Dusk
Olivier Schopfer
Author: meganrusso
Earth to Earth
Earth to Earth
J.S. Watts
At the end, we all return peacefully to the elements that gave birth to us—unless the element that took us claims us first and for itself alone.
The world is full of echoes: the fading shadows of the taken. Water flows with the spirits of the drowned. Flames crackle to the anguished screams of the burned. The thin shades of those whose last breath was ripped into the air flock the ether and those whom the earth swallows lie absorbed within its vast unforgiving darkness.
#
The town of Blackhill squats deep in the heart of the Draymar Mountains. It has been a mining town for centuries. Coal runs under its skin and in its blood. It was home to the first Draymar Mine, and then the Great Draymar Mine and then the New Great Draymar Mine, but the mining ended in 1927 with a cave-in at the New Great Draymar that claimed the lives of over one hundred men, tearing out the bleeding heart of the town and seventy-three fragile families.
On that day, Death walked through the town’s streets hand-in-hand with despair. For the families left behind, it was the not knowing that inflicted the most damage. Many men were killed instantly, crushed like dry seeds by the weight of the mountain’s falling guts, but others… Those cursed ones lived on for days after the cave-in, buried alive in their waiting graves while the earth and rock around them slowly ate them: absorbing their breath, their strength, their anger and hope, and finally closing-in forever on the husks of the men they had been and taking those too.
My only son died in the disaster, leaving behind a distraught young widow, an endlessly grieving mother, a baby daughter who’d barely had the chance to know him and taking with him the future of our family. He had been the focus of all our hopes: the way out of the coal dust. He shouldn’t have been down the mine that day. We thought we had given him a hard-scraped escape route, an education invested in by our back-broken labour and the daily struggle of our lives, but with a new baby, he needed more money and such were the times, he went down the mine to work a shift or several alongside me. On the day of the disaster, he had gone down into the dark to work one last shift. He never came back up.
His loss and the manner of it were bitterly unbearable, but worse still was my solitary knowledge that it was not an accidental death. I knew it was murder, but I could do nothing with that knowing. It surrounded me, held me in. There was no escape.
Without the mine, Blackhill withered and declined. Those that could, abandoned it and its all-consuming poverty. McKillip, the mine owner, was amongst the first to go. He had lost a mine but had gained a fortune through insurance deals. He went off with his young family intact to start afresh in another town, abandoning the one his mine had gutted.
Years passed, even if their passage no longer seemed relevant. Changing times brought fresh opportunities for some. In due course, the son of the mine owner returned to Blackhill, though whether he did so in the knowledge of his father’s past actions, I neither knew nor cared. What drew me to him was the blood that pumped through his veins: his father’s blood. I sensed it and it awoke the living hatred that had held me together all the while. Time became relevant once more: it was time for revenge.
#
Marcus McKillip came back to town on a storm-battered day. It felt as if the elements themselves were protesting against a McKillip’s return. The wind tossed leaves into the air and then branches as if they were leaves. Rain poured down like the torrential gush of water from a giant hosepipe. Under the weight of so much water, the earth became heavy and started to move, sliding down the hillside towards the road that McKillip was on, but he drove a flash, fast car and out-ran the mudslide.
“Eh, it’s a wild night out there, boys,” was all he was heard to say, and then he smiled, as if the anger and wildness of the elements was of no consequence. A home-coming drink at the local inn and he was off to reclaim the family house. I observed and waited.
The next day there was an unexpected earth tremor, but McKillip kept on smiling as he went about his business. “It’s good to be home,” he said and he made himself properly at home, reopening his father’s old house, reclaiming its formal garden from the natural wilderness it had become, digging deep into the poor soil that many of us had greater cause to call home. The earth showed him what it thought of this. The earth tremors continued for days and more mud slid down the hillside towards the town, but not far enough to do any real damage.
Then the purpose of McKillip’s return became clearer. He sent men to the mine with measuring devices and surveying equipment. He did not dirty his own hands, just stayed at the family house where he shipped-in rich, fresh, alien soil for the garden and the thirty new rose bushes he had ordered: soil that did not come from the Draymars. His feet no longer walked on our earth.
A week after the surveyors and engineers left, he announced he was re-opening the mine as a theme park. The graves of brave men, the workplace and lifeblood of hundreds more, turned into a mindless place of amusement for the unknowing, thought-free public.
Safe in his father’s grand house, McKillip watched as the diggers came, gouging into the soil and rock that had formed us, tearing up our past and then unceremoniously uncovering things Old Man McKillip must have thought covered up for good. Revealed at last to the knowledgeable few was evidence that the ’27 cave-in had not been a natural disaster.
Marcus McKillip came to the mine then. I watched and waited to see what he would do, all the while the blood-hate pounding inside me like a shaman’s drum. But I held back. Yes, he was his father’s son, but he was not his father. Some faltering vestige of humanity held me back.
I looked on as Marcus McKillip stared down at the sabotage that was the brutal work of his father, the physical manifestation of his father’s greed and the black ruin it had brought crashing down on us. He said nothing, but smiled, a slow thoughtful smile and still I hesitated. Then he was gone, back up the hill in his fast car to his grand house and gardens. Within the hour the McKillip family secret was once again buried, this time beneath one hundred tons of pulverised rock and liquid concrete. The work of constructing a tawdry theme park around our suffering and misery continued unabated.
It was as if the earth had been holding its breath and then finally let go. There were more tremors and mudslides, this time more destructive, but McKillip just brought more men in to shore-up the workings. Finally, the unquiet earth claimed a man, but it was not McKillip. Accidents happen and McKillip did not care. He felt no need to come back to the mine.
Eventually, despite the restlessness of the earth, the monstrosity was completed. It was called the Draymar Theme Park Museum of Mining, but it was no academic temple to the past. Children, and adults little better than children, were to ride fake coal-trucks down thrill-inducing slopes into what was left of the original mine, laughing and screaming within feet, and sometimes less, of where men had struggled and lost, desperately relinquishing their souls to the soil. It was an intolerable abomination. And still, McKillip stayed away from the mine.
The day of the “Museum’s” grand opening and at last Marcus McKillip came back to the mine in person to gloat over his desecration of our rock and soil. He walked slowly up the new path to the old pithead, past the waiting crowds, smiling broadly as if he thought he had laid claim to a fresh gold mine.
He took the new, shiny cage, far bigger than the original had been, down into the mine and then began a slow, satisfied, lone walk along the new corridors and passageways he had created. His expensive leather shoes glided over the smoothness of the artificial flooring. His pride oozed from the pores of his skin and into the air that surrounded him. I could smell his heavy aftershave, no doubt expensive, but certainly not subtle, and the pride that underlay it. I whispered his name, but there was no sign he heard me.
He continued the inspection tour of his grand work. He slowed as he neared the site of his father’s iniquity. It was buried beneath the new flooring, but there was still an old access passageway, left, no doubt, for authenticity’s sake, that skirted the area. I whispered his name again and he paused and then stepped off the new pathway and into the old passage, his shoes making contact with the soil and dirt of ages that had accumulated there. He bent down and scooped up some of the dry earth, letting it run between his fingers as he walked further down the passage, away from the new and into the old.
I waited, close to where Old Man McKillip had secured his own family’s future by taking away mine and the lives of one hundred and four men in their prime. For a third time, I whispered McKillip’s name and this time I think he heard me. He stopped and looked around. That was when I made my move to restore the true balance of the Earth.
The floor of the old tunnel shook and soil began to shift, trickling gently and unnoticed at first into the passage from the walls and ceiling and then accelerating its cascade. Mud and coal dust began to pour into the shaft. Out in the new area, honest dirt was sliding behind and around the fake mine fittings, but Marcus McKillip would not know this. It was his turn to be trapped, becoming rooted to the spot as his expensive leather shoes sank into the loosened earth of the tunnel. He shouted out. Fear took hold of him. But it was not just fear. The earth continued to shift. Verticals buckled and horizontals tilted. Thick fingers of soil and coal dirt seized his ankles and then his calves, wrapping themselves round him like stout blackened vines and pulling him backwards and down into the ground. As he fell, the rock itself parted like torn flesh to allow him entry to the bowels of the mountain and the deeply buried grave that had waited over thirty-five years for McKillip flesh and bone to lie in it. Then it began to close back over him, filling his eyes, nose, and mouth and suffocating his final frantic cries.
Now it is his: his grave, his coffin, his shroud. He will, though, have to share it with what is left of what I was, but he is welcome to it. What do I care now? Vengeance is mine: an elemental truth enunciated and let go. The anger that has held my echo captive flows with McKillip into our resealed tomb. In the earth I died. In the earth for so long I remained. To the earth I now return.
All Soul’s Night
All Soul’s Night
KB Ballentine
The veil thins . . . shreds. The dead
and living will mingle this night.
Light shrivels, shadows staking claims.
Sea grumbles in the distance, air surging
salt and winter, gulls quarreling
their way home.
Inland, crabapples wither where they fall,
a few leathered leaves hinged
to baring branches.No black cats, specters or formless mist
will keep me in tonight—too long
since I last breathed you.Seeking the Dead
Seeking the Dead
DW McKinney
The nursing students lived in Meadowlands residence hall with a baby’s ghost. He wasn’t really a baby, but of an indeterminate age lost to the longevity of his tale. When I first heard about him, my womb quivered at the thought, and I believed the dead to be an infant.
“Let’s go find Blue Boy,” Julia said one night.
It was a foolish idea only made possible with the helping hand of Smirnoff. It wasn’t surprising either—Julia had dropped out during our freshman year due to personal and financial problems. She returned every few months to pick me up so we could spend a weekend together.
We often talked about mortality when she visited. Her interests were spurred by debilitating pain from an ongoing genetic disorder that had worsened over the past two years. At the time, I was given to risky behaviors and morbid curiosities.
Prior, on my twenty-first birthday, Julia had taken me to the Winchester Mystery House. It was a mansion in San Jose, California, that underwent ceaseless renovations for thirty-eight years to protect Sarah Winchester from vengeful spirits of people killed by Winchester rifles. Staircases ended in windows or walls, doors opened to nothing.
As we entered the mystery house, exhilaration couched in mild fear pulsed through me. During our tour, I waited until our group left the ballroom to marvel at the ornate architecture alone. As I approached a set of closed doors with windows, I saw one of the brass knobs slowly turn. It could not have been someone on the other side trying to get in. There was no silhouette against the sheer curtains, but I had to be sure. I peeked past the curtains, but I didn’t see anyone. I ran out of the room and smacked into Julia.
“The doorknob turned on its own,” I sputtered.
We peered into the room, and we could hear the knob rattling. We fled, certain that we had narrowly escaped a ghost.
That experience must have lingered with Julia, a faint itch she couldn’t satisfy. Searching for Blue Boy was her attempt to scratch it.
Julia and I strolled around the university campus, stars twinkling in the night sky. It was eerily quiet, the soft rustle of fluttering leaves an invisible audience watching our every move. Vodka burned through veins as we stumbled across the creek bridge toward Meadowlands.
The university’s crown jewel was an iron-grey mansion. It sat at the head of a sprawling green lawn ringed with verdant gardens and mulberry bushes. Acacias dropped blossoms on the bordering pathways and during the day, the sun swept across the residence hall as if it were in constant receipt of divine blessings. In the shadows, ivy strangled its walls.
Once inside, the floorboards creaked with whispers of the boy’s death. Campus ambassadors skirted mention of the child to prospective students and their parents as they toured the Wicker Room, the dormitory’s common area that frequently sat devoid of human presence. Parents snapped photos of the lattice windows and marveled at the architecture. Their questions disguised their excitement—they wanted their high school seniors to register for this specific dorm, the best dorm.
The dorms at Meadowlands were often the featured image on the university’s brochures, the glistening red apple color to tempt the naive. It exuded a faux elitism that followed everyone who lived within its walls. When I stared at the glossy images on the brochure, I searched the attic windows, hoping the unsuspecting photographer had captured a tiny silhouette.
Before it was subsumed by academia, Meadowlands’ countless leaded windows brought light into the Victorian summer home of Michael H. de Young and his family in the early 1900s. I imagine when the nanny wasn’t washing adventures off the children in the grand bathtubs, the children scampered down the wide staircase spine that curved from the great entry hall to the second floor. Their exuberance thudded across the sun-kissed floorboards, their laughter lifted the curtains and carried through the house like a gentle breeze. The building was later converted into dorm rooms with walls and floors so thin that residents couldn’t clear their throats without their neighbors hearing them.
Julia and I dragged each other through Meadowlands’ main student entrance and tripped up a flight of squeaking steps. A thick hush blanketed the hallways, the faintest movements behind the series of closed doors startled us. It was quiet hours, which meant Blue Boy could rip our throats out or frighten us to grotesque, disfigured corpses and we’d have to endure it in silence or risk receiving a noise violation.
We lingered in a study alcove hoping to coax unsuspecting nursing students into telling us more about Blue Boy. Julia had heard about his existence before she left school, but she didn’t know the full story. Filled with equal parts bravado and reluctance, and keeping my voice low for fear that Blue Boy would hear me speaking ill of him, I gave the details.
The legend, or its patchwork frame that I had stitched together from various storytellers over the years, was that the boy’s mother or his nanny, depending on who told it, submerged him underwater in a rage and drowned him in a bathtub. He died blue and bloated, succumbing to the strangling hold of the bathwater. After his death, the family quarantined the tub in the attic and never used it again. Who is to say why M.H. de Young sold the house to an order of Catholic sisters for ten dollars, but his son’s murder, the tub still slick with his young life, might have played a role. The bathtub stayed abandoned in the attic along with the spirit of de Young’s son who became Blue Boy.
Resident Advisors claimed to hate it when it was their shift to monitor Meadowlands. There was too much paranormal activity, the television in the RA office turned on and off on its own volition. The room became frosty on cold nights despite the heater being on, and sometimes the heat rose exponentially until the radiator clanged in protest and the room blistered. Wet footprints appeared on the hardwood floors in the entry hall, disappearing without a trace in the middle of the foyer. No one was ever sure if Blue Boy was malevolent, but they wanted to keep their distance all the same.
When I finished speaking, a thick presence clung to the air. Thinking of my grandfather’s folktales, I believed it was the remnants of a haint—recalling Blue Boy had churned up parts of him in the atmosphere, giving him the power to materialize and harm us. I held my breath so that I wouldn’t accidentally inhale Blue Boy’s essence and tether him to me. But his name burrowed under my skin, forming a connection that unsettled me.
“I don’t know if I can do this, dude,” Julia said with a nervous giggle.
We cast furtive glances over our shoulders, expecting to see the worst we could imagine lurking in the corner. Julia and I waited in the alcove a minute longer and when no one appeared, we choked back our fear and scurried down the hallway to explore the rest of Meadowlands.
We blustered into the Hunt Room where students gathered for murder mystery dinners and study sessions. A mirrored bureau rested against one wall near its entrance. I walked over to the fireplace and tried to pry open the metal grates sealing it shut. The metal whined as I pulled but did not give. Mismatched wooden chairs surrounded a rectangular dinner table. The cool wood delighted my fingertips as I ran my hand over its surface. In the wall’s faded paintings, red-coated hunters and their hounds chased prey across the grounds. The flooring popped and crackled as Julia and I walked across the room, and I entertained the feeling that at any moment, it would open up and we’d tumble into some long-forgotten basement, dragged to our deaths by devils.
We crossed into the great entry hall and circled the large oak table at its center. We called out to Blue Boy, beckoned for his presence behind titters and muffled laughter. We dared each other to be louder, to bark out Blue Boy’s name as if commanding the dead. I imagined a pearl-white, claw-footed tub filled with water, a boy lying peacefully at the bottom. As our words rose toward the attic, the tub frothed with greying bathwater that spilled over its edge as he emerged. We had awakened him, the burning intensity of our voices attracting him like a moth.
Julia and I walked into the Wicker Room. Lamps lit every corner and the overhead lighting cast the room in an amber glow, yet a general discomfort pervaded the air. We shook our heads and scampered back, and after finding another staircase, we paused to catch our breath.
“What do you want to do?” Julia asked.
I wanted to find the attic. I craved something more than just an aging tale of a dead boy.
“Let’s go,” I said and jutted my chin upward.
Julia trailed behind me. The twisting staircase swallowed the light and muted sound from the hallway below us. Our clunky footsteps echoed in concert with the sorrowful groans of the stairs. We wanted to go higher. To see him. Yet, our excitement puddled into trepidation and we paused every two steps.
“I dare you to go first.”
“Come with me.”
The stairs stopped at a closed door. Whoever entered had to step up into the room, or whatever exited would fall directly out of it and onto us. We stood a few steps below, eyeing each other and the door. Julia’s unsmiling face peered back at me in wide-eyed recognizance—we shared the same thought. There we were again, another door and another ghost.
“You go,” Julia said.
“No, you,” I exclaimed.
We giggled at our absurdity and peeked over the railing to see if anyone was coming to reprimand us or save us.
“I dare you,” she said.
“And what do I get if I do?”
“I’ll give you five dollars.” She held the ‘s’ until it hissed between her braces; I was Eve being tempted toward an unknowable fate.
I clasped her clammy hand in agreement then shook jitters from my body. I inhaled, letting the exhalation propel me to the top step in two bounds.
“Get ready to run,” I said over my shoulder.
I grabbed the knob, turned and pushed. It didn’t budge. I shoved my shoulder into the wood. Nothing. I looked back at Julia and then fueled by adrenaline, bent down to peer into the keyhole. I had to at least lay eyes on the bathtub.
I nestled my eye into the keyhole and as I focused, a grey figure brushed past. I cried out and stumbled back down the steps. My nails dug into the lacquered railing as I steadied myself. Julia screamed and hobbled down the staircase. I jumped over the rest of the stairs to the landing and trailed behind her, restraining the urge to push her out of my way. As I glanced upward to see if Blue Boy was in pursuit, I caught sight of a moth fluttering toward the buzzing fluorescent light.
Months following this adventure with Julia, during my senior year I would request to live in this residence hall. I could think of no better place that befit my suffocating loneliness than a haunted mansion. When night washed over the campus in a velvet wave, I turned off my bedroom lights, cracked open my window blinds, and crawled into bed. My breath blunted by the comforter pulled to my mouth as I stared out the window, waiting for a specter to play at the foot of my bed on the moonlit carpeting. I was moored in a melancholic depression, eager to embrace the dead rather than sit upright to eat with the living.
O’Leary’s
O’Leary’s
Donna Vitucci
A gloomier house you would not find, perched there atop the hill, complete with a German Shepherd to guard it and a rattle trap barn in the rear. The main structure stood at the end of a long gravel drive, amid trees whose dark and icy shadows embraced our slight shoulders. A wind rattled the last leaves on the spindly branches, and the ones that scuttled across the gravel like crabs and mice and lemmings.
The house stands unoccupied, abandoned by the owners, the O’Leary’s, now living in Pennsylvania. They are unable to sell the once-magnificent white clapboard house with its grand staircase of now rotting boards to trip the unsuspecting. So imposing it doesn’t need locks. Its reputation for horror and bad dreams are quite enough to keep out vandals. Or maybe vandals themselves contributed to its demise what with the clap-trappy state of the place. Nevertheless, this frightening structure is rooted like a vine deep within our imaginations.
In the front yard is a well, where we drop many a stone and a penny to try and hear it hit water or dirt. We are just looking for some definition to our boundaries. There are signs reading “Don’t Trespass” and “Danger” which we never mind anyway. The bottomless well, the lonely tire swing swaying in the wind or its own haunted propulsion are not enough to stop us.
We stand on tiptoe at the kitchen’s back window to peek inside at the shifty stacks of mail on a table, nothing opened, all unread. Our sight continuing to sweep the room, over the kerosene lamp, andirons, and butter churn until the German Shepherd’s bark runs us off. Yet, the dog has never been seen and though the house is never entered, it creaks all the same. But we are drawn to the barn.
The barn we can get into so we do. Bales of straw piled in corners for long ago sheep whose stench remains in the barn-boards and the stalls, some of their wooliness in cobwebs. The straw was ideal for extending fire. Matches enthrall me. Once I set a book of matches on fire, dropped them in the ashtray and watched as the ashtray split from the heat.
Firebug, my dad called me. My mom told me to quit.
Younger children revere me. I enter O’Leary’s barn near dusk with Tracy and Ellen following. Fire and esteem have my head swimming. I am going to strike a match.
The neighbor girls’ eyes shine bright, their eyes fastened on me and what I take from my pocket. School teaches fire safety; our families scold, “Don’t play with matches.” But like the warning signs on the O’Leary’s property, I ignore them.
“We’re in O’Leary’s ramshackle barn,” Tracy says.
“Our shoes are caked with mud,” says Ellen.
“We’re going to be whipped anyway,” I say. The sulphur smell in the air, the match I strike illuminating the three of us, the stalls, and straw. “Voila!”
The first match’s flame descends until I have to drop it. Two, three, four, five more. One, when it drops, touches a strand of straw and glides along it before winking out. Once each match goes out, the barn appears eerier, darker, bereft. Our small hands huddle together holding a teepee of straw. A lit match makes it burn brightly. Ever more teepees, ever more burning, until I touch the last match to a whole straw bale and then the fire takes the next bale and the next, eventually catching the stall boards and the posts. Like an electric bird it flies to the rafters and cuts across the main beam. We stay rooted, watching until the roof comes down and the sides fall in.
Outside the grass slashes so cool against our ankles. Dead grass, but grass all the same. Once green, it almost feels wet to us. We remember we want a drink, and run to the well. No water there, but we are a little out of our minds. Fire does that, it covers everything and then clouds, scars. It makes you forget. It overcomes you. It overcame us. It’s why horses panic in a fire, why they stampede and why they mow down one another in their fright. We try to find each other in the dark, and only come up with two and still parched.
“You pushed Tracy in the well!” Ellen cries.
I swear it was like flicking a match, it was that easy.
Screams and sirens and suffering smoke. You can’t tell who is alive or dead, white or black, blond or brown. Neighbors are everywhere, rescue folks, gawkers you can’t begin to count. The revolving red lights of night where all numbers, letters, identification burn. Even the long-dead sheep are screaming a cry I never want to hear again. Call it purified, the burning barn is beautiful to me. My fingers itch to strike another match.
Tracy disappears, but not in the well. But, we knew that, didn’t we? She walked out of the barn like a stick on fire, her blond curls sparking, her fingertips smoldering, her shoes burning a path brightly to O’Leary’s back door, where she knocked, where she bleated with what was left of her voice, her little handprint a ghost burn on the bottom of the door.
To Carry a Stone
To Carry a Stone
Jordan Brown
Wisconsin.
I miss the smell of her hair. Greasy and warm, archaic, like something discovered, smelling of dirt or bones or first love. Her hair is like silk, satin, some smooth ribbon, soft and gentle as it falls from behind her ear. She tucks it back again, and what I would do to tuck it for her. To feel it slip behind her ear, hold my palm against her neck, and smile as she lifts her eyes. It’s late summer of 2016 and I’m thirty-one years old. I haven’t drunk a drop or done drugs in over two years. It’s not bad really.
I left Amanda or lost her, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. But I got my driver’s license back and I got this room and I’m going to school again in the fall. I’m really trying to do my best, I’m trying to do things different.
My room is in the basement of an old building just off campus in Oshkosh. Built in the style of Spanish Renaissance, it’s made from old stones and light-colored mostly tan brick. It is three stories tall and has apartments that run from six to eight-hundred dollars. That’s more than I can afford but the ad I saw said, “Ask us about our sleeping rooms.” So I did—three hundred for a big room with a rug in the middle and a fridge, a bed, a dresser, couch, chair, table, more chairs. I lost a lot of things on the way to sobriety, so here I am, plus a desk and a hot plate and a bookcase and I think it’s a pretty good deal.
There’s a slick, rich floor underneath the rug, some fancy cement from Italy full of chips and colors. Two of the walls are just plaster, and on the other side of one is this lady who’s always in bed. It’s right against the wall and I can hear her there, all the time, and I can’t help but wonder if this has always been her life.
There’s a toilet and a shower in the hallway, and a slop-sink down in the laundry room where I can wash my plate and my cup and my pan. That’s all fine with me except that I have to go by this other lady’s room to get there. Her name is Kim. She stands behind her door and swears at me or about me as if she were talking to someone else.
“That goddamn kid, in and out, Jesus Christ. What the fuck,” she says.
I guess she’s used to Debbie who hardly goes out in the hallway. When she does and I see her there, not in her bed but standing up, wide-eyed like she’s looking real hard at something behind me. She’s friendly.
“Hi Debbie,” I say.
“Hey,” she says. And then her eyes kind of bug out and she smiles so her teeth show.
But Kim’s not like that at all, she hurries to get back in her room and I never get the chance to try to be nice. I don’t want to live here anymore so I put in a notice and I got a different apartment that I move to next month. In the meantime, I’m going west with some buddies and we leave tomorrow morning so I guess Kim will always think I’m bad.
Minnesota.
Four crows are on a telephone pole as we head to the border of the state. The clouds are layered like an oil painting, blue to white and back again. A silo stands up against the fields and sometimes it seems that if I blink or sneeze this could all crack apart, like a wooden frame falling to the floor. The paint-crusted canvas would be left flapping stiffly in the breeze. I think about the smell of her hair again, and the feel of it under my nose as I kiss her forehead and her freckles burn beneath my lips.
A little stream runs under the highway like a bead of sweat down her back. It’s easy to miss. The pine trees are lined up and skinny to the top. I anticipate that the waterways will widen as we go west and maybe some magic will be revealed. As we get toward the Mississippi, the scrappy bushes turn to thick ferns and the trees fill out but when we finally cross the river, I see that it’s just a bunch of water.
North Dakota.
When it’s my turn to drive, everyone goes to sleep and I’m left with nothing but thoughts. It’s after midnight, it has been storming for hours, and there’s construction on the road. We rented a car that is big and fast and heavy—it’s nothing like my loose old minivan at home. It makes me nervous, and so do the rivers of rain around me, running through the ditches. The traffic barrels and cut up concrete that narrow the lane make me nervous too. Lightning flashes, now so far in the distance of the night that it lights up stretches of fields farther than I thought I could see.
I try to remember the last time I saw her. I think it was in the doorway of her grandmother’s house after she left rehab. We didn’t know what to say so we stared at each other. And then I held her, my hand against the thin cotton of that yellow dress, sweat sticking it to the small of her back, fitting her to me.
Montana.
When the sun comes up, I see that things have changed. Hills are all around me, small bumps on the horizon turn into large rocks and plateaus. Sometimes I see these dead trees, black and broken. I can’t look away and when the car hits the shoulder of the road again, my friend wakes up to find me steering with my knee and hanging out the window, trying to take pictures.
On the far side of the state, we stop and camp near a great wide river. It’s shallow and I walk into it, my pants pulled up to my calves. I find a flat stone under the surface, smooth and soft like the palm of her hand. It calls out to me and I pluck it from the water and put it in my pocket, like a little secret. I fish a dollar from my pants and leave it at the bottom of the river under a larger rock. An offering to something, an exchange maybe.
In the morning we find out that Brandon lost his wallet sometime last night. He thinks it was when we stopped for firewood. Everything about this trip depends on his credit cards. Brandon calls the local sheriff and I roll my eyes. The chances of someone finding and returning his wallet seem one in a million. It’s unlikely that we’ll find it either, but we look anyway and discover a twenty dollar bill in the grass near the on-ramp. Taking this as a sign, we spend hours walking up and down the highway, him on one side, me on the other. I keep going across the bridge, hundreds of feet above the river we camped next to. I can see the rocks in the shallow water, they look like grains of sand so far below me now. I don’t want to do this anymore. They look so soft. I take off my hat and hold it over my face and breathe in, deeply. Just the smell of hair makes me think of her. Brandon comes running up the highway, his cellphone in his hand. The sheriff called. Someone found his wallet. One in a million.
Idaho.
I’m happy to be in the back seat again. The mountains are incredible and it feels like the earth has opened up. Every road is the edge of a plate, on the edge of a table, and I can’t tell if my hands are shaking or just my heart. We won’t be here long. I remember now, the last time I saw her. We were naked together, on the couch in her new apartment. She was lying on top of me and we were sweaty and sad to see each other again. Then, standing in the doorway, was the man she left me for.
“What the fuck is this,” he said.
I got up and scurried into the bathroom. I must have taken my clothes because I don’t remember worrying about that, just putting them on monotonously, like I’d done this before. I had done this before, been naked alone in someone else’s house, hiding, while she tried to explain it all away while her lives intersected. Standing alone, embarrassed, frightened, thinking. Thinking now what? I went into the living room and I stood between them. He was still in the doorway, blocking me.
“I don’t suppose it would make me feel any better to hit you?” he said.
I thought about that, thought about my answer. “I don’t know,” I said. “That’s up to you.”
Washington.
We’re staying in a hotel that was built in the ‘70s and the gal at the front desk acts like that was a long time ago. I think this is the best bed I’ve ever slept in and I don’t want to leave it. The sheets are thick and cool, the comforter calm and heavy. They lay over me like darkness and I feel so safe. Before we left on this trip, I met someone new. When I get back home, I’m going to go out with her because I’ve decided to open up. I can talk myself into anything. We have a lot in common, but she’s much younger than me and quietly hopeful. Maybe she’s got a past too. Maybe we’ve all got stones in our pockets.
