Stepping into the glade is like stepping into another world. The landscape is desolate, painted crimson by the thousands of fruiting cranberry vines that claim the bog each fall as the other flora dies back. Their fruit bursts beneath the soles of your rubber boots as you walk across the spongy ground and you grimace, thinking of the sickening pop of the snail eggs you used to cull from your ex’s aquarium. You traverse the bog half-blind, breath clouding your glasses as it meets the damp chill in the air. The musty scent of vegetal decay clings to the inside of your nose.
The elevated walkway that winds through the marsh is packed beyond capacity with rubberneckers. You had to park almost half a mile away from the trailhead. Although you want to be annoyed, you can’t blame the folks around here for trying to catch a glimpse, even if there’s no chance of them seeing anything from that vantage point. This is probably the most interesting thing that’s happened around here in years. It was the same in the little mountain town you grew up in—anything from a new Wal-Mart opening to an old house being demolished drew people by the hundreds.
You have to hike much further than your body is used to before you finally reach the site, which is well off the beaten path. By the time you get there, your bad knee is throbbing like a smashed grapefruit. You think longingly of the two precious Oxycontin left over from your top surgery that you have hidden at the back of the linen closet for exactly this kind of situation. You should have brought them with you.
Colin and Jeff are there when you hobble up, and annoyance flashes through you upon seeing that Park has already put them to work. He always does this—pushes his way into your projects, takes over without being asked, somehow ends up in charge. Half the time his name appears before yours on papers you authored. For once, just once, you wanted to be the one calling the shots.
“What the hell, man?” you snap, rubbing your knee.
Park flashes you that cocky, insincere smile that always makes you want to knock his teeth out. “Nice of you to join us.”
You fold your arms. “Nice of you to leave me behind at the motel. I thought we were hiking out together.”
“Ah, you know. The guys wanted to get an early start.”
Great—now you have heartburn, too. “They’re my supervisees, Park. I wanted to get a look at the body in situ before anyone had a chance to mess with it. You never know what we might miss once we start digging things up.”
“Relax, I took pictures.” Park waves his cell phone at you. “I’ll send them to you later.”
You know he won’t, but if he says another word to you, you’re going to end up in front of HR when you all get back to campus. He keeps smiling as you walk away, doing your best not to let him see you limp as you go. He’s humiliated you enough on this trip already.
Colin jumps guiltily when you clear your throat behind him. Straightening, he tries and fails to wipe his peat-smeared hands clean on his rubber waders.
“Dr. Crane, I’m really sorry—”
You shake your head. “I know. It’s not your fault; I’ll deal with it later. Jeff?”
Your other supervisee, who seems to harbor none of Colin’s qualms about sneaking out early to excavate the find of the century without you, is continuing to scrape away layers of peat and shows no signs of stopping just because you addressed him. “Yeah?”
Pinching the bridge of your nose, you sigh. “Stop, please. Come here.”
He rolls his eyes as he tosses the trowel aside, and you make a mental note to be extra harsh when critiquing the next chapter of his dissertation. This kind of attitude is going to get him nowhere in academia.
Or maybe it will, you think, glancing over your shoulder at Park, who is sipping steaming coffee from a thermos without a care in the world. It’s a depressing thought, and you do your best to quash it before it wraps around your already-frail professional confidence like a strangling vine.
“Look,” you say, addressing the two of them, but making sure to speak loudly enough that Park catches it too. “I know you guys are excited, but we need to be deliberate here. This site is ecologically fragile—we wouldn’t normally be allowed to wander around off-trail. Every step we take compacts the moss, and that can have a significant impact on the plant life, not to mention any additional bodies that might be preserved here. I know we usually care more about dead things than living ones in this department, but please be careful, okay? If we blow this, the rangers are never going to let us come back.”
Colin glances down at his feet as if only just noticing the mess of crushed cranberries beneath them and then flushes, chagrined. Jeff looks as if he wants to roll his eyes again but eventually nods his understanding.
“Good.” You take a deep breath and sigh. “Hang back with Dr. Park for a minute. I haven’t even gotten a chance to look at it yet.”
Colin and Jeff wander over to Park in search of coffee, and the two of you are finally alone. Wincing, you crouch at the edge of the scraped and trampled peat with reverence, taking in the dark, contracted form half-birthed from the muck.
You fumble for your gloves, urgency overwhelming you although this moment has been thousands of years in the making. Park has already stolen so much agency from you on this dig, and it isn’t even noon. You need to take it back before he gets his hands on anything else.
The body’s face breaks the surface of the surrounding earth like a swimmer coming up for air. It looks as if its features were carved from bronze: eyes closed, lips parted, brow wrinkled as if immersed deep in a dream. About a foot distal to the rounded chin, a hand emerges from the peat, extended as if in greeting. It was this that the park ranger who made the initial discovery had almost tripped over.
Gingerly, you reach out and touch its cheek.
“Welcome back.”
###
The body, after being carefully excavated from the peat, carried back to the trailhead by Colin and Jeff, and transported back to campus for study, is given the name Raintown Man. After a trip through the university medical center’s CT scanner yields more accurate measurements of the remaining bones and preserved viscera, this is revised to Raintown Woman.
You’ve never been fond of this naming tradition, and especially so in this case. While the current consensus is that the body is measuring female, the data is somewhat ambiguous. The scan also noted a lack of breast tissue. You, in your own interstitially gendered state, sympathize with the time traveler. Moreover, the impersonal nature of the place-name only serves to put distance between the researcher and the discovered body—a tenuous, uncanny space which rapidly collapses when you find yourselves face-to-face. The body is painfully human, even more so than the fresher cadavers in the anatomy lab upstairs. Raintown Woman, Tollund Man, Yde Girl, all of the others, are not objects but subjects. They aren’t alien. They’re you.
A fact that Jeff can’t seem to get through his thick skull.
“You think her tits rotted off, or she just didn’t have any to begin with?” he’s saying, cupping his hands to his chest to illustrate, apparently unaware of your presence in the hallway. Colin, who is just visible through the lab’s cracked door, squirms.
“I think,” you reply, entering and setting your books down with more force than necessary, “that if you’d like to continue making comments like that, you can find yourself a different advisor.”
Colin looks like he wants to sink into the floor. You feel bad for catching him in the crossfire, but your patience with Jeff is waning with each passing day. You’ve dragged him in front of the department chair twice in the last year—once for making comments of a similar nature about another student, and once for taking selfies with a cadaver with his phone. The latter instance in particular disturbed you. Although the act isn’t explicitly prohibited by departmental codes, there is an unspoken ethical line there, the violation of which would never have crossed your mind.
Both times, Park interceded on Jeff’s behalf. He isn’t even on a full strike with the university, and that bothers you. The ruling was ultimately that those incidents weren’t bad enough to merit disciplinary action. What, then, would be? The thought itches under your skin.
Jeff holds up his hands in a placating gesture. “Relax, I was just joking around.”
“Weird. I don’t see myself laughing.”
When you were in his position, you would have killed for an opportunity like this. A bog body, near perfectly preserved, dropped straight into your lap? The chance to have your name on an article in a high-profile journal so early in your career? You would have settled for an advisor who gave half a shit about your research interests. But here he is, making a mockery of the find of a lifetime. It exhausts you.
You’ve tried to iterate this to him before, but it never sticks. And the unfortunate truth is that, even if he bothered to listen, he doesn’t respect you enough to take your words to heart.
“Here.” You tear a scribbled list of books and articles you want retrieved and annotated from your notebook and hold it out. “You can work on this today.”
He stares at you for a moment, looking remarkably like Park, and then snatches the paper. As he storms out, you’re pretty sure you hear him mutter bitch under his breath. You let that one slide, if only for the sake of being rid of him. You’re too tired to fight today.
Colin opens his mouth to apologize, and you wave him off. “I know, I know.” You open your laptop. “Moving on. Why don’t we work on something fun?”
Adjusting his glasses, he grins.
Under your direction, Colin collects an assortment of samples from the body. “Hey there, Rainy Day,” he says kindly as he prepares to scrape underneath the fingernails. “This will be quick, I promise.”
That softens you a little. “That’s what you call her?”
He shrugs, blushing.
“It’s sweet. I like it.”
“What about you?”
You look at the body for a moment, sizing her up on the steel table. Her head is tilted to face you. It still seems as if at any moment she could open her eyes.
You are also a victim of the place-name tradition. Although its peculiarity often leads people to assume that you chose it when you started to transition, your name is in fact still the one you were given at birth. Why your parents saw fit to christen you after a city they’d never visited will always be a mystery, but changing things legally has always seemed like a headache. And all of that aside, it’s relatively unisex, so you’ve seen no reason to discard it.
This person, unstuck in time and robbed of their resting place, deserves something better than Raintown Woman. You settle on a name you’ve always thought of as lovely but never entertained as an option for yourself. You’ve never felt feminine enough to claim it, but it suits her perfectly.
“Tallulah.”
It’s strange, but you feel as if she approves.
###
Not long afterward, you start dreaming about her.
You’ve been looking at a lot of corpses lately. Your typical fare is more skeletal than fleshed, so it’s possible that the imagery is just far enough outside your wheelhouse that it’s getting to you. Tallulah and Tollund Man are easier to work with because they are (or were, in the case of the latter) full bodies; you can almost pretend they’re sleeping. The partials, though—Old Croghan Man in particular—disturb you. Looking at the photographs, you can’t help but think of him as a fleshy sock. His deflated, boneless shape is nauseating. It’s like he wants you to crawl inside him. You worry that if you were ever in the same room as his remains you wouldn’t be able to resist.
Even though it’s been two years since you and your last partner split, you still sleep on the right side of the bed. Once you ceded that space, you couldn’t take it back, even after she was gone. The empty swath of sheets waits, patiently, for someone to fill it.
A cold, stony weight settles onto the mattress when you roll over in the night, and the wrongness of it prompts you to open your eyes. Beside you, Tallulah’s profile arches toward the ceiling. The sheets drape wrongly over her drawn, angular form. Holding your breath, you fumble for the light, terrified to risk a blink. When the lamp clicks on the bed is empty, but there are divots in the mattress you can’t explain.
You sleep with the lights on after that.
Park, as expected, is making a nuisance of himself. He’s coauthoring the paper on Tallulah—you must have done something awful in a past life to deserve this—and undermining you at every turn. Not even your most innocuous hypothesis escapes his ire.
The thing that nearly brings you to blows is his reaction to your suggestion that Tallulah might have been intersex, or possibly even transgender. The absence of breast tissue is a significant finding, and there are faint lines of what you think may be scar tissue on the chest wall visible in the CT images. Yes, they could be normal scars—but what if they aren’t? What if you have evidence of a complex surgical procedure that was not only performed, but survived, thousands of years ago? This kind of finding could make a career.
Which is why your vision goes black with rage when Park just shrugs.
“Memphis,” he says in the tone of one addressing a child, “I know it’s tempting to assign modern significance to things like this, but sometimes we just see what we want to see. And even if there is something there, this is hardly the first bog body to show evidence of lacerations below the nipples. It was torture at best. Not”—he gestures vaguely in your direction—“all of that.”
He’s talking about Old Croghan Man. A partial body, unearthed an ocean away, and under very different circumstances. Croghan’s wounds were sustained perimortem. Tallulah’s, if you’re seeing what you think you’re seeing, are fully healed. Fury surges up your throat like bile.
“What do you mean by that, precisely?” you ask in as even a tone as you can manage, because you know that the second your voice betrays so much as a shred of emotion you’ve lost.
Park is smart enough not to elaborate.
You start keeping your notes private. If you can’t stop him from weaseling his way into taking credit for your findings, you can at least make it as difficult as possible for him. Your notebook stays locked up in your office, and on the rare occasion that you need to bring it down to the lab with you it never leaves your sight.
What bothers you most about Park’s blunt dismissal is the way little splinters of it manage to worm their way inside your head. Maybe you are only seeing what you want to see. Your own experience is, of course, always at the forefront of your mind. You wouldn’t be the first researcher to succumb to that fallacy.
On the other hand, there’s certainly enough evidence to make your theory worth pursuing. And the depressing fact is that no one is looking for queer people in history except for other queer people. If you don’t do the work, no one will.
Someone like Park could never understand what this means to someone like you.
###
Tallulah died in her late fifties, likely due to natural causes. You’ve examined her head to toe a dozen times and failed to find any injuries worse than a fractured radius, which was more likely than not caused by pressure from the surrounding peat as the acidic bog leached calcium from her bones.
The details you can extrapolate about her life are minimal. The bog contained no grave goods, or at least none that stood the test of time. Any clothing, similarly, has decayed into nothing. What little hair remains seems to have been worn cropped close to the skull. Although exposure to the peat has dyed it a fiery auburn, you like to think that it was once the same silvery brown as your own.
You’ve been going home less and less, returning to your apartment only to shower and eat, which you’ve also been doing less and less. Most of your time is spent with Tallulah. A fierce protective instinct consumes you when you think of her, and you can’t stand the thought of Park—or, god forbid, Jeff—interacting with the body unsupervised.
Never mind that you now have twice as much writing to do, and half of it has to be completed in secret to avoid Park’s interference. You don’t need him to entertain your theories. The data will back your thesis up, or it won’t. Either way, you’ll have done your duty—both to her, and to yourself. And if you’re right, as you so desperately hope you are, he won’t be able to affix his slimy name to your work. The paper will be entirely your own.
You stay late, reexamining every shred of data you’ve already collected, taking new samples from her skin and the organs that looked best-preserved on the CT. Although you aren’t much of an artist, you sketch her into your notebook, taking care to mark the location of every lesion and scar. You can’t take anything for granted; everything you’ve already written needs to be reevaluated in the context of your new theoretical lens. Long after everyone else in the department has gone home, you remain, scribbling like a madman in your all-weather notebook.
You doze off one night over your half-drafted abstract and wake up to a laboratory carpeted in red.
Startled, you stand, cranberries rupturing under your feet. The soles of your shoes sink into the moss beneath. Your nose is full of damp, rich peat, vegetal and bitter.
The table where Tallulah should lie is spotless steel. You squelch across the room and yank the cadaver fridge open to find it empty.
Water rushes through the hallway outside, swelling against the door. Bog rosemary sprouts from your fingertips. In the crushed divots of your footprints, alien sundews unfurl like urchins. Their lifespans will exceed yours.
She’s near. You can feel her, waiting.
A blackened hand extends from the peat like a plea. You kneel, dark water seeping into the denim of your jeans, reaching out to grasp it—
“—Dr. Crane?”
Tallulah’s face is inches from your own, drawn and dark.
You scramble backwards, yelping, and she morphs into Colin, who is looking at you with a great deal of concern.
“Are you alright?”
Dimly, you register the cold sweat beading on your forehead, the labored cadence of your breathing. You shake your head. “Fine. I picked a bad place to nap, that’s all.”
Glancing at Tallulah, you’re relieved to see her lying inert on the table. You swallow thickly.
“What are you doing here so late?”
Colin rummages in his bag, producing a small plastic case. “I have a friend in criminal justice, and she lent me this fingerprinting kit. The body’s starting to deteriorate, right? It’s not like we’ll get an ID from this or anything, but I thought it could be cool to print her, you know, for posterity.”
Smiling weakly, you stand. “That’s a great idea. I’ll help you.”
The two of you painstakingly fingerprint Tallulah’s extended left hand. The right, which is clenched and held close to her chest, is impossible, but Colin still seems pleased with the results. You fingerprint yourselves too for the fun of it, comparing your loops and whorls to hers.
“It’s crazy how yours are so similar,” he says, holding both cards up to the light. “Look, you’ve got the same shape there, and there…”
You take them from him, squinting, and discover he’s right.
###
You never confide the nature of your personal investment in this study to him directly, but Colin seems to intuit it nonetheless. The two of you have formed an unspoken alliance, closing ranks around Tallulah in opposition to Jeff and Park. Although he surely has plenty of his own academic concerns with his dissertation defense approaching in the spring, he puts in dozens of hours scouring odd books and preserved manuscripts for material that might help you back up your findings. You know that you should feel guilty for taking advantage of him—but you also aren’t in a position to refuse the help. You still have classes to teach, papers to grade, faculty meetings to suffer through, and criminal cases to consult on. Everything would be so much easier if there were two of you.
Because you both practically live on campus at this point, he often joins you in your late-night vigils, finding you in the lab after the library closes. He brings you coffee from the student union building, its acridity made up for with copious spoonfuls of sugar, and the two of you scribble notes in silence until dawn. You quickly become accustomed to this easy rhythm, the wordless exchange of Styrofoam cups and hastily jotted ideas—which is why you don’t look up when the door to the lab snicks shut.
“Memphis.”
Park’s oily tenor startles you, and you nearly drop your pen. Standing between you and the exit, he looks unbearably smug.
You swallow. “What are you doing here so late?”
“I could ask the same of you.” His gaze lingers on the almost-full notebook beneath your hand with undisguised hunger. “I worry about you, you know. We do disturbing work. Maintaining a work-life balance is critical for stability, but you haven’t been balancing lately, have you?”
“Your point?” You grit your teeth. You’re painfully aware that you’ve let your obligations slip—your office hours are a thing of the past, and the number of unread emails in your inbox is now in the triple digits—but it isn’t like you’ve checked out completely. You’ve been dragging yourself to class. You’re even up to date on Jeff’s dissertation, despite the fact that you would rather be spending your time reading literally anything else.
“Your output doesn’t match up with your input. If you were actually working on the article at this pace, it would have been done six times over by now. The material you sent me yesterday was half-baked. Good enough for a grad student, but I know you’re capable of much more than that.”
This is the closest thing to a compliment Park has ever paid you. For the first time, you wonder if the enmity he customarily expresses toward you and your ideas isn’t born, at least in part, of jealousy.
“If I were you, I’d cut me in on whatever you’ve actually been working on before you embarrass yourself. I’m only willing to stick my neck out for you so far. And I’d hate for the dean to get the wrong idea about you and that student you’ve been spending so much time with.”
He speaks with a collegiality that doesn’t match the threat in his words. You can feel yourself shriveling, pinned like an insect by his gaze. He has you cornered, and he knows it.
“Food for thought.” He waves his hand, sparing you the embarrassment of forcing out an excuse you both know is a lie. “Don’t wait too long.”
As he exits, he hits the lights, plunging the lab into darkness.
###
Tallulah’s skin bears ink.
You would have missed it, if not for your repeated examinations. There are only shades of difference between the black of the tattoo and the peat-tanned and oxidized hue of the tissue, and the lines have blurred and faded from exposure to the elements, but her right thigh reveals the shadow of a striped, trumpet-shaped bloom.
It’s a Jack-in-the-pulpit. You know because you have one, too—in the exact same place.
The easy explanation would be that you’ve all been working under an incorrect assumption from the start: that Tallulah is in fact a recent murder victim, rather than an ancestral body traversing the centuries within the bog. Imagery aside, this blackwork could only have been done with a modern tattoo machine. The problem with that is that radiocarbon dating places her body firmly within the Bronze Age. Tallulah is by far not the first ancient corpse to surface with ink—Ötzi alone had more than sixty individual markings—but the tools available at the time could not have rendered something so intricate.
And the tattoo is so horribly, painfully yours.
It’s impossible.
And yet.
You approached her wanting to know if someone like you could have lived and died so many years ago. You’re sick to death of arguing the fact of your existence. Proof, physical, tangible proof of queerness before Christ is a dragon you’ve been chasing for years. It’s a legacy you’ve fantasized about leaving for those who come after you.
In the recesses of your mind, you place her under glass. A spotlight illuminates the spadix on her thigh, the minute concave ridge of scar tissue on her chest. The glyphs on the plaque beneath are inscrutable. The exhibit is shrouded in thick, swirling darkness.
Your breath seeps out in a heavy fog as your fingertips smudge the glass, ghostly impressions overlaying her shifting form. Around you, hundreds of purple pitcher plants swell and split open, a chorus of carnivorous voices speaking in tandem.
We remember you.
She lies unmoving, untouchable, unknowable. The response to a question yet to be asked, metamorphosing in a cradle of peat for millennia.
Waiting.
###
Park has been in your office. You know because his cologne lingers like a miasma, clinging to everything it touches.
You expected he would tire of your reticence, eventually, but didn’t think he would go this far. It’s safe to assume that he’s already made copies of anything interesting he found while rifling through your desk. He at least tried to put everything back the way you left it, but the books and papers are stacked just a little too neatly to escape your notice.
Luckily, the only notes you care about anymore are secure on your person.
Tallulah has other scars. Patterns of striae tell the story of lean years and bountiful summers. A half-moon in her scalp, according to Park, was likely sustained in a fall on sharp rock. You bear its twin, a souvenir gained from clipping your temple on a dresser as a child. Officially, the scars on her chest remain unexplained, but their significance is obvious to you.
You don’t feel compelled put her on the way you do Old Croghan. You don’t need to crawl inside her to understand her life. You’ve lived it already.
Park can have your notes. Even if he copies every shred of writing you’ve done, he could never reach this revelation on his own. His unwillingness to look outside himself will forever blind him to the truth.
You slip out of your office and into boreal forest.
The cranberries are dying back, rusting the landscape in mottled patches, but the mountain ash and holly bleed clusters of scarlet berries that bend their branches low. The ground exhales as you walk, veiling the bog in mist.
She lies in the center of the glade on a bier of silver, an ancient sleeper waiting for an awakening prince. Ferns whisper under your feet as you approach. Cast in bronze, she reaches for the autumn sky.
“Am I you?” you ask, and the moss swallows the words as they fall from your lips. “Were you me?”
Silence emanates from her frozen form. Between you, the peat yawns wide, inviting, beckoning you into its embrace.
Sleep, and become.
You enter the open ground.
