Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan Page B

mershon,’ she would say, and then make me go down and dunk myself three times in the freezing stream while she stood and muttered her stuff on the bank.
    I grew miserable and bored of it, and still she came up with new trials. I began to think a beating of Ashbert’s boys would be preferable. However close to death it brought me, at least it would be quick. Certainly an end to this and a nap in a sunny place where my clothes could dry out were seeming most immediately attractive.
    ‘Ha!’ She checked the sky again and grinned at me, her face all folds of leather. ‘Look at it, Dought!’
    ‘At what?’ I grumped.
    ‘There.’ She pointed up into the flying smoke.
    It seemed to me I saw only a smudge such as is often in my eye when I have the leisure to look awhile at the sky. It took a time of squinting to the sides of it that it became a crinkle, a star-ish shape of grey pleats hanging over us, around a puncture mark.
    Now Annie was beetling about with this and with that, all excited. She sent up smokes, and some of them obscured the mark and others brought it to more darkness, until I was quite used to and bored by the horrible hovering thing, and unconvinced. I could not see how this had to do with the vision she had showed me as we lay in the hay, which had been of a world where nobody loomed or towered. Many maids there had been, my size, and men of a spirited disposition, my kind, who would join me in whatever prank or party I might devise. It had been all colour and dancing there, not this shadow growing on the air, not the cold water dripping off me and making me sniffle, not one foul smell upon the other until my nose was so dizzy it could only discern the outermost edges of the nastinesses.
    ‘Here we go, Collaby,’ she finally said, and there was that little gamester I knew, bright and naughty as ever in the stance and glancing of her. ‘I will leg you up to it.’ She linked her hands into a stirrup and bent down to me.
    ‘What? What am I to do?’ I put my hand on her shoulder and my foot in the stirrup, suddenly all boredom gone and my knees locking with fright.
    ‘Go on up to it. Your world is waiting, what I drew on you.’
    ‘Up there?’ She had hoisted me, and the thing was over me like a lowered bum, like a lowered cloud ready to release its storm. Oh, it was no ordinary cloud; I could feel the concentration of it, its compressed lightnings all unable to burst out.
    ‘Push into it!’ she cried. ‘Dig! Quick, afore my skirt catches in the fire!’
    I joined my hands as a God-man prayeth, and pushed the point of them up into the grey. ‘’Tis quite hard, Annie; it does not feel inclined to yield.’
    ‘It will yield, it will yield. Just you push, just you force it. It is yours, I tell you, on the other side.’
    What a substance it was, particularly when my fingertips broke through. Nasty washes of sensation passed down me; Annie felt them too, I could tell by her shaking. ‘Cawn, Dought, my toes are crisping here.’ And she straightened further. Her head was against the edge of the phantasm, all misty there. She had forced my arms through into cold, cold! Cold water had broken out the bottom of the world above and was dropping and soaking me.
    ‘Blemme, woman, you are putting me through into an ocean, to drown there!’
    ‘’Tis not salt,’ she said, smacking her lips. ‘It is lake or pond or stream or summut.’
    ‘Some fish is brushing me, aak!’
    But she forced me up with my feet, and I was so stiff with fear that I did not think to bend my knees. My head went through; it felt as if all my hair and beard were tearing out on the way. All the forest sounds turned to the
gloomp
and
glop
of bubbles through water, and the push of it. Light, there was light up there! And a great plant—not a fish, a broad plant with leaves flat as eel-tails—trailed overhead of me in the stream-current, in the frothing mud.
    Two strong pushes and Annie had skinned me alive, but I was through. My