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It gets my wrist.

It is like being put down in snow. Everything on that side of me goes far away, and my knees go, and I am in the mud in the lane with a thing wearing my face holding my arm with both hands and a cold going up it into my chest. It cannot run, so it feeds.

I am slowing down.

I keep saying it anyway. I say it into the mud, and my mouth is not working properly, and I hear it come back off the wall half a beat late, which is how I know I am still saying it out loud.

“You’re not me.”

Hoofbeats on the foundry road. Fast.

I know the horse. I would know that horse in my sleep, and it is nearly here.

The horse comes round the bend at a run and he is off it before it has stopped, and the mare stands blowing in the lane with her reins on the ground, and nobody goes to her.

He does not look at either of us. He puts his hand on the shoulder of the woman standing over me and snatches it back as a hand comes off a stove. Then his hand is on the back of my neck for one breath, cold, his, the way it has been every night for a month, and then it is on the back of the other one’s, and he does not take it away.

“Keep saying it,” he says to me.

“You’re not me.”

“Again.”

“You’re not me.”

The seam opens.

I see it from the ground, by the lamp lying on its side in the ruts. His coat is open and his shirt is open, and the line down him from collarbone to hip has come apart, and what is behind it is not the dark of the lane.

The dark of the lane has a hedge in it and a wall and a lamp.

This has nothing in it at all.

The lamp flame leans toward it. The cold on my arm lets go and runs toward it too, and the hands that were on my wrist are not hands any more.

The thing with my face turns its head and looks at him, and then at me.

“Wait…” it whispers.

And then it is gone.

My husband stands over a shadow with his side open to the night, breathing hard, and then he puts his hand flat against the line, and it closes.

I am sick in the ditch, with his hand on my forehead.

“Did we?” I say, when I can. “Is it gone?”

“It is gone.”

I sit in the mud with my back against his shins and laugh at nothing, and cannot stop.

“I do not like that,” he says above me. “I was afraid. I rode that horse harder than I have ever ridden it and I was afraid the whole way, and I would like you to stop making that noise so I can hear you breathe.”

“I’m frightened too. That’s what the noise is.”

He waits. When it stops he picks me up out of the lane, mud and all, with my arm hanging wrong and my teeth going.

“Is Corentin all right?”