rewilding

Hypatia Orchard

               “You need to let loose,” Hannah shouted over the music. We were at a spin class, which she had dragged me to, because God forbid I fall behind on my Strava activities. We’d started doing a monthly challenge to motivate ourselves. Turns out it was just me who needed the motivation, and quite frankly I didn’t give a single fuck.

               “What mad thing do you have in mind?” I puffed out.

               “Oh, I don’t know, you’re the creative one. But the breakup really did a number on you. It’s time you embraced your wild side. I know it’s still in there.” She was hardly breaking a sweat. “You could go on a solo getaway. Get a bit freaky.”

               “I like that idea. Somewhere away from civilization where I can jerk off and start a cult.”

               “Ideally the place will come with a hot gardener who can help you with that.”

I looked over at her. Still no sign of pain. Bitch. The instructor yelled at us to get up off the seat. My quads burned but it didn’t bother me because I was thinking about the hypothetical gardener. It was the first time since the breakup I’d felt desire for someone else, and the fact that he was made up was irrelevant. 

*** 

I booked myself a weekend at a stone cottage in a plum orchard just south of Clyde. The sun was already low in the sky when I drove in, and it looked nothing like the pictures. It was apparent there would be no gardener to help me out—grass was knee-high and most of the fruit in the orchard had been shat out by birds. I turned off the engine. I could find a nice hotel in one of the close-by towns and write an angry review over a glass of prosecco. Or I could see it as all part of letting loose. 

I got my things out of the backseat and put my bushwhacking skills to practice. The first thing I noticed about the cottage was not that the front door was wide open but that there was a stack of firewood piled up by the side of the house. Did I seem like a girl who could build a fire? It was early autumn so I could probably get away with no heating but a stone cottage didn’t scream warmth.

Aside from the door being left open, there was something else off about the place. I half-expected someone to chase me out with a broom, muttering something in a foreign language, or to hear a witch’s cackle and the door to lock behind me. But I was in rural New Zealand so neither of those things happened. 

I placed my bag down on the double bed. The cow portrait on the wall stared at me as I took my shoes off. I scrunched my toes—the sheepskin rug felt nice underneath. Out in the kitchen, I noticed a bowl of plums on the wooden table. I bent down and saw that one was half-eaten. What the hell? 

A prickling sensation ran through my body—was I being watched? The small living room couldn’t exactly hide anyone; there was only a sofa, a table with two chairs, a log burner, and a squat bookcase tucked in a corner. It had one book in it. I picked it up. It looked about two hundred years old. I fingered the pages—brown, musty-smelling, fragile. The contents, though, were not so much. It was a book about water-women. Mythical beings, similar to nymphs, who live in waterways. My fingers tingled. They felt slick and wet. Were they also glowing? An ache pulsed from deep within, a slow build like the first tremors of an earthquake. I wanted to shout, to jump up and down with glee, aware it could pass any minute. A feeling I thought was lost had been returned to me. I ran to my bag, fished my laptop out, pulled up a chair and got to work.

It was dark when I checked my phone again. There was a message from Hannah—So proud of you. Full debrief when you’re back in the city. I’m also dying to know if he has a moustache. In my head he does. Need confirmation.

I looked back to my laptop screen. I’d written almost ten pages within two hours. But the words weren’t in any particular order. Even though they held little structure their rawness felt like a mirror being held up to me. If I needed any more evidence that I was an unwell human, there it was. Nevertheless, a sense of achievement burst through me. 

The wind picked up. I stood to press my face against the glass as if I was an exhibition piece. The women in that book weren’t trapped like this. They knew the secret to living freely. 

It was completely black outside. I could barely make out the fruit trees past the verandah. I took a step back and saw myself in the reflection. That’s when I noticed my eyes were no longer blue—they were black. I rubbed them. I must have been imagining things. I’d exhausted myself from writing. The sound of the wind became louder. Its force beating against the cottage like a whip. It seemed to be talking to me. Willing me to follow it. And so I did. 

I went out the front door and through the orchard. Ripe plums squashed under my feet, and the smell of fermentation permeated the air. Its vinegary quality awakened a hunger in me I’d been repressing. It made me want to get down on all fours and push my face into the earth to taste the rotting fruit. For a moment, I had entirely forgotten why I was out there. My ears pricked up at the whooshing sound. It told me “come here”.

I followed the sound down to a clearing. There was a stream, bathed in moonlight, surrounded by flax and fern. My soft, urban soles padded over smooth stones, the whooshing sound growing louder. Maybe I could pretend to be a water-woman for a while. No one was around to witness this descent into fantasy. The night was warm enough, too. I undressed and felt the hairs on my body stand up but as soon as I entered the water everything was soothed.

All of it was mine. The gentle flow of water, the focal light from the moon that somehow made me see better, the freshness of the air that filled my lungs. I could actually enjoy the quiet. 

But of course there was a caveat. There was something waiting under the silver stream. 

A pair of black eyes, just like mine had been in the window, blinked beneath the surface. Was this part of my fantasy? My knees crumbled and I fell back. She rose then. Not suddenly, not dramatically, but with a presence that made everything else still.

Before I had a chance to scramble out of the water she took hold of my hands. I had no choice but to give into her command, the whooshing sound had already become his voice. There was no escaping. It was the morning he ended things. The sun filtered through his apartment like it always did, dull and indirect, the kind of light that made everything look like an old photo. I sat on the edge of his sofa, watching the words leave his lips, but they fell like pebbles, not punches. Muffled, distant—as if we were both underwater. How many times had he rehearsed them? 

The glitter of the moon on water caught my eye and pulled me out of the memory. The water-woman was still squeezing my hands, taking deep breaths as if she was the one who needed to ground herself. Her long, tangled hair stuck to her face but it didn’t seem to bother her. I wanted to reach out and part it for her, tuck some of it behind her ears. But she wouldn’t let go of me. Her eyes, black and endless, were windows. Through them, I saw his face, not as he was, but as I remembered: tired, practiced, already gone. 

The familiar feeling of pain prickled at the sides of my jaw, around my ears, and dug its way into my mind. Bastard. It felt like it was settling in, making itself at home. I imagined it dusting the bookshelves lined with old rage journals, sweeping the floor while whistling an insufferable tune, even sorting through records I couldn’t bear to play.

There were cracks all over my body when I looked down at myself. They felt like fault lines. On the precipice of rupturing. Her hands tightened around mine and my breath caught as I looked into the black pits that were her eyes. 

“They’re not cracks. They’re ravines ready now to fill.” Her words reached me not from mouth, but mind. Water poured into me, finding the curve of my hip bones, the waterways that encircled my ribcage, the edges between my body and the space around it. I hadn’t realised my body had felt two-dimensional until I felt the roundness of it filling up again. She pulled me into the depths of the water and when I emerged she was gone. My skin hummed. I was no longer caged by the city or his shadow.

At dawn, I walked back through the orchard, which was now alive with plums that glistened like fresh blood. I picked some, cradling as many as I could manage in my arms. Fruit flies followed me back to the cottage as if they were my disciples. Through the open door, just as I’d left it, I dropped the plums into a bowl and took a bite out of one. I didn’t wipe away the juice that dribbled down my chin. I let it stay, warm and sticky, and smiled. 

—

Hypatia Orchard likes to embrace the subtle wildness of life, much like the characters she writes about. She loves... a sprinkle of magic here and there, finding pockets of sunshine, and most importantly—being a woolgatherer.