RECOLLECTIONS OF A TRAPPER SHACK CONFESSION
The last time he took me out into the woods, he said I had onion peel eyes and that my professors were mutilating me. Why? Because of all the dirt they couldn’t dig themselves out from. All of this was funny because in the fall he’d been my professor, and until later that day he was the filth with which I covered myself each night. As for the onions in my eyes, I can’t help that I cry when I read in front of writers. I’ve always known that’s what he liked best about me.
I’m not stupid, I knew it wasn’t going to end well, but I didn’t expect to get so much out of it. Really, it wasn’t all bad.
I didn’t used to talk to people. Didn’t want them to mistake me for someone who belonged, which to me meant someone they could use up and forget. I didn’t even want them to mistake me for living on the same continuum of time. From the time I could pick my own clothes, I wore saddle shoes and circle skirts. I didn’t think they looked better—like I said, I’m not stupid—but it felt right. Now that it’s over, I can see how that might have had something to do with why I ended up in the trapper shack.
Again, it wasn’t all bad. There were parts of inhabiting his life that made me feel like a living Modernist painting. I was Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 unspooling myself in every direction. New versions of the person I could be revealed herself in every dinner conversation, every piece of ephemera.
For example, I liked the watercolor of Sardinia he hung behind the toilet, although if I had the choice I’d have preferred Dubrovnik or Barcelona.
I liked that when I followed him to his apartment I’d catch whiffs of warm paper and waxed leather, but in the morning everything smelled vaguely pancreatic.
I liked that I could whisper all of this to him and he would carry on as if I hadn’t said a thing.
“Your face reminds me of a big pink lumpfish,” I could say.
And he’d respond, “And to our right is where the Cayuse slayed the Whitmans for their false promise of salvation.”
I liked that he’d tell me secrets as if I wasn’t listening. In the car, he told me about this girl he’d kissed through a hedge until both their faces bled. Sometimes a man says something and you just know he’s been trying to say it his entire life. When he told me about that girl, I knew he’d been telling me a story about her from the moment he’d stopped treating me like a student.
Considering this whole thing from his perspective, it must have felt like he was running out of time. The weather wasn’t good that day, but he had to get me out to that shack. He wouldn’t even say where we were going, he just went on and on about the changes in the cloud formations and how much he hated farmland, how I mustn’t peek in the boxes until we got where we were going.
And when we did get there, and I did look in the box, and I found that revolver of his father’s, do you know he still tried to carry on as if everything was right? He made me carry the box with the old gun for miles through the mist. I remember the way the air felt thicker between the ferns, how my knees came away speckled with wet dirt. By the time we found the shack, the sky was bone white between the pines and I wasn’t sure which way was which. All around, these primordial ferns grew up so tall and dense I couldn’t see our path.
Inside he showed me these worthless traps the old trapper left behind, but they might as well have been state of the art. I’ve relived that moment over and over. My heart races and I know I couldn’t have run if I’d tried. He pressed the rusted teeth of an old bear trap into my skin like some kind joke and I swear I felt their jaws snap across my ankles.
Then he took me around the back and pushed away all the rotten needles and ferns covering the root cellar. He’d prepared it like some kind of bunker. What could I say? I listened to him talk for a long time about how I was being ruined by my old professors. He called me a finely cut gem worn down by coarse grit. Should I have been flattered?
There we were in that pit he’d dug with a cot and a stove and enough water to last a year, or so he said. He wanted me there for a year with sun on my cheeks and daisies in my hair.
He wanted me to crawl underground, beneath that shack enclosed on all sides by ferns and mist, and live? There was no sun. Instead I felt this slicing pain around my face where he said my professors had twisted in their talons, but it wasn’t because of them at all. Or maybe it was them too. Maybe it was all the people I’d tried so hard to sanctify my spirit from.
I can still feel it—like scarification under the skin—whenever I think of his grip around my wrist, the way the finer bones slipped apart from each other at the hot recoiling strike of the revolver’s hammer. There are some feelings you can always slip into with perfect clarity.
Any girl can tell you, there’s a particular feeling you get when someone does a little too much for you. What only a few can tell you about is the exhilaration you get when you ignore that feeling. It’s funny, the last thing he told me, his best argument for why I should be his underground bride, was that I wasn’t really living, that I was losing myself day by day. If he’d listened to me at all, he’d have known he was my greatest expression of free will yet.
Maybe he was right, and this horror was his last gift for me. He wanted me to run away, and that’s exactly what I did. Just not with him. Not to that grave under the trapper shack. He really thought he’d built it for the two of us to live.
I’m not here to be filled up with your hopes and regrets.
I’m here to overflow.
Misty Violet, old enough, Pacific Northwest ✯ www.writemistyfor.me
“I'm a writer, and as of now that eclipses everything. I tried to live my life the smart way, and it didn't get me anywhere close to joy. I joined an actual cult, then left an actual cult. Now that I've begun to correct my path, the changes I've made don't feel like sacrifices at all.”