Arcadia by Lauren Groff

to go shadowy. The wind picks up within the forest, and Bit can hear its dark rush toward them.
    At last, Bit washes his hands carefully and brushes his teeth three times with baking soda. He kneels behind his mother’s pillow. He cups her cheeks. Slowly, he lowers his mouth to hers, kissing with all he has within him, pressing his lips hard against hers until he can feel the shape of her teeth behind her lips and taste the bad tang of her breath.
    She doesn’t awaken when he lifts his head away. He takes his hands back sadly. This is what he’d feared. Bit is not the one. He is not her prince.
    The women boil down the sap in a water heater Tarzan welded into a huge double boiler, and the air all over Arcadia smells sweet and a little burnt at the edges. Bit can almost taste the sugar when he puts out his tongue. One morning, when Sweetie brings the Kid Herd over the fresh drifts of snow to the Sugarshack, Mikele and Suzie, who have boiled all night long, are giddy, and paint the soft snow with streaks of syrup. The syrup sinks as it cools, and when they fish it out, it has hardened into candy.
    Don’t tell Astrid, says Suzie. She hacks the syrup taffy into pieces and hands them out to the kids. His piece is so sweet that Bit gags, but to not hurt their feelings he swallows it anyway and pretends to want more.
    Abe’s clothes stink with sweat and sawdust; the men are finished with the entire roof. Tomorrow, the joints of Abe’s hands won’t have ice in them all the time, and Bit won’t startle when he accidentally brushes them in his sleep. Tomorrow, Abe will start to put in bathrooms and plumbing to the Eatery, and the huge heap of salvaged copper pipes down at the Motor Pool will shrink to nothing.
    When we’re in Arcadia House, people say all the time now, longing writ on their faces. Always, the dream of when . Things will be better, we will be warmer, people won’t argue, we will send extra aid into the world, we will start the publishing company, nobody will have vitamin D deficiencies, the kidlets will go to school, the midwives will be on hand, the bears won’t come out of the woods and ransack the garbage pails and scatter the unwashed diapers or Menstru-fleeces all across the Quad, there will be no loos.
    Muffin, who once lived with her mothers in an apartment in Albany, tries to describe toilets to the kids: You turn a knob, she says, and water gushes out and swallows up your poop.
    Helle begins to cry. Like a monster, she sobs. It eats your shit!
    The others sigh and shift away, as they usually do when Helle cries. But Bit goes to her and hugs her to him, this squishy hard girl, all elbows and pudge. At first she pulls back, but when he lets go of her, she sinks against him. She is bigger than he is, but sometimes he thinks she’s younger, even, than the toddlers. She is strange. She smells like a vanilla bean. Bit always feels a little sick for her.
    Not like a monster, says Muffin with disdain. It’s like the loos. But it doesn’t stink and isn’t cold and there aren’t spiders and the Sanitation Crew doesn’t have to pump them, and you don’t have to spread lye. You just turn the knob and it goes away.
    Where’s away? says Leif.
    I don’t know, says Muffin.
    They look at one another, thinking. At last, Erik, who is eleven, says, I think the ocean. Yes, they all agree, away must be the ocean, which Bit pictures as the Pond on a windy day, people in strange outfits waiting on the opposite side: women in kimonos and wooden shoes, men in paddy hats and dashikis like Muhammad’s, little flotillas of shit rushing over the surface toward them, scrap-paper sails and all.
    As they sleep, a cloud dumps snow upon them. Ersatz Arcadia has become a smooth pretty village of white, poked with playful, smoking chimneys, like the old-timey picture in Hannah’s book on Russian serfs. Today, again, Hannah doesn’t get up. Every part of her is filmy with oils. She murmurs and grabs Bit and pulls him in gently