The Woods Outside Our Father's House by Savanna Scott Leslie
2023 Winner
Our father had just died. Back then, I still couldn’t form that kind of sentence in my mind, but I carried its meaning with me like a key that I had swallowed. In the mornings, especially, I sometimes thought I could feel it grating away at me as it twisted its way through my guts. In my mouth it left the taste of nickel.
My sister was abroad, and anyway she’d told me she couldn’t confront any of it. Not the empty house, not our old toys, not the phone numbers or the magazine subscriptions or the forgotten on the porch. The business of our father’s death fell to me, and I came to gather up the crumpled receipts of six and a half decades.
I didn’t argue. I’m the oldest daughter, so the great matter felt like my responsibility. And besides, since our mother had gone, a heaviness had set in between our father and my sister. I served as a kind of interpreter between them. This would be my last chance to intercede.
And so I had gone home. I found myself sleeping in our father’s quiet house in the woods, where I stayed for some time while I made arrangements. I had come bracing myself against distressing changes but found the process dull. Maybe my mind itself was dulled by grief. In any case, what struck me most was all the things that hadn’t changed. The smell of linseed oil worked into hand-carved wood. Queen Anne’s lace. The way the wind screamed through the conifers when it picked up at night. Linoleum. Curtains that strained the moonlight, extruding shadows through the rooms.
All these things had kept on going without me. I had felt that all of it would stop when I closed my eyes and vanished entirely when I left. Time seemed both to pull me backward. During my stay at our father’s house, I felt a lurch between the past and the present, like stepping from a dock onto a boat.
My main goal was getting the house ready to sell. That’s all I’d decided on before setting out. My wife had driven me to the airport. “You don’t want to keep it,” she had said. A few days had passed since the accident, and we were already used to discussing what my wife called “our options.”
As we drove down the highway, my mind sketched an image of the house with its tin roof. I recreated the long, gravel driveway to the concession road, but I couldn’t remember what the trees were like.
“I don’t want to keep it,” I agreed.
***
It wasn’t that hard to list the place. It turned out our father had had the same idea. He’d hired an agent with flecks of lipstick on her front teeth.
“Didn’t tell you, eh?” The agent had curled her fingers around a coffee cup. We were sitting in her small, carpeted office.
“He never said.”
“Leave it to me, and you’ll have no trouble.”
I decided to stay until she found a buyer. Anyway, I had to get rid of our father’s things. Those days were slow and tiring. I started in the basement and worked my way up. I filled plastic bins with what seemed to me like garbage. An entire dresser was filled with receipts for trivial purchases. Snow boots. Disposable razors. Those kinds of things. Our father must have spent so much time alone in the house. He might have done the same type of work after our mother had gone. Separated only by the flimsy screen of time, we faced the same cycle of purple sunsets, sore arms, and deep sleep.
I had settled into a quiet rhythm. I purged the house of detritus in the mornings. Then I paused for lunch, leftovers or a fried egg. In the afternoon, I cleaned everything with dish soap or ran errands in town. My wife usually called on her way home from work, and sometimes I texted my sister, too. At night I mostly sat on the stairs and drank too much. I’d put a podcast on my phone to hear the sounds of conversation, but I didn’t really listen. My thoughts were white noise.
When I finished with the second floor, I opened all the windows and surprised myself with a feeling of accomplishment. I had only the attic left to deal with, just some cardboard boxes, a steamer chest, and an ancient veil of dust.
“Not much left for me to do down here,” I told my wife. “Just about finished with everything.”
“Come home,” she said. “Leave the keys with the agent. It’ll sell when it sells.”
I said I’d think about it. My sister had gotten the agent’s number and begun to channel her grief into micromanagement. My role had shrunk.
I was in the upstairs hallway, wrestling with the trap door through the ceiling. Having taken stock of the attic and shoved the creaky ladder back up, I couldn’t close the hatch again. A breeze stirred my bangs across my forehead. It drew my attention through the open window at the end of the hallway to the teeming, humming woods. The late-afternoon sun had cast everything in a coppery light. Lowering the attic ladder back down to the floor, I remembered the rickety structures my sister and I had built out there. We had made a hidden kingdom under the trees.
Outside, the temperature was cool more than cold, but I unknotted my sweatshirt from around my waist and tugged it on properly. My boots pressed heavily into the grass as I crossed the shaggy lawn. Breathing in the woodland rot and regrowth, I paused at the tree line, where the straggling clumps of grass gave way to fawn-coloured earth. The forest had always been there. My coming and going were nothing to it. Without roots or stems, I was a warm and wet and wandering thing. I set out through the fringe of poplars. Their round leaves were pale on one side and dark on the other, so they seemed to twinkle faintly as they twisted in the wind. Then I passed through wilder trees, oaks and firs that had planted themselves and belonged to no one. The air seemed to thicken, filling my body with their scent. It mingled with a deeper smell of cured needles and groping fungi, so I became aware of their discrete landscape on the forest floor.
My body seemed to know its way through the underbrush, impressing itself into the moss and lichen that grew on the rocks poking out of the soil. My thoughts had congealed. My whole body felt like eyes gone out of focus. A stillness grew behind my navel and spread outward. I rested in this aimlessness as my body’s automatic functions kept on. I wonder now if our father had felt that way in the end. Surely the mind sinks away before the body goes. But at the time, my thoughts of him and his house had faded away. My mind was clear as the forest stretched around me. The shadows shrank in on themselves. Through the soles of my boots, the crackle of desiccated leaves and needles revealed the forest’s patient thirst. I followed the curve of a ravine. I lost sensation—not the nagging buzz of paresthesia but true numbness, the weightless absence of feeling. I let the valley’s slope pour me down like rainfall.
As the ravine tapered around me, the canopy overheard became denser. Acorns were crushed under my boots, and I picked my way between the trees as if shouldering through a crowd. The sun was almost hidden in the branches. Light as thick as pine sap bathed the leaves and ferns in a preternatural glow. In this ethereal moment, I came to an oak as wide as myself. I dragged my fingers across the rifts in its bark, and the feeling of this rough surface stirred my thoughts back up. I wished our father had been as strong and lasting as the tree. I thought his body should have joined the forest instead of staying sealed up in a polished, plastic box—a seed that would never grow. I could have carried him out here and put him, like Merlin, inside the oak. But it was too late. I saw the fragile stalks that were the oak’s own daughters. Although they were little more than twigs, they carried the same yellowish leaves as their father. The oak had outlived many of its children, just as it had outlived our father and will outlive me.
As I ducked under a low branch, which seemed to be reaching down to the earth, I came face to face with myself. For a long while, I stood blinking back at my doppelgänger. I was still pressing my fingertips against the oak’s bark, and my wild heartbeat was thrumming into the tree. In the fading light, I came to notice two silvery threads above my reflection. A wide, round mirror was hanging from the tree. Because it had no frame, it was almost invisible. In our father’s house, I’d hardly glanced at my reflection. Now I looked closely. My cheeks were sharper than I remembered, and I had let my eyebrows go wild. The skeletal husk of a maple samara was stuck in my hair. My lips looked colourless, and they were hanging a little open as I breathed through my mouth. But it wasn’t my haggardness that held me spellbound; it was our father. I could see him in the cleft of my chin, my black hair, and my aquiline nose. The dark eyes looking back at me were his, and they glittered with the tired warmth they’d shown me in life.
***
By the time I got back to the house, it was almost completely dark. I’d left the porch light on, and its steady yellow reeled me in. The next day, I swept the attic and got rid of the last boxes. I kept the light on when I locked the doors and handed the agent both sets of keys. When I got home to my wife, I never mentioned the mirror. I haven’t even told my sister, though we’re talking more these days. It’s just something I’ve carried with me. You’re the only person I’ve told.
Savanna Scott Leslie writes fiction and poetry. Her work has appeared in journals—including Room Magazine, Broken Pencil, Filling Station, and Canthius—and the anthology The Art of Being Dangerous. She has a master's degree in creative writing from the University of Edinburgh, and she lives in the Okanagan Valley.