The lady with the big head wants me to keep writing about her even though I thought I had understood her story and typed it all up, then put that story in a book and shared it with other people. All along she knew I would keep going but didn’t let me in on her knowing. She relishes in showing me I am wrong about so many things because she is a somewhat ghost who appears and disappears to me, wearing veils that morph between the faces of my ancestors, descendants and kinfolk, the world that awes me, and all of the things I fear.

She likes to obscure herself. She reminds me every day that I will die, that this life is a finitude in which I walk and breathe and shit and love and fuck and taste and joy. Such is her kindness. Such are her trickeries. She knows time and unknows knowledge in me every time I walk into the bush and am taken apart bit by bit, made to sense that I am coherence and incoherence, one small emergence gathering rose petals and psychic impressions in an emergent world.

It is all very nerve-racking. The lady with the big head gets quite fed up and consistently morphs into the fabric of the world beyond my thinking, drawing me out of myself and toward the world beyond my thinking. She makes me think when I am down at the river that I should always and forever be down at the river and never, ever go home. Then my rational mind reminds me that William needs to be picked up from school and that I have a pot of herbs brewing on the fireplace and that it is time to be going back up the slope. The lady with the big head stays out there doing whatever she feels like all the time, always attuned, while I tune in and out and in and out like an uncertain piano unable to hold a tune through an entire song, or sometimes almost maniacally, like a basketball bouncing on a gym floor.

LADY WITH THE BIG HEAD’S BAKERY

I do or do not want to open a bakery in the forest with the lady with the big head, hoping she’ll bake me flaky croissants every day, and sometimes Danishes with fresh berries when in season. The problem is that I would have to be the one to work there full-time and take on all the responsibilities of ordering flour and butter and salt, and keeping the levain going and ordering the stainless-steel counters and getting the electricity hooked up, though the lady with the big head might consent to building the hearth. She might consent to secret baking when I’m not around to ask her a million questions about what she is doing and why, though she would never commit to doing it regularly because doing things regularly is mundane. The lady with the big head leaves mundanity to me, delighting in the ways that I struggle with my boredom—finding such safety and comfort in predictable routines, then longing to break away as soon as I feel some measure of solace.

 When ruminating on her trickeries and imagining making croissants together that I might later sell to augment my income, since wandering in the forest brings no financial return, I try to communicate to her that I am not looking for a production baker but she doesn’t care what I have to say about production baking, and has no grounding in capitalism.

This conversation, like many of our conversations, takes place in an imaginal realm that is always an adjacent possible to the realm in which other humans who cannot imagine the same things as me might assume that I am just sitting in a chair looking out the window. While in another reality I am heavily invested in folding butter and flour in ever-so-delicate layers to ensure a proper flake, attempting to demonstrate reason to a partway ghost.

The lady with the big head declares she will participate in the bakery only if there are no shelves or jaunty display baskets of any kind. She makes it clear that I am not to advertise the bakery, or attempt to offset costs by selling the surplus to the neighbours.

In order to play a trick on her, I try to have her wear a hairnet that I pretend is a sort of tutu veil for her head so that none of her bits will fall in the dough. She purposefully exfoliates her face into the dough to scorn me.

I’m not sure how I feel about eating croissants flecked with her otherworldly skin cells, but when I close my eyes and inhale the scent of the warm soft pastry as I bite into the croissant’s insides, I feel as though everything in the world is glorious for eternity, even though the feeling only lasts the duration of the croissant. This is why I desire the bakery more than anything, but the lady with the big head mocks me, because my desires are so predictable. I am always trying to make the things that please me repeat ad nauseam and pushing as hard as I can at the things that repulse me or make me feel sad. The lady with the big head thinks this is both futile and absurd and does not consider the possibility that she may be the absurdity because no one in their right mind would ever consider her exactly real.

LADY WITH THE BIG HEAD HAS

TRANSFORMED HERSELF

INTO A SALAMANDER

The lady with the big head has transformed herself into a salamander manifesting itself in my body. It is such a kindness, but makes it difficult for me to go through my daily tasks in this human-made world. For instance, my skin is so moist now. I slip from myself constantly, and my smart phone no longer recognizes my pads. Although I am slippery and my skin reflects light as a sheen back into the earth’s visual unfolding, I am so vulnerable to drying out.

My wife Alma is always applying moisturizers to my skin when she notices patches of dryness. She is a good wife who is always worried about my health and well-being so has been doing a lot of research about salamander habitats and proper pH portfolios. She wants to make sure the moisturizers she applies will not seep right through my porous membranes and poison me or poison the landscapes I ooze myself into. There are a lot of lubricants for humans that can harm a salamander, so Alma makes her own. She digs up pond grasses and scoops of tender green algae, then dries them out with plantain, chickweed and calendula petals. She flakes these into mud and borrows fat from the fall-slaughtered pig that we keep in our freezer and were intending to make into gifts for the birds but never got around to because we were spending so much time thinking about my skin and how to keep it from drying out with the wood heat. She mixes it all together with clay from the riverbed to make a greasy paste that soothes me so deep inside it’s like my whole nervous system settles whenever I see her approaching with the jar.

Although Alma now tends to my dryness, I have to admit that it has been a hard winter during which I have struggled not to become desiccated. We thought perhaps it was akin to a hibernation, or a sort of fugue state from which I could easily rehydrate myself, but after repeated negligence to my moisture content I came to understand something was seriously wrong. The lady with the big head had moved away from me, bringing her salamander sleekness out of my dry crackles—guiding herself back into the forest where there are always wet rotting places to burrow into and recover from all of my failings to give her a proper home. I had no means to lend myself to her gifts without snapping back toward my comforts. Still, my body refused to yield back to what it had been before she entered me and made me into more than I had ever been before.

She didn’t exactly ask me before initiating the transformation, and perhaps did not know of me that I do not know how to stink of earth without feeling I should wipe myself down with lavender soap made from the milk of goats. The soap freshens me, and dries my skin out. Like her, I practice land swimming as I walk through the forest in my Gore-Tex coat. Animals flee from the swishing sounds of my chafing. The coat is not a suitable skin in which to belong in the forest, keeping me absurdly dry.

Despite Alma’s encouraging potions, I don’t know how to maintain my wetness. I dip my hands into the sink and take long baths so hot I come out a different human, better than I was before because of the way fire and water interact with one another under the right conditions, blessing me from the outside in. During my soaking, the lady with the big head swims inside me again, but the water cools and after towelling myself off, my skin shows little cracks, as though all my moisture went out of me and into the bathing tub, then drained away back into earth along with the salamander the lady with the big head had become.

I often forget that I am a salamander as well as a human when I’m busy with all the things I deem important in life—like sharing food with Alma and cleaning up afterward, like procuring good soap and helping the neighbour with her sick laying-hen, the one whose vent had prolapsed and frozen solid, then crusted over with vile substances from inside her body. There was nothing we could do for her but chop her head off to end her suffering, and with her body make an offering far off in the forest where we know scavengers pass.

Or like playing video games with our son William, because it’s the only way he spends any time with me lately without complaining. And to be quite honest, I’ve become a little obsessed with the latest iteration of The Legend of Zelda on William’s Switch that takes me back to the hours I spent with my buddy Trent as a preteen on his Super Nintendo, immersing ourselves in the heroic task of saving the Kingdom of Hyrule. I pretend to Alma that I’m only doing it to cultivate an interest in William’s interests, but I suspect she’s onto me because she looks at me with a little cock to her left eyebrow and a tiny pursed smile every time I ask William if he wants to do some gaming with me on the weekend after we head out on a family hike and he’s tackled a few things on his chore list, like turning the compost and mucking out the goat barn.

One night when William and I are fully immersed in an epic quest to free the dragons’ spirits from the evil forces we are always combatting in our gameplay, Alma calls me to the front door. The lady with the big head is there in a salamander body, and as we stand looking out at her, she walks across the threshold. I squat down and put out my hand and she raises her head to bestow me with a salamander’s kiss on the knuckle of my right pointer finger. I do not know what I have done to receive such a gift and responsibility as this, but I heed her.

She walks in as though she intends to explore the house more fully, but I am aware of our cat Alice, who will not abide a somewhat ghost in a salamander body to exist beyond her predatory mouth’s sharp incisors and her desire to devour small moving things. I gently pick the lady with the big head from the porch floor and carry her back to the forest, across the threshold of her home, and place her down where she belongs.

We are now guests of one another. A magic that confuses and awes me. I know she cannot survive in my dry world. There are so many changes I have to make before I am truly able to receive her, and I am so often a blubbering fool oriented to loops of disassociated thinking that leave my body untethered in the world.

I often think of my dead dogs, who helped me transcend my separation. In trusting me, they taught me to know beyond the confines of my humanity, seeking always to communicate with me, though so often—in my silo of human knowledge limited by dominant empirical beliefs in individual and human separateness, which makes us numb to our own embodied beingness, and illiterate in the more-than-human world’s reaching—I failed to expand my thinking to learn what they were telling me. Over time, through their devotion and patience, through their nervous systems honed to enfold me, through my need to know how to be in better relations, I learned to know them, and in turn to know beyond myself. Still, I am barely an apprentice in knowing. I pretend myself in the forest in my Gore-Tex coat. Sometimes I am not pretending myself. Sometimes I go naked, without the Gore-Tex coat.

I write letters to the lady with the big head on compostable paper with biodegradable inks that I place in little crooks all over the forest. I tell her how soothing my warm blood can be. I tell her my blood cannot regulate my organic systems when I am cold for too long. I draw her my beauty and the beauty of all my befallen human kin with so many apologies. My shame rots beneath logs, amidst leaf litter. Sometimes there are frozen months in which salamander lies coiled in burrows under earth, and the lady with the big head dreams salamander dreams or goes about being the many other things she is while cold winds blow across fields of frozen water made of minuscule crystalline flakes that amass into thick white-blue blankets, under which the land sleeps.

At home we stay busy burning fires, eating up our stores and mastering potion-making to regulate Link’s body temperature in the fluctuating temperatures of Hyrule, while Alma heads off to work to determine what kind of pathogens and chemicals are coursing around in people’s body fluids.

LADY WITH THE BIG

HEAD’S PRONOUNS

The lady with the big head has much in common with no one. Sometimes she goes to the city and does what wraiths do. She yells but no one hears. They all have their earbuds in and are riding in loud machines to get where it is they need to go. People are busy with their lives and heartaches, with their lusts and consumer goods and news bites. People have a lot to say about what they think. They know how to do it fast and in under fifty-five words. They know how to use images instead of words to approximate feelings, to render complex influxes of feelings into easily communicable emoticons.

I thought for a while that the lady with the big head was etching smiley faces and poop emojis with hearts on them into some of the birch trees in the forest around our home, which caused me a lot of distress. More distress than the erotic sketches she was making of likenesses of me and Alma and William engaging in sexual play with mosses and lichens and mushrooms, some which looked like giant seafoam-green phalluses and others like earth-brown vulvas so intricately fissured I felt like I’d entered an eternal labyrinth, losing my mind wandering the pathways. She was trying to demonstrate that all of these beings are constantly making their sex on us, even though we rarely realize it—except for Alma, who suffers from allergies.

Alma notices when the birch trees are spewing yellow clouds of sex material all over the valley, her eyes red leaking slits as she wipes thick layers of pollen off the car every morning before she drives into work, kicking up plumes of it as she picks up speed—pollen intermixed with road dust, cosmic particles, dried bird droppings become wind-borne, and all manner of invisible microscopic life. Her body is incapacitated by their sex drive, which makes her both lonely and cranky. She envies William and I our unaffectedness, upset that her bodily sovereignty becomes a lark to her every time she breathes.

Nonetheless, Alma and I continue to read feminist theory, which does not apply exactly to the lady with the big head and her doings because she exists outside of patriarchy. She is not, we also come to understand, a she at all, and is more like a they, we learn from queer writers, who insist we get our pronouns in order. The lady with the big head doesn’t exactly give a flying fuck about which gender pronouns we use because English is not their language and it is only our limited mindframes that make us want to gender ghosts. We do not know what their language is, but we do know the power our language has to shape our very looking, and shape what we understand as freedom, therefore we do what we can to adjust. Alma and I encourage one another to try harder to de-binarize our thinking. William is better at this than we are because he is learning how to allow fluidity to be what it is at a much younger age than either me or Alma, whose inclinations toward fluidity were put down hard and fast in social worlds that had no words like nonbinary in their lexicon when we were both becoming girls.

William is also learning about how to etch into birchbark, which I discovered when he left his sketchbook open on his bed to the page that had a poop emoji and happy-face drawing on it, and found an antique carving knife underneath. When questioned about it, he gave a wry smile and told me that the lady with the big head had left the knife on his windowsill and that he thought they were looking for an artistic collaborator.

I worried that William might corrupt the lady with the big head’s artistic practice with his potty humour, but who am I to intervene if the lady with the big head invites William to co-create with them, knowing full well that he’s a teenage boy? They draw more cock and balls and vulvas on the trees than he does, exploring the genitalia of various forest creatures in exacting anatomical detail. Although I would rather see neither detailed animal genitalia nor heart poop emojis in the forest when I am trying to do my walking meditations, I also understand that the lady with the big head and William are helping me come to terms with my aversions, which are just attraction’s dualistic other, and in this way, pushing me further in my awareness than I could ever go alone.

It is helpful that we don’t have to think exactly in words when we are near the lady with the big head, that in fact our words themselves often become indefinite in their presence, bulging and deforming, becoming other possible words, or no words at all, and we are able to sense a wordless world imbued with meanings we can sense but make no sense of. In this way the lady with the big head enlightens us.

She abolishes our theory and invites us to exist in the thrum of them. We no longer know how to speak of them. We mix and match our words. William insists we also sometimes refer to the lady with the big head as a he, because sometimes he is. He sex shifts and gender shifts or has no binary sex or gender at all. He is, after all, a partway ghost, and we have yet to learn about how to theorize partway ghosts in the philosophers we are reading.

The lady with the big head suggests we lick some lichen, so we do.

It is scratchy on our tongues and tastes like dust. The next day I find myself longing for more.

The next day I find that my tongue feels numb when I try to speak, as though my words were foam.

The next day I feel as though my body is spiralling outward from a core, ever so infinitesimally expanding, and this process is called aging, and it is bringing me toward death.

I notice this in photographs of myself lately, wherein my skin appears to be floating above my musculature, some interstitial layer underneath that flows in unison with the interstitial space under earth that is all wound through with mycelial networks conducting vast choruses of life that we cannot see and barely know how to measure with the scientific methods we have at hand.

The lady with the big head is sometimes a lady and sometimes a tardigrade. Sometimes they are a colony of lichen taking a thousand years to spread across a rock and sometimes he is a bull moose calling loud that he is ready to inseminate someone, and to contend with any other bull moose nearby that might have the same intentions as he does toward the cow moose with the long eyelashes that often feeds in the swamp nearby.

They, or she, or he, or all of these things at once are difficult to make meaning of, often obscuring the very words we seek to use with their multiple magical and erotic agilities. 

LADY WITH THE BIG HEAD

FLOATS DOWN THE RIVER

I see something black floating down the river. At first I think it’s a log shorn from the riverbank by high water, then I see it is both being swept by the current and moving horizontally against it. I notice a trailing veil, sweeping downstream from the body. A wolf I think, or a bear, but what is trailing from it? It is swimming across to the other side of the wide river, away from where I sit beneath a cedar, dripping river water from my naked skin and only somewhat moved to be on alert for my life.

Last week the neighbour texted to say there was a huge black wolf in the field beyond his yard, and today, after emerging cold and shimmering from the river’s ice-cold holiness, in which time is washed away, shocking me to renewed liveliness from all the accruals that froth in my mind and get piled up like logjams in my body, I found wolf tracks twice the size of my lab’s paws, imprinted in the sandbar where I’d just plunged myself in.

I am anew, my eyes attune to a numinous world. The lady with the big head emerges from the waters on the opposite bank, at first on two legs, then they place their front paws down, draw up their veil from the river, absorbing what might have been an overlong lupine tail. They look back at me, shake first their head, rippling the shake through their whole body like a wet dog, and then shedding all wolfishness, morph into a large black bear.

A song emerges from my throat, skimmers across the surface of the water, and the world around me vibrates, becoming amorphous, pulsing with whatever force it is that makes sound into song, that dwells between the interstices of minute particles of matter to cohere them into form.

Either the lady with the big head become bear is reckoning with me, or she is afraid of something on the same side of the river as me, further upstream, and I am wholly unimportant—just a witness to her shapeshifting, possessed of a voice that can be compelled into song by the land’s unfolding, in which the lady with the big head plays a communicative part.

I cannot cross over as they do, my fragile human form unable to undertake the vastness of the river.

Yet bestowed of the gifts I have here received, I return to my own humanness, slip my clothes back on and head home to make corn dogs for William, who berated me enough at the grocery store yesterday that I broke down and bought him a box, secretly thrilled at the thought of dipping them in bright yellow mustard and eating them right off the stick, as I used to do as a child. Alma frowned and held the box in her hands like a dirty diaper when she saw them.

“Really?” she asked. “You’re going to let him eat these? You know they are made from slaughterhouse pigs whose lives and deaths are an atrocity, the meat filled with irredeemable violence that will infect your and William’s dreams?”

I planned to ask the pigs for forgiveness as the corn dogs roasted, to burn some cedar from the riverbank for the pigs’ nightmares to pass through us, for their life forces to feed our bodies, and for our digestion to offer them some kind of release. I held Alma’s hands and looked in her eyes, and responded, “It was my plan all along to free them, to honour their abused lives with the tasty joy of my tongue and then return them to earth through my bowels, and sing for their spirits with smoke.”

Alma barely buys it because she believes in wholesale consumer boycott and cannot abide the coins that passed from our purses to the meat people, but I try to frame my method of eating corn dogs as a possible act of resistance by inscribing sacredness to the process as I chew.

Neither of us is ultimately going to prevent future horrors from taking place, but Alma feels herself the purer, since she remains free of the tainted meat. I know we are always already tainted and search for methods of release among the layers of violence we move between, in every space humans have organized themselves in over time, which is to say the world’s entire history. And outside of humanity, there is just the plain stuff of life’s violence, and matter’s violence, the sheer destructive power at the very heart of formation. But more vital than all that, more immediate, we are living on colonized land and our very living here when we are not from these lands detonates violence, whether or not we pretend to be holier-than-thou.

Alma questions my morality when I take this line of thought. She wants our ethics to be firm. She worries these universalisms offer excuses framed in reductionism, instead of being liberatory.

I apologize for the corn dogs, but William and I eat them anyway, because otherwise it’s a waste, and Alma and I have not even broached the subject of the genetically modified maize that is likely coating the meat. William and I have seconds, and William, even thirds. He is a growing teenage boy, after all.

William will not deign to tell me his dreams, but I do dream of heartbroken pigs. I dream of their snouts and teeth. My heart offers them a light, a song, a something. The lady with the big head emerges from the river, over and over again, looking back. Everything becomes amorphous. None of it makes up for their enslavement. I continue to hover between life and duty, attempting to learn how to read.

‍

‍

Image: Marika Echachis Swan, Cryer, 2023, lino print. Artist's note: Cryer honours the sacred role of those of us brave enough to release the inter-generational burden of grief passed down so that the next generation walks a little lighter. She is flanked by maidenhair ferns, the ones seen happily bobbing next to our west coast waterfalls.