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The Bog Girl

Karen Russell (2016)

The young turf-cutter fell hard for his first girlfriend while operating heavy machinery in the peatlands. His name was Cillian Eddowis, he was fifteen years old, and he was illegally employed by Bos Ardee. He had celery-green eyes and a stutter that had been corrected at the state’s expense; it resurfaced whenever he got nervous. “Th-th-th,” he’d said, accepting the job. How did Cillian persuade Bos Ardee to hire him? The boy had lyingly laid claim to many qualities: strength, maturity, experience. When that didn’t work, he pointed to his bedroom window, a quarter mile away, on the misty periphery of the cutaway bog, where the undrained water still sparkled between the larch trees. The intimation was clear: what the thin, strange boy lacked in muscle power he made up for in proximity to the work site.

Peat is harvested from bogs, watery mires where the earth yawns open. The bottom is a breathless place—cold, acidic, anaerobic—with no oxygen to decompose the willow branches or the small, still faces of the foxes interred there. Sphagnum mosses wrap around fur, wood, skin, casting their spell of chemical protection, preserving them whole. Growth is impossible, and Death cannot complete her lean work. Once cut, the peat becomes turf, and many locals on this green island off the coast of northern Europe still heat their homes with this peculiar energy source. Nobody gives much thought to the fuel’s mortuary origins. Cillian, his mother, and several thousand others lived on the island, part of the archipelago known to older generations as the Four Horsemen. It’s unlikely that you’ve ever visited. It’s not really on the circuit.

Neolithic farmers were the first to clear the island’s woods. Two thousand years later, peat had swallowed the remains of their pastures. Bogs blanketed the hills. In the Iron Age, these bogs were portals to distant worlds, wilder realms. Gods travelled the bogs. Gods wore crowns of starry asphodels, floating above the purple heather.

Now industrial harvesters rode over the drained bogs, combing the earth into even geometries. On the summer morning that Cillian found the Bog Girl, he was driving the Peatmax toward a copse of trees at the bog’s western edge, pushing the dried peat into black ridges. True, it looked as if he was pleating shit, but Cill had a higher purpose. He was saving to buy his neighbor Pogo’s white hatchback. Once he had a car, it would be no great challenge to sleep with a girl or a woman. Cillian was open to either experience. Or both. But he was far too shy to have an eye-level crush on anyone in his grade. Not Deedee, not Stacia, not Vicki, not Yvonne. He had a crush, taboo and distressing, on his Aunt Cathy’s ankles in socks. He had a crush on the anonymous shoulders of a shampoo model.

He had just driven into the western cutaway bog when he looked over the side of the Peatmax and screamed. A hand was sticking out of the mud. Cillian’s first word to the Bog Girl required all the air in his lungs: “Ahhhhhhfuuuuuck!”

Here was a secret, flagging him down. A secret the world had kept for two thousand years and been unable to keep for two seconds longer. The bog had confessed her.

When the other men arrived, Cillian was on his knees, scratching up peat like a dog. Already he had dug out her head. She was whole and intact, cocooned in peat, curled like a sleeping child, with her head turned west of her pelvis. Thick, lustrous hair fanned over the tarp, the wild red-orange of an orangutan’s fur, dyed by the bog acids. Moving clouds caused her colors to change continuously: now they were a tawny bronze, now a mineral blue. It was a very young face.

Cradling her head, Cillian lost all feeling in his legs. A light rain began to fall, but he would not relinquish his position. Every man gathered was staring at them. Ordinarily, their pronged attention encircled him like a crown of thorns, making him self-conscious, causing red fear to leak into his inner vision. Today, he didn’t give a damn about the judgments of the mouth-breathers above him. Who had ever seen a face so beautiful, so perfectly serene?

“Mother of God!” one of the men screamed. He pointed to the noose. A rope, nearly black with peat, ran down the length of her back.

Murder. That was the men’s consensus. Bos Ardee called the police.

But Cillian barely heard the talk above him. If you saw the Bog Girl from one angle only, you would assume that she was a cherished daughter, laid to rest by hands that loved her. But she had been killed, and now her smile seemed even more impressive to him, and he wanted only to protect her from future harm. The men kept calling her “the body,” which baffled Cillian—the word seemed to blind them to the deep and flowing dream-life behind her smile. “There is so much more to you than what they see,” he reassured her in a whisper. “I am so sorry about what happened to you. I am going to keep you safe now.”

After this secret conversation, Cill fell rapidly in love.

Cillian was lucky that he met his girlfriend on such a remote island. When these bodies are discovered in Ireland, for example, or in the humid Florida bogs sprinkled between Disney World and Cape Canaveral, things proceed differently. The area is cordoned off. Teams of experts arrive to excavate the site. Then the bog people are carefully removed to laboratories, museums, where gloveless hands never touch them.

Cillian touched her hair, touched the rope. He was holding the reins of her life. Three policemen had arrived, and they conferred above Cillian, their black boots squeezing mud around the bog cotton. Once it had been determined that the girl was not a recent murder victim, the policemen relaxed. The chief asked Cillian a single question: “You’re going to keep her, then?”

Gillian Eddowis was on a party line with her three sisters. She tucked the phone under her chin and took the ruby kettle off the range, opening a window to shoo the blue steam free. In the living room, roars of studio laughter erupted from the television; Cillian and the Bog Girl were watching a sitcom about a Canadian trailer park. Their long silences unnerved her; surely they weren’t getting into trouble, ten feet away from her? She had never had cause to discipline her son. She wouldn’t know where to begin. He was so kind, so intelligent, so unusual, so sensitive—such an outlier in the Eddowis family that his aunts had paid him the modern compliment of assuming that he was gay.

Voices sieved into Gillian’s left ear:

“You want to warn them,” Sister Abby said.

“But, Virgin Mother, there is no way to warn them!” Sister Patty finished.

“We were all sixteen once,” Cathy growled. “We all survived it.”

“Cillian is fifteen,” Gillian corrected. “And the girlfriend is two thousand.”

Abby, who had seen a picture of the Bog Girl in the local newspaper, suggested that somebody was rounding down.

A university man had also read the story of the Bog Girl’s discovery. He’d taken a train and a ferry to find them. “I’ve come to make an Urgent Solicitation on Behalf of History,” he said. He wanted to acquire the Bog Girl for the national museum. The sum he offered them was half of Gillian’s salary at the post office.

In the end, what had happened? Christian feeling had muzzled her. How could she sell a girl to a stranger? Or pretend that she had any claim to her, this orphan from the Iron Age? Gillian told the university man that the Bog Girl was their house guest, and would be living with them until Social Services could locate her next of kin. At this, all the purple veins in the man’s neck stood out. His tone sank into petulant defeat. “Mark my words, you people do not have the knowledge to properly care for her,” he said. “She’ll fall apart on you.” The Bog Girl, propped up next to the ironing board, watched them argue with an implacable smile. The university man left empty-handed, and for a night and a day Gillian was a hero to her son.

“So she’s just freeloading, then? Living off your dime?” Cathy asked.

“Oh, yes. She’s quite shameless about it.”

How could she explain to her sisters what she could barely admit to herself? The boy was in love. It was a monstrous, misdirected love; nevertheless, it commanded her respect.

“The Bog Girl is a bad influence on him,” she told her sisters. “She doesn’t work, she doesn’t help. All day she lazes about the house.”

Patty coughed and said, “If you feel that way, then why—”

Cathy screamed, “Gillian! She cannot stay with you!”

It was gentle Abby who formulated the solution: “Put her back in the bog.”

“Gillian. Do it tonight.”

“Who’s going to miss her?”

“I can’t put her back in the bog. It would be . . .”

Silence drilled into her ears. Her family had a talent for emitting judgment without articulating words. When she was Cillian’s age and five months pregnant with him, everyone had quietly made clear that she was sacrificing her future. She’d run away to be with Cillian’s father, then returned to the boglands alone with a bug-eyed toddler.

“I’m afraid,” she confessed to her sisters. “If I put her out of the house, he’ll leave with her.”

“Oh!” they cried in unison. As if a needle had infected them all with her fear.

“Do something crazy, stupid . . .”

Silently adding, Like we did.

“Now, be honest, you little rat turd. You know nothing about her.” His uncle put a finger into his peach iced tea, stirred. They were seated on a swing in the darkest part of Cillian’s porch. Uncle Sean was as blandly ugly as a big toenail. Egg-bald and cheerfully unemployed, a third-helpings kind of guy. Once, Cillian had watched him eat the sticker on a green apple rather than peel it off. Sean was always over at the cottage, using Gillian’s computer to play Poker 3000. He smeared himself throughout their house, his beer rings ghosting over surfaces like fat thumbs on a photograph. His words hung around, too, leaving their brain stain on the air. Uncle Sean took a proprietary interest in anything loved by Cillian. It was no surprise, then, that he was infatuated with the Bog Girl.

“I know that I love her,” Cill said warily. He hated to be baited.

Uncle Sean was packing his brown, shakey weed into the rosy crotch of a glass mermaid. He passed his nephew the pipe. “Already, eh? You love her and you don’t know the first thing about her?”

What did he know about her?

What did he love about her?

Cillian shrugged, his body crowding with feelings. “And I know that she loves me,” he added, somewhat hastily.

Uncle Sean’s pink smirk seemed to paste him to the back of the wicker seat. “Oh?” His grin widened. “And how old is she?”

“Two thousand. But she was my age when they put her in the bog.”

“Most women I know lie freely about their age,” Uncle Sean warned. “She may well be eleven. Then again, she could be three thousand.”

Gillian, plump and starlit, appeared on the porch. A pleasant oniony smell followed her, mixing with the damp odor of Sean’s pot.

“Are you smoking?”

“No,” they lied in unison.

“Tell your . . . your friend that she is welcome to eat with us.” With a martyred air, Gillian lifted her kitten-print pot holders to the heavens. Cill smiled; the pot holders made it look as if she approved of the situation—two big thumbs-up! His poor mom. She was so nervous around new people, and the Bog Girl’s silence only intimidated her further. She was insecure about her cooking, and he knew she was going to take it very personally when the Bog Girl did not touch it.

Dinner was meat loaf with onions and, for Sean, a thousand beers. It was not a comfortable meal.

Gillian, stirring butter into the lima beans, beamed threats at her son’s new girlfriend: You little bitch. Crawl back into your hole. Stay away from my son.

“Biscuit?” Gillian asked. “Does she like biscuits, Cill?”

The Bog Girl smiled her gentle smile at the wall, her face reflected in the oval door of the washer-dryer. Against that sudsy turbulence, she looked especially still.

Three drinks in, Uncle Sean slung an arm around the Bog Girl’s thin blue shoulder, welcoming her into the family. “I’m proud of my nephew for going after an older woman, a mature woman . . . a cougar!”

Cillian fixed his uncle with a homicidal stare. Under the table, he touched his girlfriend’s foot with his foot; his eyebrows lifted in apology. His mother shot up with her steaming cauldron of beans, giving everyone another punitive lima ladle and removing the beer from the table. Their dog, returning from her dusk mouse hunt, came berserking into the kitchen, barking at a deranged pitch. She wanted to play tug-of-war with the Bog Girl’s noose. “Puddles—_no! _” Cillian’s vision was swimming, his whole body overheating with shame. He relaxed when he stared into the Bog Girl’s face, which was void of all judgment, smiling at him with its mysterious kindness. Once again, his embarrassment was soothed by her infinite calm. His eyes lowered from her smile to the noose. Of course, she’s seen far worse than us, he thought. Outside the window, insects millioned around the porch light. The bog crickets were doing a raspy ventriloquy of the stars; perhaps she recognized their tiny voices. Soon Uncle Sean was snoring lightly beside the pooling gravy, face down in his big arms. Cill sat slablike in the moonlight. The Bog Girl smiled blindly on.

For the first two weeks, the Bog Girl slept on the sofa, the television light flickering gently over her. That was fine by Gillian. She wasn’t about to turn an orphan from the Iron Age out on the street.

Then, on a rainy Monday night, without warning or apology, Cillian picked up the Bog Girl. He cradled her like a child, her frondy feet dangling in the air. Gillian, doing a jigsaw puzzle of a horse and colt in the kitchen, looked up in time to see them disappearing. She felt a purple welt rising in her mind, the revelatory pain called wonder. Underneath the shock, other feelings began to flow, among them a disturbed pride. Because hadn’t he looked exactly like his father? Confident, possessed. He didn’t ask for her permission. He did not lie to her about what he was doing, or hide it, or explain it. He simply rose with the Bog Girl in his arms, nuzzling her blue neck. The door shut, and he was gone from sight. Another milestone: she heard the click of the lock.

“Good night, son!” she cried after them, panicked.

She could not reconcile her knowledge of her sweet, awkward boy with this wayward, confident person. Was she supposed to go up there now? Pound on the door? Oh, who could she call? Nobody, not even her sisters, would take a call about this problem, she felt quite certain. Abby’s son, Kevin, met his girlfriend in church. Cathy’s son, Patrick, has a lovely fiancée who teaches kindergarten. Murry’s girlfriend is in jail for vehicular manslaughter—but at least she’s alive!

In the morning, she watched the mute, hitching muscles of his back as he fumbled with the coffeepot. So he was a coffee drinker now. More news. He kissed his mother’s forehead as he left for work, but he was whistling to himself, oblivious of her sadness, her fear, completely self-enclosed in his new happiness. It’s too soon for this, she thought. And: Not you, too. Please, please, please, she prayed, the incomplete prayer of mothers who cannot conceive of a solution.

That evening, she announced a new rule: “Everyone has to wear clothes. And no more locked doors.”

That Saturday, Cillian took the ferry three hours to a mainland museum. Twelve bog bodies were on display, part of a travelling exhibition called “Kings of the Iron Age.” The Bog Girl had met his family—the least he could do was return the favor. Cill sneaked into a tour in progress, following a docent from sepulchre to sepulchre. Under the glass, the Kings of the Iron Age lay like chewed taffy. One man was naked except for a fox-fur armband. Another was a giant. Another had two sets of thumbs.

Cillian learned that the bogs of the islands in the cold Atlantic were particularly acidic. Pickled bodies from the Iron Age had emerged from these deep vats. Their fetally scrolled bodies often doubled as the crumpled maps of murders. They might have been human sacrifices, the docent said. Left in the bog water for the harvest god. Kings, queens, scapegoats, victims—they might have been any of these things.

“From the contents of his stomach, we can surmise that he last dined on oat gruel. . . .”

“From the forensic analyses, we can surmise that she was killed by an arrow. . . . ”

“From the ornaments on this belt buckle, we can surmise that these were a wealthy people. . . . ”

What? No more than this could be surmised?

The docent pointed out the dots and stripes on the potsherds. Charcoal smudges that might be stars or animals. Evidence, she said, of “a robust culture.” Cillian took notes:

“they had time to kill. they liked art, too.”

Back on the ferry, he could admit to his relief: none of the other bog bodies stirred any feeling in him. He loved one specific person. He could see things about the Bog Girl to which this batty docent would be totally blind—for example, the secret depths her smile concealed. How badly misunderstood she had been by her own people. She was an alien from a planet that nobody alive could visit—the planet Earth, in the first century A.D. She felt soft in his arms, bonelessly soft, but she also seemed indestructible. According to the experts, a bog body should begin to decompose rapidly when exposed to air. Curiously enough, this Bog Girl had not. He told no one his theory but polished it inside his mind like an amulet: it was his love that was protecting her.

By August, their rapport had deepened immeasurably. They didn’t need to say a word, Cill was discovering, to perfectly understand each other. Falling in love with the Bog Girl was a wonderful thing—it was permission to ignore everyone else. When school started, in September, he made a bespoke sling and brought her with him. His girlfriend, propped like a broomstick against the rows of lockers, waited for him during Biology and Music II, as cool and impassive as the most popular girl the world has ever known.

Nobody in the school administration objected to the presence of the Bog Girl. Ancestral superstitions still hovered over the islanders’ minds, exerting their quiet influence, and nobody wanted to be the person responsible for angering a visitor from the past. Soon she was permitted to audit all of Cillian’s classes, smiling dreamlessly at the flustered, frightened teachers.

One afternoon, the vice-principal called her into his office and presented her with a red-and-gold badge to wear in the halls: “visiting student.”

“I don’t think that’s really accurate, sir,” Cillian said.

“Oh, no?”

“She’s not a visitor. She was born here.” In fact, the Bog Girl was the island’s oldest resident, by at least nineteen hundred years. Cillian paused. “Also, her eyes are shut, you see. So I don’t think she can really, ah, study. . . .”

“Well!” The vice-principal clapped his hands. He had a day to live, quotas to fulfill. “We will be studying her, then. She will give us all an exciting new perspective on our modern life and times—Oh my! Oh dear.” The Bog Girl had slumped into his aloe planter.

Cillian put the badge on her polyester blouse, a loaner from his mother that was vintage cool. Cillian—who never gave a thought to his own clothing—enjoyed dressing the Bog Girl for school in the morning. He raided his mother’s closet, resurrecting her baby-doll dresses. The eleventh-grade girls organized a clothing drive for the Bog Girl, collecting many shoplifted donations of fall tunics and on-trend boots.

Rumorsprawl. Word got around that the Bog Girl was actually a princess. A princess, or possibly a witch. Within a week, she was eating at the popular girls’ table. They’d kidnapped her from where Cillian had positioned her on a bench, propped between two book bags, and taken her to lunch. Already they had restyled her hair with rhinestone barrettes.

“You stole my girlfriend,” Cillian said.

“Something awful happened to her,” Vicki said reverently.

“So bad,” Georgette echoed.

“She doesn’t like to talk about it,” Priscilla said, looping a protective arm around the Bog Girl. The girls had matching lunches: lettuce salads, diet candy bars, diet shakes. They were all jealous of how little she ate.

How had Cill not foreseen this turn of events? The Bog Girl was diminutive, wounded, mysterious, a redhead. Best of all, she could never contradict any rumor the living girls distributed about her.

“She was too beautiful to live!” Priscilla gasped. “They killed her for her beauty.”

“I don’t th-th-think,” Cill said, “that it happened quite like that.”

The popular girls adjusted their leggings, annoyed. “No?”

Cillian was dimly aware that other tables were listening in, but the density of the attention in no way affected him. “I am hers, and she is mine,” he announced. “I have dedicated myself to learning everything about her.”

A sighing spasm of envy moved down the popular girls’ table—what boy alive would say this about them? A miracle: nobody mocked Cillian Eddowis. They were all starving to be loved like this. The popular girls watched him avidly as he ate a grilled cheese and waffle fries, his green irises burning. Between bites, his left hand rose to touch the Bog Girl’s red braid, tousling it like the pull-chain of a lamp.

Gillian couldn’t help it: she was heartbroken. The past that was most precious to her had filtered right through her son. The songs she’d sung to him when he was nursing? The care with which she’d cut the tiny moons of his fingernails? Their 4 a.m. feedings? Erased! Her son had matured into amnesia about his earliest years. Now her body was the only place where the memories were preserved. Cillian, like all sons, was blithe about this betrayal.

“There is so much about yourself that you do not recall,” Gillian accused him after dinner one night. Cillian, writing a paper about igneous rocks at the kitchen table, did not look up.

“When you were my boy, just a wee boy,” Gillian said in a voice of true agony, “you used to be terrified of the vacuum cleaner. You loved your froggy pajamas. You used so much glue on your art projects that your teachers—”

“Quit it with these dumb stories, Ma!”

“Oh, you find them dumb, do you? The stories about how I had to raise you alone, without a penny from your father—”

“You’re just trying to embarrass me in front of her!”

The Bog Girl smiled at them from the amber armchair. Her leather skirt was outrageously short, a donation from tall Bianca. Decorously, Cillian had draped the cable guide over her lap. Bugs spun in her water glass; mosquitoes and dragonflies were always diving into the Bog Girl’s food and drink, as if in strange solidarity with her.

Cillian drew himself up triumphantly, a foot taller than his mother. “You don’t want me to grow up.”

“What? Of course I do!”

But Cill was ready with his rebuttal: “You gave us rhyming names, Ma!”

This was true. Gillian and Cillian. She’d come up with that plan when she was a teen-ager herself, and pregnant with a nameless otter, some gyring little animal. A rhyming name had seemed just right then; she couldn’t have said why, at seventeen. Had Cillian been a girl, she would have named her Lillian.

“You’re so young, you can’t know . . . ” But what did she want to tell him?

Her body seemed to cave in on itself then, becoming smaller and smaller, so that even Cillian, fortressed behind the wall of his love, noticed and became alarmed. “Ma? What’s wrong?”

“It’s changing all the time,” she murmured ominously. “Just, please, wait, my love. Don’t . . . settle.” What a word! She pictured her son sinking up to his neck in the reddish bog water.

She was hiccupping now, unable to name her own feelings. Without thinking, she picked up the murky water glass, drank from it. “Your potential . . . all the teachers tell me you have great potential.”

Just come out and say it. “I don’t want you to throw your life away on some Bog Girl!”

“Oh, Ma.” Cill patted her back until the hiccups stopped. Her face looked crumpled and blue in the unlit room, hovering above the seated Bog Girl. For a second, they might have been sisters.

The Bog Girl floated, thin as a dress, on the mattress. Barrettes, pink and purple, were scattered all over the pillow. She smiled at Cillian, or beyond him, with her desiccated calm. Downstairs, Gillian was making breakfast, the buttery smells threading through his nostrils like an ox ring, tugging him toward them. But when she called up for him he was barely in the room. He was digging and digging into the peat-moss bog again, smoothing her blue cheeks with both hands, spading down into the kingdom that she comes from.

“Cillian! The bus is coming!” It should have taken him twenty seconds to put on pants. What was he doing in there? Probably jacking off to a “meme,” whatever that was, or buying perfume for the Bog Girl on her credit cards.

“Coming, Ma!”

Cillian was always learning new things about his girlfriend. The longer he looked at her, the more he saw. Her face grew silty with personality. Although she was young when she disappeared into the bog, her face was plowed with tiny wrinklings. Some dream or mood had recurred frequently enough to hammer lines across her brow. Here were the ridges and the gullies her mental weathers had worked into her skin.

Cill studied the infloresences on her cheeks. Her brain is in there, the university man had said. Her brain is intact, preserved by the bog acids. Cillian spent hours doing this forensic palmistry, trying to read her mind.

“Will you have a talk with him?” Gillian begged Sean. “Something is going really, really wrong with him!”

“First love, first love,” Sean murmured sadly, scratching his bubonic nose. “Who are we to intervene, eh? It will die of natural causes.”

“Natural causes!”

She was thinking that the poor girl had been garroted. Her bright-red hair racing the tail of the noose down her spine. You could not survive your death, could you? It survived with you.

In mid-October, a stretch limousine pulled up to the cottage to take Cillian and the Bog Girl to the annual school dance. A techno-reggae song called “Bump de Ass!” filled the back seat, where half a dozen teen-agers sat in churchlike silence. The Bog Girl’s reticence was contagious. Ambulance lights sparkled through the tinted windows, causing everyone to jump, with one exception: Cillian Eddowis’s date, the glamorous foreigner, or native—nobody was sure how to regard her.

Since acquiring his far older girlfriend, Cill had begun speaking to his classmates in the voice of a bachelor who merely tolerates children. “Carla,” he said, clearing his throat. “Would you mind exhaling a little closer to the window? Your smoke is blowing on us.”

Two girls started debating whether or not a friend should lose her virginity in a BMW that evening. What was the interior of the car like? This was a very important question. The girl’s boyfriend was a twenty-six-year-old cocaine dealer. Prior to the Bog Girl’s arrival on the scene, everyone had found his age very impressive. The dealer boyfriend had been unable to accompany the girl to the school dance, so she had taken poor Eoin, her sophomore cousin, who looked near fatally compressed by his green cummerbund. The twenty-six-year-old would be waiting for her in the BMW, post-festivities. Should she deflower him?

“Wait. Uh. I think he’s deflowering you, right? Or maybe you’re deflowering each other? Who’s got the flower?”

“Just do it, and then lie about it.” Carla shrugged. “That’s what I did.”

“My advice,” Cillian said, in the unfamiliar voice, “my advice is, wait. Wait until you find the person with whom you want to spend all your earthly time.” The Bog Girl leaned against his shoulder, aloof in her sparkly tiara. “Or until that person finds you. If that’s this guy, well, kudos. But, if not, wait. You will meet your soul mate. And you will want to give that person every molecule of your life.”

The attempted conversion of the high-school gymnasium into an Arabian-themed wonderland had not been a success. Cill and the Bog Girl stood under a palm tree that looked like an enormous toilet brush, made of cellophane and cardboard tubes. Three girls from the limo came up and asked to dance with Cillian, but he explained that his girlfriend hated to be left alone. All were sulkily respectful of her claim on him.

The after-party was held in an old car-parts warehouse on the west side of the island, where everything was shut or abandoned; the population of the island had been declining steadily for three decades. The music sounded like fists beating at the wall, and the floor was so sticky that Cillian had to lift and cradle the Bog Girl, looping her silver dress around one arm. Cillian had never attended an after-party before. Or a party, for that matter. He surveyed his former tormenters, the seniors, with their piggish faces and their plastic cups. Some were single, some had girlfriends, some were virgins, some were not, but not one of them, Cillian felt very certain, knew the first thing about love.

Eoin the sophomore came over, his date nowhere to be seen. He was breathless in the cummerbund, in visible danger of puking up Bacardi. He rolled a bloodshot eye in Cill’s direction, smiling wistfully.

“So,” he said, “I’m just wondering. Do you guys—”

Cillian preëmpted the question: “A gentleman never tells.”

It was a phrase he’d once read in a men’s magazine, while waiting to get a root canal. In fact, his mother needn’t have lost so much sleep to this particular fear. At night, Cillian lay beside the Bog Girl, barely touching her. A steady, happy calm radiated from her, which filled him with a parallel euphoria.

Cillian carried the Bog Girl onto the dance floor, her braided noose flung over his shoulder. And even Eoin, minutes from unconsciousness, could hear exactly who the older boy believed himself to be in this story: Cillian the Rescuer.

“Oh, damn! Wise up! She’ll make you wait forever, man!” The lonely laugh of Eoin died a terrible death, like a bird impaled on a spike.

At 3 a.m., the lights were still on. Uh-oh, Cill thought. Mom got into the gin again.

Drinking made her silences bubble volubly. He almost got the hiccups himself, listening to her silences. Oh, God. There was so much pain inside her, so much she wanted to share with him. Cillian and the Bog Girl tried to tiptoe past her to the staircase, but she sprang up like a jack-in-the-box.

“Cillian?” She looked child-small in the dark. Her voice was tremulous and young, and her slurring reminded him of his own stutter, that undead vestige of his early years. His mother sounded like a sleepy girl, four or five years old. Her feet were bare, and she rose onto her stubby toes to grip his arm. “Where are you coming from?”

“Nowhere. The dance. It was fun.”

“Where are you going?”

“Aw, Mom. Where do you th-th-think?”

“Good night!” she called after him desperately. “I hope you had a good time! You looked so handsome! So grown up!”

By early winter, the Bog Girl’s stillness had begun to provoke a restlessness in Cillian, a squeezed and throbbing feeling. He was failing three subjects. His mother had threatened to send him to live with Aunt Cathy until he “straightened out.” He didn’t care. Waiting for the bus in the freezing rain, he no longer dreamed about owning a car. He knew what he would do with the summer money he’d earned from Bos Ardee: run away with her.

He’d flunk out of school and take the Bog Girl with him to the mainland. She’d be homesick at first, maybe, but they’d go on trips to urban parks. It was the burr of peace, the burr of happiness, goading him on to new movement. Oh, he was frightened, too.

In his fantasy life, Cillian drew the noose tighter and tighter. He imagined, with a strange joy, the narrow life they would lead. No children, no sex, no messy nights vomiting outside bars, no unintended pregnancies, no fights in the street, no betrayals, no surprises, no broken promises, no promises.

Was the Bog Girl a co-signer to this fantasy? Cillian had every reason to believe so. When he described his plans to her, the smile never left her face. Was their love one-sided, as the concerned and unimaginative adults in his life kept insisting? No—but the proof of this surprised no one more terribly than Cillian.

One night in mid-December, lying in bed, he felt a cobwebby softness on his left cheek. It was her eyelashes, flicking over him. They glowed radish-red in the moonlight. Cillian swatted at his face, his own eyes never opening. Still sunk in his dreaming, he grunted and rolled over.

Cillian.

The Bog Girl sat up.

With fluttering effort, the muscles of her blue jaw yawned. One eye opened. It studied itself in the dresser mirror for a long instant, then turned calmly back toward Cillian. Very slowly, her left arm unhinged itself and dropped to the plaid bedspread. The fingers curled around the blanket’s edge, and drew it down. A blush of primal satisfaction colored the Bog Girl’s cheeks as the fabric moved. She tugged more forcefully, revealing Cillian curled on his side in his white undershirt. Groaning in his sleep, he jerked the covers back up.

“Cillian,” she said aloud.

Now Cillian was awake—he was irreversibly awake. He blinked up at her face, which was staring down at him. When they locked eyes, her frozen smile widened.

“Mom!” he couldn’t help screaming. “Help!”

The Bog Girl, imitating him, began to scream and scream. And he could see, radiating from her gaze, the same blind tenderness that he had directed at her. Now he was its object. Something truly terrifying had happened: she loved him back.

For months, Cillian had been decoding the Bog Girl’s silences. He’d peered into her dreams, her fears, her innermost thoughts. But her real voice was nothing like the voice that he’d imagined for her—a cross between Vicky Gilvarry and Patti LaBelle. Its high-pitched ululations hailed over him. In the kitchen, the dog began to bark. The language that she spoke was no longer spoken anywhere on earth.

He stumbled up, tugging at his boxers. The Bog Girl stood, too. The past, with its monstrous depth and span, reached toward him, demanding an understanding that he simply could not give it. His mind was too young and too narrow to withstand the onrush of her life. An invisible woods was in the bedroom with them, the scent of trees multiplying. Some mental earthquake inside the Bog Girl was casting up a world, green and unknown to him, or to anyone living: her homeland. Her gaze drove inward, carrying Cillian with it. For an instant, he thought he glimpsed her parents. Her brothers, her sisters, a nation of people. Their cheeks now beginning to redden, every one of them alive again inside her village. Pines rippling seaward. Gods, horned and faceless, walking the lakes that once covered Cillian’s home. Cillian was buried in water, in liquid images of her; he had to push through so many strata of her memories to reach the surface of her mind. Most of what he saw he shrank away from. His mind felt like a burned tongue, numbly touching her reality.

“W-w-who are you?”

“Heartbreak” is the universal diagnosis for the pain that accompanies the end of love. But this was an unusual breakup, in that Cillian’s mind shattered first. The love that had protected him began to fall away. Piece after piece of it clattered from his chest, an armor rusting off him. What are you?

The Bog Girl lurched toward him, her arms open. First she moved like a hopping chick, with an unexpected buoyancy. Then she seemed to remember how to step, heel to toe. She came for him like an astronaut, bouncing on the gray carpet. The only English word she knew was his name.

Almost weightlessly, she reached for him. For wasn’t she equally terrified? There was no buoy other than this boy, who had gripped her with his thin, freckled arms, bellying her out of the peat bog and into time.

Cillian hid behind the dresser.

Her fingers found his hand, threaded through his fingers.

He screamed again, even as he squeezed the hand back.

Her words rushed together, a thawing waterfall, moving intricately between octaves; still the only word he understood was his name. Perhaps nothing he had said to her, in their six months as a couple, had been comprehended. Cillian worked the levers in his brain, desperately trying to find the words that would release him.

“Unlock the door,” his mother’s beautiful voice called.

Cillian was frozen in the Bog Girl’s grip, unable even to call out. But a moment later he heard the key turning in the lock. Gillian stood in the doorway in her yellow pajamas. With a panoramic comprehension, she took in what had happened. She knew, too, what must now be done. If she could have freed these two from the embrace herself, she would have done so; but now she understood the challenge. The boy would have to make his own way out. “Take her home, Cillian. Make sure that she gets home safely.”

Cillian, his eyes round with panic, only nodded.

Gillian went to the Bog Girl, helping her into a sweater. “Put a hat on. And pants.”

His mother shepherded them downstairs and onto the porch, switching on every yellow bulb as they moved through the cottage. It was the warmest December on record, rain falling instead of snow, the drops disappearing into the rotted wood. Cillian carried the Bog Girl to the edge of the light before he understood that his mother was not coming with him.

“Let her down gently, son!” his mother called after them.

Well, she could do this for him, at least: she held a lantern steady across the rainy lawn, creating a gangplank of light that reached almost to the larches. She watched them moving toward the inky water. The Bog Girl was howling in her foreign tongue; at this distance, Gillian felt she could almost understand it.

Oh, she hoped their breakup would stick. She had divorced Cillian’s father, then briefly moved into his new house; it had taken years before their affair was truly over. You had to really cultivate an ending. To get it to last, you had to kneel and tend to the burial ground, continuously firming your resolution.

This was a bad breakup. A quarter mile from the cottage, under a bright moon, Cillian and the Bog Girl were rolling in the mud, each screaming in a different language. Their screams twined together, their hands reaching for each other; it was during this undoing that they were, at last, truly united as a couple. His flashlight rolled with them, plucking amphibious red and yellow eyes out of the reeds. “It’s over. It’s over. It’s over,” he kept babbling optimistically, out of his mind with fear. Her throat was vibrating against his skin. He could feel the echo of his own terror and sorrow, and again his mind felt overrun by the lapping waves of time. She clutched at the collar of his T-shirt, her body covered in dark mud and cracked stems of bog cotton, blue lichen. At last he felt her grip on him loosen. Her eyes, opaquely glinting in the moonlight, liquid and enormous, far larger than anyone could have guessed before their unlidding, regarded him with what he imagined was a soft surprise, and disappointment. He was not who she’d expected to find when she opened her eyes, either. Now neither teen-ager needed to tell the other that it was over. It simply was—and, without another sound, the Bog Girl let go of Cillian and slipped backward into the bog water. Did she sink? It looked almost as if the water were rising to cover her. Her cranberry hair waved away from her scalp. As he watched, her body itself began to break up.

Straightening from where he was kneeling on the ledge of mud, he brushed peat from his pants. His arms tingled where her grip had suddenly relaxed. The clear rain drenched his clothing. The bog was still bubbling, pieces of her sinking back into the black peat, when he turned on his heel and ran. For the next few days, he would be quakey with relief; he’d felt certain, watching her sink away, that he would never see the Bog Girl again in this life.

But here he was mistaken. In the weeks and years to come, Cillian would find himself alone with her memory, struggling to pay attention to his droning contemporaries in the cramped classroom. How often would he retrace his steps, wandering right back to the lip of the bog, peering in? Each dusk, with their primitive eloquence, the air-galloping insects continue to speak the million syllables of her name.

“Ma! Ma! Ma!” That night, Cillian came roaring out of the dark, pistoning his knees as he ran for the light, for his home at the edge of the boglands. “Who was that?”

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