The good doctor carries a gastraphete. We’ve painted the undersides of our jaws, bellies out and naked. There is no choice but to borrow the path from our ancestors. We mark the side of the bank with bulleted progress, guided by the taut and slack of the skeins of hair tied between the final five like muscles. Noon’s whiteness thrusts through breaches in the canopy and wraps the woods in the balmy threat of fever. Forward-moving we sound like the clawing of some giant beast, paused we feel the air recoil from the throbbing of our chests, and around the wrists of our detained grows a rosy garland that brightens in the writhing of our march. Day seems to rupture. Reaching the opening of widened earth, the aberrant among us are shouldered to the muddy banks. Fear kicks like a horse, the woods filled with howling from the salty ground. The good doctor raises his palms to a blueblack sky, a flock of geese.