Lia Purpura, Wasp Nest (detail), featured in AGNI 102
The Sundial Pilgrimage
It’s morning. I’m off again to my tree, my bundle of tricks slung over my shoulder, the summer solstice having played out a few weeks ago.
Every year since the event, when summer is beginning to close in, I go to a different part of the vast forest. There, I select a tree. I always have difficulty choosing. Last year I did a young silver birch, its leaves still sapping green. It took me until early autumn, tangled up in the filigree of lean branches from dawn to dark. The little heart-shaped leaves were difficult to work. My fingers were pricked redraw, my old eyes gone askew. But all these leaves deserve a chance, and for as long as I’m standing I’m not giving up on a single one.
This summer I’ve headed east. I found a spindly rowan tree, old enough to have proved its viability and young enough to warrant my help. Rowan leaves are fragile, rowans fancy themselves as strapping ash but in truth they’re nothing like that. Their delicate leaflets are arranged around a stem, about twenty to each, though every baby thinks it’s the only one.
I set to, selecting a slender needle from my bag. With it, I choose a silk thread, blue in contrast to the leaf ’s green in order to map my progress as I work. I’ve learnt that one unbroken thread-length is best for use on all leaflets radiating from the central stem. Doubling it up and releasing as I sew. A tiny knot at the end. I place the initial snick cautiously, beside a minuscule vein for strength and some ballast for my knot. I start at the terminal leaf, gently piercing the fine-grained cuticle.
The first leaf is always challenging. Sometimes I ask whether it feels pain, any panic in the young tree it’s clinging to, sap fizzing, does it understand the struggle ahead, the stealthy magnet below. Sometimes, when I sense fear from the leafling, I sing a lullaby.
Centred between apex, petiole, and midrib, I pull the thread through. When there’s a neat line of stitches perforating the leaf side to side, I sew down towards where the leaf grasps the axis, weaving the thread with the blade’s vascular network. On reaching the base, I circle it, trussing the embroidered leaflet to its stem. I pull the thread taut, without strangling the living anchor, then stitch my way back up the adjoining leaflet in an unbroken track of blue filament.
I know I’m being overly specific, too intricate, but I don’t know which detail could reasonably be left out and which is integral to the structure, a joist, a girder, a load-bearing beam. Even if I wanted to, it’s impossible for me now to revert to succinct, to detached abstractions, impossible after everything that has happened.
I work through each glossy blade, fastening them to the stem. I’m careful not to tear the tender green lamina or angle any leaf away from the sky. Each one of them has a predestined position on the stem, which I don’t entitle myself to interfere with, my parameters rigidly set from the beginning. To follow the rules without enquiry is the strongest tool in my tricks-bag. Ready, wily as a weasel, I sew.
Once each leaflet is tied, I wind the thread around the main stem, binding down to where it attaches to the twig and circling there, the blue distinct against the duskiness of the bark. With little left of the thread, I loosen the last few swirls around the twig and run it in under. I pull to confirm that it has bound, that the coming weeks of residual growth will ensure the thread becomes embedded in the tree’s flesh. Thus the little rowan leaf is rendered safe. Gravity will have no say here.
It is trying work. It’ll take many more weeks to finish just this one young tree. Each stem bears several hopeful leaflets, each twig several stems, each secondary branch several twigs, and the trunk is host to a multitude of lanky juvenile branches brightly reaching skyward, away from the middle, the attachments becoming weaker and more vulnerable the further from the roots.
But the dark matriarchs. The patriarchs. The ancient towerers at the centre of the forest. Those trees whose thick branches attach directly to the trunk have resolve. They will bend for no bloodsucking younger branches, no transient fruit, no storm. Nor will they bend for any howl, any terrible prayer screamed directly into their bole, any yearn tugging at their rooted strength. A lonely blackthorn in an open field learns to bow to the prevailing wind but the trees at the core of the forest have no such humility.
The towerer at the dark middle of the forest. She’s still alive, I can feel it, in the soil, her roots entangled with all the others. I orbit around the edges, but never will I go deep in there again. I won’t breathe its loamy air, I won’t walk its profane ground. As slight as I am, as feeble, I still have my will. I have resolve.
On that day, the day of the event, I was walking, there, close to the centre, through waning bluebells, lighthearted. It was my everyday walk, at midday, away from home. Away from my sit-stand desk, my laptop. The selection of fine-nibbed pencils, the rolls of architectural tracing paper. Away from my first-draft sketches and into the old forest, to arrange thoughts, to arrange the day’s plan for a sequence of rough designs for the council’s proposed Refugee Centre on the outskirts of the city. The city I lived in, contentedly, for the duration of my marriage. The city and marriage I’d left for a small holding, an old cottage backed up to the forest, its now-overgrown garden spilling freely into where the two tenderly touch.
The event. It was late spring, all peace among the trees. I was head in the clouds, lines swirling, atriums, balustrades, cantilevers. I heard something, not trees, not leaves nor roots nor animals. I didn’t know. I heard something coming from the centre. How could I have known. I went closer, got down on my hunkers in the veiny undergrowth, limbs folded like a hare.
A man, there, in a clearing, maybe ten yards from where I crouched among the fading bluebells and bloodless leaves. A young man, alone. Clean-shaven, a jacket too big for his thin shoulders, boots too big for his feet. Oxblood boots, labourer’s boots. A man, way in among the towerers at the centre of this tangle of forest.
He was gathering fallen branches from around the base of an ancient ash tree, piling them together to construct what resembled a poor man’s pyre. He was arranging these half-rotten branches underneath a stout bough which forked repeatedly as it diverged outward and upward from its huge mother-trunk. Occasionally, he stepped onto the structure, jumping lightly. The weaker branches cracked under him and he jumped harder, pressing the splintered down. He continued the primitive construction, checking its strength every now and then, and yes, I had cause to wonder. Solid cause to wonder. But I stayed rooted, noting each specific structural detail, every small engineering decision, too stupid to turn my head and walk away, to slink away weightless, to forget about it all.
When he had the wooden pyre high enough, the top mess of branches raised up by the compressed detritus beneath, he stood on it once more. This time, it remained firm, hoisting him a yard or so above the ground. I watched him reach inside his jacket and remove a thick hemp rope. He looked to the bough above him. Holding one end of the cording, a crude knot tying a circle together, he swung the other end skyward. It whistled around the bough and fell back to him. Knees bent to lower his stature by about a head’s height, he hoisted until the noose hung as halo just above. He swirled the loose end several more times around the bough, pulling it taut. He gripped the rope in one hand and the noose in the other. Lifting himself up, he tested the overhanging bough by imposing his full weight. The rope moaned, but the bough remained unmoved.
And still there I stayed, watching it all.
He climbed off his scaffold. He tugged at the rope and, confident it had found steady purchase, wound the remainder about the trunk, tying it. He returned to his rickety mound of dead wood and climbed back up, arms held cruciform for balance, mindful this time not to snap any of the remaining branches. Standing to full height, he brought his legs together and took some time to find equilibrium, shifting his oxblood boots, making small adjustments, a nervous first-time soloist tuning a violin is the inadequate comparison that comes to mind now. From where I watched, the braided noose surrounded his young, pale face like a Victorian locket.
He looked once more at the bough. Then he stilled, hands clasped in front of his crotch. I recall he cleared his throat.
Imagine that. Imagine remembering that. The sound was bare, wispy.
He took the noose, slipped it over his head.
And still, there I lay, watching the whole thing like it was mine.
He tightened it, the ignorant knot fisted at his ear, and he sighed, a slow exhalation, guillotined at the end with the snap of a small cough. He leapt in the air and on his descent scissor-kicked the pyre of sticks beneath. They scattered, leaving him swinging wild. His hands flew straight to his neck, clawing at the rope. The sound he made was a fractured, a crackling kind of whir, I hear it still. His legs continued to lash out, but, with nothing left to strike, they danced a hopeless savagery. One boot flew off, landing in front of me. Its oxblood tongue lolled. A roar at last sprang from my throat.
I ran to him, grasped his thrashing legs, heaved him up as best I could above my shoulders. His heels dug into my belly, his crackling spat down on me. I tried to hold him, putting myself between him and Earth’s central magnet. But I am slight, there never was much to me.
His balance shifted, veering left, right. Cursing the drag reaching up from the ground, I tried to correct my stance, but the more I moved the more he spun, this way, that. My arms were weakening. After a time, a duration I still cannot settle on, I howled at him that I couldn’t hold him much longer, it was futile, I was sorry, so sorry for everything. I sang out the sorry like a prayer, trying to hush his fear. Soon the Earth’s pull broke my grip and I fell facedown onto the remains of his scaffold.
Lying there, I started up my song again, this time trying to null his presence above me. But I could hear him. I ventured to look up. He was still kicking, weakly, the white sock on his bootless foot twirling like a child’s flag. His hands clutched at the embedded rope, nails feebly scratching into his neck. I found his eyes, they were wholly present. I shouted to him to give up, stop, there was nothing more either of us could change. I turned away, readying myself to run. But as soon as my eyes left his, I knew what I had to do.
I gathered what strengths I had, channelling them all into my limbs. I leapt high in the air and threw my arms vice-like around his thighs, my legs tight around his calves, binding myself to him, arresting his spasms. And there I hung, gripping him monkey-like, adding my parasitic weight to his, further bait for the magnet below. Yes, he tried to rid himself of me, fingernails hooking strands of my hair, body writhing to lose my fatal mass. Ineffectual. I had resolve.
Thus coupled, we swung like a pendulum, back and forth, back and forth, ticking off each miserable second, each minute. My commitment to him was unbreakable, I hope he knew. Perched cross-legged on his feet, I sang him a lullaby. In between each sugary verse, I shushed, and felt his suffering fade as I delivered him to his end.
Over time, a long, unspeakable time, our pendulum unwound to a stop. In the descending silence at the core of the forest, I turned my face up. Black blood had congealed around my companion’s nostrils, spittle dropping from a slack mouth. He was gone. At last, this young man in oversized wear was gone.
I retrieved his missing oxblood boot and placed it back on him, first restoring the sock still dangling from his foot. I tied the laces, securing them neatly with a double knot. I did the same to the other boot, unfastening then refastening to match. Finally, turning my back on the young man, the rope, the bough, the tree, the dark ground in the middle of the forest, I walked away.
With each step, the Earth sucked at my soles, pooling their blood. Though my gaze was forward, I could hear the low crackle of his bough behind me, the sigh of the rope, the drips of his spittle counting out my steps as I left him alone, as alone and uncoupled as I was, turning slowly on a knot.
I did not go home to my desk and the laptop and the vellum and the cardboard mock-up of a multi-storied glass-fronted butterfly-roofed building with a series of tiny grey nuclear families looking inward and outward at each other. Skirting the edge of the forest, I walked for miles, for days, everything inside me rearranging. I hid at night, finding low bushes to crease into. I was held wakeful by visions of his suspended figure, an inept sundial at the centre of the wreathing forest. I pictured his spine stretched straight as a zealous sapling. I pictured him shrouded by the web of branches, destined never to count out with circling shadow the hours, the years.
Several black days later, when I’d gathered my thoughts, I returned in darkness to my house, cautious as an intruder. I was there only to gather the makings of a shelter: a tarpaulin, groundsheet, blankets, matches, traps that I’d inherited with the house. And my bag of tricks, to begin this undertaking, the needlework project I’d blueprinted over those days of treading the forest. Before going, I unplugged the laptop and disconnected the house from the internet, from any communications satelliting above. I returned to the forest through the back door.
My visits home are rare. My old garden has become indistinguishable from the forest it lies up against. Just once, I stayed overnight, to record these events, to chart them as clearly as I could, standing at my desk, protractor, T-square, compass. I entered my bedroom, observed myself in the mirror. Cheekbones, iliac crests of my hip bone, all else dark and dirt. My clothes threadbare. My resolve. I slept curled by the open back door, nose to knee, listening, ready to bolt like a fox back into the forest at the slightest indication of my own species, their sound, their acrid smell, their questions.
The late-summer night is closing in, the moon is beginning to glow through a lattice of leaves. I’m sitting in the heart of my rowan. Every leaf to the right of me I have sewn good and tight to its branchling. Those to the left I have yet to address. It will take many more weeks to finish this one. The sutures on the secured catch the moonlight, the thread-tracks forming a miniature city. The leaflets that remain unstitched flitter like cornered moths, waiting, some losing their grip and falling. I know I cannot help them all.
Later tonight, I’ll climb down. I’ll lie beneath my tarpaulin, atop the ground some distance away, against this unholy magnet, feeling its persistent drag downward through my throat, my lungs, my womb. Bats, badgers, pine martens active around me, all of us feeling the spool winding. My eyes will close on the embers of my campfire, pulp of dandelion roots and sweet flag I roasted earlier tracking through my guts. I won’t rise until I smell the summer dawn. And when it blinks through the leaves remaining, I’ll search out sustenance. A tender rabbit caught in my trap, a horde of glistening snails clustered on yesterday’s detritus, a fistful of watercress, a sip from a cold limestone spring. Then, belly full, I’ll resume my needlework.
Niamh Mac Cabe
Niamh Mac Cabe’s writing has appeared in The Stinging Fly, Narrative, The Offing, Aesthetica, AGNI, The London Magazine, The Forge Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. A visual artist also, she lectures in the writing and performing arts programs at ATU Sligo and lives in Leitrim, Ireland. More at niamhmaccabe.com. (updated 10/2025)