Yesterday I made a bargain with the forest. I would return, body bare, open. Not a shirt to shield my skin against the sun. No pants to keep the blood suckers at bay. If I stood long enough, truly long enough, in one spot until the delicate threads of mycelium curled around my toes and the leaves of the trembling poplars beat away my skin, until the birds plucked out my eyelashes and built nests in my hair, until my limbs covered with plates of wooden bark and my gut, from mouth on down, filled with soil and microbes from her own body, if I vowed my immobility and surrender that long, would she take me? Yes, only then.