From Bitter Water Opera, which will be published this month by Graywolf Press.

I walked down a thin path, spotting in the distance a tall stone wall, as instructed. My wheeled luggage clunked behind me.

At the stone wall was a sturdy wooden door with large padlocks. Corresponding keys were tied underneath vines to the side of the door.

The owner, Simone, had been pleased to hear from me, urging me to stay for a few weeks in exchange for upkeep. She was a former professor of mine, at the tail end of her overseas sabbatical.

Her house was in the woods outside a small hamlet. I planned to take some time in silence, get myself in order, in a bare environment without distraction. I had long looked to fix my life through other people, so now, I considered, I could try fixing it alone.

I pushed my entire weight against the door.

Behind the door was a yard that appeared to have once been tidy but was now overgrown. Split milkweed and cattails covered the lawn. Clusters of cleavers grew around the pond that fronted the main house. It was a large space, with the pond and a stone path. An empty, greening fountain.

I walked through the high grass to a white wooden house, spotted with dirt, with black shutters and a shingled roof. A lime-green grasshopper sprung off the doorknob. Everything extremely alive.

Inside was cold and quiet. Downstairs was a living room, a small country kitchen, and a long wooden staircase. Various recesses held tall solitary candles.

I tired quickly, made myself a cup of nettle tea, and went upstairs. I got into bed wearing only a T-shirt, under four blankets covered in dust. I set an alarm on my phone. No missed calls or messages. I hadn’t told anyone where I had gone. I’d vanished, as I’d always wanted, like Jean Rhys, whose absence went on for twenty years before she released Wide Sargasso Sea.

I closed my eyes and lay still, and envisioned everyone I’d ever met laughing in a brightly lit house, grazing each other’s cheeks with their hands, while I watched from far away in the cold, slowly evaporating into air.

Attached to Simone’s email was a list of tasks:

cut, maintain all grass
clean the fountain
take away vines
weedwacker
paint the shutters black
pressure-wash house

There were more paragraphs below that described intricacies of the property: a suggestion to cut my hair and scatter it among the plants to deter squirrels and cats; a xeroxed page from a Boston Journal of Chemistry article explaining that “the prevalent tone in nature is the key of E” and that the majority of winged insects harmonize and sound together in “the same symphony.”

I stood in the center of the property and looked around. The green ground stretched out before me. Through the brambles was a rusted red toolshed where I found a yellow shovel. A tinted window let in enough light to fall onto a pair of gloves. A bug walked across the wall and when I stubbed it with my thumb it left behind a blue smudge. The bug had been alive and then it suddenly wasn’t, like a flipped switch. It was that kind of death I wished for then, like a sniped balloon.

I walked back outside to the center and looked around again. The spot beneath my feet was as good a place to start as any, as far as I knew. I pulled at a few dandelions.

What I was supposed to do would take forever, I thought.

I looked again at the list of tasks. Grass cutting seemed the most familiar, so I went back to the shed and brought out the mower.

I yanked a cord. The machine sputtered then fell silent. I yanked again. Nothing gave. I pushed the mower across the tall wild grass back to the shed.

Two days passed, then ten.

For breakfast one morning I had pantry pickles and instant coffee. I stared out the kitchen window at the exuberant yard. All the wiry greenery, coiling and rising. I noticed specks of dandelions for the first time, fairy-ringing around the fountain. I paused midbite.

A large mass was floating in the center of the pond. Something that looked like a dead body, on its stomach. I put down my coffee and rushed outside in bare feet. From a distance, the body was wearing what appeared to be a camel-colored Burberry trench coat. I stood still, startled and numb.

Was it the dramatic end of some cast-aside lover of Simone’s? Or did someone trespass and fall into the pond by accident? The image crossed my mind of a murderer dragging the body through the grass, collecting ticks and mud, with only owls and mice as witnesses. Some kind of warning.

I walked across the grass until I reached the wooden dock. I flipped over a muddy yellow kayak and wobbled out into the water. Cold mud coated my toes and miry water splashed into the kayak. My arms were jelly. Once I drew closer to the body, I reached out my paddle and nudged it.

A scream bubbled up so suddenly that the kayak swung from under me. My arms flung and met a net of pond plants. I reached forward, instinctually grabbing onto the soft bloated body, then shrank away, scrambling to the kayak.

A deer, with its eyes eaten away by fish.

Sodden and flashed with adrenaline, I paddled back to shore. Instructions seemed to form naturally in my head. In the toolshed, I found coils of rope caked in spiderwebs and made a wide lasso that would fit around the deer’s waist. I paddled back out into the pond and tied one end of the rope to a hook on the kayak, forcing myself to look upon the deer’s body. How did I end up here, and why didn’t I have anyone to talk to?

Lugging the deer from the pond, I felt a shift, as if something in me had separated or fallen away. The smell of the deer, searing, like blood and damp garbage, stuck to me when I was back in the house. I sat in the kitchen, picturing it falling through a layer of ice in winter. I imagined it remaining there, drifting in a cold world until the thaw.

After some time passed I stood up. I went to make canned beans for lunch, wondering how much time it would take for the vultures to come and nibble the body clean.

The next days were gruesomely lost. I seldom left the bed and when I did it was out of necessity. The garden continued to grow, the fountain continued to green, and the list of caretaking tasks expanded in their urgency so that a chasm grew between them and the possibility of my completing them.

There was no more food left in the cupboards or the pantry. I found my way to a main road, where I had been weeks ago.

At the market I got eggs, rice, tomatoes, onions, milk, lemons, a loaf. Simple foods. I felt as if I were covered in tight casts and bandages. I bought a small red wagon, the kind that children use to lug one another around. I placed my bag of simple foods in it and walked out into the sun again.

Out on the sidewalk, I retrieved sourdough bread from the wagon and took large, pulling bites. Swallowed them quickly.

I reached a line of trees at the end of the block. The trees grew single file, straight and flat, and latticed together to form a fence. Their complex weaving excited me. I imagined someone spending years leading and pruning the branches until the pattern was fully formed. All of life is like this, I considered. My life could be like this.

Through the branches was a gardener in neon boots, singing a melody in a major key. nursery was written on a sign tacked onto a small wooden building behind him. I went inside even as I almost regretted it, pushing down the desire to be closed away in the cottage.

Inside were more neat rows. Rows of herbs and tropical plants, vegetables and hanging baskets. And through the back door were lines of trees similar to the ones out front.

The thought of some fruit trees at the property felt stirring, if not a sign of something purposeful, so I selected a single pear-tree sapling, crooked with small leaves. The singing gardener in neon boots rang me up at the register. Up close he looked like an old hippie, and he asked if I knew of Donovan or Cat Stevens. I muttered a reply and he gave me leaflets that explained orchard growing, perennial care, and other things. I thanked him, so overwhelmed by his casual kindness that I almost teared up while placing the small, crooked pear tree into my red wagon.

I was leaving the nursery when I heard a faint collection of voices. I climbed up the hill with my red wagon, following the sounds, until I reached an old Congregational church. The pear tree inspired some sort of valiance in me, proving some capability, so when I experienced a curiosity toward the chapel and the music, my body unthinkingly carried me forward through the front doors. The tall, skinny windows were propped open with umbrellas, and inside smelled like math textbooks. I slipped into a pew in the back with a woman who handed me a red book. I had left my wagon outside but brought in the pear sapling, and seated it beside me on the pew. All around, women and men sang a hymn that I thought I’d heard before, and out the windows hemlocks bent and swayed across the grove.

A man with large white hair sat in the pew in front of me; a green caterpillar inched across the back of his collar. At the end of the hymn, he stood up and climbed the stairs to the pulpit. The chapel was so old that creaks shuttered across the floor like lightning.

In the beginning was the . . . he said. I relaxed, so overfamiliar with the phrase that it inconsequentially floated past me.

There, in the old pew, my attention drifted as I looked out the window. When I turned back, the green caterpillar was creeping into the preacher’s hair.

Words don’t fall away and disappear, but form thoughts, shapes, lead separate lives . . . blossom, or echo, clicking into meaning years later . . .

I touched my leg.

Revelation finds its time . . . the things you say can either build and lift something up, or produce a rot—not only in those who hear, but in you too.

I imagined his words as small, buoyant pearls, cast from the front of the chapel and out the propped-open windows, into the town, over the house and the high wall, some falling and settling onto the ground, falling into open windows of parked cars outside the market or the potted soil at the nursery, breathed in and carried on clothes, waiting to be encountered and revealed. I imagined all our words living out similar courses, so that we were moving through a misty network of word droplets, which changed in concentration and motivation depending on the proximity of certain people and ideas, and how easily the tide of language might be manipulated by propagating our tongues and hearts with goodness, by choosing to say and repeat it.

The pews emptied out and I stayed, quiet and calm, vaguely recalling psalms. My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer.

A woman reentered the church to retrieve her glasses case. She looked up at me, surprised. On the way out, she paused at my pew.

“It looks like you had a good day,” she said, referring to the pear tree. We both smiled. She placed her hand on my shoulder for a moment, then wished me good night.

I walked back, pulling my red wagon. I had a hard time seeing the path, so I walked slowly with my arm outstretched. Occasionally I’d bump into a branch and would be surprised by how soft it was. For an hour I walked the path. The forest transformed into something halcyon and storybook-like, as though the many creatures were guiding me along with a gentle touch, like a small caterpillar rounding around on skin.