The Uses of Enchantment by Heidi Julavits

Author:Heidi Julavits
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Literary, Fiction
ISBN: 9780307389404
Publisher: Random House LLC
Published: 2006-10-15T07:00:00+00:00

What Might Have Happened

When the girl woke up, she was alone. The sun, a bleach stain upon the overcast sky, had nearly cleared the tops of the pine trees that closed in on her from all directions save the direction of the very narrow road.

Still half asleep, she turned her groggy attention to the mess at her feet—potato chips ground into the Mercedes’s carpet, a skull-shaped stain of spilled root beer. She could see her breath, which meant the man had abandoned her some time ago. He hadn’t left the car running, nor the heat. How inconsiderate, the girl thought to herself. Her man wasn’t shaping up as she’d hoped.

She opened the door and stepped into four inches of snow covering a partially frozen puddle. Immediately her field hockey cleats filled with icy water. Her calves and ankles tingled.

Hello, the girl called out.

Overhead, the trees sounded like brushes slipping through somebody’s coarse, heavenly hair.

Her anger turned to worry. To just up and leave her to freeze to death in her field hockey uniform did not seem like him. To leave her to be gnawed to death by wolves, discovered by a depraved snowmobile rider who would take liberties with her stiff if still inviting cadaver.

She circled the car, spotted footprints leading through the woods. To the left of the footprints, every four or five steps, was a minuscule drop of blood.

So he was hurt, she concluded, but not badly. His finger, most likely; he’d reopened his wound. He had gone into the woods, simply to pee. Again she called out, to save him any potential embarrassment. Again all she heard was the sound of brushing hair.

She followed the footprints through a parting in the trees, tracing the vague suggestion of what might, in snowless times, be a path. As the cold intensified, so did her earlier dismissed anger. How could he leave her like this? Alone, in the woods, without the car key, without access to heat? She cycled back to the possibility that he was seriously injured. Now she hoped that he was seriously injured. She hoped he was gradually bleeding to death beneath a boulder that had landed on his leg. She hoped his foot had sprung a bear trap, that he’d been mistaken for a deer by a bow hunter. Nothing else would excuse his abandoning her.

Soon the path became a clearing, the clearing became a meadow. The footprints continued across the snow-blown expanse and entered the woods on the opposite side. Where was he? Her wet feet, now starting to freeze, throbbed in a prickly way and she started to cry, the tears freezing and shrinking and pulling at her skin like glue. She was thirsty, hungry—when had she last eaten? The diner, and then, after the gas station stop, she’d eaten a bag of vinegar chips that left her stomach raw and the insides of her cheeks fuzzy with canker sores. The people she and the man had been at the diner were hard to connect to the people they were now.

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