The man, whose name I learned was Wesley, was guiding me through the crowd. I let him do it because what else was I supposed to do? It's dream logic. You just have to go with it.
He took me to a cottage on the outskirts of the village that looked like every other cottage we passed. Inside there was a table and two stools and a fireplace with ashes. A straw mattress in the corner was covered by a blanket that had been patched so many times that it looked more like a quilt.
"Sit," he instructed, pushing me towards a stool. "And don't move. I mean it, fox. You move and I'll tie you to it."
"Chill. I'm sitting."
He gave me another of those looks and then he moved, pulling things from the shelf above the hearth. He grabbed a piece of cloth, a wooden bowl, and a jar filled with something that appeared to have been dug from a marsh.
Wesley poured water from a jug into the bowl and knelt in front of me. He took my foot first and untied the strip of fabric I had wrapped around it. He examined the wound, followed by the makeshift bandage and the frayed edge of my shirt, where I had torn it.
I watched as he soaked the cloth in water, skillfully cleaning the cut with a gentle touch, contrary to my expectations of someone who was just jumping off crates and shouting about pirates.
"Hold still, Sister." He continued to work, carefully applying pressure to the wound and rinsing the gauze.
First, I was brother. Now, I'm was sister? I looked down at myself. I attempted to subtly touch my chest. Yep, small, but there. I looked lower. Definitely still there.
“Just curious… this brother-sister thing. Is this like a… nonbinary thing or like a Mulan situation?"
He wrung out the cloth without looking up, ignoring me.
"She's the Man? Twelfth night?" I tried again.
He stopped moving his hands and looked up at me. "You know Twelfth Night? Oh, Fox, you were listening!" he exclaimed. He seemed truly touched. "All those times I told stories and you pretended to sleep. You were listening."
"We watched the movie in English cl— never mind. Just to clarify, am I dude or a chick?”
"You are... my sister. As you have always been. Since birth. Are you well?"
"Well, it’s just people seem to think I’m a dude. You called me brother earlier sooooo…” I trailed off.
"Everyone out there has thought you a boy since you were old enough to hold a rake. You insisted upon it. You begged Mother to cut your hair and let you work the fields beside Father.” He picked a thread off his shirt. “It suited us well enough. Father needed hands in the field. I had no interest in soil or labor. You wanted to work." He shook his head, turning his attention back towards my feet. "You've done a fine job of yourself today. Harmon's boys?"
"Uh-huh." I agreed. I had no idea who Harmon was.
"I told you to leave them be. Did I not say that? That they are brutes and bores and not worth the breath it takes to insult them?" He wrung the cloth out. The water in the bowl was turning pink. "And what did you do?"
"...Insulted them?"
"Insulted them." He sighed. “You have the restraint of a drunk horse and half the sense." He dipped the cloth again and reached for my face. He tilted my chin with his fingers so that he could get to the swelling along my cheekbone. His touch was light. Practiced. "This will bruise badly. Mother is going to have my hide for letting you out of my sight."
"It's not your fault, dude.”
"Everything you do is my fault. You do something foolish, I answer for it. You start a fight, I mend you." He dabbed the wound on my cheek, and I winced in pain. "It has been this way since we were children and I see no evidence it will change." He unscrewed the jar of the swamp paste and the smell hit me.
Ugh, gross.
He scooped some onto his fingers.
"What is that? It smells like death."
"Death would be an improvement on how you smell, so perhaps it will do you good on two fronts." He grinned at me and pressed the paste against my foot. It burned. I grabbed the edge of the stool.
"Son of a —"
He smeared more of it along the cut and I bit down on the inside of my cheek so hard I tasted copper.
"There. Done. You'll live, which I'm sure is disappointing to Harmon's boys and a great inconvenience to me." He bent down and pinched my earlobe.
"Ow! What the —"
"That is for making me worry." He turned back to the shelf, already humming and already somewhere else. "Now. Are you hungry? Because I have bread that could break a window and half a turnip, and if you want anything better you'll have to steal it, which I do not condone but will not prevent."
I ate the bread. It could, in fact, break a window. My jaw hurt chewing it, which was either because the bread was that hard or because my face was that messed up.
"Can I take a bath?" I asked.
The humming stopped.
"What did you say?"
"A bath? I smell like—I pointed to myself. "Well, you can smell what I smell like. Everyone within ten feet can smell what I smell like."
He didn't move at all. He didn't blink. He crept towards me, similar to how one would approach a wild animal, and placed the palm of his hand on my forehead.
"What are you doing?"
"Hush." He pressed harder, moved to my cheeks and tilted my chin. "How many of me do you see?"
"One. Unfortunately."
"And you know your name? You know where you are?"
"Dude, are you good?"
He pulled his hand away. He looked at me for a long moment, and then his face broke open into the widest, most radiant grin I had ever seen on a human face. He looked like he might start crying.
"Fox," he whispered. "Fox, do you mean it?" He grabbed both of my hands and squeezed them. "I cannot remember the last time you bathed. I have tried. I have lain awake at night and tried to recall it and the memory will not come. I believe it may have been spring. Not this spring. The one before. Perhaps the one before that."
"That's... really gross."
He was already on his feet. He grabbed the wooden bucket by the hearth and held it above his head like a trophy. "Today is a day of wonders! First Fox comes home bloodied — not a wonder, that happens often — but then! Then! She asks to bathe! Of her own will! No bucket thrown! No threats from Mother! No dragging her to the river by the ankles!" He was almost at the door. "I will fetch water from the well. The good well, not the one the Harmon boys spit in. Stay there. Do not change your mind.”
He disappeared outside. I could hear him singing. The words tumbled over each other about a fox and a river and a miracle and some poor soul who hadn't known the touch of soap since God was young. A woman's voice from a neighboring cottage yelled something I couldn't make out. He yelled something back, joyful, and I heard the creak of a well handle and more singing.
He came back with two full buckets sloshing water over the sides, still singing. He placed a pot on the fire and dragged the wooden tub out from behind a curtain, filling it with water, bucket by bucket, on successive trips, all the while humming. A new verse had been added to the song, which told of a wonder that would be told for generations to come.
"There. It is not a king's bath, but the water is clean, which is more than can be said for you, fox, and has not been said for you in a very, very long time."
The water was lukewarm, and the tub was too small, so my knees were practically up to my chin. The water turned gray almost instantly. Then brown. I tried not to think about it.
I scrubbed my skin until it was raw and pink, using a rough cloth. My fingernails were a lost cause. I picked at them until they were less horrifying, but there was grime in there that clearly was not planning to leave.
Still. It was a significant improvement.
Wesley tossed clothes at me from behind the curtain. There was a clean shirt and pants that fit slightly better. And leather shoes with soft soles. I put them on. The left one pressed against the cut on my foot and I sucked air through my teeth.
I stood up and tried to deal with my hair. There was no mirror. I ran my fingers through it; it was short. It was much shorter than mine. Tess used to say that my current haircut made me look like I was trying to start a punk band in 1983, which I'd taken as a compliment. But this hair barely reached my ears. Thick and kind of wavy, it was cut roughly, like someone had used a knife. I kept running my fingers through it, trying to figure out the shape, pushing it back and forth, tucking it behind my ears where it wouldn't stay because it wasn't long enough.
The door banged open.
A woman stood in the doorway. She was petite, noticeably shorter than me. Her hair was pulled tightly into a bun, and her sleeves were rolled up to her elbows. Her hands were callused and red. Her gaze locked onto mine, then shifted to Wesley.
"No," Wes said, already backing up. "Mother, before you —." She hit him. Open palm, back of the head, fast and practiced. He ducked the second one, but not the third. "Ow — Mother —"
"What did I ask of you this morning, Wesley?"
"I was in the square! She was meant to be —"
She grabbed Wes by the sleeve and pulled him towards me. "Look at her."
"It is not so bad as —"
She let go of him and walked across the room. She took my face in her hands. Her rough palms warmed my skin.
"Harmon's boys," she said.
"Yeah."
She held my face for a moment longer, then let go and stepped back.
"You are my daughter," she said. “Whatever the village sees when they look at you, whatever name you answer to in the square, it does not matter. In this house, you are my daughter. Had they torn your clothes," she went on, and her voice did not waver, "had they held you down long enough to see what they should not see… do you think they would have stopped at bruises? Do you think Harmon's sons would have shown you mercy?"
"I would not have let it come to that," Wes said. "I would have been there."
"You were not there." She did not say it cruelly. "And one day you may not be there again, and what then?" She turned to face me. "You have your brother's tongue and your father's pride and neither has ever served you well. You think yourself brave. You think because you can throw a fist you are safe. You will never be safe. Not so long as we carry this secret, and I will carry it to my grave if I must, but I cannot carry it and bury you both."
"I'm sorry," I said. I don't know why; I was weirdly invested in this family soap opera.
She seemed surprised like she had never heard that word from this mouth.
"Sit still," she said, and turned to the shelf for the herbs. She pressed a cup into my hands, filled with something dark and murky. Bits of leaves floated on the surface, smelling like the swamp paste's angrier sister. "Drink," she said. "All of it."
I have never in my life tasted anything that bad. It tasted like dirt and bile and whatever grows in the darkest corner of a prison cell. I gagged. My eyes watered. The mother watched me quietly.
"All of it," she repeated.
I finished it. My tongue tried to leave my body. She took the cup back.
I mean, on the one hand, it was kind of cool. It was so detailed. It had lore, for fuck's sake! There was an entire family with a backstory and a secret cross-dressing plot line, and a brother who sang songs about bathing. On the other, this dream suckeddddd.
Maybe I was coming down with something. Maybe the Chinese food had been bad. Maybe I had a fever, and this was some kind of delirious hallucination, and my body temperature was 104, and I was slowly dying on my mattress, and nobody would check on me until Friday.
I was ready to wake up. Lucid dreaming, regular dreaming, fever dream, whatever this was… I was done. I'd had the experience. I smelled myself, I got beaten up, I took a bath in a wooden bucket and drank something disgusting. Fantastic! Wonderful! Very immersive! Could I go home now?
I tried pinching myself.
"Fox, what are you doing?" Wes asked from across the room.
"Nothing."
Fuck.