She enters the woods, and the woods enter her. In sound, plump wood pigeons cooing softly from the pines; in smell, the scent of sweet sap; in touch, the pine needles beneath her feet promising bites with their smoothness.
She shrugs off her rabbit furs and wool, and they fall lightly around her, leaving her white against the dark of the forest. She steps into the ring of mushrooms, so fat with spores they look like they might give in and burst at any moment. As she lets her fingertips touch her thighs, her hips her belly, she thinks she might know how they feel.
She lies in the centre of the clearing, naked but not exposed. She is a part of things. She is watched – a stag bloodied from the rut stands crowned in autumn; a pair of wolves circle death-quiet through the trees.
Her fingers start their ritual, circling like crows whose wingtips brush the secret spaces of the woods. She is as wet as storm-drenched moss.
The stag is watching. She breathes out white clouds that shudder in the frosted air. Her body is the forest, alive and hungry, built on instinct and desire and wrapped around deeply buried ancient bones, where pain and darkness make their home.
She feels the river that runs through her swell with snowmelt. Its rapids thrash with white foam, and the coursing current sweeps up everything in its path until the banks burst and the forest is drenched in sun-sparkling water that swallows the roots of the aching pines.
The stag is a man now, tall and grey, antlers turned to hornbeam and ash. He is naked too, but no more than a tree is naked. Amber eyes like lost leaves gaze at her with the hunger of winter.
She opens for him, spreads her legs with desperate longing, and takes him inside her. His hands are rough, bitter bark against her skin, and she mewls like a wildcat cub as her body shakes under his. She feels herself opening further and further, split so deeply the threads of her soul come apart. His hands bruise her skin, and in the moment of ecstasy she sheds her flesh as easily as she shed her furs and joins him in the sap-soaked arteries of the forest’s heart.
The stag turns, white-tailed, and vanishes between the trees.
Scorpio Appetites 