Chapter 6: Verse Seven

She crossed into the home counties at the Manix boundary stone, which was leaning, and the difference arrived in her body before she could name it. For nine days she had been surveying strange ground gone wrong. Now she was surveying her own. It was worse. She had not expected it to be worse, and spent the first miles working out why, because working out why was the only gear she had. Strange country broken was arithmetic. Home country broken was memory with the pegs pulled. The big oak at Miller's turn was gone, and she knew it was gone because she knew the turn. She had shot bearings off that oak at fifteen with her father's old transit. She had a benchmark elevation for the root ledge written in a field book that still existed, in a drawer, at home. The turn now bent around a raw socket of earth with the roots still in it, torn upward, and somewhere overhead in the traveling sky was a tree that owed her a bearing. The lane past Corbin's was down in the flooded bottom. The bottom had never flooded in her lifetime. She knew the culvert that drained it. Knew its fall to the inch. The culvert now drained nothing because the ditch it fed had reversed its grade, which ditches do not do, except that everything did everything now. She stood on the bank doing gradient arithmetic on a lane she had walked barefoot, and made herself stop. A carter's family passed her going east. The children stared, and one of them pointed at her face and asked what was wrong with her eyes. His mother hushed him with the particular horror of a parent whose child has just insulted an afflicted woman, and hurried them on with a…