in the beginning

the staircase tree and the ocean of branches -1

On the absolute end of the furthest branch, she hesitated. Momentum had brought her this far, unburdened by the weight of a plan. Her next move would be a defining one. So, she hesitated.

Behind her was every stupid thing that had unfolded into this crushing moment of decision. Ahead of her was the unknown, compelling in its current lack of mistakes she’d made but if she were honest with herself probably just as rich with opportunity for new mistakes. Maybe worse mistakes.

The window waited. It could afford to wait, it had been sitting patiently within the patient bones of its old skeleton for her entire life. Behind its opaque depths the unknown also waited. It was too dark under the dense reach of branches for the window to reflect her indecision clearly, which she was grateful for. Suddenly it was all a little much. She felt herself in relation to the window, and to the branch; then to the ground below and the sunset sky above. The enormity of the universe roared around her. She was very small. She was very alone.

Rocking slightly she muttered, ‘Thinking of you as I sit here in a tree with no backup!’

Her eyes filled with tears and she shook out a quiet angry sob. It was his fault she was in this situation. His fault for leaving everybody on their own. It wasn’t like he’d had to sign up, there wasn’t even a draft…nobody had made him go. And here she was, in a situation where a brother might actually be useful for once, but no.

Thinking of you as, that was one of their things. It had begun in early childhood and been so enjoyed that it stuck, spackled through their communications in ways that evolved over the years to fit any occasion. It had begun early. It was going to be Ethan’s ninth birthday, and he had demanded to invite a much admired local celebrity, a minor leagues sports hero about whom he had written an essay that had been published in the school newspaper. Their parents had initially advised against it, probably fearing that his hopes would be disappointed, but after being worn mercilessly down over the course of several weeks they dutifully sent the invitation, albeit with many warnings about the general unavailability of sports stars. Ethan had staunchly refused to believe that any outcome other than the one he desired could be possible. Their parents eventually gave up even talking about it, rolled their eyes at each other whenever it was mentioned, and appeared to simply hope for the best. 

The entire thing had bored Ella in exactly the same way that the sport itself bored her. She had agreed with Ethan that the sports hero should come to the party, but without much conviction. She agreed because she wanted him to be happy, and it was clear that nothing short of a celebrity appearance would do the trick. She could not feel any real interest in the hero himself, and was in fact fairly certain that his presence would turn a party that could be enjoyed by all into an experience that only an enthusiast could love. With the best will in the world she could not make herself pay attention while the sport itself was being played or explained to her. Often while keeping Ethan company during a game she would find herself staring at the tv as though following the action attentively, and would realize that she had been off in a daydream for an indefinite amount of time, hearing and seeing nothing. She never told Ethan when this happened, and because it also tended to occur whenever he talked to her about the sport, he just assumed that she had a quietly intent interest in it, agreeing and sympathizing with him so completely that any actual contributions from her would have been unnecessarily redundant. When she was able to pay attention for a minute or two she rarely had any idea of what was going on, although sometimes she experienced a glimmering of understanding. For instance one year Ethan had gone around all summer tossing a ball sideways and yelling ‘hook shot!’ so she always recognized that move when she saw it, with an animal part of her that leapt to attention and thought to itself before her forebrain had even realized what was going on, hook shot!

Anyhow, the sports hero hadn’t come. He didn’t show up, and then the day after the party Ethan got a picture postcard in the mail, which showed the widely smiling sports star in a party hat and apron that said GrillStar standing in front of a barbecue grill with a spatula in one hand, giving thumbs up with the other. On the back was written Thinking of you as I bbq these steaks tonight! Hope you’re having a great celebration of your own. Happy birthday!

Ethan had been outraged. No appeal on the strict schedules of athletes nor assurances that steak was the most festive of meats to grill in honor of someone else’s birthday could soothe him.

‘He had to barbecue?!’ he yelped. ‘He could barbecue anytime! What does that even mean, thinking of you as I barbecue steaks?! That doesn’t mean anything!’

He threw the card on the ground and stomped on it.

‘Thinking of you as I stomp your face!’ he yelled.

This had unexpectedly struck Ella as hilarious, and she laughed without being able to stop. Their parents, more apt to focus on Ethan’s outbursts than his feelings, had not known what to do with either of them. Eventually Ethan had begun to see the joke, and they squealed with laughter together. They spent the rest of the day yelling the funniest things they could think of at each other in this format. ‘Thinking of you as I have a poop!’ ‘Thinking of you as I pick my nose!’ They had gone to bed still yelling it (‘Thinking of you as I brush my teeth!’, ‘Thinking of you as I kick my socks off under the covers!’). They had still found it funny the next day, and the day after that, and it retained its humor long enough that eventually it was strung through every aspect of their particular lexicon. Their parents had never been big fans of it, but it had stuck, to be used in all sorts of scenarios all through their lives.

The smile that had taken command of her face at the memory of the great birthday melodrama twinged itself painfully away. She thought of him desperately. Where was he? Was he ok? Was he in his own equivalent of stuck up a tree, alone and miserable and probably hopelessly endangered? Would they ever share the stories of the lonesome thinking of yous that had happened since he left, someday when the war was over and everyone could be back home?

‘Thinking of you as I miss you,’ Ella whispered. It sounded like she was talking to herself, but she knew she wasn’t.

After a lifetime of accord their first major disagreement had stunned them both beyond the ability to communicate, and they had parted almost wordlessly, crushing each other in their farewell hug as though they could squeeze their unspoken thoughts out their pores and into each other’s understanding. He had always accepted her perspective unquestioningly, although they both expected it to change and evolve as reality unfurled. Their approach to anything always began with what she thought, although their shared activities were fueled by both their interests. Through the small adventures that their quiet way of life had to offer she had guided them with a gentle yet inevitable hand, and neither of them ever questioned the wisdom or agreeableness of this arrangement. Then the war came.

She knew as soon as she heard of it that he would go. Cold surged up from her belly and froze her throat. When he came home from work that day his face was closed to her as it had never been before. He had made his first decision without her. They moved around the room like two marbles loose in an empty box, no purpose guiding them but a blind desire to avoid the other’s eyes…and perhaps a longing to be holding the other’s hand very tightly like small children. She had made up her mind to never cry over it in front of him, but as soon as their eyes met hers overflowed with tears.

‘I have to, Lala,’ he said.

She was immediately angry at him for using his ancient nickname for her, which he had abandoned years ago as too childish. He was trying to soften her to his point of view. 

‘No you don’t,’ she told him, a wild hope flowing through her that she might still be able to change his mind. 

‘I do,’ he said. ‘Please understand.’

Hope died. She had never seen him so quietly sure of himself. 

‘I will never understand,’ she said through clenched teeth. Her entire body felt clenched, as though it were trying simultaneously to crumple itself together and pull itself apart. ‘There’s not even a draft.’ 

He stood looking at her. She felt tears running down her face, and tiny half moons of pain where all her fingernails were pushing into her palms. She felt panic at the thought of his leaving; horror at the thought of his fighting; savage at the thought of his dying.

Also she felt sorry for him. He had no way to manage her in this moment, no tools with which to comfort or persuade her. It was his first choice apart from her, and she wished it could have been any other choice. One upon which she could have embarked with him, in favor of his decision, in partnership with his plans. Her body softened, her fingernails left their trenches in her flesh. She felt her shoulders lower themselves several inches down her spine. She looked at him with her face open, waiting to hear what else he would find to say. Apparently he interpreted this as an acceptance of his choice.

‘Thank you,’ he said, and wrapped her in a big hug. ‘I’ll make you proud, you’ll see.’

I don’t want you to make me proud, she thought, I want you to keep me company. I want you to always be here.

But she didn’t say it. 

In the days that followed, as he prepared to leave, she didn’t say much of anything. The ice that had woven itself through her throat at the first knowledge of the war settled deeply all through her body, until she sometimes wondered if she was entirely numb. She ceased to wonder and simply accepted it as fact as she folded his clothes with frozen fingers into the unreasonably boyish backpack he was taking with him to training camp; as she watched him in front of the mirror when he thought he was all alone, practicing standing with his feet together and his shoulders straight back; as she peeked in on her mother silently, grimly making the last batch of his favorite cookies. The moments of his leaving rolled over her each in its turn like a wave that one has seen coming but that has turned out to be larger than one had thought; she surrendered herself to the breathless darkness of each one without a struggle. She thought dramatically to herself that she was like the motionless figurehead of a sinking ship, watching inch by inch her own slow descent into the gloom of unfathomable depths.

When he went away she gave him a tiny mouse made of jasper to keep him safe from harm. She also gave him her blessing – her pride in his courage, her assurance that he was doing the right thing, and her conviction that he was bound to do it well. It was the first time she had ever outright lied to his face.

Her eyes and words were bright until he had gone all the way through airport security and disappeared from sight. Then she laid down on the floor in departures and would not get up again. The silence of the waves rushed over her as she lay motionless on the bottom of the sea floor. She was vaguely aware that family and friends were fussing around her, but she did not know what they were saying. She felt guilty for causing her mom more stress by making a dramatic scene, but she couldn’t seem to do anything about it. The part of her brain that was in charge of caring didn’t seem to be working. At last mom and Tony got her lifted up between them and hauled her half walking, half dragging, out to the car. She could feel herself moving but really she knew that she was not leaving at all. She would stay on that floor forever, until he came home. There was no existence for her now except the quiet cold one alone at the bottom of the ocean.

Strangely, however, this had turned out not to be true. Life had gone on. Although the cold never truly left her core, she found herself warming by degrees. Despite herself she kept being caught by interests, sucked into activities. In addition to the indignity of being forced to go on with everyday living when one has made up one’s mind that life is over, there were all the unusual alterations to daily life brought on by the war. What had surprised her the most about war was the static of it. There were things that they could have been doing, but they seemed incapable of doing them. Mostly what they did was sit. Or stand around. They were like so many shadows that just lurked around the house or work or or school, wherever they happened to be, talking of nothing but war, thinking of nothing but war.

She craved this kind of interaction, because it made the war seem faraway. To the people of a country unaccustomed to land warfare, it seemed unreal. Not impossible or unfathomable, just unthinkable. The detachment that others were able to feel toward it was like water to her thirsty soul. She felt scorched by the frost of her fear when she was left alone with her own thoughts for too long. The war loomed into her mind then and filled her skin with its presence. It was too close to her, because Ethan was part of it. At the same time, she grew scornful of the people who had no close connection to the war. She grew hateful toward the platitudes they offered, always the same, trying to convince themselves that they were safe and their lives could continue unaltered. She couldn’t bear to be alone with her thoughts, but she couldn’t stand to be with others and their thoughts either.

At last in desperation she took to walking every day for hours in the banban orchard behind their house, trying to dull her mind with exercise and exhaust her body into sleeping at night. The orchard had never been anything but abandoned during her lifetime, left to grow wild in whatever way best suited itself. She and Ethan had always called it ‘the forest.’ It stood densely across a narrow strip of tall, weed riddled grass that they had somewhat optimistically referred to as ‘the meadow.’ From the time early spring began to allow enough light after school to play outdoors to the time winter’s days darkened while class was still in session, they spent all their free time in the meadow or the forest. There was always some gorgeous adventure to be had in these overgrown wonderlands.

The bark of the banban trees lay flat and silky against the snaking bodies of trunks and branches. Their leaves were papery and translucent even in the earliest wakening of spring, and in the autumn they wafted to the ground to form great heaps of crumpled golden gauze. Their fruit they held only in their highest branches, ripening slowly from tiny hard green buds to fat dusky pods, warm from the sun. The banbans never fell from their branches until they were entirely rotted, which meant that enjoying them was an exercise in both stamina and resolve. Once you had bitten into one, felt the shell give way to the sweet jelly within, tasted the subtle tang that danced along the sweetness, the smooth bark of the trees and the high nests of their fruit became a deeply personal problem to solve.

This problem and their varied solutions to it had been a central quest in the adventures of their childhood. Climbing the smooth trunks of the trees was impossible; no one had ever done it, and nobody even claimed to have seen it done. The neighborhood children made a long-standing game of running up the trunks to see who could reach the highest point, but the greatest height was always still well below the lowest branches. Throwing rocks to knock the banbans down had been a brief endeavor. The lower branches calmly sent the rocks ricocheting back, the fruit above them untouched and apparently serenely unaware of any ventured assault. Throwing ropes up to loop over low branches was a better plan, but only worked with trees whose branches were not tightly intertwined with those of its neighbors. Even when all factors aligned and a rope was looped, once you had climbed up to the first branch you were barely nearer to the distant fruited branches. You were able to continue looping and climbing until you at last reached the upper branches, but it became harder as you climbed higher because while the lower branches snaked almost horizontal to the ground, the top branches reached nearly straight up to the sky.

It was still the best option for several summers, and Ethan and Ella would spend whole days scaling the trees and collecting the elusive banbans, long after their friends had abandoned the project in favor of snacks that came quietly out of the refrigerator or pantry without a struggle. For some reason that she could not explain and did not even stop to think about, Ella was obsessed with those banbans. She would rather go hungry in pursuit of them than enjoy any other foods or any other pastime. Ethan, who would rather spend his time doing what she was doing than find something to do on his own, joined her more often than not although he grumbled a lot about being hungry and often brought snacks along. All summer they spent their days climbing and hunting, periodically stopping to picnic on their harvest. And then, one magical gold and purple evening, they found the staircase tree.

They called it that at once, because it was probably its name. It was a particularly gnarled and twisting tree, with knots and whorls making their sinuating way up it at the most opportune intervals imaginable. If you curled bare toes around one, and fingertips around another, and so on, and so on, you could climb it just like a staircase – a labyrinthine staircase. You could also lose the grip of fingers or toes and go sliding back down it, belly and chin bumping ingloriously against the knots between you and the ground. Up they went, and down they slipped. There was a cadence to it, a tune almost. You had to sing it just so, just the right notes at just the right speed, like a secret password. Their young bodies knew the tree’s song by heart in just a few days. They went caroling up it in pursuit of banbans higher than they’d ever reached before…and found something even more wonderful.

From the ground the low branches of the trees had formed an unassailable ceiling; from beneath they formed a fitful floor, like a sea of branches flowing in every direction. Ella and Ethan sat in the staircase tree and stared in wonder. The first tottering steps they took across this floor were slow and careful. Before long though they were running across it, nimble bare feet skipping from branch to branch. A new world of exploration was open to them. The forest was vast, but they knew every inch of its ground floor from years of play. Now they learned its second story by heart, wandering the sea of branches with bellies full of banbans and heads full of adventure tales. This was how they found the lonely house.

The big old house had doubtless belonged to the orchard in life, and still did in its quietus. It had been abandoned decades before and its lower level doors and windows were boarded up, but banban branches curled their twiglets into the squares of its broken upper story panes. Ella imagined the trees petting the house to sleep, like a dozing cat. She could almost hear the house purring. They found that some of the branches could get them near enough to jump to the porch roof and back again without much effort. From the roof they climbed into a cheerfully gap toothed window, and tumbled breathless with adventure into the drafty attic. It was as easy as that, and they had their own playhouse. The lonely house, they called it, even years later when they were too old for make believe and spent their time inside it experimenting with stolen cigarettes and dancing to music their mom disliked. Its rooms were spacious but its ceilings were low, and they never cared to spend much time downstairs. The gloom cast by the boarded up windows gave the lower rooms a murky, drowsy feeling. They preferred to spend their time in the light and wind of the upper rooms, where leaves blew in and out at windows and whirled uninterrupted down the hallways.

She had been sitting on the broken old porch that very morning, just a handful of hours before everything happened. She had finally wound her way slowly back to the house, mind agreeably numbed by the layers of nostalgia, and rather regretted returning. Mom and Tony had been talking about what to do if things got worse. Mom thought that they might not, but Tony was sure they would.

‘If this goes much further,’ Tony said, ‘we’ll want to get away from the big cities and military bases. Get somewhere with a natural water source, but no naval operations.’

Mom nodded slowly. ‘Ok.’

A sarcastic snort died unspent in Ella’s nostrils. For the first time the gravity of the situation hit home. If her mom wasn’t making fun of Tony’s detailed plans for flight, their situation must be truly bad.

‘Now that will mean heading northeast,’ Tony continued, ‘but that will mean dealing with mountains. Let me think about this. No, wait. I’m going to go get gas first. Then I’ll think about it.’

He said, and vanished. They heard the truck roar to life in the driveway, and hum away. Ella and her mother stood looking blankly after him, and then at each other.

‘Is he serious?’ Ella asked.

Mom nodded.

‘So we’re going to drive god knows where past some mountains and find a natural water source and then what?’ Ella demanded.

Mom shrugged. ‘Camp, probably. Tony loves camping.’

‘Mom?!’ Ella felt desperate. ‘We don’t camp!’

Her mother shook her head helplessly. ‘I think we do now, boo.’

the cat and the motorcycle – 2

The line of cars snaked slowly out of the town center toward the highway. 

Suddenly Ella was struck by a horrible thought. She knew what she had forgotten. 

‘Mom, wait! We forgot Alfred!’

‘Oh no,’ her mom said, turning a worried face toward Tony. 

‘We have to go back!’ Ella demanded. 

Although they were barely moving, Tony kept both hands on the wheel and his eyes on the car in front of him.

‘Tony!’ Ella wailed.

‘We can’t go back now,’ he said. ‘He’s a cat. He can take care of himself. Cats are legendary for taking care of themselves.’

‘Not Alfred!’ Ella protested. ‘He’s sweet and fat and trusting and he’s never had to take care of himself. He won’t understand. He’ll be hungry and confused and scared and there will be nobody to take care of him.’ 

She started to cry.

‘Tony.…’ her mother said, touching his arm.

He pulled his eyes slowly away from the road and looked at her.

‘I’m sorry, Meems. We can’t go back now even if we wanted to. There’s nowhere to turn around.’

Ella saw that it was true. The double line of cars was moving inexorably along the highway on-ramp. There was no space to make a u-turn. 

She thought rapidly. They probably weren’t even a mile from home, and it had taken them ages to drive this far. They were still several hundred feet from where the cars merged onto the highway, which was itself packed wall to wall with inching cars. She could run back to get Alfred and make it back before the car had gone even the length of one exit. She unbuckled her seat belt.

‘Ella!’ 

Mom knew what she was planning, and reached back to grab her. Too late. She opened the car door and hopped out. 

‘Mom, I’m going back to get him. We’re barely moving. I’ll have lots of time. I’ll catch you.’

‘No!’ mom and Tony yelled together. 

Mom lunged for her. Ella snaked away from her grasp and slammed the door. They were yelling after her but she didn’t care.

‘Just stay in the slow lane!’ she called back to them.

She knew she could make it. She set off for home at a sprint. 

It took her longer than she’d thought it would. She couldn’t just run at top speed indefinitely, it turned out. In fact it turned out that she could only run at top speed for about a block and then her body absolutely demanded that she progress at nothing faster than a medium jog. By the time she plodded up to her own house her lungs were tingling and her legs felt squishy. Gratefully she dropped onto the front steps to catch her breath. Huffing and puffing, she scanned the yard for Alfred. It wasn’t the time of day for him to be making his rounds, so he should be there. He spent his afternoons napping in some sunny spot, storing up energy for the evening’s social excursions. Each day as dusk began to fall he would rise, stretching and yawning widely, and begin his leisurely meander between all the houses where neighbors who liked him lived. The afternoon was just beginning to get stale, so he should still be snoozing somewhere nearby.

She finally caught a full breath and stood, shaking her jello legs to firm them up. She called ‘here kitty kitty’ in an unhopeful sort of way and began to search around. He wasn’t going to leave whatever cozy sunspot he was napping in just because she called him. She would have to actually hunt him down. She pushed aside the furry leaves of the lamb’s ears plants to look under the rose bushes, where he liked to sleep in the sun-warmed dead leaves and fallen petals. Sure enough, he was there, a soft puddle of orange and white.

‘Kitty!’ She scooped him up, ignoring his creaky protests. Cradling him carefully in her arms she headed toward the street. Alfred was not pleased with this arrangement. For the first time she began to actually think this venture through. She couldn’t run while carrying him, so the return journey would take more time. It was also not very likely that he would cooperate for long. Always before when she had had to carry him, like on trips to the vet, she had had a cat carrier, or at the least a blanket to wrap him in. He was already beginning to kick his feet out for an escape, and test his claws on her chest.

‘Alfred, behave!’ she ordered. 

He kicked her harder. She felt her eyebrows and upper lip hairs begin to sweat. She suddenly noticed the line of cars making their slow way down the street and felt as though everyone in them was watching her. A feeling of flailing desperation overtook her. Damn ungrateful cat…

Holding him tightly against her body with one arm, crouching awkwardly inward, she squirmed out of her hoodie and somehow managed to get it wrapped around him. He wriggled and kicked as she bundled him but after several perilous moments she was able to swaddle all four of his legs. He peered at her angrily out of the hoodie. She was overcome with an insane impulse to laugh. She straightened up and clutched him tightly to her chest with both arms, and discovered suddenly that they were not alone. Along the everlasting line of cars foreign soldiers on motorcycles were riding, every so often stopping a vehicle and searching it. This added to the general confusion and panic, and brought the already sluggish line of traffic to an occasional standstill. Now one of the motorcycle soldiers was sitting with one foot on the curb of the sidewalk outside the front gate, watching her. She froze. 

His eyes were roaming lazily across her, and as they came to rest on hers he smiled. It was a nice smile. He was young, about her age or even rather younger. Ethan’s age, maybe… 

He said something in a language she could not understand, but she knew it was about Alfred. It sounded like a joke. She managed a stiff smile back, and wondered dizzily what he wanted. She did not have ID on her. In a panic, she realized that she did not have anything on her. She had to get back to the car…

The soldier smiled again, and said something else. He jerked his head toward the back seat of his motorcycle. This was unexpected. She thought rapidly. On the one hand she did have somewhere to get in a hurry, but…on the other hand…there was really no way of knowing that he would take her where she wanted to go. There was really no way of knowing where he would take her at all. She swallowed hard, and, smiling for all she was worth, shook her head.

‘No thank you, I don’t have far to go…’

His face lost its look of sleepy good nature. He smiled again, and she could tell that he was trying to look agreeable, but this smile was not a nice one. He looked her in the eyes, and said something. He patted the seat behind him, and cocked his head toward it. She had a feeling he was not asking. 

Her throat went dry as dust. She could feel her lungs tingling again. She took a step backward, and his face changed. He muttered something mean sounding and kicked the kickstand of his motorcycle down. He began to climb off it. She stepped backward, and back again, and then suddenly Alfred took his chance. Maybe distraction had loosened her grasp, maybe he just felt that the psychological moment had come. Whatever it was, he chose that instant to scratch her deeply down her belly, kick away from her surprised arms with one emphatic leap, and disappear across the lawn and into the laurel hedge. She stood there for one dazed moment holding the empty hoodie against her stinging belly, looking stupidly after him. She heard the soldier laugh. The sound recalled her sharply to the moment; that laugh was so much lighter and carefree than she could have imagined. He had left his motorcycle and was standing inside the gate. She wasted a precious moment or two wondering whether that was a good idea, in this rush for departure. It seemed unforgivably careless. Anyone could take it, right now while his back was turned. It was running and everything. But then, maybe the risk of stealing an invading soldier’s motorcycle wasn’t worth it… 

As she stood thinking she saw the laughter leave his face like a cloud going over the sun. A purposefulness replaced it. He took a step toward her. There was a dreadful alertness in his eyes. Without thinking she flung her hoodie at him. It hit him in the face and the surprise of it slowed him for an instant. In that instant she turned and ran. She heard the sunflower gate clang behind her as the grasses of the meadow behind the house rushed past her ankles. She could not believe that her body had ever been tired of running. It seemed born to run, everything in her poured into the effort carrying her forward. She heard the sunflower gate clang again and willed herself not to look back. She tore through the meadow and into the forest. She hit the first rows of trees at a dead run. Her fingers and toes found the knots of the staircase tree. Up she scrambled, in a pure symphony of muscle memory. She heard him reach the tree beneath her and scrabble at it. From far above him she found a strange set of emotions surging through her. Beneath the terror she was surprised to find that her soul rankled with the slap of a gauntlet thrown; within the enormity of fear echoed a small, expanding ebb of delight for battle. If he thought he could catch her on her turf…

Up and up she went, each hand and foot hold finding true. She reached the lengthwise branches, and swung herself up. 

At last she looked down.

He was at the foot of the tree, looking up. 

He looked angry, and she had a dreadful moment of wondering whether he had a gun. Her breath, which had been working sweetly in concert with the rest of her body to power her across the meadow and up the tree trunk, suddenly caught and soured in her chest. Her sweat chilled on her skin and she shivered. He made no movement that would suggest he was thinking about a gun, however. He just stood there, looking up at her, and the comforting thought crossed her mind that if he did try to shoot her, the rock throwing harvest efforts of childhood would seem to indicate that the horizontal branches could most likely be relied upon to shield her from the bullets. With that in mind she turned her attention to climbing higher, to put more of those branches beneath her.

She heard him say something, and paused to look down again. He was still just standing there, and he still looked angry, but he also looked beaten. She could not help feeling a little smug. He said something again, and it sounded like a question. As she watched he tried to climb the tree. She went a little sick with the fear that he would actually accomplish it. He looked strong and agile, and determined. She knew somehow that at this point climbing the tree would be less about catching her, and more about matching her. Whatever his original intentions toward her had been, what existed between them now was a power struggle. He did not however possess the secret of the staircase. He was clever, and deft; he found a handhold or two. But he lacked the familiarity and finesse to make his way up, and his heavy boots did him no favors. Despite himself he slid back down. 

He looked up and found her eyes again. It was the worst his face had looked. She was appalled to realize that up to this point she could have found him attractive, had his actions not been so predatory. There was nothing compelling about him now. Hate burned out of him. She felt her heart begin to speed. Her fingers against the cool bark of the tree were clammy. He yelled something up at her. It sounded ugly, and it was almost certainly a threat. 

Shaking, she returned her attention to the climb. The branches began to reach upward. The space between her body and the ground became more intricately latticed with the branches below. As the thatching beneath her thickened and closed, as he became almost lost to her view, a calm began to sink through her. She watched him leave with a grim and gratified satisfaction.

This satisfaction was short-lived. Within moments she heard a motorcycle rev. He was back, and began to circle through the trees, revving his engine wildly. Again she was surprised by her emotional response. Fear surged, certainly, but her prevailing feeling was one of frustration. He didn’t have anything better to do? Who was in charge of him? This was the way they could afford to run a military? He could just tantrum indefinitely over his injured sense of dignity? What a waste, what a stupid childish waste.

However, she soon realized that he was showing no signs of leaving, and nobody seemed to be coming to collect him and make him do something useful. He was apparently at leisure to spend his time and gas indefinitely on treeing her like a squirrel to make some kind of point. 

Despair overtook her. She would certainly never catch the car now. She could not even hope that they would return for her, because Tony had said all the exits back off the highway had been closed. Not that they would have been able to find her anyhow, halfway through the orchard a hundred feet up a tree with a motorcycle soldier below doing his orbital impression of a lunatic comet.  

Bitterness swept through her. What an ungrateful bastard Alfred was. She suddenly felt the scratch on her belly. Unreasonably, she thought of his tiny paws and how small and helpless he was all alone out in the great world. None of his favorite houses would be open to him. She pictured him wandering between them, finding them all dark and empty, growing more confused and forlorn with each shut door, and tears filled her eyes. If only she could have made him understand. Now the outlook was bleak for them both. If only the motorcycle soldier didn’t find him…

She shook herself a little. The time to think of Alfred had passed. She had followed her first impulse to do so, against everyone’s wishes, and this was what came of it. She couldn’t get back into the house because she had no key, and anyhow that crazy fucker was still down there riding around. She wouldn’t be able to catch the car now, even if traffic was still as slow as it had been. Too much time had passed and she was already feeling fatigue setting through her body. Even if she could have made it to the car, there was no way she could outrun the soldier again, especially not on a motorcycle. With the enemy circling below her like a shark in the darkening depths she considered her options. 

It only took a couple moments of concentration to come to a decision. Moving as quietly as if he could possibly hear her over his engine, like a shadow melting downward she eased herself toward lower branches. She ran across the ocean of boughs, each footstep falling nimbly true, fingertips brushing the branches above her to balance her against her momentum as she passed below them.

With the lonely house for company, she allowed herself another couple tears of self pity. They were going to be her last, at least for this part of her journey. She would enjoy them, and then let them go…

The pity party thrown and gone, she squared her shoulders and sucked down a good solid breath. She stopped feeling, and started thinking. It wasn’t Ethan’s fault she was up a tree and far away from anyone she loved, with no plan and now that she thought about it nothing at all actually. Not even a damn sweater, and it was beginning to be chilly. It wasn’t Ethan’s fault for leaving, and it wasn’t Tony’s fault for insisting that they all go. It wasn’t mom’s fault for deciding that suddenly they could camp, after a lifetime of devotion to sleeping in real beds under real roofs.

All of this was her fault, for not thinking of Alfred when she should have, when it would have mattered, when she could have actually done something for him. It was her fault for disregarding the input of everyone who cared about her to follow the impulse of a moment and make a huge mess of everything. And it was his fault too, the fucking soldier. She could have made it back to the car, if she hadn’t had to run from him. Even if she couldn’t have taken Alfred with her, at least she could have made it back. All of this was her fault, but it was all his fault too. Anger burned through her, crackling into resentment as it settled through her body. It smoldered agreeably, but far too soon its warmth was gone. Hating  the soldier was comforting, but ultimately worthless. She was cold, and alone with her regrets. She sighed. There had never really been any choice to be made here. Only a momentary gasp of reason, a pause to take stock of the situation that had crowded up behind her and was pushing her into the inevitable. 

As she crept through its empty rooms the badness of the graffiti on the walls of the lonely house hurt her. The weak lines and crude messages spoke such a lack of artistry in both technique and imagination. She wished she could keep it safe and locked away from a world where any dumbass with twenty dollars had access to spraypaint. Tidy it a bit, clean up its walls, and see that they never again had to display anything that had not flowed from a hand that moved to the rhythm of beauty. She trailed her fingers along the hallway, and found herself suddenly at the front door. She should be in a terrible hurry to reach the highway; but she was not ready to leave the house. Slowly, she made herself push the door to open it. It didn’t open. She blinked, shaking her head. Of course it didn’t open. It never opened, it had always been boarded up from the outside. She honestly didn’t know what she was thinking. What was the matter with her?

She climbed back up the stairs slowly, her muscles aching with every step. She climbed back out the attic window onto the porch roof, and made her painstaking way down the support column. She dropped off the porch railing to the ground below, and sat to catch her breath beneath the close planted cherry trees. 

The evening hummed with the sounds of people leaving. The foreign military vehicles, surreal against the familiar landscape, wove in and out amongst the endless procession of everyday cars making their laborious way out of the city. She knew that she should join them. Just run out and accost the citizenry through their car windows until someone rolled one down and heard her sad story and told her to hop in. She knew that the longer she waited the worse her chances would be, and the less desirable her traveling companions. 

The alarm of her recent encounter was too fresh in her system, however. The story she had read online about a girl who had been raped and asked a passing stranger for help only to be raped a second time played on loop in her mind. She knew it was silly, she knew that the majority of people were good and kind and helpful and only the standout scum on the underside of the species caused the situations that created these cautionary front page news tales. She knew that it was so much more intelligent to take her chances now in this crowded public venue than it would be at some later point when the roads were deserted. Still, she couldn’t make herself go. Against all reason she clambered up into the branches of the porch tree and stayed there. 

Nighttime settled slowly but relentlessly over the landscape. The cherry blossoms, which had been intricately, individually lovely when she first climbed into the tree, began to soften into shadowy aggregate clouds. Against the deepening darkness headlights and brake lights created glowing bead strings along the near side of the highway. They began to blur into a continuous neon line and she found that her eyes had unfocused and her body was numbing with drowsiness. In a crushing ache she longed for her bed. All at once she realized that she needed to pee, and pretty badly. The adrenaline must have worn off, she thought to herself. For the third time in as many hours she crouched in a tree and pondered her situation. 

She did not ponder long. She was too tired to remain cautious. She climbed wearily down and crept beneath some bushes to pee. Squatting there she contemplated the line of lights dismally and all at once decided she was too worn out, body and spirit, to deal with any more humans today. She would find a safe place to sleep and figure out a ride to hitch in the morning when her energies and faith in the species were refreshed. Right now all she wanted was to stop thinking, and go lay down somewhere. Maybe she was making a terrible mistake, maybe she would discover in the light of day that everyone had disappeared in the night, taking her chances of escape with them…but she couldn’t care. She simply didn’t have it in her to make it the several hundred yards to the highway; to take her chances with strangers at any acceptable level of discernment; to stay alert to her surroundings for any length of time. Maybe it was a terrible idea, but at this point her entire state of being was a terrible idea. Nothing less than an unbroken series of terrible ideas had brought her here. She might as well keep on the way she’d begun, seeing as she was basically fucked already. 

She scooched out from under the bushes and pulled up her pants. She looked around uncertainly. She would have loved to just crawl into some cozy corner of the lonely house and sleep, but she felt that she couldn’t trust it. It was too obtrusive. Anyone who happened along this road would be compelled to explore it, and she had no inclination to meet them, whether they were conducting a military sweep or joining her in the desire for shelter. As uncomfortable as it sounded, she felt like the safest choice would be to find a good solid hedge or something and sleep behind it for the night. She sighed. It was getting chilly, and she was very tired. She had better get on with it, then…

Moving in the same direction as the distant caravan on the highway, she started down the road. 

She encountered no one. Everyone seemed to be out there, on the highway, which was present as an ever more distant and fuzzy line of light. The night grew quiet around her. Suddenly, around a sharp and bushy bend, a truck loomed. She almost screamed. Her weary body came alive with energy but instead of running she just stood there, buzzing with electricity. She was too tired for flight. She dropped her stance and dug her heels in. This time she would fight. And then it appeared that she wouldn’t. The truck was parked off the side of the road, and it was empty. It was most likely abandoned. As she got closer she could see the grime deeply set in along its lines, its four flattened tires. Walking around it, she began to regard it as a friend. It looked as good a place as any to hunker down for the night. It was locked, cab and trailer, which might have been for the best. No need to sleep on display in the window, just in case someone else did happen along. She stepped up the front bumper and onto its hood, and scrambled up on top of the box trailer. 

For awhile she lay there crawling with silent terror. Every sound from the night made her rigid and breathless, as flat as possible against the roof. Every moment her imagination conjured fingers gripping some section of the edge as an unknown evil prepared to pull itself up in pursuit of her. Lying there she mourned again the fact that she had brought nothing with her. She was unarmed, unarmored, defenseless. She played with the idea of climbing down again and searching for some kind of weapon, a nice stick or two or just a few big rocks even, but didn’t have the energy to make her body actually do it. At least up here she had the comfort of the high ground, she told herself. A sort of calm sank over her. She lay on her belly with her cheek against the roof and began to take in the landscape. Above her, smoky clouds rolled over bright star points. Around her, wind sang quietly through trees and grasses. The hushed roar of traffic drifted from the highway. Music was playing on a radio, faint and faraway and unintelligible. A part of her marveled at it, that spark of everyday life still singing out in the midst of the upheaval of invasion. In spite of herself, her eyelids grew more and more insistent on dropping shut. They grew less and less inclined to reopen. Her last thought was that she wished she hadn’t thrown away her hoodie.

the wizard stick – 3

She had read actually countless descriptions of an adventurer waking up in a strange place after some daring departure or other and for a moment not knowing where they were, until suddenly the memory of the events leading up to this new sleeping arrangement tumbled to mind and washed them with a fresh resolve. No such motivational awakening awaited her. The instant her eyes opened she knew exactly where she was, and she regretted it. 

She had slept flat on her face apparently and her neck ached. The chill of the night had settled thoroughly through her clothes and they clung to her damply. This made her think to shiver, and then she realized that she already had been. Her joints were stiff with cold as she sat up, and as she stretched she found that her muscles were sore as well. Not surprising, she thought, remembering the uncharacteristic dashes and scrambles of the previous day.

She took a look around, and discovered that her vantage point afforded her pretty much nothing. She could see a short section of the road, a great deal of forest, the real solid conifer kind, not the homey backyard orchard kind, and an expressionless gray-white sky. And that was all. She couldn’t hear much of anything, either. From far away she thought she heard the highway’s constant murmur; from nearer by the companion susurration of the river. No sounds of humanity. No sounds of wild animals…although she knew it was too close to civilization for wild animals. Wasn’t it?

She was extremely grateful that it wasn’t raining. She was already feeling pitiful enough without having a Jon Cusack moment. In spite of herself her lips twitched into a smile. A Jon Cusack moment was what her mom called getting wet and being dramatic about it, because apparently Jon Cusack was famous for standing pathetically out in the rain being soaking wet. Don’t have a Jon Cusack moment, she would tell Ethan and Ella when they complained about walking home in the rain after she forgot she was supposed to pick them up, or she forgot to bring towels to the community swimming pool, or they came dripping and angry from a quickly aborted shower to confront her over using the all the hot water. You wouldn’t think it would happen so often, but Ethan and Ella both dragged every last minute of sleep out of a morning before staggering blearily about their days, and their mother was an early bird given to long, luxurious steaming showers. Also she forgot things, almost as a rule.

Slowly Ella slid down the windshield and hood to the ground. She was relieved that nothing was happening, but it was also sort of dreary. It was all going to be up to her, still. Making choices, walking in directions. She allowed herself a momentary pout. And in that moment came the sound of movement. Not cautious movement, either. Real, full bodied movement. Purposeful, fast paced. She knew she should run, but she seemed unable to move a muscle. The world was happening around her with a heavy momentum that held her thickly still in time and space. Everything was vivid and dense and slow, all of nature held itself motionless and silent to amplify the sound of whatever was coming at her through the trees.

Suddenly a bush impossibly near her shook, and all of the movement she’d been missing in the last few moments jolted through her in an instant. All her muscles, every atom in her body, sang together. She ran. 

Without looking back she knew that whatever it was had followed her; she could hear it coming through the bracken not far enough behind. A likely branch presented itself ahead of her, fat and low slung. She leapt for it, knowing she wouldn’t have time for a second attempt, and felt her arms close solidly around it. Up swung her legs. She flopped herself around until she was on top of it and crouched there, ready to jump for higher branches if whatever it was looked like a climber. And then…she realized that it didn’t.

Feeling extraordinarily grateful and a tiny bit foolish, she looked down at the dog. Her heart bounded with relief, and the involuntary delight that always accompanies an unexpected dog sighting. These emotions lasted until the dog began to bark and jump up at her. She heard its teeth snap. She scrambled back along the branch toward the trunk of the tree, and tried to watch the dog and choose a higher branch at the same time. This division of labor requiring all of her attention, it was some moments before she noticed that the dog was apparently one piece of a set. Just as she chose her branch, stood rapidly and unsteadily and clasped it with both hands, she became aware of a boy several yards away. He was standing halfway through a bush, watching her, looking as though time had gone soft around him. They locked eyes.

Immediately they each began to move. He finished climbing through the bush and snapped his fingers at the dog. She kicked both feet up and heaved herself onto the higher branch.

‘Be cool,’ he told the dog. ‘Sit.’

The dog sat, but it continued to glare at her menacingly.

The boy (or was he a man?) looked up and found her eyes again, smiled apologetically. He was about Ethan’s age, or maybe hers…it was hard to tell. There was something about him that seemed simultaneously full grown and incredibly young.

‘Sorry if Wooly scared you,’ he said. ‘She’s actually not mean, I think she thought you were a squirrel.’

‘She’s mean to squirrels?’ Ella asked, and then wondered why this particular line of thought was the one she was following.

He grimaced. ‘Yeah. She can’t help it though. It’s her breed.’

As though bored of the conversation the dog, Wooly, (or did the boy have a funny way of saying Willy? the dog was short haired, not wooly or even fluffy at all), got up and wandered away, sniffing exploratively.

Ella looked back at the boy and found him looking at her.

‘Are you lost?’ he asked.

‘I’m not lost,’ she told him coldly. ‘I know exactly where I am.’

He looked surprised. ‘Are you sure? Nobody ever really comes here…’

She looked quickly around. Her rushing escape from the dog had taken her further back into the woods than she had wanted to be, but she could still hear the river so she knew approximately where the road was.

‘Maybe I don’t know exactly where this place is,’ she said, ‘but I know exactly where I’m going.’

‘Where are you going?’ he asked.

‘The highway. Millport. I’m meeting my family.’

He considered. ‘Millport and the highway are on the other side of the river.’

‘I know they’re on the other side of the river,’ she flashed.

He looked taken aback. ‘Well sorry, you just seemed lost and when you said that it made you sound lost.’

Crouched there in the tree looking down at him she suddenly felt a little feral. He was so calm and agreeable, standing there on the ground like a normal person. His hair and hoodie looked soft and clean and she felt her own dampish, slept in clothing against her skin, became momentarily aware of every cut and scrape on her body from all the tree climbing and bush crawling of the past day, and caught a side eye view of her wild hair. The thought crossed her mind that she must look crazy to him.

He was thinking too, she could see it on his face although she couldn’t tell what. 

‘Look, do you need help?’ he said. ‘Food at least? Millport is a long walk. We’re about to have breakfast. Clary’s making pancakes.’ 

Breakfast. The word welled gently through her body till it reached the pit in her stomach. Pancakes…

‘Why is Clary making pancakes?!’ she demanded. ‘Don’t you all know there’s a war here? We’re invaded!’

He shrugged. ‘Yeah, we know. We’re probably not going to leave though. It’s Saturday, so Clary’s making pancakes.’ 

She felt as though his words had opened up an alternate reality, where the war was neither a clear nor present danger, where life could go on in spite of it just as it always had; where pancakes were happening, because it was Saturday and on Saturday pancakes happened.

She shook her head dazedly. ‘That’s crazy…why would you not leave?’

‘Clary doesn’t think anyone will take much notice of us.’

‘What. Why?’

‘Nobody ever really does,’ he said simply.

They contemplated each other for a long moment. Ella could not understand him. His peacefulness within the engulfing quiet of the forest seemed an impossible juxtaposition to the panic and chaos that she knew were going on in the surrounding cities and towns. Although that panic and chaos did seem very far away at the moment…she listened, and all that she could hear were forest sounds, wind and birds in trees and somewhere beyond the rush of the river.

She was suddenly tired. The little tendons or whatever they were at the insides of her hips hurt. She could feel her legs shaking with the effort of keeping her crouched on the high branch. Something in her gave up a little, and she swung back down onto the fat low branch and sat on it.

He apparently took this as an overture of friendliness. He came closer, and leaned his elbows on the far end of the branch, put his chin on his arms. He looked at her.

‘What happened to you?’

She was frustrated to feel tears springing into her eyes. She ignored them but he saw them, she could tell. He made a sympathetic face. She took a deep breath and felt the tightness in her chest let go a bit.

‘I guess I did get a little bit lost,’ she admitted.

She told him her story. He was a good listener. He didn’t say anything till she was finished, he didn’t even make judgmental faces while she related her litany of bad choices. He just listened quietly with a solemn face and clear, attentive eyes.

When she was finished he said, ‘I would have had to go back for Alfred too.’

She could tell that he meant it. 

The stress of the past twenty four hours melted off her bones and she felt tears in her eyes again. Somehow the worst of it all had been the self reproach, the knowledge that if she hadn’t been so stupid she wouldn’t be in such a mess. That if she had just listened to her family, she would still be with them – maybe not safe, but at least all together. She had been torturing herself with the thought of her mother’s worry, especially since it had all been for nothing anyhow. She hadn’t even been able to catch Alfred, he was probably right this minute wandering forlornly between neighborhood houses, meowing pitifully at the indifferent doors of empty homes. She’d followed her heart not her head, and it hadn’t done anyone any good, and it had made things even worse. The guilt of it had been sitting more heavily on her than any actual danger or hardship she’d experienced. Just hearing from one other person, even a potentially untrustworthy stranger, that they could understand her motives, that she may not have been wise but that she had been relatable, made an enormous difference. She might be an idiot, but at least she was the kind of idiot that someone else could empathize with. 

She shook out a quavery ‘thanks’ and a smile.

He smiled back. 

They both hesitated. This moment of closeness was temporary, theirs was an uneasy truce. Neither was sure of the next move.

Happily, there was a sudden disturbance. The dog, Wooly, was barking and jumping at the trunk of a tree. A chittering came from high in its branches. 

‘Wooly!’ the boy ran over and caught the dog by her collar. ‘Leave it, Wooly. You gotta leave it.’

Wooly whined and kept her eyes on the squirrel, but she sat. 

Taking her opportunity while he was occupied, Ella slid out of the tree. She stood a moment, waffling. She could slip away now, unnoticed, and be safe on her own again. Or she could trust him, and maybe have pancakes…

The moment passed. The squirrel apparently went its way and Wooly stopped whining and began snuffling around the base of the tree. The boy looked back. 

Ella felt herself tense as she awaited his reaction. She was out of the tree now, nothing but ground separated them. If he went sour on her she could maybe outrun him, but not his dog. 

She was taking a dreadful chance, and why? All because he said he would have gone back for Alfred. Or was it all because of Alfred? There was something about him, in everything about him, that made her feel like giving him the benefit of the doubt.

He was looking at her watchfully, trying to calculate her intention. She saw her indecision mirrored in his eyes.

His gaze broke away and he looked around, as though visibly fishing for ideas. He walked over to a bunch of bracken, and before she had time to wonder what he was doing, pulled out a big branch. Alarm jolted through her and she felt her weight shift to the balls of her feet, her body tense for flight. 

He threw the branch at her. She skittered to avoid it as it landed at her feet.

‘What the hell?!’ she shouted at him, feeling more outrage than the situation actually called for. The adrenaline of seeing him face her with the stick in his hands coursed through her.

He looked abashed. ‘I just thought…if you’re worried. About me. Maybe having a weapon might make you feel better.’

He shrugged apologetically.

She considered. 

‘Like your dog wouldn’t attack me if I hit you with a stick.’

He looked over at Wooly, who was sniffing placidly amongst the roots of a tree.

‘She might,’ he said. ‘But you won’t have to hit me so I guess we’ll never know.’

Ella picked up the stick and stood holding it like a wizard’s staff, which made her feel rather foolish but also a little more secure. Her pulse was still racing and she felt that her tentative trust in him had been shattered, even though he had actually acted for her benefit. She was conflicted. 

He seemed nice enough, but the rapid change in the soldier yesterday was still fresh in her mind. And maybe he was nice, but that didn’t mean that the rest of his people were…she had some extremely clear ideas on the kind of humans you could expect to find living in the middle of the woods. It sounded like a great way to get yourself locked in a toolshed for the rest of your life, or sacrificed to the god of some strange aftermarket religion. On the other hand, she didn’t have many options right now. She was already weak with hunger and living off of whatever she could find in the wild to eat, which by the way had been exactly nothing so far, was not very appealing. Oh, if only she could be sure about the pancakes…

‘Look,’ he said, breaking into her deliberations, ‘You don’t have to come with me. I didn’t mean to scare you and I can go away if you want. I won’t tell anybody I saw you.’

She bit her lip. If this was reverse psychology it was good stuff. She sighed. The highway would still be there after pancakes.

‘Ok, I’ll come,’ she said.

His face lit up. She had a moment of realizing that he wanted her to come with him, and she had no idea why. This made her more uneasy. Was it really just to feed her breakfast? 

She pointed the stick at him. ‘But you go first.’

He looked offended. ‘Of course I’ll go first. You don’t know where we’re going.’

He called the dog, and the two of them started off in the direction they had appeared from. Warily, she followed.

He walked lightly, as though the complicated forest floor was as simple to navigate as an everyday sidewalk. It occurred to her that maybe it was his everyday sidewalk. He kept getting too far ahead without realizing it, and then turning back to wait for her, without a glimmer of impatience. He seemed to know or instinctively find the least obstructed pathway forward, and when the occasional branch or bramble could not be avoided he made sure to push it aside for her. She appreciated this gesture but could not quite trust it. Always when she had passed the trouble spot she stopped and stood a little aside, ready to bring her wizard staff into action, waiting for him to move ahead of her again. He seemed to understand this; at least he accepted it casually and without comment. The dog was rarely with them but always nearby, exploring the underbrush around them, making its own path.

‘Is she looking for squirrels?’ she asked.

He made a face. ‘Always.’

‘What would she do if she found one?’

‘Kill it.’ He sighed. ‘Basically we just try to make sure she doesn’t find any.’

He kept speaking about himself in the plural, she thought. Whoever else lived with him, their relationship was close enough to qualify as a ‘we.’

‘Who all lives with you?’ she asked.

He looked back, and finding more curiosity than concern in her expression, smiled.

‘Well usually a lot of people, but you’re probably not going to meet them so I’ll just skip most of them. Who do we still have…the people who are still left are me and Lena, and Clary, and…’

He hesitated, calculating, and she knew that he had started by listing the most significant relationships. Whoever followed would be tertiary, secondary at best.

‘Moth and Wardell and Ann and Ollie,’ he said in one breath.

She barely heard the individual names, she was counting heads. So maybe seven-ish people. Just enough to be scary if they felt like it. The perfect number for a forest cult.

‘Where did everybody else go?’

He looked surprised.

‘Away. Like everyone. Like you all, your family.’

‘Because of the war?’

‘Yeah.’

Why didn’t all of you go?

‘Well,’ he said, Clary thinks we might not have to. And Moth and Lena are still working on the van, and Ann doesn’t want to leave her garden, and Wardell won’t leave Ann of course, and Clary wants to die in the woods. Olive wants to go but they always want to go. They still might, I think…’

This amount of information, delivered in such a matter of fact yet stream of consciousness manner, lightly stunned Ella’s brain. She felt that she could not take it all in. It seemed to her that he had left an important person out.

‘What did you want to do?’ she asked him.

Again he turned to look at her. His eyes were grave, and for the first time she could perceive worry in his face.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Clary says it will be crazy out there. People will be running scared, devolving into their worst selves. Getting desperate and taking what they need from anyone they can, any way they have to.’

Ella nodded. Tony had said the same thing.

‘But then maybe it would be better to take our chances out there with everybody else than just sit here alone waiting…?’ he continued. He was talking almost more to himself than to her. ‘Here we’re a bunch of women and old people, well there’s Moth and me but that’s probably not going to be worth much, if Clary’s wrong and soldiers do come…’

They walked on in silence for a few moments, each of them deep in their own thoughts.

He stopped suddenly, so suddenly that she almost ran into him. She leapt backward, and gripped her stick with both hands. He didn’t even seem to notice. He was looking at her, looking her over, perhaps for the first time taking in the full extent of the disheveled state of her hair and clothing, the scratches and bruises that covered her limbs. He met her eyes.

‘Is it crazy out there?’ he asked.

She hesitated. She honestly didn’t have the best idea of how it was out there. Her own experience had been so removed from the general civilian exodus.

‘I don’t exactly know,’ she told him. ‘You know what happened to me. I didn’t get very far into the whole evacuation thing. I had a bad experience with a soldier but I think that was because I’m a girl.’

He nodded. ‘What did you see while you all were in the car though? Before you went back for Alfred?’

She cast her mind back.

‘Hundreds of people…thousands maybe. I guess it must have been thousands of people, because it was hundreds of cars. Just everybody and all their stuff piled into cars, all trying to get onto the highway. And soldiers. They had guns and motorcycles and other weird army trucks. They didn’t actually seem to be trying to hurt anyone. They actually just seemed like they wanted everyone to get the fuck out of there. Like we were just a bother…like we were just kind of in the way. All the highway on-ramps were open but they blocked off all the exits so nobody could come back. The highway was full of cars going East, but not many cars were going West. I’m not sure why. But eastbound was wall to wall cars. Last time I saw it was late at night and it was still wall to wall cars.’

He stood listening intently as she talked, and when she had run out of things to say, he was silent. She felt like he was waiting to see if she had anything further to share.

She shrugged apologetically. ‘That’s all I’ve got.’

He seemed to snap out of his own thoughts, and gave her a smile. ‘That’s ok. That’s good stuff to know. It’s more than we knew already. Although it’s basically how Clary said it would be.’

‘Clary sounds kind of like Tony,’ she blurted without thinking.

He grinned. ‘Maybe. Big know it all?’

She grinned back. ‘Yeah.’

‘But,’ he added, ‘too right about stuff all the time to be able to ignore them?’

‘Yes!’ she laughed. ‘That’s Tony exactly. So irritating.’

He laughed too. ‘Clary’s the same way. But I think you’ll like her.’

Simultaneously the thought of Clary reminded them both of pancakes. Ella’s stomach growled.

‘Let’s keep going,’ he said, and started off again.

The dog, who had been unobtrusively absent during their pause for discussion, reappeared and began to trot ahead of them. It seemed to know where they were going. They must be getting close. Ella felt anxiousness settling through her again. It was strange how when she was talking to him she forgot to be worried, but as soon as they stopped talking and she started thinking, worry returned.

‘What will Clary think of you bringing me?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. 

‘Will she be mad?’ she asked nervously.

‘Of course not,’ he said, turning back to give her a reassuring look. ‘Clary always says the more the merrier. She’d probably even let you stay with us if you need to. Like if you’re not sure you can find your family right away. I don’t see why she wouldn’t. Especially if you have some good skills. She likes people who pitch in with jobs around the place.’

He looked at her in an encouraging kind of way.

She thought quickly. Did she have some good skills? She was sure she must, but at the moment the only ideas coming to mind were ridiculous ones. Everyone at home appreciated that she would eat everyone’s pizza crusts for them if they didn’t want them. Cats always seemed to like her. Her mom said she had a positive genius for starting things she didn’t finish. Her writing 101 teacher had said she had an exquisite talent for finding the hidden story. The girls at work thought that nobody could make a prettier french braid. Ethan had always told her there was nobody better at making an awkward situation more awkward…

Occupied with her thoughts, she had forgotten to pay attention to where she was walking, and caught her foot suddenly on a root. She stumbled heavily but managed to keep from falling, or losing her grip on her wizard staff. Her aching muscles protested the sudden windmill flail, and she grimaced. This forest hike after all the recent intermittent sprints and tree climbing was her body’s last straw. Her mind, still halfway working on a list of actually useful skills to share, felt that it had finally come up with something.

‘I’m great at climbing trees,’ she blurted in a voice of bitter sarcasm.

He looked back, raised his eyebrows. ‘Really. You’re listing tree climbing as a skill.’

She felt defensive, but she also had to laugh. It was a strange thing to come up with, for an adult, when life skills were being requested. It was better than eating pizza crusts, though, so she decided to stick with it.

‘It has its practical uses,’ she insisted. ‘I could pick things for you all. Do you have fruit trees?’

His voice changed to a thoughtful pitch. ‘Yeah actually. Ann’s got a ton of fruit trees. And nobody likes harvesting them. Especially not the cherries.’

‘Well there you go! I could harvest the cherries. And now that we mention it, I’ve got actual fruit harvesting experience. A lot of experience, in fact.’

She had started off joking, but as she talked she felt more and more genuinely accomplished. Had she not, pretty much single handedly, solved the riddle of the staircase tree and brought bountiful harvests of banbans to her friends and family every summer of her childhood?

He looked back, surprised. ‘I didn’t think city people picked fruit,’ he said.

‘I guess most don’t,’ she agreed, ‘but I’m a special case. It’s a long story, or I guess maybe it isn’t. I’ll tell you sometime.’

He turned back to the path, but not before she caught a pleased look crossing his face. She realized belatedly what she had just said. No doubt he was taking her words as an indication that she would stay.

‘After pancakes, maybe,’ she amended quickly.

She saw comprehension in the back of his neck, but he didn’t turn to look at her again.

‘Ok,’ he said.

They walked along in silence. Elia felt a little remorseful, but she didn’t see why she should. It wasn’t her job to stay with his family just to make him happy. And why did he want her to stay anyhow? Mistrust burbled up again and fought to overpower the promise of pancakes. She twisted the stick in her hands. Would she have to drop it at the edge of the forest? She would feel extremely silly carrying a big stick in with her to pancake breakfast. But maybe better silly than sorry? She cogitated.

All of a sudden the invisible path he’d been forging intersected an actual path, a narrow line of packed dirt through the forest. He turned left to follow it.

‘You were far away from home,’ she observed.

‘Yeah,’ he agreed, sounding unenthused. ‘Wooly was chasing a squirrel and you know…’

Suddenly his voice seemed faraway and tinny. To Ella’s horror a feeling as familiar as it was unwelcome began to sweep over her.

‘Oh shit,’ she said, and her vision turned black around the edges and yellow in the center. 

Her face felt like she was about to vomit. Blindly she blundered a few more dizzy steps, hands out in front of her, hoping the wave would pass. It didn’t. She sank to her hands and knees and toppled over, grateful to feel the cool ground against her face. She could see nothing but soft black shot through with yellow sparks, and the world she was lying on spun. Vaguely she could hear the boy saying something. He sounded close. She wondered if she still had her stick, managed to feel the palms of her hands with her reeling mind. They were empty.

Oh well, she thought, and let herself drift. The blackness thrummed over her in wave after dizzying wave. She let them come, feeling sicker with each one but helpless to prevent them. Finally the last one washed away from her with a gritty slowness and she cautiously tried opening her eyes. The world was still yellow, but she could kind of see. The boy was kneeling next to her, looking extremely freaked out.

‘Are you all right?’ she heard him ask.

She opened her mouth to respond but all that came out was air. She lay there and breathed for a few moments, feeling slick cold sweat all over her body.

‘I’m going to get help,’ he said, scrambling to his feet.

She grabbed at him weakly.

‘Nhh,’ she said. ‘Wait.’

He looked uncertain, but he sat back down.

She sat up dizzily. The world, if not quite spinning still, was decidedly wobbly. She waited for it to settle down.

Finally it began to stabilize. The sparks faded from it. She looked at him. He was sitting next to her, cross legged, deeply worried.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

‘Blood pressure,’ she said. ‘Or maybe blood sugar? I can never remember. But when it gets too low I pass out.’

‘Did you just pass out?’ he asked, sounding horrified.

She shook her head. ‘Not quite. If I lay down fast enough I don’t pass all the way out.’

He shook his head. ‘That’s crazy.’

‘I know.’

‘What makes it happen?’

‘I’m not sure. Lots of things. It mostly happens when I don’t eat enough. And sometimes when I stand up too fast.’

‘Well when you’re ready we’ll stand up really slow,’ he said, ‘and then we’ll go eat lots of pancakes.’

not all who wander – 4

She felt a little wobbly, but she wobbled along on her own. She was grimly proud of this fact, especially since she felt fairly certain from his anxious expression as he monitored her shaky navigation of the forest terrain that the boy would be happy to offer her a steadying hand. 

She was glad her family couldn’t see her now, wobbling off on her own after a strange boy in the woods toward some strange group of unknown people. And then her next thought was that she wished they could know – that anyone could know. What if these people turned out to be total creeps and locked her in a shed forever? It happened. Look at that movie about the mom and kid who escaped after like years. Wasn’t that based on a true story? Actually was it though? Hm. But anyway. Here she was, a true story, and her family would never know what happened to her. They would think she was dead probably but never quite give up hoping, and then the whole time she’d be trapped in some terrible place slowly losing her mind and god knows what else. Where was her big stick? She was ok with walking it in to breakfast now. She didn’t care how silly she looked. And of course now it was gone, lost when she blacked out. It had probably been right there when she came out of it, but she’d been too dizzy and focused on pancakes to remember it. Really, pancakes were a great lure. She’d never understood even as a small child how anyone could be dumb enough to get themselves kidnapped over candy, but she felt like she got it now. All you really needed was to be hungry enough, and if you thought about it that probably extended to all kinds of metaphorical hunger as well. She glared blearily at the back of the boy’s neck. If she was going to wind up locked in a shed there had better be pancakes.

The boy looked back just then, caught the glare; misinterpreted it.

‘I know it seems far but really we’re almost there,’ he said reassuringly.

It did seem far. She looked around and felt anything but reassured. The path marched its winding way through tall grasses and clumps of ferns, closed thickly in by branches whose moss and needle covered grasp always fell away just short of reaching it. The morning was misty, and the light that filtered into the woods was gray. Everywhere she looked she saw nothing but trees fading into fog, standing close together, reminding her of a vertical version of the ocean of branches; keeping their secrets. Maybe secrets not so nice as those the banban trees kept. Her mind was coming back online after its brush with blackout, and she suddenly realized that this path was the only orienting tool she had left. Everything else looked exactly the same in every direction. If she had to get herself away from here in a hurry, could she do it? Or would she simply be horribly lost? A panic began to jangle through her. She brought all her senses to a sharp point, wild for any clue to her whereabouts. 

The gentle rush of the river flooded into her consciousness. I’m here, it whispered, I’ll always be here. Relief soaked through her. She felt weak with gratitude. That was her plan then, to just always know where the river was and if necessary fling herself directly into it to be carried away like a child too tired to go any further under its own power. It might be cold, but it wasn’t freezing. It was almost spring now. If need be she could just float on her back to Millport. It almost seemed like the most logical thing to do. Maybe she should just have some pancakes, tell everyone thank you, and fuck quietly off down the river before anything had a chance to get weird. Except the cold…the water wouldn’t be freezing but damn would it be cold. It might still be cold enough to kill her. She remembered that early every summer there were warnings about how the days might be hot now but the water was still cold, you could get hypothermia. Was hypothermia fatal? She didn’t even know. Probably without a sweater it was. Oh god she was cold. The cold bit her skin and ached in her bones. And there was no way it was as cold out here in the air as it was in there in the water. 

Maybe she could find a boat? Or fashion a raft? Her mind went soaring after materials to use and ways to tie them together. The world around her was a wealth of branches, weren’t those the classic raft material? Maybe she could find some rope to borrow after pancakes. Maybe they even had an inner tube or something they’d let her have. With vivid clarity she saw herself sledding headfirst down the river, lying comfortably on her belly, all the way to Millport. Her mind calmed agreeably. She noticed two small conifer trees growing side by side like fat baby Christmas trees holding hands, and smiled at their sweetness – so friendly and innocent against the dark backdrop of their tall, forbidding, fog wrapped ancestors. The boy, who she had almost forgotten about, suddenly put out a hand toward her.

‘Watch out for that puddle.’

She hopped to avoid it and as she landed they stepped out from between branches into sudden brightness. The sky was overcast, but the morning was lighter than it had seemed in the woods. They were standing next to a large camper trailer, the kind people buy for their retirement and go traveling the country in. Except, it was ancient.

‘This one’s mine,’ the boy said, patting it as they walked by.

Her only impression of it was that it was a dull silver metal, and it was dirty. Like the truck she had spent the night on top of, its features were greenly outlined in grime. It was parked alongside a mossy wood plank fence with forest on the other side of it. The fence seemed redundant, unnecessary, the woods behind it crowded up so dense and familiar, leaning their branches on it like a neighbor looking over to say hello. The fence continued out across a patch of grass toward a gravel road, where it suddenly gave up and gave way to a tangled hill of bracken. Across the road she saw a uniform row of trailers, and behind them more forest. Her peripheral vision caught a mirroring row of trailers to the left, with the thin silver line of river beyond them. The gravel road made a brief dash through the woods between the rows of trailers and ran down to the river, where it slid out to become a boat ramp. The motley row of mobile homes on the other side of it looked tiny, almost toylike, beneath the dense emerald vastness of the trees. Ella had a childlike impulse to reach out and try to pick one of them up, vroom it by hand down the gravel road. There was a small buttercup yellow trailer that would have been especially delightful to play with…

Suddenly she smelled pancakes. Joy sang through her in a thousand tiny dancing sparks of light. She even forgot to shiver for a moment. The boy was heading toward a central structure, a high roof on pillars that reminded her of a picnic shelter at a park. A small group of people was clustered around a laptop on a picnic table, watching what sounded like the news. She could hear a newscaster talking about the local invasion. It made her feel better to see modern technology here, and an awareness of and interest in the war. She began to feel less anxious. This place didn’t seem as weird as she had thought it would. There weren’t any creepy little corn husk dolls around anywhere that she could see…no suspicious shipping containers or storage sheds to stash a kidnapping victim in. The invasion might not be driving these people from their homes, but it didn’t seem to be for any disturbing reason. This just seemed like a normal group of humans, having pancake breakfast and watching as the story of a faraway war unfolded. Wooly trotted up to them and sat with her chin resting on the knee of a man in a ratty but cozy looking quilted jacket that Ella found herself coveting. He patted her head absentmindedly without taking his eyes from the screen.

As she followed the boy toward the picnic shelter everyone at the table looked up. She recognized the same blank surprise across their four different faces, a surprise that seemed so fitting that she was suddenly thankful not to be carrying the big stick. There were two men and two women, an older set and a younger set. The older set looked a little older than her parents; the younger set looked a little older than herself. The younger woman pulled her eyes off Ella and looked at the boy. Her mouth opened, but then she shut it again. She looked over her shoulder. Ella and the boy both followed her gaze. The first thing Ella saw was pancakes. Really, truly, pancakes.

A woman stood flipping them on an electric griddle that was set up on a card table and plugged into an extension cord that trailed its way over from the window of a nearby camper. A large fluffy black dog sat by her feet, intently monitoring each pancake as it was poured and flipped. Despite the chill morning the woman was wearing summer shorts, oversized and brightly patterned. Smoke wafted around her, and at first Ella thought the pancakes were burning, until she realized that the smoke was pluming from a cigarette the woman held between her lips. The boy gave Ella a look, nodded his head toward the pancake flipper. They walked over. The woman saw them approaching out of the corner of her eye, but returned her attention to the griddle without acknowledging them. She was wearing a blue sweatshirt with the number 3 on the back, and when she turned Ella could see the word ‘peculiarity’ on the front.

‘What’s this?’ she asked around the cigarette, not taking her eyes off the pancakes.

‘She’s lost,’ the boy replied.

She cast him a glance. Slowly she poured batter onto the griddle, dropped the ladle into the mixing bowl, and took her cigarette between two fingers. 

‘Not all who wander are lost,’ she said in an exhale of smoke, apparently to the pancakes, emphasizing the last word with a flourish of the cigarette.

The boy sighed. 

‘Clary…’

Clary turned her gaze on Ella. She looked about the same age as Ella’s mom. Her eyes were large and gentle, soft and deep; and yet they gave off an impossible, nearly visible sharp heat. They looked at each other for some moments. Many thoughts crossed the older woman’s face, most of which Ella couldn’t read. There was skepticism for sure, and maybe pity…certainly the procession ended in a probationary sort of acceptance.

‘Not all who wander are lost,’ she remarked to Ella in an offhanded meter, and took a drag of the cigarette. 

It was the first time she had spoken to her directly, and Ella was caught off guard. Was that their standard greeting here? Was she supposed to say it back? Did it mean that she could consider herself welcome? Or was it a polite way of suggesting that she had ulterior motives to hide and was doing a poor job of it? And if it was the latter, what could possibly be a persuasive response? The thought of turning out her pockets flashed wildly through her mind and she almost laughed. She held Clary’s gaze and tried to make her face look as honest as possible. She opened her mouth to say something but she hadn’t thought of anything to say and so nothing came out. 

There was suddenly the smell of burnt pancake. As though nothing of consequence had happened or was expected to happen, Clary turned back to the griddle. She made a regretful sound.

‘There’s nobody in the prairie schooner since Tyler enlisted,’ she said to the blackened pancakes as she scooped them into the trash can. ‘If she’s staying she can stay there.’

She poured another round of batter onto the griddle. The conversation was clearly over – if Ella had had any sort of first impression to offer, the time had passed. 

She was filled with consternation. Why couldn’t she have thought of something to say? Come up with any good skills to offer? And yet, she was confused. What was all that about those who wander aren’t lost? She couldn’t keep up with that kind of mind game. Maybe she was better off saying nothing at all than the wrong thing? She looked at the boy. He shrugged, and although his eyes looked a little worried, he smiled.

‘So you’re not lost,’ he said. ‘Let’s have some pancakes and then if you want I’ll show you the prairie schooner.’

With stacked plates they joined the group at the picnic table. The table and benches looked ancient and she expected them to be rickety when she sat, but they were surprisingly solid and stable. Somebody must keep things in good working order around here, even if they didn’t bother to fancy them up. The night had been damp and the world still was, everything glistening or sodden depending on its surface, but beneath the metal roof of the shelter the table and benches were dry. A low fire crackled in a stone rimmed pit near one end of the table, sending its smoke curling into the high rafters. Everyone else was clumped around the laptop at the other end of the table, which Ella thought was insane, until she remembered that they all had warm dry clothes, and several layers of them. God she wished she had a sweater. She could feel every chill hair on her body standing erect in the middle of its own particular goosebump. She sank gratefully onto the end of the bench as close to the fire as she could get, and felt its warmth begin to lap at her edges.

She cut a forkful of pancake, lifted it to her face, and inhaled. Beautiful. It was almost the last breath she took until the stack had finished its transition from plate to stomach. She knew she was gulping her food, but she couldn’t help it. The pancakes were fresh and sweet and had no time to get soggy from their generous syrup bath. It didn’t seem to matter how she ate, anyway. Nobody was paying attention to her. She had been vaguely aware of heads turning her way as she sat down, but she had been too focused on eating to care and it was clear that she was less interesting than whatever news was coming from the laptop. She focused on the sound coming from it, and heard a newscaster saying and we expect the metro area to lose power within the next several hours. Everyone at the table sucked in or blew out their breath; except Ella, she was trying to get as much syrup as she could off her plate with her fork, and she was considering just licking the plate instead. 

‘Clary!’ yelled the older man, startling Ella so that she nearly dropped her fork, ‘They expect the power to go!’

‘Well so did we,’ Clary called back. 

‘Any minute now though,’ he amended. 

‘Well everybody get your shit handled now then,’ she said. ‘And this’ll be the last batch of pancakes since I don’t have enough batter to drag out the campfire griddle if the power goes out right away.’

For the first time in several minutes the boy thought to check on how Ella was doing. He looked at her, and at her empty plate.

‘Better get more pancakes now if you’re gonna,’ he advised. 

She did not need further encouragement. 

Clary looked up as she approached, and again Ella had the feeling of being seen more thoroughly than she was comfortable with. Something about Clary’s gaze made her want to confess all her sins and hopes and dreams, to earn the merits of honesty since it seemed like Clary already knew them all anyhow. There was a small crinkle to Clary’s eyes this time as she piled pancakes on Ella’s plate without comment. Something about the crinkle made Ella feel like a pat on the head. Feeling slightly more at ease, she doused the pancakes liberally with syrup.

When she returned with her plate refreshed, everyone had gone from the picnic table except the boy and the younger woman. The laptop was also gone, taking with it her cover of distraction. The boy was reading a battered paperback with no covers while he ate, but he looked up and smiled at her as she sat down. The woman looked up too, but she did not smile. Her expression was uninviting. Ella was no longer too hungry to notice anything else, and she could feel the woman watching her as she ate. She looked up, hoping to find a friendlier gaze than she had initially encountered. The woman was looking at her shirt, and glancing down, Ella realized that in addition to the general grubbiness there was a slender rip snagged down her belly, tinted just at the edges with blood. She looked back up. The woman met her eyes with a softer if not warmer expression. 

‘I’m Lena,’ she said, offering a hand. Her voice was polite. There was neither friendship nor animosity in her expression, as though Ella was a fact but did not need to be a factor. ‘Reeds’ sister.’

‘I’m Ella,’ she said, shaking the offered hand, ‘who’s Reeds?’

Lena pointed with a nod of her head at the boy, who was now entirely absorbed in his book, sitting lengthwise with his feet up on the picnic bench. His pant legs were a good six inches too short, and above his sneakers he was wearing one gray and one blue sock. Without taking his eyes from the page he speared a bite of pancake and lifted it to his mouth.

Ella had just enough time to think to herself that Reeds was a strange name, when they were rejoined by the rest of the group. Clary was talking.

‘First thing is, we’re not sure how long before they knock out our power grid. Second, if they left it up maybe they’d monitor and track usage. We don’t know. So either way we’re moving to generators, starting tonight. And those are only gonna run a couple hours a day, to conserve power. So everybody get your shit in order now.’

Reeds looked up from his book, looked over at Ella. 

‘Maybe you should have a shower now then.’

A shower. It sounded marvelous.

‘Yes, please.’

‘Hey Lena, can you let her borrow some clothes and show her where to go?’ he asked. ‘Clary says she’ll be in the prairie schooner.’

Ella felt suddenly that this was all moving a little fast. Here she was, just done with breakfast and already in possession of a prairie schooner, whatever that was. Reeds saw her expression.

‘If she stays for awhile, I mean,’ he amended, giving her a reassuring smile.

Lena frowned.

‘Why don’t you just shower at my place,’ she said, ‘I don’t know what all shower stuff Tyler left.’

Ella followed her, feeling nervous about this new turn of events and suddenly sluggish in the wake of two pancake stacks. Her plan had extended to breakfast, and not beyond. Everything from here on out was uncharted territory, and it was happening too quickly for her to think it through.

They arrived at a trailer that had the appearance of having been wrapped in a crazy quilt. It was minutely handpainted with a dazzling variety of bright, intricate patterns. Lena swung lightly up into it. Ella stepped up after her into a miniature home, like a fantasy playhouse she might have dreamed up as a child. There was a tiny kitchen sink with a tiny window over it, an impossibly tiny stove looking nearly dwarfed by the regular sized coffee kettle, a tiny dinette table with a tiny built-in bench…the walls had the same bright, jumbled effect as the exterior, but she saw that here it came from small patches of different wallpaper that had been pieced together like patchwork.

‘Shower’s back here,’ Lena said from the far end of the trailer, pushing aside a flowered curtain. She turned on the water, testing the temperature with her hand. ‘I’ll go grab some clean clothes for you out of the laundry, I’ll be right back – hop in.’

She pulled a towel from a shelf above her head, tossed it onto the tiny countertop around the tiny sink next to the shower, and swung out through a back door Ella hadn’t known was there. The door slammed behind her, and she was gone. 

Ella threw off her dampish, rumpled clothes and hopped in. Her first sensations were not of comfort, or relief. The shower was a precarious confusion of cluttered bottles, and the floor was slightly scummy. Her toes curled away from the feel of it, and she pulled her arms in tightly to avoid knocking anything over. The space was tiny, the tiniest shower she had ever been in. That made sense, considering the baby kitchen, but it was taking some getting used to. Even the ceiling seemed to be pushing in on her. She stood very still under the shower head and told herself sternly that the scum on the floor was only conditioner residue buildup and she could just ignore it. Looking through the jumble of bottles stacked along the wall and piled in the corners she felt more confident in her assessment. Most of them were conditioner, and now that she thought about it, Lena did have very unruly looking hair. Her toes flattened into a firmer stance; her body relaxed. Almost for the first time she noticed the warm water cascading over her, and melted thankfully into it. She closed her eyes, tipped her face into the fall of water, and shut out the world. Its healing touch sluiced down her defenses and pulled at her emotions till they poured out. Her body curled into itself and under the gentle rain of the shower head’s low pressure her face froze into a long, silent wail of grief. She wasn’t even sure why she was crying. Maybe for her poor tired body and everything it had been through in the past day. Maybe for the strangeness of the situation she found herself in, and the strangeness of all that was going on in the wider world. Maybe just out of relief at finally being warm again for the first time in so many hours. Her body shuddered out the last of its shivers and her muscles began to loosen, slacken. She stopped sobbing and just stood limply, crying softly. She wasn’t sure why she was crying, but whatever it was, it felt good to let it out. 

She heaved one last long giant stuttering sigh, and opened her eyes. The shower seemed bigger now. There seemed to be fewer bottles. She scanned them critically, trying to decide whether she wanted to wash her hair. The problem was that none of these bottles were the product she used, and anyway it wasn’t hair washing day. She had washed her hair the day before and it liked a good long break between times. However, if this was going to be her last shower in the known universe…also, yesterday had been an unusually grimy day. There was probably actual dirt in her hair. The moment in the tree this morning flashed through her mind, the way the boy had looked at her and she had realized how feral one day in the wild had made her. That thought decided her. She wanted these people to see her with clean hair, so they would know who they were really dealing with. She chose a shampoo at random, and lathered up. 

The familiar routine pulled her mind back to the last shower of her life, as she had peevishly referred to it yesterday morning (was it really only yesterday?) before joining mom and Tony at the kitchen table for Last Breakfast. She had been a little shit. She knew she had been a little shit, had known so at the time, but had not been able to, or had not bothered to try to do anything about it. She was mad all the way through, mad about camping, mad about the war in general and all the uncertainty it had shattered her life with; which was understandable and even forgivable maybe, but the way she’d taken it out on mom and Tony was not. She wasn’t some moody teenager anymore, but she’d been acting like one. Now that she’d lost them, maybe forever – her mind recoiled at the thought – she was desperately sorry. She wished she could go back in time and be helpful and cheerful and brave. How hard was it to pack up some clothes (lots of light layers, Tony insisted) and toiletries and go sit in the car for a few hours? Tony and mom had planned out everything else for her. They’d asked basically nothing of her and she’d done the little that was required of her with a rotten attitude. And she’d forgotten Alfred, which was totally on her. Alfred was her cat, it was useless to think that maybe mom should have remembered him too. God she hoped they were all ok, mom and Tony and Alfred. She hoped Ethan was ok, and Mo, and dad…she didn’t know where any of them were, and none of them knew where she was. Were they all in similarly strange situations? She wouldn’t be surprised…war turned everything topsy turvy.

The door of the trailer slammed again, jolting her out of her thoughts. Lena was back, with apparently a jarring lack of personal boundaries. Or maybe it was just the forced intimacy of the trailer…? She didn’t actually pull the shower curtain aside to talk to Ella, but it sounded like she was standing right next to it.

‘I got you some cozy clothes. You can have different ones if you want but I thought these might be nice to rest in. And your shoes look way smaller than mine so I don’t think I have any shoes that will fit you but I got you some slippers. Maybe Ann’s shoes will fit you, she’s got small feet. Although your shoes will be fine once they dry out.’

‘Thank you,’ Ella called as though she were further away than she was, wondering if she was going to have to get out of the shower and get dressed with Lena right there. 

‘There’s a clean towel on the sink,’ Lena continued in a voice that made Ella jump, it was so near, ‘I want a shower next and this was my clean towel for the day and I forgot to get another one so I’m gonna run do that and I’ll be right back.’

Ella heard the door slam again. Then silence.

Thank goodness, she thought, and quickly rinsed and shut off the water. A seeking hand found the towel, and she dried off behind the privacy of the shower curtain just in case. The clothes Lena had left were indeed cozy. A soft tee and sweatpants, and an oversized sweater so worn that it was practically silky. Everything was a bit too big, making her feel like she was swimming in softness. She was sitting on the edge of the little dinette bench pulling on clean socks when the door slammed open again.

‘How’s everything?’ Lena asked, but not as though it mattered very much.

‘Wonderful,’ Ella smiled. ‘It feels so good to be clean.’

‘Awesome,’ Lena said, and threw the towel she’d come in with onto the sink counter. She pulled her shirt over her head and kicked off her shoes. She was definitely undressing to get into the shower, and she seemed to have no memory of the fact that Ella was there with her. She unzipped her pants, and Ella’s body sprung into action. She jammed her feet into the slippers.

‘Bye! Thank you!’

Lena stepped out of her jeans and kicked them aside.

‘No problem,’ she said, and moved to unhook her bra. 

Ella fled, blundering floppily down the front step of the trailer. The slippers were too big, and she almost lost one. Regaining her footing, she stood and looked around.

No one was at the picnic table. No one was in her line of sight at all. Listening, she heard the distant clink and splash of dishes being washed. From inside the trailer she heard Lena’s shower go on again. Off to one side of the fire pit was a semicircle of canvas chairs. Sitting sounded awfully nice. She wandered over, taking in the scenery as she went. All the trailers on this side of the road were quiet and dark. Behind them the forest was quiet and dark also. No wonder everyone here felt like their existence was a secret they could keep. She was beginning to feel like a secret herself, closed away in this immense hush. She sat, and kicked off the floppy slippers. The fire had died down to smoldering embers but it still gave off a little heat. Cautiously she put her feet up on the rocky edge of the firepit. It was faintly warm. She slouched down and leaned back, resting her head against the cradling fold of the chair’s fabric back. She contemplated the metal roof, and beneath it the visible stretch of sky. The sky was uniformly gray, kitten soft and pale. She closed her eyes. The air was cool on her face and on the tops of her sock feet. The warm rocks under her soles felt comforting. From down the road the river whispered soothingly. She drifted, letting the calm soak through her and overtake her senses. 

Her mind wandered back over the events of the previous day. The Last Breakfast had been luxurious, one of mom’s ongoing attempts to smooth Ella’s mean mood: eggs scrambled with cheese, and bacon, and strawberry pop tarts. Ella’s mean mood had continued unsmoothed, and Tony had begun rolling his eyes at mom that they should just ignore it.

She had spent her time in the car looking at the occupants of other vehicles to see how everyone else was handling things. She had plenty of opportunity to do so, because despite her mother’s constant stream of protests Tony switched lanes nearly every car length to move as efficiently as possible through traffic, affording her a regularly changing tableau. It seemed that the windows of every car they passed framed scared little faces mirroring the scared little self that she was inside, under the mean mood. Looking at them she began to think for the first time since camping had been mentioned about someone other than herself. 

There were so many combinations of people that didn’t make sense. Did they just grab their old lady neighbor? Did they pick up their elderly mother on the way out of town? She had tried to distract her mind from its worry by making up stories about them. She remembered the lone occupant of one car, a woman in hijab who stared straight ahead with dull eyes, violently grinding her jaw. Watching her had flooded Ella with vicarious stress, but she could not look away. Suddenly, impossibly, a bright pink bubble had emerged from between her lips. She blew it out slowly, bigger and bigger, and then sucked it back in. She looked over, saw Ella, and winked. Ella had nearly laughed out loud from relief. She smiled at the memory, but a moment later she felt her eyes sting with tears at the thought of the thin, worried old man who had sat all alone on the side of the road in his already broken down truck.

‘You’re just going to have to not look,’ Tony had said in response to Ella and her mother’s concern.

This had seemed immeasurably cruel but only several hundred feet further on the reality of it had begun to sink in. Desperate people were all around them. Everyone looked like they legitimately needed help, and it was an exercise in mental torture to imagine what could happen if they didn’t get it.

She swung back and forth between compassion and fear. She wanted to help everyone she saw; and she feared the destruction their neediness could wreak on what little stability she had. Not that she had to worry about it. Tony had planted his flag staunchly on the everyone for themselves hill, and that was the hill he would die on. More than once she caught mom’s eye in the mirror and they wordlessly agreed that Tony’s way was the best way; maybe not the gentlest, most humanitarian way; but the best way for survival. Tony had always joked with Ella and her mom as he and Ethan and Mo left the two of them out of some outdoorsy adventure or other that they’d be the first deer eaten at the watering hole. There had never been any reason to doubt this, and before there’d been any circumstance that necessitated them fending for themselves they’d embraced the characterization laughingly. Now it was no joke. Literally, Tony was the only thing between them and any number of gruesome Darwinian ends. And yet it seemed so selfish to hog him. As they passed other cars it became obvious that despite their lack of survival skills, she and her mom were nowhere near the bottom of the food chain.

The real trouble had come when she looked over as they muscled their way past an unbelievably ancient station wagon. Two equally ancient looking ladies sat in the front seat, one clinging to the steering wheel for dear life, the other clutching a cat wrapped in a blanket to her chest. At the sight of the cat, Ella’s stomach had dropped. Alfred! Traffic had jerked to a standstill at that moment, and the rest was history. 

The memory of those two old ladies made her feel sick. She wondered where they were, hoped they were ok. At least they had their cat with them. She squashed the thought of Alfred out of her mind. She should focus on one self imposed guilt trip at a time. Right now she was feeling like a dick for the way she’d treated mom and Tony. Alfred was ok, he was a cat. He was resilient. Tony said so, and Tony should know. Tony was the one who knew how the world worked. Not that she had come to this conclusion lightly. For the several days of planning before the great departure, she had argued bitterly.

‘Why can’t we just go stay somewhere out of state? Like in a building? Why do we have to camp?’

Tony had lifted his head from the gear he was sifting in his tackle box and looked at her seriously. ‘Do you know anyone out of state we could stay with?’ 

He was not challenging her – he was really asking. 

She turned her mind to the problem bright with anticipation; any alternative to camping would be a good one. She thought quickly, and then slowly. Then she thought all the same thoughts over again. She sagged with failure. How could she manage to not know anyone living anywhere other than this one stupid small town? Tony saw her expression and turned quietly back to the tackle box. She was not quite ready to let it go, however.

‘What about a hotel then? A motel even?’

With leaping heart of hope she saw herself bumming around a small but cheery establishment, she and mom sharing one room while Tony had one to himself and all his fishing gear, they could still stay somewhere by nature and he could fish every day and everyone would be happy. Tony looked up again but his expression was not encouraging.

‘It’s a nice idea,’ he said kindly, ‘but we can’t afford it. Even if everyone wasn’t jacking up the prices which they are, bastards, we don’t have that kind of cash.’

‘I wouldn’t have to have my own room!’ she assured him. ‘We could all share! I’ll sleep on the floor.’

‘Hey kiddo, I’m sorry, but you don’t come from the front of the train. None of us is gonna be working while we’re evacuated. No revenue, you know what I mean? We don’t have much savings. The hotels are full and the rates are outrageous. We could afford one week maybe and burn through all our money and eat nothing but fish after that. That doesn’t sound good, right?’

He looked up to see her fallen face.

‘Hey,’ he said in his nicest voice, ‘It won’t be that bad. You said you were cool with sleeping on the floor. Well that’s all camping is. Really.’

She had just turned in a huff and walked away. Her eyes ached and her throat swelled with grief. He had been so nice, he had been trying so hard. And she had been such a shit. Her chest tightened with regret.

She felt, rather than heard, someone sit down nearby. She opened her eyes. The younger man from breakfast was sitting on the edge of the picnic bench at the other side of the firepit, exactly as far away from her as he could be. He was holding a guitar. He looked up at her, and the calm that his sudden presence had jolted out of her seeped back into place. His was the mildest face she could imagine, with the kindest expression peering out of it. He looked as though he would like to be here, but not if it was going to bother her at all.

‘Mind if I play a little?’ he asked. 

His voice was deep but quiet. She shook her head. He smiled a small smile and dropped his head over the guitar, which she saw was battered almost out of its shape. He began to pick bright bits of sound from its strings. She leaned back again and closed her eyes. The notes began to slide together into more of a melody. He was not playing anything she knew. She had a feeling he was not playing anything that anyone knew. Her mind floated lazily on the music, found itself dawdling down a sunbaked sidewalk under fat rustling green leaves, looking into shop windows, stopping at a street cafe for cold bright drinks…she opened her eyes. He was playing skillfully, beautifully. Surprise welled through her. It was not what you would expect to find in a trailer park in the woods in the middle of nowhere…it wasn’t what she would have expected to find, anyhow. He was lost in his own music. She felt confident in watching him, he had forgotten all about her. He was playing to himself. He was not old, but not young. He was in between her age and her parents’ age, but closer to hers. He was strong looking, but there were crinkles at his eyes and lines around his mouth. His hair was buoyant and thick, but it was going silver all along its edges. The music meandered to a bit of a dropoff, and she saw his head begin to lift. Instinctively she closed her eyes. The music hung on one last plink for a moment and she imagined him taking stock of the situation. Then it strummed vaguely away again into a flurry of notes that fell gently after each other like raindrops down a window that never quite pooled at the bottom. Just as it began to sound like a final note could fall, a note of uplift would take its place and the whole thing would begin again. She followed the note drops down the window, toward the end that never came.

war and peacefulness – 5

She awoke gently, with the smell of smoke and coffee in her nostrils. The guitar still plinked across the fire pit, which had replaced its low embers with a crackling flame. A speckled kettle sat over it on a grate. Reeds and Lena had returned and were sitting quietly with their hands around steaming mugs. They both had wet hair and a freshly scrubbed appearance, which reminded her to spend a moment reveling in the good clean feel of her own hair and skin. Lena was staring unseeingly into the fire, and Reeds had a folded paperback in one hand, propped against his knee. The guitar player had moved from the bench to a chair between them and had his mug balanced in front of him on the fire pit. She had a feeling that this happened often here, the coffee and campfire, and guitar and silence. She felt an encompassing sense of peace. Part of her wanted to just stay lazily floating in the peacefulness, but the enticing smell of coffee overpowered her. She sat up. Lena blinked away from the fire, and Reeds looked up from his book. The guitar player threw her a quick glance but immediately dropped his head again; the guitar itself took no notice of her, continued picking out its wandering way.

‘Hey,’ Reeds smiled.

‘Hey,’ she felt herself smiling back.

‘Want some coffee?’ 

‘Yes!’

He poured her out a mugful and passed it over. She wrapped her hands gratefully around it, lifted its warmth to her face.

Nobody seemed compelled to say anything. She herself felt completely free to say nothing. She stared into the fire, a spooky feeling of being lost in time and space sinking through her. She didn’t belong here, but if any other stranger came along they would never be able to tell. The environment had opened up and swallowed her whole and now she was here in its belly like everyone else it had swallowed. Was this what war did? Pluck you like a little plant out of your home and from amongst your friends, and fling you far and wide with no aim and no plan, to land wherever you might and survive on whatever came to hand, in the company of whatever happened to be around? Or was it just what this place did, pull you into its secret serene vacuum where nothing from the outside world could touch you? She could almost imagine time standing still around her while far away her loved ones grew old and moved on without her. It wasn’t just the fathomless spellbound silence flowing on forever in all directions at the back of the guitar plink and fire crackle; it wasn’t just the primeval imagery of kettle over open fire, or even the impression of history melting forward from the rows of vintage trailers. It was all of these things together, and more. It was something coming from inside her. It was the ridiculous sensation that she was safe now, that the war no longer applied to her.

She took a sip from her mug, and blinked in surprise. It was extremely bitter. No one ever made coffee dark enough for her taste. Tony and Mo always complained that her family made a cup of coffee so strong that a spoon could stand up in it. It seemed like an omen. With its bite on her tongue, she pondered. Should she really walk out on a safe space where the coffee was good? Her river rafting idea was starting to seem like a bad one. Even assuming she could pull together a waterworthy craft, how long would she be floating on it? How would she know when to get out of the river? Would there be like a sign on the riverbank saying WELCOME TO MILLPORT? Her knowledge of riverbanks was not extensive but she doubted it. And if she did find the right place to get out of the water, what then? Would she be able to dock her raft at the spot of her choosing, or would she be stuck in the water until it decided to dump her somewhere? What if where it decided to dump her was the ocean? The ocean was pretty far away but it would be just like her to get a whole spiffy float conveyance together and then be unable to manage it. She had no experience whatsoever with watercraft but she could easily imagine herself struggling to steer one. And it wasn’t like anyone, not even a totally expert boat…driver…pilot?…could just stop against a current whenever they wanted, right? She could wind up out at sea, which basically meant: dead. She could wind up trapped in the slow endless circles of a treacherous whirlpool, she was pretty sure those actually existed in real life, which basically meant: dead. She could wind up smashed to bits on some rocks in a rapids, which basically meant: dead. She could accidentally go over a waterfall, she didn’t know if there were any but there might be, it wasn’t like she was even a little bit familiar with the topography of the river…which basically meant: dead. Or, most likely, she could wash up ashore somewhere she very much did not want to be. Maybe mom and Tony would be the only ones camping along the river but she felt disinclined to count on it. And stabbed in a tent on a riverbank wasn’t a huge step up from locked in a shed in the woods forever.

She looked up, peered furtively around to see if any of these people showed any telltale signs of latent shed shanghaiing tendencies. No one even seemed to remember that she was there. The guitar player was curled over the guitar, swaying the strange, sweet music out of it. Lena was curled over her mug, face drawn to the fire, unconsciously swaying to the music in slight movements that vaguely mirrored the guitar player’s without being anything like as energetic. Reeds was curled into his chair around the book; it was a flimsy canvas chair just like the one she sat in, but he had managed to wrap his long frame into it like a cat tucking itself up to sleep, his feet braced against one arm, his coffee in one hand, the folded paperback in the other. The morning mist was curled around the picnic area, back from the fire aways but not in a timid manner, more as though its assurance of its own right to be there made it gracious of the space others might need to feel comfortable. She looked down at herself. She was curled on her spine, her head cradled in the fold of the chair back, feet up on the side of the fire pit, warm mug held with both hands on her belly, throat full of the timeless elixir of cold air and hot smoke.

She could belong here. She felt it. The people here seemed like good people. Weird, but good. And they had everything they needed to survive. They had offered to share it with her with no real hesitation. She might be safe here. She might even be happy here. If no red flags popped up in the next couple of hours maybe she’d bust out her people skills, throw herself on their mercy, and set up camp in the prairie schooner. Whatever that was. A trailer, obviously. Maybe the cute yellow one… Her imagination tripped over its own feet in its rush to envision the housekeeping she could set up: having coffee in the tiny kitchen on mornings that were too cold to stay out by the campfire…washing her few small dishes in the tiny sink, looking out the tiny window into whatever great and glorious view its particular allotment of forest offered…snuggling down cozy in the tiny bed with big heaps of blankets…bringing in wildflowers to put in whatever scrounged containers could fit along the tiny shelves or windowsills, how much more adorable would it look from the outside with bright sprays of flowers in each of its small yellow framed windows…

Voices crashed in over the plink of the guitar and broke her out of her thoughts. The older man and woman from breakfast were walking toward the fire, talking to each other excitedly.

‘She just left, without saying anything?’ the man flung his arms outward; his voice, his expression, his whole body conveyed disbelief.

The woman put out a hand to calm his flailing arms. ‘They just left…’

The man glared at her, yanked his arm away from her. ‘This is not a time for semantics!’

She was shouting now. ‘It is not semantics!’

The guitar came to an abrupt halt with the squawk of a string. The group around the fire pit looked at each other in alarm. 

Sounding worried, Lena asked Reeds, ‘Did Ollie leave?’

Reeds shrugged, but he looked worried as well. ‘Not that I know of.’

The guitar plunked out a low pitched dunh-dunh-dunh as the guitar player said, ‘I noticed the truck was gone when I got up but I figured Wardell just moved it.’

Lena put her teeth together in a yikes face.

The couple were approaching the fire, stopping every few feet to argue more intently, each gesturing fiercely with an empty coffee mug to emphasize their point.

‘Just because you decide you’re not a girl doesn’t mean you’re ready to join the military,’ the man said.

‘I KNOW THAT,’ the woman responded, ‘I just think we can use their preferred pronouns like they asked us!’

‘Oh yeah, well if you want to talk about asking us stuff, maybe they should ask us before they leave with our one working vehicle and the best rifle! Not to mention the only handgun. Not to mention half the ammo.’

The woman didn’t seem to have an answer for that. She looked at him with her lips smashed together, and then turned and stomped the rest of the way to the fire. She sat hard and mad in the chair next to Reeds. She did not seem to see any of them. Her eyes had an angry faraway stare and she was breathing sharply out of her nose. Quietly Reeds took her mug from her hand, filled it with coffee, and gave it back to her. She took it without noticing, and then looked down at it, looked up. 

‘Oh,’ she said, sounding genuinely surprised to see them.

‘Hey,’ Lena said gently.

The woman’s mouth wobbled. She hid it behind the coffee mug. She took a couple of sips, and each one seemed to calm her a little. She lowered the mug.

‘Ollie left,’ she said in a shaky voice.

Before anyone could respond, the man joined them. He didn’t seem angry anymore. All the energy had gone out of him. He sagged with sadness, maybe tiredness. He sat next to the woman, put his hand on her shoulder. She whipped her head around to face him, still mad, and saw his apologetic expression. Hers softened, and she put her hand over the one he had on her arm.

‘I’m sorry, baby,’ he said. ‘I’m just worried. You know I’m just worried.’

‘I know,’ she said, her voice small. 

‘My little girl doesn’t know what she’s getting herself into,’ he continued, in a ragged voice that begged her just to let him say it this once without correcting him, because it was what he was feeling, whether it was right or not.

‘I know,’ she said again, and her tone made it clear that she was feeling the same way.

He scooted closer and put his arm around her. She dropped her head against his shoulder. A silence in which nobody seemed to know what to say or do followed. 

A jolt of guilt had gone through Ella at the first intimation of pronouns as she realized that she hadn’t thought of Mo in days. Through the ensuing clash between Ollie’s parents half her mind had been on Mo, wondering frantically, as though it could make up for lost time by moving as quickly as possible now, where he was, what he was doing, what he would think of where she was and what she was doing. Mo had tried on they/them pronouns the summer before college, and although he’d ultimately decided that he/him still felt closest to his real true self, any brush with the concept still made her think of him. God how she missed him. She missed his calm, unhurried assessment of any situation, cutting effortlessly to the obvious conclusion; obvious once he named it, of course, but up until that point a haphazard unsolved puzzle. She missed the security of their partnership, knowing that someone she viewed as better than herself in every way had her back in any situation, without a flicker of judgment, because somehow he thought she was the best one. She missed the way she knew he would laugh at her, kindly of course, sitting here swallowed up by this strange place, freshly showered and full of pancakes, dreaming up floral decor for an as yet unclaimed tiny home while not far away at all the real world raged on with an unfamiliar, savage ferocity. What would he think of this place? What was he thinking of anything that was going on right now? She hadn’t heard back from him in weeks, which was much less excusable than not hearing from Ethan in weeks. Mo wasn’t moving around all over the place, jumping out of helicopters or whatever. He was just at college, studying. Wasn’t he?

Chilled by the thought of how little she really knew about what his life was now, she sat up and leaned closer to the fire, letting her vision slide unfocused into its flames. She didn’t know what anyone was doing right now. She thought Mo was studying, and Ethan was fighting, and dad was stuck on the east coast where he’d traveled for a convention, and mom and Tony were over in Millport, camping and fishing. But really she had no clue. Mo could be fighting, and Ethan could be a prisoner of war and dad could be hitching a ride back across the country, and mom and Tony could be part of the caravan of cars pulled over on the side of the highway, eating the last of the cheese and crackers while they waited in vain for her to catch up with them. Or they could all be dead. Every single one of them. Especially Ethan. The hated image her brain had conjured for her when she’d first learned that he’d enlisted crept into her mind and terrorized her with its rendering of his dead face, cold and still with startled unseeing eyes that all the curiosity and wonder had gone out of. Her own eyes burned with tears and her insides felt like a balloon very rapidly pumped too full of air. She blew it out heavily, not realizing until most of them had left her mouth that words were riding on the wake of the breath.

‘It’s so awful to have somebody you love out there. It just eats at you all the time. I always think all I want in the world is for him to still be alive, but then every time I think that I start wanting to know he’s alive, to hear from him…’

She trailed off. Everyone was looking at her in surprise. She was horrified at herself. What had she just said? Why was she even talking? This wasn’t her time, wasn’t her space. These people were experiencing a fresh and terrible loss, and here she was talking about her own problems like she actually belonged here. Saying really unhelpful things, also. Not even focusing on the bright side. She was incredibly selfish, and immature, and stupid, and rude.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she rushed to apologize, ‘I don’t know why I’m talking. This all just reminded me that I have someone I love out there too. And I don’t hear from him. Any time it comes up I just feel like I’m dying from it. But I’m still talking and this isn’t even about me, I’m so sorry, you don’t even know me.’

Ollie’s mom reached a hand toward her from across the fire.

‘You’re ok, honey,’ she said. ‘It’s hard to have someone you love out there and not know how they’re doing. We’re all in this together, ok? I’m Ann, and this,’ she gestured to Ollie’s dad, ‘is Wardell.’

Ella’s eyes pricked with new glad tears on top of the old mean ones. ‘Thanks. I’m Ella.’

Wardell nodded politely to her without much apparent interest in either her outburst or the introduction – his mind was clearly still elsewhere. But Ann said, with a smile that made Ella feel like she meant it,

‘So now we know you.’

Ella felt warmed by this exchange. She had been feeling rather dragged in where she didn’t belong and wasn’t welcome, like a stray puppy Reeds had brought home that nobody else thought was a very good idea. She glanced over at Reeds and found a strange expression on his face. He was looking at her as though she had surprised him, maybe not in a good way. Before she could speculate however his face had changed as he met her eyes. Now he was looking cheerful as usual, but she was sure she sensed a hint of detachment. She felt as though he’d withdrawn something from her, and it was probably his confidence that he’d made a good choice in bringing her here. Maybe he was uncomfortable vouching for her now if she was going to go flying off the handle like that, even if Ann seemed to like her better for it. She felt as though she had missed something, but the moment was over and gone. He had turned away, was reaching behind him for another log to put on the fire. Remorseful, she looked at Ann for a boost of reassurance, and found Ann once again lost in her own troubled thoughts, her face twisted with quiet heartbreak. Ella wished she could think of something encouraging to say. She measured her own distress over Ethan’s safety against what Ann must be feeling, and thought it must be many times worse for the parent of a child who’d run off on their own to join an uncertain contingent in an unknown location, in these most precarious of times. At least Ethan had joined a specific military unit, and gone through training, and known where in the world to show up to in the first place. Ollie was out there on their own, searching for the right side to join up with in a cityscape crawling with the enemy.

She searched her memory for anything that had ever made her feel better about Ethan joining up, but all that was coming to mind was the promise he’d made to Mo that last day at the airport. She had been uncertain how Mo felt about Ethan enlisting. Unlike everything else in their shared universe, his feelings about Ethan were an untouched subject of conversation. As he said goodbye Mo’s face was impassive, but that was not unusual for him. Any variety of wild emotions could fit neatly behind that calm expression. He put his hand on Ethan’s shoulder.

‘Don’t be stupid.’

Ethan grinned down at him.

‘Am I ever?’

Mo didn’t smile back. Still grasping Ethan’s shoulder, he shook him for emphasis with each syllable.

‘All. The fucking. Time.’

Ethan’s grin faded. They stood looking at each other for a long moment. Ethan relented. 

‘Ok. I won’t be stupid.’

Mo smiled then, but it was a tortured little smile. ‘Sure you will. But not on purpose. Promise?’

‘Promise.’

This exchange had brought Ella a strange sense of relief. It was more significant that Ethan had promised Mo not to be stupid on purpose than if he had made the same promise to herself. He listened to Mo more than he listened to her. She did not even resent this. She knew it was because he knew she made too many allowances and excuses for him, while Mo could be depended on to tell him exactly what his shortcomings were.

The memory had done its work to unclench that sharp little tightness in her chest that always took hold when she thought of Ethan dying, but it was not going to be of any help to Ann. Sighing, she took another sip of her coffee, the first in many minutes. It was cold, and brutally bitter. There’s some sort of metaphor in that, she thought, trying to joggle herself into a clever and humorous fame of mind. Something clever and humorous would be good to say, probably. Something to lift the mood. 

‘Where’s Clary?’ she heard the guitar player mumble to Lena, leaning toward her as he poked up the fire.

‘Who knows,’ she murmured back, taking the poker from him and rearranging the job he’d just done.

He seemed unoffended by this revision of his work. His hands had been courteously silent during the exchange between Ann and Wardell, and the moments afterward when Ella’s emotions had surprised themselves out of her audibly; but now he sighed and shook himself out, picked the guitar back up and strummed a few scattered bars. Ella felt as though she could hear him collecting his thoughts as he gathered notes up into a bit of a tune.

‘Ollie’s a smart kid,’ he said suddenly, not looking up but clearly speaking to Ann and Wardell, ‘They’re gonna be fine. Maybe they don’t know what they’re getting into, but none of us really does right now. Out there at least they can make a difference. I kinda wish I’d gone too. Might have, if they’d asked me.’

He looked around the circle and met a spectrum of displeased expressions. The upbeat little tune he’d been picking stopped as he lifted his hands placatingly.

‘Hey, all I’m saying is we don’t have it so great here, either. We’re about to lose power, we’re sitting ducks, and we’re gonna run out of food and water in like days. All I’m saying is if Ollie looked around and weighed some options, it doesn’t seem like they made the worst choice.’

Ann and Wardell shook their heads, but Lena and Reeds were nodding. 

‘It’s true,’ Lena said, ‘we’ve got to start thinking about what our plan is here.’

‘Or if we’re going to leave,’ Reeds added.

Another silence descended.

It was broken by the door of a nearby trailer slamming open. Clary emerged, slamming the door shut behind her. Her hair was wet. She still had on the sweatshirt she’d been wearing earlier but had changed the floral patterned shorts for a striped pair. Ella wondered if she wore shorts all year round no matter what the weather was like. Ethan had a friend like that. It could be snowing in the middle of winter but he was still wearing basketball shorts above his socks and sneakers. Ella could see now that the shirt said Shear Peculiarity. What was that, she wondered. Was it sheep shearing? She’d only known Clary for about an hour but she could absolutely see her shearing a sheep.

‘Who died?’ Clary asked cheerfully, looking around the circle of somber faces as she poured herself a mugful of coffee.

Reeds crinkled up his face at her, nodded meaningly toward Ollie’s parents.

Ann’s lip trembled. ‘Nobody,’ she said shakily, ‘We hope.’

Clary’s cheerfulness faded. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Ollie left,’ Reeds supplied, after a long silence in which everyone waited for Ann or Wardell to say something. Ann and Wardell said nothing. They appeared to have wandered mentally off again, bodies by the fire but minds out there on some unknown road with Ollie.

Clary did not seem surprised, Ella noticed. She looked sorry, but not surprised.

‘Shit. I’m sorry guys. When did she go? Do you know where she went?’

‘They,’ Ann whispered.

‘Isn’t it obvious?’ Wardell responded bitterly. ‘All she’s…they’s…been talking about for weeks is joining up. When I went to wake them up because they were missing pancakes, I saw the truck was gone. A bunch of their stuff is gone, and some of our stuff. The best guns. She’s gone to fight.’

Ann sniffled. ‘I just hope they’ll be ok…’

Clary sighed. ‘The truck, huh? That was a good choice.’

Was Clary’s voice uneven? For the first time her composure seemed to crack a little. Ella could see worry dark in her eyes. Before she could wonder about it though, Wardell continued passionately, as though no one else had spoken,

‘I was never gonna be happy about it, this stupid military obsession. But I might have let her go if it was some other time. But now…right now, with this war…with this administration…’

Clary raised her eyebrows. ‘What’s the administration got to do with it?’

‘The whole damn thing’s a money grab. They’ll send anyone’s kid out there in the line of fire if it’ll make a buck. And nothing makes a buck like a war. You don’t see them sending their kids.’

Silence threatened sourly to descend again.

Before it could fully settle, Clary said, ‘Usually I’d agree with you – I’d be the first to say it. But it’s different now. We’ve got actual war here. In our own backyard. We’ve got everything to lose and if we’re gonna keep it somebody’s got to fight for it. If Ollie’s out there fighting for it then I think they’re magnificent.’

There was another silence. As though satisfied that enough had been said on the subject, Clary sat down and took a sip of her coffee. Then she looked directly at Ella.

‘What’s your story?’

Ella hesitated, startled. This was the first occasion she’d had to summarize her story. Reeds was the only person she’d told it to so far, and she’d hit him with the unabridged version. Everyone was looking at her, waiting, and Clary’s eyes were on her with an intensity that felt like the moment of focused calibration before tweezing out a sliver. Ella looked to Reeds for reassurance, hoping that he hadn’t really decided that it had been a mistake to bring her here. He crinkled his eyes at her in an encouraging way, and gave her a little nod that felt like a gentle nudge, the kind she imagined a mother bird gave a timid fledgling to get it off the branch. She hauled in a big, fortifying breath.

‘Well I was evacuating with my family,’ she began.

There was a general nod and murmur of comprehension; she could see interest in the eyes of the guitar player for the first time.

‘And we were in really bad traffic moving really slow because everybody else was evacuating all at the same time and when we were a little ways from home I remembered that I forgot to bring my cat so I ran back to the house to get him.’

‘Oh my goodness,’ Ann interjected, ‘on foot?’

‘Well, yeah. I could walk there faster than the car could drive, because of the traffic. And then when I got home I found him, Alfred, my cat…but then a soldier tried to kidnap me but I got away but then I had to run. And I lost Alfred, and I couldn’t find my family again.’

There was a general murmur of dismay.

‘A soldier?’ Wardell asked sharply, ‘One of ours?’

She shook her head. ‘One of theirs.’

He seemed relieved.

‘Holy shit, that’s terrible,’ Lena said, looking at Ella for the first time as if there might be more to her than an unexpected annoyance.

‘It was really scary,’ Ella blurted, feeling so grateful for the momentary sympathy from Lena that she almost cried. 

‘How did you find your way here?’ Clary asked, rousting her back out of the moment – she could hear a world of unspoken meaning behind that simple question.

‘Well I didn’t, not really. I was walking on the road last night, the one that goes kind of along the river, looking for a place to sleep because I was really tired from running so much and I wanted to rest up to find my family today. So I found this old truck in the woods that looked like it was left there for a long time…’

She saw recognition go around the circle. Was it their truck? Whoever it belonged to, it was obvious that they knew about it.

‘…and I climbed up on top of it and slept on it. Then I woke up this morning and I was going to get back across the river to the highway and start looking for a ride to Millport to meet up with my family but like almost as soon as I woke up there was this animal chasing me, and it was Wooly.’

A burble of amusement went around the circle.

‘But Reeds made her stop, and felt sorry for me I guess, and told me to come back and have pancakes with you all. And I was really hungry, so I did.’

She saw a couple of looks go around that she assumed had something to do with the way she’d inhaled the food off her plate this morning. Apparently people had not been too preoccupied to notice, after all. 

‘What’s your family’s plan at Millport?’ the guitar player asked.

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. We were going to camp for a couple of weeks, as long as it took to figure out a safe place to migrate to. Or maybe as long as it takes to overturn the invasion and it will be safe to go home? There wasn’t a really good plan, we just had to get out of our house because our town got actually occupied.’

‘Is that the city, you mean?’ Wardell asked.

She nodded. ‘Yeah, the whole metro area got spots occupied apparently. Tony said it made strategic sense for an expansion plan.’

A ripple of unease went through the circle. Worry appeared on every face.

‘So let’s hold that thought,’ Clary said sharply, to apparently no one in particular, so suddenly that Ella jumped.

‘Wait, what thought?’ Lena asked.

Everyone was looking bewildered.

‘Whatever thought y’all are having in your head right now about what’s going on out there. Because we gotta decide if we’re going out there in it, or if we’re staying here and hunkering down. And we need to figure it out now.’

‘What do you think, Clary?’ Reeds asked. 

Clary shook her head. ‘I’ll go last.’

Everyone looked around reluctantly. Nobody wanted to be the first to speak. The guitar player began picking out bits of song again. Ella recognized the tune from the first season of Stranger Things…should I stay or should I go now…

Lena flashed him a look of evident irritation.

‘So what are the pros and cons,’ she said in an exasperated tone, ‘Let’s start there. Cons for staying: we’re gonna run out of food, the power’s getting cut, we’re sitting ducks – if the other side shows up here for some reason we’re probably dead. Cons for leaving: we have no idea what’s really going on out there or if we can get somewhere safe. Do we even have any ideas of somewhere safe to go?’

‘I think a border,’ Wardell said. ‘We’re pretty much in the middle between north and south. We could go either direction.’

The guitar player shook his head. ‘I doubt we can just drive across. The news said they were turning people away at both ends.’

‘Also,’ Reeds said, ‘and I’m just saying, but historically speaking, if the occupation does reach here it’s not very likely they’ll kill us. It’s possible of course but we’ll probably just wind up in a war camp.’

Lena sighed. ‘Fine. Dead or a war camp. Great options.’

Reeds made a face at her. ‘I just feel like we can be accurate.’

‘Ok, ok,’ Clary broke in, ‘so getting across a border would be nice but it sounds like we’d probably just end up waiting outside to get clearance to go in. Which may or may not happen soon enough for it to be a good idea. Where are some other places we can go?’

No one responded. It was clear that everyone was trying to come up with the answer that would save them all, furnish them with direction and purpose and above all a plan, but nobody was having any luck. She was reminded of her own experience, trying to think of any arrangement with any person in any place that would somehow preclude camping. It was amazing how people just lived their whole lives in the place where they were. Everyone was part of a vividly interconnected global world now, but most people’s actual lives followed patterns that were just as tribal as ever, arising from proximity and built around shared space.

‘Sun Tzu says not to make a move unless it’ll give you an actual advantage over where you are now,’ Reeds said.

‘Well I don’t know who Sun Sue is but I think she’s got a point,’ Clary responded, nodding approvingly.

‘Sun Tzu!’ Reeds exclaimed, clearly scandalized. ‘He’s only the most well known military genius in history. He wrote The Art of War! Well…I guess that’s marginally debatable. Not The Art of War part, the greatest genius part. I guess I have to say that he’s one of a very few of the greatest military geniuses of all time.’

‘Well, super,’ Clary said agreeably ‘I like to side with a great genius whenever I can. So nobody can think of anywhere advantageous to make a move to, then?’

After an uncomfortably long silence, Ella found herself raising her hand like she was in class. The gesture made her feel foolish as soon as she noticed it but once she’d begun she felt stuck with it. Clary nodded at her and she gratefully dropped her hand.

‘We could go camp with my mom and Tony in Millport,’ she offered. ‘Tony knows how to fish and we packed a lot of rice and canned food.’

‘That’s nice,’ Clary responded in a polite voice, as if she were talking to a well-meaning but oblivious child, ‘but if we’re going to camp I think we should just do it here. We’ve all got homes here, which I personally prefer to a tent on the ground. And we’ve got some food stored up, although I’m not sure what all.’

Ella felt instantly idiotic. Hadn’t she been listening to what Sun Tzu said? How was that an advantageous move, going off to camp in Millport, when they already had everything they needed here? Maybe she should just sit here quietly and keep her mouth shut unless the subject of good skills to offer came up. At this rate she was going to be lucky if they let her stay at all. What a doofus she was.

‘That’s a good point about the fish, though,’ Wardell said, giving Ella an appreciative nod that made her feel somewhat redeemed. ‘We’ve got the river right here. There’s probably loads of the spring migration to reel in.’

‘Fine,’ Clary said, ‘so am I understanding that we’re leaning toward staying? Because I don’t hear any actual ideas about leaving.’

‘I mean this is the same problem we’ve been having this whole time,’ the guitar player said impatiently, ‘We should have left weeks ago but we didn’t have anywhere to go. And we just kept hoping the front would hold.’

‘Ok well then it comes down to what we’re more scared of,’ Clary responded. ‘Do we want to be sitting ducks over here where we don’t have much but nobody has any reason to come, or do we want to be ducks wandering around a war zone with a bunch of other lost ducks, some of which might help us get to a good safe place?’

‘I don’t think we can leave,’ Reeds was forming the words slowly, as though he was dragging each one out from under a heavy pile of thoughts. ‘We don’t have enough cars to fit us all in now that the truck is gone. The van is still broken. We don’t have enough space for people, we don’t have enough space for food and water. We wouldn’t have space for the animals. We could split up and leave some of us behind but how would we decide that? And if we don’t have anyplace to go, we don’t have enough gas to just drive around till we figure it out.’

There was another silence; this one was nearly deafening. Everyone, including Ella, looked expectantly at Clary, who was calmly sipping her coffee as though nothing new had come to light. Ella was struck by a flash of intuition. She wasn’t sure how she knew, but she was immediately certain that this was why Clary had been worried when she’d heard that Ollie had left. Clary had known that they were stuck here as soon as she’d heard the truck was gone. Now she met their urgent combined gaze with leisurely unconcern.

After a long, anxious pause, she said lightly, ‘Ok. So we’ve decided we’re staying?’

Everyone looked around at each other. On every face Ella saw a shadow of resignation or relief.

‘What if we do both,’ Lena said.

Reeds and the guitar player groaned and shook their heads at each other. Catching Ella’s enquiring look, Reeds explained, ‘She always wants to do both.’

Lena seemed unfazed by their reaction. ‘When both isn’t the best option anyone can be my guest and point it out. But it always is, so. I say we do both.’

‘What does that mean this time?’ Clary asked.

‘We stay for a few more days, at least till the craziness of the initial evacuation is over. If we don’t have to deal with bad traffic the gas we have will get us further. Moth and me will get the van running. We have it pretty much figured out, we just need to get the work done. Then we’ll all leave together, nobody gets left behind. We have like a week’s worth of food here probably if we’re not too picky and we eat the refrigerator stuff first. We don’t have to worry about water while we’re here because we’ve got the river and basically infinite firewood to boil it. If we still get internet for like the next week or so we should be able to have a decent idea of where to go and when to go and what to expect out there. We can be strategic about it.’

Clary was looking at Lena with a restrained expression, but Ella could see pride in her eyes and approval in the set of her mouth. She felt pretty sure that this was what Clary had been waiting for from someone in the group. As soon as Reeds had pieced together the problem and Lena had broken down the solution, it was obvious that there had only really ever been one course of action open to them. Clary had realized this as soon as she’d heard that the truck was gone; but for whatever reason she’d wanted them to figure it out on their own. This technique was confusing, but intriguing. Was Clary craftily, creepily manipulative? Or just meticulously democratic, careful to let everyone else weigh in on group decisions? She’d said she’d go last with her opinion, but she hadn’t actually gone at all. 

The heads around the fire pit were nodding assent. Ella felt herself nodding along with them. Clary’s eyes landed on her.

‘That means you, too?’ she asked.

All at once everyone was looking at her again. She felt her eyebrows sting with sweat. She knew in that instant exactly what she wanted, knew that she’d wanted it from the moment she’d walked into the camp and seen actual honest to god pancakes.

‘If that’s ok,’ she said shyly, feeling newly unsure of her welcome.

Clary nodded crisply. ‘It’ll have to be.’

Anxious at this less than effusive response, Ella glanced at Reeds for confirmation. He was looking narrowly at Clary with his eyebrows tangled into a slight frown. When he saw Ella looking at him, he rolled his eyes and twitched his shoulder in a tiny shrug. She got the feeling that she was going to need to come up with some useful skills in a hurry. She should have mentioned fruit picking earlier. And…what else could she do? Her eyes roamed the park for ideas. Maybe she could offer to scrub the trailers? Some of them were looking downright filthy…

Bringing her attention back to the present moment, she realized that Clary was talking.

‘..and despite some shakeups we’re at net neutral…gained a person but lost another.’

Ella heard the guitar player whisper, ‘The lord giveth and the lord taketh away.’

A small spasm of amusement crossed Lena’s face. It could not have been called a smirk, but it was in the same family. Maybe the baby sister of a smirk.

‘Shut up, Moth,’ she said quietly to the guitar player, giving him a shove.

Moth (?…was that really his name? everyone seemed to have weird names here…) made a no you shut up face at her and put the guitar down. 

‘We should see how much food we’ve got left,’ he said to Clary.

She nodded thoughtfully. ‘With seven people it’s gonna go fast. I wonder what all we have in the big freezer out in the barn.’

‘I’ll go look,’ Moth said.

She nodded again. ‘Make sure you close it back up real tight,’ she instructed, ‘With the power going out any old time now we need to keep the cold in as long as we can.’

Turning, her eyes snagged on Ella and she said, ‘Reeds, take the new kid here and show her the Prairie Schooner. Get her what she needs to settle in. And show her the bathroom. After that you can get the solar generators out of the barn and think of some ways they’ll be useful. Lena, I need you with me.’

She turned to leave, and Lena got up to follow her.

‘Wait,’ Ann said, ‘I called my sister yesterday and told her if anything bad happens to come here.’

There was a general nod and murmur of agreement. 

Clary turned sharply back, looking harassed. ‘What? Here? Why here?’

‘Well, because we’re so out of the way, and we’ve got the river and all. You know. All the reasons we’re not leaving right away.’

Heads were nodding. Clary looked around at them, and her mouth flattened out into a thin line.

‘Ok, how many people told somebody to come here if anything bad happens?’

Hands went up all around the fire. Clary’s eyes took on a hundred yard stare. She turned without saying anything and shambled vaguely to her trailer. The door slammed open. It slammed behind her. Everyone looked at each other, but nobody moved or said anything. A few moments later the door slammed open again. Clary emerged with a lit cigarette, patting the pack and lighter into her shorts pocket. She waved a clipboard at them.

‘Ok, everybody! Let’s make a list of all the people we told they should come here if anything bad happens. And anyone we think they might bring with them. Start with the people they’ll probably bring, like if they have kids, but put in anyone you think they might drag along, like their friends or neighbors.’

Foreheads wrinkled in concentration. The pen began to move across the paper. Clary paced and watched over shoulders as names were written down. She trailed a burning cigarette wherever she went but Ella noticed that she was not smoking it.

‘If they talked about bringing anything, write that down,’ Clary instructed. ‘Like if they said they have a dog or a generator or something.’

The clipboard was passed around for a few minutes, with people returning to write down things they had forgotten or scratch through something they’d decided was actually irrelevant. Eventually when the pen had been lying still on the clipboard for several long moments as people shuffled and looked at each other to see who was next, Clary called them to order again.

‘Ok. We’re going to start rationing now. Everybody go get every non-refrigerator food item you have and dump it here in a pile,’ she gestured to the picnic table. ‘No hoarding, or I’ll know. And when I find it I’ll make you wear the wrapper stapled to your shirt like the scarlet letter.’

There were a few groans and nobody moved. Clary looked at them grimly and lit another cigarette. This time she smoked it.

Suddenly out of nowhere Reeds said, ‘What if the violent rise and fall of revolution is really just a blood clot in the wounds of the great collective beast, momentarily congealing the trickle of corruption and congenital despair?’

Ella felt as though a firework had exploded in her mind, tried to trace the vibrant sparks as they fell – what had he just said? She was sure she’d caught fewer than half the words, she felt like her mind was running around with outstretched hands trying to catch them like raindrops…but she was just as certain that he’d said something both true and beautiful, even if it sounded outlandish and wildly speculative and almost more like poetry than sense. What if each war that had ever been fought throughout the entirety of human history was one small piece of a larger, unified cry for fundamental, universal justice? 

She wanted to hear him say it again, but she was too bashful to ask. Nobody else seemed the least bit interested. Lena and Moth rolled their eyes at each other and appeared to accept this as a sign to finally unfurl themselves from their chairs and start pulling stuff out of their cupboards. Ann and Wardell had not heard him at all. Staring mutually off into space, they were both startled by Lena and Moth’s abrupt rise and departure from the fire, and were now blinking around, trying to catch up on what they’d missed.

‘What if it is,’ Clary said briskly, as though Reeds had just said something entirely commonplace. ‘But for now let’s focus on congealing the trickle of slow starvation. Scoot, everybody. Oh. And we’ll go through refrigerators next. We’ll gather this evening for a final feast of the perishables.’

a light from the shadows shall spring

November / December

if this life is mine

September & October

walk through fields of evergreen

August

singing with them jezebels

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of smooth plaster…

thunder in our hearts

May June July

as your day unfolds

April

wind in the night

As the crow falls

So do I

I rise again but not as high

These wings aren’t broke

And they’re not clipped

But here and there some feathers slipped

They sailed away

On dips and climbs

Lost in and out of space and time.

hitchin’ on a twilight train

March

the camellias smelled like candy

It was the most badass thing I’ve ever seen. She looked down at her mangled foot and her mouth opened and I expected a bunch of screaming to come out, but all that actually did was a long breath of air.

‘That could’ve been worse,’ she said.

She put one hand on my shoulder for balance and with the other gently pushed off the bloody shoe. A nasty gash went across the top of her foot, which was bright red with blood. I felt a little dizzy.

‘Whoa,’ she said, as we grabbed each other for balance, ‘who’s got who here?’

‘Sorry,’ I laughed a lame little laugh and got a steadier grip on the ground.

She got a steadier grip on me, and lifted her leg to bring the injured foot up near her face for inspection. I was impressed.

‘I guess you can kick really high,’ I said, and then felt like it was a stupid thing to say.

She shot me a bit of a look. I couldn’t tell if it meant that she thought it was a stupid thing to say too, or if she thought I was trying to hit on her. She looked away and I decided never to say anything stupid again.

‘Welp,’ she said, putting the foot back down, ‘It’s not a deep cut. Just a gusher.’

She tested her weight on it and winced a little, but found her footing and loosened her grip on my shoulder.

‘I think I’ll sit,’ she said, ‘Maybe you can get me some water to wash it with?’

‘I’ll get the doctor!’ I said eagerly.

This was something I could do well, I could run extremely fast, everyone always said so, and besides if I was running for help I couldn’t be there saying anything stupid.

‘No!’

Her objection was violent. She half stood, and grabbed at me. I stopped.

‘What? Why? You need attention. Your foot looks bad.’

‘It’s not, not really,’ she said, sitting back down and sounding calmer. ‘It’s just a lot of blood, not a lot of damage. And, um…I don’t want this time to end.’

Warmth buzzed between my ears. Somehow I felt my body sit next to hers. She smiled a little smile at me, and I could feel myself smiling a big smile back.

‘I don’t want this time to end either,’ I said.

I wanted to say something else, something really dashing and romantic, but I couldn’t think what it would be. We sat there without saying anything for a few moments, and I could feel her warmth near mine, and the sliver of chill air between us. I heard her breath, and then listened to mine and hoped it sounded natural and self assured, if she was listening to it. A take charge sort of breathing, that’s what I hoped it sounded like.

Take charge, my mind thought, and then suddenly, oh!

‘I’ll get some water to wash your foot,’ I said in a totally take charge kind of voice.

She jumped, startled.

‘Whoops,’ I said apologetically.

She laughed. ‘Water would be good.’

‘Wait right there!’ I said, turning to run, ‘I’ll be quick!’

She nodded.

I ran so fast. And slid around in the shadows like a ninja, too. I could hear everyone everywhere looking for me, but I evaded them all. I snuck to the back hall where no one ever hangs out and got the first aid kit out of the overflow closet. I almost got caught sneaking back out across the patio but fortunately everyone is always too self absorbed to notice anything other than themselves. Even while they’re literally saying, Where is Florian? I ducked behind the receiving tables and they wandered off, pretending to look for me but really just using the time to make themselves seem all busy and special and important. They don’t fool me. 

Florian is in another castle, bitches, I laughed to myself as I crawled away with the first aid kit tucked into my shirt. I snagged a bottle of water from an abandoned ice chest and took off back to the cliff garden. Throbbing with excitement and kinda out of breath I pushed through the heavy old gate that had just mangled her poor foot. Stupid gate. I have told them to fix it like a hundred times. Well a couple times at least. The problem is that nobody ever comes here except me, so nobody cares about it.

‘I’m back,’ I whispered.

To nobody. Because she was gone. I could tell from something in the air, or something not in the air. Even without looking through the garden, which I did anyway. I knew she was gone, completely gone.

I felt like fucking shit. I had no idea why she was gone. We’d had such an amazing time together. Ever since I saw her standing nearly behind the curtain of one of the great hall windows, looking at me. Nobody’s ever looked at me like she was looking at me. It was like she was reading me like a book. As soon as I saw her I felt like I was on fire and I tripped over my own fucking feet. She didn’t laugh. She didn’t even smile. She just stood there partway behind the curtain and looked at me. All night she looked at me like that, like I wasn’t this young dumb idiot. Like there was something interesting about me. Not the crown. Not everything about the crown and all the stuff that comes with it. Something interesting about me.

And we laughed so much. We laughed when I walked up and stood behind the curtain with her and knocked over a fucking vase right away. Who puts a fucking vase behind a curtain anyway. She said that, to make me feel better, and we laughed. We laughed when she said Oh fuck it, I’m not sure about what, I asked her but she didn’t say, and we snuck out the window together.

We laughed while we hid under a table and drank a bottle of wine and ate a cake by the handful right off the plate. She swiped them both off the table in one second, so fast and sneaky, the waitstaff literally put the cake plate and wine bottles down and looked away for one minute and bam, they were under the table with us. The waitstaff couldn’t figure out what had happened, they were freaking out, and we laughed so hard, with cake in our mouths.

We laughed while we talked for hours about all the things we love and hate. Music, movies, famous people, books, games…trees. She wanted to know what my favorite tree is and I had to think about it and she said hers is birch, and I said mine is cedar, and she changed hers to cedar too but then she changed it back again, and then she said they were both the best tree and she couldn’t choose. I felt like that made sense.

We laughed while we ran all over the grounds taking turns drinking wine right out the bottle and I showed her all the things I like about living here, and all the things I think are stupid. She thought the big fountain in the courtyard is stupid for all the same reasons I do, it’s so ugly and pretentious. We sat in the dark on the side furthest from the front door and splashed our feet in the bubbling water and talked and laughed in whispers watching all the fancy people arrive. I told her about the little cave inside the camellia trees where I hide sometimes and watch people look for me, or listen to them talk about me. She wanted to see it so we waited for a quiet moment and snuck across the courtyard and crawled in. The big party lights everywhere made it lit up inside like a green and gold tent, and the camellias smelled like candy. Sure enough, a couple of the courtiers went by complaining about how unreliable I am and I rolled my eyes at her and we laughed with our hands over our mouths. Then it started sounding like they were really going to come looking for me and they always find me when I’m in the camellia cave, so I told her we had to run away.

She stopped laughing and asked if I should just go back in. I told her no way. I have to do these stupid things all the time. Bailing on one every now and then is my prerogative. Keeps things interesting for people. That’s what my dad says anyway, when my mom is bitching at me for not living up to my obligations. She looked at me like she was sad all of a sudden. She put her fingers in my hair and I could feel that they were sticky but I didn’t care. I think she was going to kiss me. Everything was golden dark around us and the camellias smelled like candy. 

But then we heard my mom coming down the drive, telling the courtiers to check and see if I was hiding in the bushes. So we had to claw our way out through the back of the camellia tree, and got all scratched up from the branches. For some reason that made us laugh again, and we lay on our backs in the rose garden feeling all of our scratches tingling and laughing and looking at the stars. But then we heard mom yelling to check the rose garden so we had to get up and run again. We just made it out of the garden and behind the trees before they got there. We snuck back up behind the fountain and sat in the shadows, watching all the waitstaff work and the really late guests show up, most of them drunk. I could still hear them looking for me. They never give up.

Then she swiped another bottle of wine right out of the cart as the stewards went by and nobody even noticed and we looked at each other with laughing mouths but didn’t make any noise, and she grabbed my hand and we ran. Our fingers were sticky with cake and we were laughing so hard we couldn’t run straight and we were giddy with wine, at least I was, I don’t actually drink it usually. We didn’t know where we were going but of course we wound up here because this is always where I wind up when I’m running away. You would think they’d figure it out by now, but no. It’s because they only think of themselves.

And now she’s gone. I’m sitting here alone like I always do but this time I’ve got frosting on the webbing between my fingers and wine in my belly and the worst kind of ache in my chest. I would give anything to see her again. I don’t even know her fucking name, the thought makes me feel wild. I’m sitting here where we were just sitting together, and she’s gone. There’s nothing but me. Me and her poor sad little shoe.