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It’s moments like these that make her think the drudgery might be enough. That tide and flesh have nothing on flour, sugar, and maple sap. She cuts another triangle, bites it clean through, and the unending burden of the day lifts just a bit. Just enough she blinks a little longer than usual, swallows a little slower, takes a breath in to taste the syrup on her tongue and rejoices in it. Katabasian Mason’s warning and Faulkner’s questions recede into the deep, rich flavor. This could be enough. Nana Glass could be wrong, and she could go out and live in the woods with nothing but her horrifically soft heart and a can of maple syrup and some bisquick. It’d certainly rid her of Faulkner. And she would give thanks. Every. Day. To be rid of Faulkner.
“There’s a town north of here,” he says, “Marcelle’s Crossing,” he says. He tells her about hate and fear and how he doesn’t understand anything but love for the River. She doesn’t understand how he refused the pancakes. Thick, and fluffy, and delicious. Rare. He keeps talking, his words washing over her and she feels herself eroding. She spears another triangle with her fork. Waits for it to dissolve on her tongue, given over to her continued existence as her continued existence is given over to tide and flesh. To seeking out and anointing the next sacrifice, to crawling into bed and pulling the blanket under her chin and staring at the wall without seeing it. Maybe her life will always be like this: counting down the hours until dark, a calendar in the back of her mind ticking down the nights until the angels must be fed. Closing her eyes to see a wall of faces staring from the inside of her eyelids. Drifting to sleep to the sound of their sobs.
She stirs a triangle around on her plate, watches the syrup overtake it. Bubbles rise from its fluffy middle: fast, then slow, then stopped. It’s ruined now. Soggy. Too soaked to taste good, too much sweet.
She wouldn’t do well alone in the woods. She would run out of pancakes. She would, eventually, stumble into something holy and beyond her and hungry. Or she would starve. Nana Glass was not wrong: she is not above this, she is drowning in it. Knee deep in her river and trailing corpses as she struggles upstream. Fighting the current and the drag of bloated flesh and the mounting exhaustion.
Another triangle. Another swallow, another burst of sweet. It is not all tide. She is not made entirely of water. The pancakes, the syrup, the good. The games she played with Em, the stumbling and her brother to pull her up. Trawler Man, take your prize and leave a gift behind and knowing that no gift was greater than his hand in hers pulling her onward, away from the banks and the mud and the sack cloth covered sacrifices. The words just words, her brother inseparable from herself, her scraped knees to be tended to later. No new face looking at her with an echo of that excitement. Just the two of them, she and her brother, running away from Nana’s cabin and not looking back. Calling, and his answer.
She scoops the drowned bite onto an untouched stretch of pancake. A sodden waste swept to higher ground. Lifts them to her mouth in unison. She could go out. She could live in the woods. Wait there, in the middle of the land, far from the river, until she could not bear the hunger anymore and her anger and desperation won out. Until she did something to be ashamed of. Until she slunk back to the river, back in with the tide to kneel and sing before running out again. She could play that game with herself.
Instead she sits. Swirls the last bite of pancake around her mostly-dry plate. Enjoys the burst of syrup across her tongue and tunes out Faulkner’s wretched voice beside her. Flour, sugar, syrup. This, in this moment, is enough. Thick. Sweet. Rare. This last bite restores her patience, her desire to be kind. For now.
“Come on. Let’s see this town for ourselves.”
She pushes away from the table, from her empty plate and Faulkner’s drained cup. She leaves, knowing Faulkner will follow. She walks back to the river.