The Near Excarnification of Sweet Jodi Wilcox

Joe Davies

The ideal day for a bike ride has little wind and no rain, and a temperature hovering close to 20℃. On just such a day one early June, a rider took the trail leading northwest towards Upton, the old rail bed of the K&M line, now groomed and largely underused. As he rode, the cyclist tried to remember to take in his surroundings. There were rolling fields sown with corn and other fields left open for grazing. There were marshy areas and stands of evergreens—spruce, pine, cedar. There were alleys lined with birch, others hemmed in by tall grasses. The grade of the trail was gentle, never anything beyond what a train might once have managed. Here and there the surface was broken slightly where water had washed across, but this was rare. At one spot, beavers had constructed a dam off to the side, creating a pond. At another, the rider had to dismount to pick his way through the branches of a recently fallen tree—just part of the experience, in the midst of which the biggest challenge seemed to come from trying to remain conscious of it. So much was familiar. The old barn covered with vines, standing on a hill. The bend where a stream matched the curve of the trail, its bank covered by small, mauve flowers. The sun behind him, his own active shadow falling before him on the path as he flew along. 

The rider slowed and cautiously crossed one of the many roads that intersected the trail. This particular road was paved and busy, and up ahead was the mouth of a short tunnel where the trail went under another road. It was in the darkness of this tunnel that the rider went end over end when his front wheel came into contact with the body of Sweet Jodi Wilcox, propelling him over his handlebars.  

No one could ever tell Sweet Jodi Wilcox how to behave. Never mind what got said, she would do whatever came to mind with apparently little concern for the consequences. She had more scars than a professional fighter, fewer inhibitions than a performance artist—and was smart too, so smart they advanced her a grade when she was only eight. She'd have been pushed ahead another if her parents hadn't expressed their reservations, but they did and so, without Jodi ever knowing, her parents managed to slow her onward momentum just a little. 

She was also a big girl. Pick a dimension—length, width, depth, height—she owned it. By age eleven all her clothes were coming from the far end of the rack. When she got to university, things became more interesting than ever. Not only did she excel in her studies, she also discovered what appeared to be the function of the common house party—at least for her—which was to try to get legless. And did she ever try. It was awe-inspiring and more than a little terrifying to behold. Nothing was safe. 

One such occasion—an early summer party held in a town some ridiculous number of kilometers from campus—was where she met a wooly-haired boy named Scott—she never knew his name, until after—but he was the one who became the catalyst for what befell her. 

There was a certain back porch, and on that back porch was where the beer and punch were kept. It was a lovely June evening. The stars were out—that is, they were mostly out. The light pollution from over and beyond smeared a chunk out of the night sky—blotted it clean. 

“That’s it,” said Scott, pointing in the direction of the light. 

Sweet Jodi Wilcox, who barely noticed Scott’s presence next to her at the punch bowl until that moment said, “Huh?” 

“School,” said Scott. He almost drooled the word he was so far the other side of speaking straight. 

“By ‘school’ I take it you mean the venerable institution also known as ‘the university,’ would that be correct?” 

Scott looked up at Sweet Jodi Wilcox and said, “Damn! You’re not even hardly drunk!” 

“Oh,” said Jodi Wilcox, “I am drunk. It’s just that I happen to be not quite drunk enough.” 

“That so?” 

“Not yet,” and she body-checked him and he toppled sideways, knocking over a collection of empties. “And yes, it is so,” added Sweet Jodi Wilcox, and she laughed enchantingly. 

When he’d once more managed something like a vertical attitude, Scott asked, “You got a name?” 

“That,” said Sweet Jodi Wilcox, “is a perfectly stupid way of asking the question.” 

“I asked for your name.” 

“You did not. You asked if I have a name, which I understand to be a round about way of approximating the question you want answered, likely something along the lines of ‘What is your name?’ But what you asked,” and here she mimicked him, “‘You got a name?’ is best answered by saying, ‘Why, yes, little boy. It so happens I do.’” 

She was about to head back into the house when his fumbling voice behind her asked, “Wanna go for a walk?” 

This held her in her tracks. 

“A walk?” 

“What? Question not answerable enough for you?” 

“Oh, it’s answerable, all right. I’m just trying to guess if you have any idea what’s about to happen to you.” 

The short answer to that question was—he didn’t. In fact, neither of them did. 

The two of them rambled out across the lawn and into the dark, wooly-haired Scott stumbling over a knot of grass, ranting as he went, “God damn fricken excarnification!” 

“That sounded almost like English,” said Sweet Jodi Wilcox. 

“Trying to impress you.” 

“Save your energy.” 

Over a fence and across a field they went, through some trees and along the side of a creek that was almost dry owing to the activity of beavers not far away. Jodi pushed Scott down onto a patch of gravel and straddled him. 

“Say ‘uncle,’” she said, and he did. He was not the best kisser. It hardly mattered. 

“What did you say?” asked Sweet Jodi Wilcox, “A while back? Excarnification?” 

“Uh-huh.” 

“Know what that means?” and she nibbled his ear. 

“Uh-uh.” 

“Guess.” 

“Church got something to do with it?” 

“Once upon a time, probably.” 

“What’s it mean?” 

“Pull your pants down, and if you behave I’ll show you something much better.” 

“You propositioning me?” 

“No. Just positioning.” 

She gave him some breathing room and he wiggled his pants down. 

“So what’s it mean?” 

“What? Excarnification?” 

“Yeah.” 

“Ever hear someone say,” and here she put on a cowboy accent, “‘I’m going to tear a strip offa you’?” 

“Yeah.” 

“Well, it’s something along those lines. Only worse.” 

It was at that point that something came lumbering through the brush towards them. Coincidentally, both immediately assumed it to be a bear. It was. 

Jodi didn’t stop running for a good five minutes, and when she had it was to discover she’d gone off in different direction from her wooly-headed companion and hadn’t the least idea which way it was he might have run. 

So much for that, thought Sweet Jodi Wilcox, and looked at the night sky, saw where the stars were smudged out and headed that way, what she rightly assumed to be the general direction of bed. To her great surprise and satisfaction, she discovered that the small bottle of booze she’d brought for the night’s festivities was still in her hip pocket, untapped and intact. 

So began what became an ambling, boozy sort of a slog. 

If there had once been roads in that part of the countryside, then all evidence of them was in hiding. Sweet Jodi Wilcox found nary a one. First it was fields, then woods, then more fields and more woods and something that was almost a swamp, in which at various points both her left and her right sneakers were nearly sucked from her feet, though most mercifully not at the same time. When she came to what at first seemed like a country lane, she was nearly penitent—such an outing, she thought, should never be attempted without someone else to do the walking. She was at the doorstep of exhaustion. 

It was not a lane though. It was a trail of some kind, cutting diagonally through the wet mess she’d just been mucking through. There was no question of whether or not to take it though—she was going take it—the question was, in which direction? Because neither seemed to be the one she was after. Exercising that helpful knack that humans have of being able to decide between two equally bad options, she, in the blink of an eye, opted for the charmlessness of the one over the lack of promise of the other and was soon headed in what would turn out to be the wronger of the two. By the time she discovered this and found herself veering in the direction from whence she’d come, what she suspected was almost half an hour had lumbered past. She reached for her phone, wanting to know the time. It was gone though—no phone—lost no doubt somewhere in the muck, or when she’d been running from the bear, or perhaps back in the gravel where she’d briefly rolled about with that wooly-pated boy. 

“Rats,” she said and emptied her bottle, then turned and headed the other way, drooping slightly, inside and out. 

What felt like a couple of hours unwound themselves this way, with stumblings and noises in the wood and things scurrying from one side of the path to the other. It wasn’t cool exactly, but it sure was damp, which after a while became distinctly unpleasant. She needed sleep, poor thing. 

Then, thankfully, the horizon began to brighten, day approached, and up ahead she saw… well, to be honest, she wasn’t sure what she was seeing. First the trees to either side thinned and here were the first open spaces she’d seen since setting out, with tall grasses crowding the edges of the path she was stumbling along—and the thing up ahead—what it was, what it looked to be was—a cave. Or no! Not a cave. A tunnel. It was a tunnel. And above, a car swooping along it, was a road—a road that presumably might lead her all the way back to the dorm and her unslept-in bed, with its full-on-irony-intended Powerpuff Girl sheets—or, oh, irony-be-damned, why deny it—it was something sentimental, her having once been excessively taken with those large-eyed beacons of juvenile enablement—and no, it’s not important to the story—or not especially—well, perhaps just a little. 

It was perhaps four hours later that our cyclist friend flipped over her in the tunnel. It could easily have been me, that cyclist—just the sort of thing my dark imagination can picture happening one of these days. 

What transpired was this: 

As Sweet Jodi Wilcox drew closer to the tunnel, the gods played a dirty trick. The gentlest puff of air was all it required. Because what that air carried, as Sweet Jodi Wilcox stumbled along unsuspectingly, was pollen—vicious pollen to be precise. The grasses lining the way were the source, the pollen forming a nigh indiscernible haze in that early morning light. In a minute or so she was sneezing, her eyes watered, her whole being sagged under the wallop of it, sucking whatever umpf was left right through the bottom of her mud-encrusted sneakers. She hardly knew what was happening, the effect so disorienting—all she knew was that she needed to curl up somewhere and vanish—which she did. Where she vanished was the tunnel. She stumbled a dozen paces inside and collapsed, the hoped-for route home only meters above her inert form. After the cyclist had flipped over her, one close and squinty look at Sweet Jodi Wilcox’s puffed-up eyes and the slobber leaking from her was enough to convince him she’d been poisoned or worse, and he—having not lost his phone—dialed 911. The ambulance arrived not much later. It was the second call it had been out on that morning. The other involved a wooly-haired boy who’d had a chunk bitten from his ass by the bear he’d been pantlessly running from. 

When Sweet Jodi Wilcox finally reached those Powerpuff Girl sheets, the solace they provided was impossible to measure. They were a comforting embrace. They were all that was good. They were home. 

That afternoon, when she awoke somewhat restored, she learned a certain boy’s name was Scott. She visited him in hospital, her eyes still puffy, which he mistook as the product of her having been weeping on his account. Now, when Sweet Jodi Wilcox recalls this visit, she remembers having brought this Scott a posy of flowers—but it just isn’t true. She brought him no such thing. In fact, she brought nothing at all nothing save her blunt and daunting now-and-again very lovely presence.

Joe Davies' short fiction has appeared in The Dublin Review, eFiction India, The Missouri Review, Prism International, Queen's Quarterly and elsewhere. He lives in Peterborough, Ontario.