Fen

Daisy Johnson's
Fen
is a liminal land. Real people live their lives here. They wrestle with familiar instincts, with sex and desire, with everyday routine. But the wild is always close at hand, ready to erupt. This is a place where animals and people commingle and fuse, where curious metamorphoses take place, where myth and dark magic still linger. So here a teenager may starve herself into the shape of an eel. A house might fall in love with a girl. A woman might give birth to a – well what?

English folklore and a contemporary eye, sexual honesty and combustible invention – in
Fen
, these elements have come together to create a singular, startling piece of modern fiction.

Daisy Johnson was born in 1990 and currently lives in Oxford. Her short fiction has appeared in
The Boston Review
and
The Warwick Review
, among others. In 2014, she was the recipient of the 2014 AM Heath prize.

THE LAND WAS
drained. They caught eels in great wreaths, headless masses in the last puddles, trying to dig into the dirt to hide. They filled vats of water to the brim with them: the eels would feed the workforce brought in to build on the wilderness. There were enough eels to last months; there were enough eels to feed them all for years.

The eels would not eat. They tried them on river rats, sardines, fish food, milk-softened bread, the leftover parts of cows and sheep. It was no good: they reached into the water, scooped them out, slapped them down, slit them lengthwise. There were too many eels and not enough men. And eating eels barely more than bone was not really eating at all.

They burnt the eels they could not eat in piles, stood watching. It was, they were certain, a calling down of something upon the draining. Some said they heard words
coming from the ground as the water was pumped away and that was what made the eels do it, starve themselves that way.

We were walking home from St Silvia's when Katy told me she wasn't going to eat any more. She'd stopped in the road. I turned back.

What do you mean?

There were three years between us and I was used to the look she gave me.

I'm stopping eating, she said. I started today.

Even that first night I thought I could see the shift in her. All the lights were on in her room: the lamps on her desk and her bedside table, the overhead, the glow from her computer screen. When she lifted her shirt to change, her spine was a heavy ridge along the middle of her back.

When she wasn't in lunch on Thursday I went to find her. Ducking down to look at feet beneath toilet-cubicle doors, behind the smoking shed; finding her, eventually, on the stile at the bottom of the school field. I'd brought an apple, rubbed it to a shine on my skirt, held it out to her. She was perched on the stile with her knees raised to her chin, not holding on. The fields were half flooded the way they often were.

I said her name but she didn't seem to see me or St Silvia's behind me or anything else until I tossed the apple
to her, striking her leg. She almost lost her balance, made a hissing sound, then thumped down and grabbed my wrist.

I continued daily over that week to try and feed her, surprising her with peeled carrots chopped into mouthfuls, chunks of melon, halved avocados. When she ignored them I tried whitely iced doughnuts, chocolate bars, scoops of ice cream. I left the food in places I knew she would find it: on her bedside table, on the top of the cistern in the bathroom, in the drawers where she kept her clothes. I could smell the food rotting in the guttering from my window, did not need to look out to know what was there: doughnuts squashed to jam explosions, browning avocados, a slick stream of leafy raspberry-ripple.

Katy would rap her knuckles on our conjoining walls so I could go and hear how she'd refused biscuits, made clever excuses for missing lunch. At dinner she would kick me under the table so I could observe the ease with which she would appear to be eating. She'd perfected it: talking a lot, chopping everything on her plate once, putting down her knife and fork to talk more, and then chopping everything again and raising up her full fork and putting it down to say something else. Her movements were swift and jerking.

In her bedroom after dinner I watched her scooping food out of the pockets of her blazer, dropping it into
the guttering. In a way she'd never done when I tailed her to netball practice or balanced on the edge of the sofa while she and her friends watched films, she included me in this: her starving.

The weekend was easy. We made our own lunches, ate in front of a film on Saturday night, were expected to help ourselves to the chocolate cake, the bananas in the fruit bowl, the freshly squeezed orange juice. She was mutely triumphant whenever I saw her, watching me as I ate two of everything and then rounding her shoulders in an exaggerated gag.

But then, Sunday. Our grandmother. Clipping in on high heels, balancing a mountain of almond meringue in one hand, a pot of cream in the other. The segments of roast came out of the oven one by one. Katy sidling in to watch, holding stiffly onto the back of a chair. The chicken was trussed, brown, cracked, steaming and sliced so legs fell akimbo and the stuffing unfurled. Katy's hands were curled to mounds on the table. She was sweating across her neck, chest and forehead, her mouth open a little as she breathed. She could not keep up her patter at all while we ate, only pushed the food from one side of the plate to the other.

What's wrong with you? Grandmother said when Katy emptied her plate into the bin, refused meringue.

Nothing. Just feel a bit sick.

I opened my mouth to speak; saw Katy's black pupils contracting, her tongue furious against the roof of her mouth.

Go upstairs if you're not hungry.

Katy passed close behind the back of my chair, the bottoms of her feet slapping the tiled floor.

She did not talk to me until after school the next day. Coming up and taking my hand, telling me we'd walk back the field way. She tugged me along. At the top of the stile she hesitated, pale with sharp points of red on her cheeks, knuckles whitening, panting a little. It was over a week now. I wondered what she was running on, air or determination or anger or something or nothing or someone.

We walked along the edge of the cornfield, past the canal and the tree-shadowed dirt where the older kids came to drink; earth dug down into a fire pit at one end, the beer cans, someone's white underwear floating in the beck.

You won't tell anyone, Katy said, not turning back. She took my bag from me, held it over the shorn-back ground. I thought about the sound the combine harvesters made, working through the night. Katy shook her arms so the books and pens and hairgrips fell, scattered. I shrugged, knelt to put everything back in.

You won't tell them, she said.

*  *  *

By the end of the second week she was falling asleep: pillowed on her arms at dinner, curled on a bench at lunchtime, drowsed so deep you had to shake her. I dreaded waking her, seeing her eyes rolling into focus. She missed classes, made me miss them too, grabbed me in corridors so we could go and sit on the stile at the bottom of the field.

At lunch Katy's friends, mobile phones jutting from the waistbands of their skirts, cornered me in the locker room. They were tall, more limb than body.

What's her problem? one of them said. There were streaks of blue highlighter in the girl's pale hair. She hasn't answered any of my phone calls.

She thinks she's better than us, said another, leaning on a locker, jigging her skirt up a notch higher at the waist.

Well. She's coming to Harris Ford's party, I presume, said the first, folding her arms across her ribcage.

I don't know.

They looked at me as if they didn't believe a word.

I dawdled at the end of school, not wanting to pass on their messages or see her falter at the head of the stile, and when I got home she was there already – stood in the middle of the kitchen while Mum moved round and round her, leaning in now and then to shift a strap or move a strand of hair. How could she not see it? The skin on Katy's arms was bleached of colour; her mouth was a stretched line.