Judith Lysaker
What She Knows
She sets out in the cold. She was right to come, despite the storm and the fading day, right to leave her house, that was being boorish about her needs. Only yesterday, the kitchen refused to keep things in place, and caused her to waste her time looking for a can opener, which was lying beside the bottle of Vodka in the freezer.
She walks in the woods now. Pleasing patterns of snow cover her coat. The trail remembers her footsteps, and the oaks greet her kindly with their winter leaves. She feels at home here, the grayness layering itself in tree bark and cloud. Soon, she is on a ridge above the snowy reservoir where the wind shows off its velocity. She listens as its secrets merge with her own and watches the clouds bend back the edges of the sky to show her what she needs to know. “Ah, yes!” she says, but it returns to the sky.
The path forks in front of her, and she hesitates, daunted by the familiar confusion. She sees a sycamore at the edge of a thicket of pines and takes the path toward it, detecting a hint of recognition, feeling more resolute in its presence. She walks on, though the path is longer than she remembers, and her steps become heavy in the snow-covered needles. She is tired now. The frozen ground calls to her. She lies down and relaxes into its firm welcome. In the dwindling light, there is a moment when she hears a thought sweep through her—someone might be wondering where you’ve wandered off this time—but it leaves in an instant and with forgiveness. So her mind lets go of all effort, and she lies in forgiveness, with the trees hovering over her like benevolent giants, her eyelashes tingling with slivers of ice. The wind fills her, and she smiles while she watches all she once knew flash brightly and disappear.
Judith Lysaker lives in Indiana with her brilliant, veggie-loving German Shepherd. An erstwhile academic, she now spends long hours writing short forms. Her work has appeared in Gone Lawn and *82. In her earlier career she published books with Teachers College Press and the National Council of Teachers of English.
