bigger and braver than any she could ever comprehend and all she has to do is find the strength to go after it.
At night she writhes in her bed listening to it. Wanting it. Needing it until it causes her cheeks to burn red and tears to run from her eyes. And in the morning she slows her steps as she passes by the gate in the middle of an errand. She promises herself that tomorrow she will sneak through it. Tomorrow the world will be hers.
Tomorrow she does pass through the gate. Just enough to know that no siren will wail at her departure. That no one will notice her absence.
In her dreams and when she’s awake, again and again she crosses through the gate. She’s timed the Guardian patrol just right so that she knows when to slip away, when to sprint down the path with a lightness of freedom unlike she’s ever known. It consumes her.
Sometimes she tells herself she won’t ever come home. Yet she always does. Because there are rules and she’s a good girl. But not so “good” that her skin doesn’t start to feel tight and itch as if her body’s shrinking and the only thing that will release the compression of it is to escape to the path.
So she does, pushing farther and farther into the Forest. She learns to ignore the Unconsecrated who follow her every step, learns to listen instead to the way the wind tickles its way through leaves overhead and to the chirp and whir of birds.
The sun feels brighter and the shade cooler in the Forest and she starts to wonder why it’s off limits. She likes that she doesn’t have to think what’s next when she’s on the path: it’s just one step and then another and the fences keep her moving straight ahead.
One day, she walks far enough to find a second gate, and she stands for a long time staring at it, wondering if she should go through or if it’s a sign that she’s wandered too far.
She sets her hand on the metal latch, feeling a pattern of rusty prickles against her fingers. She still hasn’t decided what to do when a voice calls out to her. “You’re here,” it says.
Startled, she runs her gaze through the Forest and down the path and finds a pair of eyes looking back at her. A young man approaches the gate from the other side.
Not expecting anyone else to be on the path, especially a stranger, it takes a moment for her to find her voice. “I am,” she responds because to show her confusion and shock would make her appear weak. Tabitha never likes to appear weak. “Are you expecting me?” she asks because she’s suddenly not sure whether she’s awake or asleep.
She notices that the young man has his sleeves rolled up and his forearms are exposed. She’s seen forearms before, of course, but there’s something different about his. Something so informal and intimate about the sloppiness of the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, as if she could push a finger underneath the fabric and tempt the sensitive skin there.
The sun glows off the blond hair covering his arms. His fingers look long and tan, curled slightly as he stops on the other side of the gate. “Not especially, but I’m glad you’re here,” he says. She looks up from his arms to his face.
He’s smiling at her, eyes slightly crinkled because the sun is at her back. “I think,” she tilts her head and ponders for a moment because she doesn’t like to be rash with her words. “I think I am too.” She grins at him.
She learns that his name it Patrick and that he comes from another village in the Forest.
“I didn’t know there were other villages in the Forest,” she admits, and he explains the system of the paths and gates, the tangle of their order.
She tries not to let him see what this knowledge does to her, how it makes her blood pump furiously through her body. Growing up, she’d been told they were all that was left. Her village the only survivors of the Return.
She was told it was her sole and sacred duty to continue the path of humanity.
“Quite a few of the villages are gone,” Patrick explains. “But there are enough left that we’ll survive.”
Neither of them opens the gate between them and, as she walks home in the late afternoon, Tabitha’s head explodes with the newly learned reality of her world. It’s as if she’s spent her life kneeling on the ground, staring at a rock, and suddenly she’s standing, staring at a field full of stones.
She wonders what it would be like to fly. To see the entire world at once. She runs through the Forest, arms out, with fingers almost—but not quite—brushing the metal links of the old fences. She realizes that the world might be hers to know after all.
They agree to meet at the same gate on the second afternoon after the full moon each month. Tabitha spends the between days lost in dreams. Her mother starts to scold her for burning dinner. Her younger brother skins his knee one day when she’s not paying attention. She barely remembers the words to the prayers she’s asked to recite at services.
But she’s alive. And she wants to grab everyone around her and scream that there’s a world that’s more important than any of these daily toils. Yet she doesn’t say a word because she fears them locking the gates. Locking her from the path, and from Patrick.
The first two times they meet again, neither opens the gate. They stay on their respective sides and tell stories. She rolls onto her back on the path and stares up through the canopy of leaves and watches how the sun caresses each one as Patrick tells her about his dreams.
Sometimes she closes her eyes and wonders what it would be like to walk through the gate and run away with him. And sometimes she imagines bringing him home with her and claiming him as hers.
At the end of their third meeting, he laces his fingers through the links of the gate and she laces her fingers through his and they sit that way for an afternoon, feeling each others’ pulse fighting.
He brings her a gift at their next meeting: a worn book with pages as soft as feathers. She’s astonished at how small it is, how compact. The only books she’s ever seen are copies of the Scripture in her village, thick heavy tomes with paper like onionskin.
“It’s my sister’s favorite,” he tells her. “I thought you might like it too.”
She reads the little book three times before their next meeting, trying to understand what it means. It’s about a house and a woman and her husband who, she discovers, may have drowned his first wife. It’s lush and dangerous and makes her body pound and pulse.
“Why would a man be so cruel to his wives?” she asks Patrick after the next full moon.
He looks at her with his head tilted. “It’s just a story,” he says. “It’s just made-up. It’s fiction.”
She nods but she’s frowning because she still doesn’t understand what that means and he pulls her into his arms to ease her worries.
In the winter she tells him about Brethlaw, the celebration of life and marriage at her village. He opens the gate and she walks through it, and now they tangle together under blankets surrounded by snow that floats through the air and melts against their skin.
He traces his finger down the spine of her back, weaving between her bones. “Would you leave your world for me?” he asks.
“I might,” she tells him. She wonders how the world ever fell apart with this much love in it.
Her parents are unhappy with her. She’s not focusing, they tell her. They remind her that if she doesn’t find a husband soon she may be left with no option but to join the Sisterhood like her friends Ruth and Ami. And where this might have been an effective threat to her in the past, she just swallows back smiles because she knows there is no man or God for her other than Patrick.
Patrick’s not at their meeting spot. It’s the first time he’s been missing, and Tabitha wraps her arms around her body and paces little circles in the freezing rain. She walks through the gate and sprints down the path wondering if he’s hurt or lost, but there’s no sign of him.
She goes home confused and a little empty. Where before she felt too big for her skin when she walked around her village, now she feels too small. Her body doesn’t work the way it should—she’s clumsy, tripping when she walks. Nothing is right anymore.
The next month she checks the moon, making sure she knows exactly when it’s at its fullest. She’s so anxious to go to Patrick two days later that she’s not as careful as she should be. One of the Guardians sees her
