In the Pines

“All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception.”
—Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

 
The day that Perri was released from the Preakins County Jail was the day that her partner left her for Cedar, who was tall and gangly and had arrows and diamonds tattooed on their knuckles. The new pair stood together in the parking lot waiting for her with a pack of American Spirits and a strawberry smoothie that Perri had asked her partner, Luna, to get for her at the gas station, where they sold juices next to the hot dogs and glistening chicken breasts that turned slowly on spikes, dripping yellow grease.

“I love you so much,” Luna said as they pressed a kiss on Perri’s cheek, holding her tight for a moment before pulling back and handing her the smoothie. The water and fruit mix had mostly separated, the coagulated artificial strawberry bits floating in a thick layer at the top while pearls of condensation gathered on the outside of the plastic cup, which was no longer cold.

“You’re such a badass,” Cedar said, taking a drag of their cigarette. “Have you seen your mugshot? Everyone’s been sharing it. You look so hot.”

The three climbed into Cedar’s pickup, Cedar in the driver’s seat and Perri in the passenger’s, Luna wedged between the two. Cedar turned the ignition, twice, three times, and as the truck began its low rumble, Luna passed her Cedar’s phone, on which Perri’s own face was staring back at her.

In her mugshot, Perri had bags beneath her eyes; her brittle, bleached hair stood on its ends. Her gaze, however, was fixed at the camera, chin lowered slightly such that she gave the impression of looking up to the photographer, diminished but defiant. Few people would consider the photograph so hot, but she was in the car with two of them.

“That arraignment hearing was a joke,” Cedar said, taking back their phone. “The judge was an asshole. I’m sure they’ll lower the charges.”

“Felony theft? It’s not like you took the bulldozer with you,” Luna agreed. “That won’t hold up in court.”

“You stop those bastards from tearing up the Earth for four precious hours and it’s the same as theft?” Cedar said. “If anything, you were—”

“Not here,” Luna glanced at Perri. “Not with the phones out. Not until the case is closed.”

“Right,” Cedar said, and for a moment the car was silent. Tall green pines flickered outside the car window. As they rounded the corner, light fell on the dashboard and Perri shaded her eyes with her hand.

“I wanted to tell you,” Luna began. “This weekend, Cedar and I started seeing each other.”

“Seeing each other?” Perri asked. She set the smoothie in one of the truck’s gray cup holders, the bottom sticky with residue.

“You know, sleeping together. They spent the night in my tent.”

“This past weekend?” asked Perri.

“Yeah—”

“While I was in jail?”

“Come on, Perri, we’re open. Be reasonable.”

Perri turned her head briefly to look out the window, where the landscape was green and lush and shadowed, then turned back to Luna. “Reasonable about the fact that they slept in my spot while I was in a fucking cell?”

“Perri, it just happened—you know how love is.”

“And did you look at my mugshot before you fucked? Did you feel less guilty if you said how hot I looked before having sex on my fucking sleeping pad?”

“Come on,” Cedar said. “You know Luna loves you, this doesn’t change anything.”

“Pull over.”

“What?”

“Pull over, I’m going to be sick.”

Cedar pressed their foot to the brake and swerved obediently to the side of the road, where Perri climbed out and began to heave, one hand on the car’s metal frame, the other seizing her own brittle hair. Pale food chunks and bile, pink from the smoothie, dribbled through the dried grass and into the ditch a few feet from the asphalt.

“Babe, can I do anything—” Luna began.

“Don’t,” said Perri before lurching forward again, buckling at the waist. Luna sat in silence in the middle seat, one hand resting gently on Cedar’s inner thigh.

---

Perri had been given two books in the cell she was confined to for the weekend: The Fellowship of the Ring with a section missing in the middle, and the Bible. She chose to read the Bible.

Monday morning she was released from the Preakins County Jail with her preliminary trespassing, theft, and obstruction of justice charges. Monday afternoon she cussed out Luna in the gravel parking lot of the environmental protest camp where they were living, something which no one seemed to particularly understand because, of course, their relationship had been open. Monday evening she dragged her sleeping pad and duffel bag from their place in Luna’s tent to a new tent, a blue one she found in the shed.

Several days later she drove alone down the highway to scout the site she’d been assigned, carrying her DSLR camera and telephoto lens, a pair of binoculars, and a notebook. The pines were fleeting outside the open window and when the Little Snake River twisted nearer to the road the trees gave way to dry, golden reeds. She parked her car in an alcove off of a service road and began to walk along the river, tracing its curves from twelve feet back in the shrubbery of the forest.

From the place in the forest where no one could see her but she could see everyone—the construction workers coming and going in pickups so similar to those of her friends, the muskrats slipping into the water just meters from where an assortment of chrome machines emitted sounds of drilling and whirring, the security guards in their black vests standing idly at the perimeter of the site—she felt a weight like the universe extending its palms and pushing with its full might upon her shoulders, which were hunched below the line of the brush.

In jail they had strip searched her and let her shower just once, the dirt and sand from the day’s protest coming off only then. At camp in the days since, she had hidden in the kitchen with the old bearded man who did the cooking. She helped him chop piles of onions, boil heaps of potatoes. Later they served it in a tofu scramble that the activists lined up to scoop into their mismatched plastic bowls. All the while the Energy Company moved their machines to the riverbank where they prepared to drill beneath the water to lay the pipeline.

At camp, people would giggle and roll spliffs in their hammocks, they would play banjos by the campfire, would gaze at the constellations in the unpolluted sky and kiss and fall in love. Here, the drill would burrow down with officers standing guard and more people would sit in jail for trying to stop it than had been there the day before.

Perri tucked the camera and notebook and binoculars into the backpack, then tucked the backpack into a nook at the base of a tree. She unlaced her shoes, slid them off, and pulled off the socks that were damp with sweat and mud. It was then that she descended to the riverbank.

She stepped over vines and stumps, rocks and pits in the soil. Soon she was at the water, slipping her feet into it, toes spreading as the peat and silt squelched between them. The shade from the trees shifted away, the sunlight hurtled down in beams like the torrent of a waterfall. It was so warm, so light where she stood ankle deep in the silt, knee deep in the cool, quick water.

“Hey!” shouted a man’s voice from the construction site. “Hey, what are you doing there?”
Perri took another step forward and stumbled, hand slapping the water and water striking her face.

“This is an active construction site, you can be arrested for trespassing!”

She stepped forward again and her foot landed on a large stone, which shifted under her weight and rocked her forward, sending her tumbling into the water. The water swallowed her easily, and in it, she found, she was suspended. She opened her eyes and saw only light, she twisted her arms and legs and met no resistance.

When she woke in the rear seat of a police vehicle with her hands tied behind her back, head throbbing, she began to pray. “Lord forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Pine trees flickered by outside the darkly tinted windows.

 
 
Andrea Felland is a student of Comparative Literature at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle. She lives and works in Paris.