sun was high in the sky the wicker man wore a necklace of birds singing in unison an inescapable song.
***
All around him men, men no older than he was, begged for help for their broken bodies, but he could only hear her voice. He turned west, facing the sun, a dying red beast on the horizon. His gait was ragged, but he had no choice, he must obey. The mud could not hold him. Gunfire could do no more than pierce him. He moved through the rain of metal, and then he moved beyond, through shattered villages and broken woods, through a long moonless night. The sun rose behind him, but there were no birds to sing, and still he moved, through an earth shocked into silence. His legs wanted to stop, his heart no longer beat, but the scent of the rowans wouldn’t let him rest, the song of the owls was like metal piercing his skull. So he went on and on, a bleeding thing, into night again, where she waited for him, standing at the end of the village road, standing on the porch in her white nightgown, standing in a night so black that she couldn’t see what was coming down the road, coming closer and closer, until it put out its hand and opened the iron gate.
L. Carroll writes in Colorado, USA.
