The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff

Author:Lauren Groff [Groff, Lauren]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

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It was foolish to stop to rest when her little boat was moving so sweet with the wind and the current, she thought, as if it were dancing with pleasure upon the surface of the water. And the wind cooled her head so that she was not uncomfortable now. And so, instead of pausing to stretch her cramped body or search for warmth and food upon land, she ate what she had left in the sack until there was no more food at all within it, and let herself thirst for a time. She needed to piss but held it in her. The mistress, during the coldest nights of winter, used a little brass pan from her Italian ancestors that she filled with hot stones, and on frigid days, she placed it between her bedclothes to warm them until it was time for the insertion of her own tender body between the sheets, and the girl thought of this, thought of her bladder full of hot piss becoming her own personal warming pan. And she laughed at herself, though not fully, only in breath, to keep the lightning of pain at the edge of her skull.

Once, the wind died down and the current carried her gentle for some hours. The very peace of the boat ride lulled her into a sweet contemplation as she watched the ranks of trees pass in the sun and looked upon the light as it slanted into the water. She felt a keener pleasure here, moving up the water, than she had ever felt in looking at any of the lifelike painted tableaux in the halls of the mistress’s friends.

The set of her mind then became soft and infinitely open, and as she gazed down into the water, she saw in the depths below her, playing in and out of the boat’s shadow, a swift great gray fish that might have been a porpoise like the ones that had danced around the ship’s wake as they rode across the face of the ocean. And now it came up, came near; and there was something in the shining glimpse, the liquid black eye of the fish gazing up at her as it passed out of the shadow into the light, that made her say, Yes, aloud, and gasp. There was an element in the trembling intensity of this vision so unlike the other most dazzling moments of her life that, for a breath, it pierced the little cloud of dullness in which she normally moved through her days. And it seemed to her that she could almost see something now moving beneath the everyday, the daily, the gray and oppressive stuff of the self, something more like an intricate geometry that lived beneath the surface of the material world. And this swift and gorgeous and too-rare strike to the heart was just like when one of the goldsmith’s apprentices beat and beat at a tiny lump of gold until all across the marble

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