Snapshot

You’re in kindergarten. Your mom listens to a lot of Wilson Phillips and you have a Chynna Phillips bowl haircut. She also listens to a lot of Michael Jackson, so things could be worse.

You live on a street with all old people. The Methodist church you attend every Sunday is mostly old people. On nice days during children’s church, the ninety-year-old teacher takes you and one other kid on a walk. And by take you on a walk, she just stands in the doorway and lets you both walk half a block along the sidewalk. Once you come to the stop sign you must turn around and come back inside.

Everyone in the town seems old. The kids in your school exist in the real world, but you don’t know them. They don’t seem to like you.

Your mom voted for William Jefferson Clinton because George H.W. Bush lied to her. On the wall of your classroom hangs a picture of President Clinton. You don’t know this yet, but you live in a union town and the picture is really the perfect counterpart to a Catholic school classroom with a picture of the Pope. There’s one Catholic church in your town. It’s really pretty and you ask about it, but your mom tells you that Catholics pray to dead people and they are all going to hell.

Milk is delivered to your classroom mid-morning. Your mom told the school you have a dairy allergy. Most of the time the cafeteria forgets to send an orange juice, so your teacher sends you to get it yourself.

You’ve heard that once you move to the middle school you will have to switch classes and have a locker. There is no way you can handle that sort of pressure, so you decide you’ll kill yourself before the end of 5th grade. You try to not worry about it for now, but you think about it each time you walk to the cafeteria alone.

*

You are in second grade and your birthday is approaching. Your small town has three options for a party: 1) McDonald’s 2) Pizza Hut or 3) Your home. All of the birthday parties you can remember have either been at home or at McDonald’s. This year you are given a choice. You choose Pizza Hut, even though you know the workers have questioned how frequently you claim free personal pan pizzas through BookIt!

It’s the day of the party. You get to Pizza Hut and see there is a long table that takes up most of the middle section of the restaurant. Balloons are attached to every third chair. In the middle of the table there is a sheet cake from the IGA. Your grandparents on your mom’s side are there. Two of your cousins are there. Your uncle’s third wife is there. A classmate comes in with her family. They are not there for your party, but they awkwardly join you anyway. No one else shows up.

You assume everyone hates you. It’s not until you’re an adult that you think back on this and realize your mom probably just forgot to send invitations.

*

You’re in fifth grade and it’s the sixth school you’ve attended since kindergarten. After your mom divorces her fourth husband you moved into a shitty apartment complex in what is otherwise a wealthy school district. To her credit, you sleep in the one bedroom and she shoves her bed into a corner in the living room. It’s the fifth housing arrangement you can remember.

You wear clothes from KMart and Dots. The other kids are wearing Abercrombie & Fitch and American Eagle. There isn’t an Old Navy in your town, so even that shit is exotic.

Your mom is dating a guy named Mark that you’ve only met once. You have dinner at his house and the only thing you really know about him is that he likes sour cream with his baked potato. Your mom gets into a fight with this Mark character over the phone one evening.

The next morning you’re getting ready to catch the bus. Before you leave she tells you, “I am going to kill myself while you’re at school.”

As you’re riding the bus you think about the teachers you could tell.  You have options. After all, you are rotating teachers in preparation for middle school. You carry a bin with supplies from classroom to classroom. You don’t care for any of your teachers though. They don’t seem to see you.

You don’t tell anyone.

She doesn’t kill herself.

That evening, you watch the news coverage about Clinton’s impeachment alone in your bedroom. You ignore the muffled crying in the next room. You are accustomed to the ebbs and flows of her emotions.

*

You’re in seventh grade and you’ve moved from your small town to a small city across the river. You’re living in the house of husband number five. Your best friend Amy calls him “Gay Ray.” You don’t know that using “gay” as an insult is inappropriate. For now it’s a thing.

Ray used to work at the county courthouse as a bailiff. Now he does not go to work, but instead gets a disability check from the government. Ray has no discernable physical disabilities. He watches old Looney Tunes episodes early in the morning as your mom gets ready for work. He laughs so loud that you can hear him on the other side of the house in your bedroom.

You are not Methodist anymore. You are nondenominational, whatever that means. You go to church twice on Sundays and once on Wednesdays. You go every night when there is a revival in town.

After church one Sunday you go to the mall with your mother. A new store has opened and it has red, illuminated letters that look like dripping blood. The letters spell out “Hot Topic.” You ask if you can go inside and look around.

“No. They sell drugs and pornography in the back room. The entire store is just a front for illicit activity.”

Amy starts dressing like a mall goth. She’s also Wiccan. She listens to Kitty and Marilyn Manson. She wears colorful jelly bracelets. The rumor is that you earn them through sexual acts.

Your mom is in the hospital for a few weeks and you’re home alone with Ray. You never get a straight answer on what’s wrong with her. When she is discharged and returns home she tells you she was in the hospital because Amy hexed her. You are not allowed to see Amy outside of school after that.

Al Gore loses the election.

*

You’re a freshman in high school. Your mom is dating two guys—a homeless man and a dude from church, while still married to her seventh husband. Well, it’s number six if you don’t count a remarriage to an ex.

You are stuck in one classroom all day taking a statewide exam. The test is cancelled after the first tower is struck. You watch the news coverage all morning and see the second tower fall. After that happens, school is cancelled and everyone is sent home.

When you get home from school a Christian television station is on, but no one else is home. Your mom is a woman of God now. She leaves the TV on during the day so that his word can flow through the house. Billy Graham’s daughter is on the TV. She tells a reporter that Americans have been telling God to get out of our government and our lives. And he did. This tragedy is America’s fault for abandoning God.

You watch the news that evening and they show people lighting candles. You buy a candle at the dollar store to burn outside on your front steps. But your mom is allergic to all candles—even unscented ones. She claims it’s the wax that bothers her. She throws it away.

*

You’re a senior in high school. You come home from school and stick your key in the front door. You notice immediately that there is no barking. Your dog always barks. She’s a sweet little Maltese that you have had since third grade. Sometimes your mom walks your dog, but her car isn’t home.

It’s dark when your mom comes home. Her arms are full of Payless shopping bags.

“We had to put Dolly down today. She’s in the laundry room on top of the dryer if you want to say goodbye.”

That evening your high school boyfriend sends you an AIM message breaking up with you. Your anxiety is “draining” him.

A few weeks later you meet a guy on MySpace. He’s a senior at the small college in your city. You drive to the campus on a Friday night. He takes you on a long walk through the woods. You think, “This is it. This is how I get raped and murdered.” He does neither.

*

You’re eighteen and you have just graduated from high school. You’re sort of dating MySpace guy, but you don’t invite him to your graduation. It’s a weird reminder of the age thing. Your mom is upset that he doesn’t at least come over for your graduation meal. Your mom has bought mac and cheese from KFC and chicken nuggets and a caesar salad from Wendy’s.

MySpace guy books you a plane ticket and a week later you're living in California with him. He has graduated too and he has a job and a house. You are going to play housewife. You’ve known each other three months.

One day while he’s at work you get on his computer.  Let’s be honest, you snoop. You find teenage porn, but you are pretty sure it’s the barely legal kind, so you let it go.

An AIM message pops up. Hannah. Lovely girl. Fifteen years old. You learn that she was fucking your adult boyfriend for the last few months. But no worries, she has moved on. She’s dating a pretty famous YA author now.

George W. Bush waits four days to send aid after Katrina.

*

You’re twenty-three and you are going to marry your high school boyfriend. You ended up at the same college and just sort fell into each other after exhausting all other options. He wants a large wedding, but you don’t. He wins this fight and you both rack up credit card debt to pay for it. It’s really a beautiful wedding. It’s in Chicago, even though no one you know lives there. The venue is downtown and exquisite. You have flowers galore, a videographer, the whole shebang. And there’s even a church choir. A fucking church choir.

He gets drunk at the reception and spends most of the evening throwing up into the sink in your hotel suite. His two brothers man the toilet and the shower, respectively.

You drive home and sleep alone.

It really was a pretty wedding.

*

You’re twenty-eight and have one child. You’re not divorced. You are not your mother. You will not be your mother. The stigma of divorce makes you feel a bit weighed down. A bit out of breath.

Hillary loses the election.

*

You’re thirty-three and your mom dies. You find out through a cousin who has friended you on Facebook.

Your mom was married to this guy named Dean for nearly ten years, which is by far her longest stint. You can’t imagine a world in which going to the funeral makes sense, but you agree to meet Dean at their apartment. He says he has personal effects you may want. Once you get there you realize “personal effects” is an upright piano that you have never seen before. You don’t play the piano. You don’t think your mom ever learned to play the piano, but you can’t be sure.

You want to ask Dean which number husband he is. You do not do so.

On the piano there are pictures displayed. You realize your mom has printed and framed various Instagram photos and Facebook profile pictures. There is also a snapshot of your mom alone, sitting on a rock with a covered bridge in the background. She has a Carnie Wilson haircut from the Wilson Phillips era—a short bob with short bangs. She is wearing a white dress shirt, a brown vest and high-waisted denim.

You tell Dean you don’t want the piano, but that you’ll take the photo.

~~~

Kelly Flynn is the Fiction Editor for Booth. Her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and she has been selected twice to attend the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Kelly is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and has served as a judge for the NBCC's Leonard Prize. She is currently working on a novel. Find her on twitter: @iamkellyflynn

Ursa Major

We live in the long hills. Miles of rock-spines running north to south. Climb one high peak if you have the head for that, and you will see the others lapped like scales out to the milky-white horizon. It’s only tourists—we do still get a few, in the warm months—who say “Long Hills” in a capital letters voice. As if everything wants a label, like soup cans in stores. Back when there were stores.

My kids still use their label-names at school, but at home “Girl,” “Little G” and “Boy” work fine.

*

Our home is a split-log, brown locust wood. Everything in the long hills is brown. The leaf litter underfoot, the streams eeling through that spongy mattress, the ponds down low where slopes come together to make a funnel and an up-welling pool round as an unblinking chestnut eye, gazing skyward. Normally we don’t go down to that water. Too far. Too steep. Too dark.

The tree trunks are slabs of gray-brown, red-brown. The needle sprays on the borer-infested pines are greenish-brown, whereas the oak and poplar leaves, shredded to lace by larvae, are brownish-green. Everything here fights to survive.

My skin is the brown of tea left to steep too long. When I was young I was lighter, like Girl, whose shoulders shimmer nougat. Our neighbors—the closest lives a mile north along the ridge—are either weather-cured or born brown. They wear oiled leather, they carry oak-handled hunting rifles.

Brown is the end color. Mix together enough colors, you will end up with brown. Try it!

*

Our cabin is set on a log foundation to keep out the creepy-crawlies, for all the good that does. No cellar, so bone-freezing cold in winter. Three rooms, all length and go find the width. As if whoever built it used trains for a model. Or these long hills.

Our neighbors hunt deer, possums, and ground-birds for food, and crows for sport. But not bears. Like us, bears come in a rainbow of shades of brown. Silky and sinewy, they roam the sides of the long hills. A small adult female weighs three hundred pounds. They drink from the deep pools. We recognize and avoid their pathways—the scavenged berry bushes, the scoured trunks of trees. As they avoid our signs and smells. Bears are scarcely ever seen. It’s said they only come out boldly in one season: Fall. Or spring. Or mid-winter. Each year, someone swears to a different season.

*

Three days ago, while out digging for the last of our winter vegetables, I heard rifle shots. Crack-crack...Craack! Down-slope, and dangerously close. No one with an ounce of brain hunts near the few homesteads still occupied in the long hills.

I ran around front. At first I saw nothing. Then I looked up and across to the next ridge. Five then six rolling tear-shapes, beige and amber and molasses, the bodies of bears in motion. I was too awe-struck to move a muscle.

Just below where I stood, a breeze parted the mountain laurel branches. In the second before they furled shut again I saw a person flat on the ground. A second later I was airborne, hurtling downward through the trees before landing—almost falling on top of him. Of both of them, I should say. The stranger lay face upward, arched over a big spanking-new orange backpack. Both ears torn off. Drained white face pock-marked as if by boils. Or nails. By nails, then. Claws. I looked away from the bulging eyes and the open black mouth of the mauled man to the hunter who must have fired the shots, who was squatted beside the stranger, hot rifle across his knees.

Opposite us, splashes of blood on leaf-litter led into the forest. Scarlet patches on brown, bright as flags. “Bear,” said the hunter. “A young sow I’d say.”

His boot tapped a silver box near the stranger’s hand. “Look. Making a video movie, he was. Sending it out.”

“Why? Damn fool reporter, maybe?” The stranger’s moaning was making me dizzy-sick, and where was this wounded she-bear?

“Or worse.” The hunter squinted up at the early April sky, where a flying black bug was growing bigger. We felt the gut-stirring vibrations of the MediVac.

*

Back at the house, I told the kids: “Everyone stays indoors. Don’t you stick even a fingernail outside.”

“But why, Ma?”

To scare them serious, I told the truth as far as I knew. “Bears are about. They’re moving.” Then, for comfort, I built up the fire so sparks shot through the chimney like it was the Fourth of July. Boy, who I’m starting to think is simple-minded as a saint, clapped his hands at each burst.

That night I couldn’t sleep for being haunted by the man without ears, his pasty city face punched full of holes like a clay pigeon.

Girl couldn’t sleep either. “I can’t catch my breath,” she panted. I shushed her and gave in; we went out just far enough to sit on the entry step. I leaned against the door with her on my lap like a big straight-legged doll. A clear cold night, a gazillion stars stacked up behind each other like Heaven could hardly hold them all. And if you looked hard enough, winking and blinking like they had something urgent to say. Though maybe not to us, who knows? “Look,” I said. “There’s the Big Dipper.”

“That’s baby talk,” said Girl. “It’s Ursa Major.”

I laughed at miss know-it-all, and she laughed too to keep me company. You have to love school.

*

Two days later a visitor dressed in a badly fitting suit jacket knocked at our door. A lawyer? We hadn’t had a social worker bother us in years. A politician? A preacher? I prayed neither.

I stepped back to let him in.

He leaned on our table, all business. “You’ll want to fill out this paper, Ma’am. It’s to claim your rights.” He showed me where to put Xs. “To document how terrorized you are. By those bears. Dangerous predators. Breeding out of control. Since the attack, you have to pay for a taxi-cab just to go buy your groceries, isn’t that so?” I pictured a flatland taxi mired in these steep rutted roads, beeping out SOS. And grocery store? Here we barter, homespun and meat and preserves for stuff like sugar, and penicillin, and knives, “liberated” from stores far away in the flatlands. I laughed to show that I appreciated his clumsy attempt at humor.

When I saw he wasn’t joking, I reached for the paper. To show him I could read.

Was I afraid of the bears? I listened in on my fear center the way you’d take a pulse. “No more than normal,” I concluded, pushing the paper back. He said I’d be shooting myself in the foot if I refused to apply for my share of the Border Zone Defense Fund. “Every other household here in the Long Hills is signing on!”

So one by one I checked the boxes. Watched him multiply each box by a factor and divide by the total number. He said my indemnity would amount to $905.59. “As close as I can push it to an even one K, Mrs...”

I shook my head hard. That crazy kind of money? Was he some kind of maniac? How to get rid of him quick, before the kids came home?

He added, “Per month, you understand.”

My heart rocked between my ribs.

“Call me Gideon,” he said.

*

Mr. Gideon drove us to the Public Affairs Station, three hills away. It’s an outpost of the County Ag Extension. Green cement blocks, and inside the eye-stinging reek of toilet disinfectant. A place where pot-bellied ex-cops eternally infatuated with guns and uniforms can play at being rangers while still pulling their pensions. I was surprised the Extension was open. Generally they lock up tight in the cold months when local people might actually need some help.

The officer in charge had a stack of more papers waiting for me. “Sign here, Mom.”

MOM? I shot him a look. Mr. Gideon was off near a window, trying to get reception on his phone. You try not to laugh at them, laughing at strangers is rude, but I could’ve advised him to give up. Anyone there could’ve told him.

“And here too. One more weensy little Jane Hancock.” My scratched signature looked totally different each time. “You’re stressed, you’re in a panic—right, Mom? How you people can complain the government has forgotten you out here, when we’re risking our own—”

“No one asked for you. We don’t give a flying f—”

“Well here’s proof the government cares about your situation. Sign here, where it says you don’t dare let your kids take the school bus. Right? Because of the homophageous bears. Even the kids need taxis! You folks need assistance!”

This time I didn’t know whether to laugh or run. Or to tell the truth, which is: I love putting my kids on that yellow school bus. Same one I grew up riding. Dented steel sides painted the color of kindergarten happiness, the bus even longer and skinnier than our house, belching black farts, revving off into the future just before sunrise. With me, the phys ed coach, sometimes jumping on behind them. And what was this leg-pulling about taxis? Maybe Panzers could handle these mud-rutted roads.

I wanted to ask about the pasty-faced man. Had he made it, was he alive? If so, where? Who was he, what had brought him out of season to the long hills? Had he frightened the she-bear, crept up on her too close? Or done something worse... I wanted to know his name. “Say, that fellow who got his face mauled—”

“He’s all taken care of,” said Mr. Gideon. An officer gave one of those significant choking coughs.

“What was it brought him here, this time of year?”

My officer leafed through the papers before answering. “Surveying. That’s what he...does. He surveys.”

I nodded. Survey. Surveillance. Spying then. On whom and why? But truth was, I cared more about the she-bear. Was she alive still? Hurt bad, or not? Was she pregnant, or did she already have little ones who’d been watching, hidden in the bushes? Bears tend to birth twins, or triplets.

I wondered: Do bears seek revenge? Band together, like vigilantes? Probably not. They are loners, and vulnerable because of that, like us. I probed my fears again, the dark corners of my imagination. I was wary of the bears as always, but no more now than before.

“Last page,” said Mr. Gideon. I had him pegged for a lawyer by now. Or a government agent. Or both.

On the last page I signed that I had testified freely without coercion. Nine hundred and change, per month, does that count as coercion? More money than I could dream of how to spend. Although, once you start making a list...

*

When all my papers were signed and stacked in a trunk with the others—were there that many people still living in the long hills?—and the trunk stashed in back of his top-down Jeep, Mr. Gideon drove me back home.

At first I was enjoying the ride, whooping with the bumps and slams and high on the idea of having all that money. But the closer we got to home the lower I felt. Was my sworn statement true? Near enough? Is there a compromise called “near enough”? How many pages had I initialed without reading? What did I swear to? And why was my signature on anything worth a single penny to anyone at all?

But what did it matter?

A person can lie when lying’s justified—like, say, figuring what to tell her kids, in case they notice telltale signs of fresh money around the home.

I kept trying to comfort myself with the money.

He pulled up in front of the cabin. He cupped his pillowy hand around the back of my skull. “You did a fine job in there, Mom. You won’t be sorry.” He poked his bristly nose in my ear. “Welcome to the party. Now, you going to invite me in again?”

“Get your dirty mitts off, mister. There’s no party. My kids are inside.” Immediately I wished I hadn’t told him that. I pictured my three babies peering at us from behind the flimsy protection of a winter-dirty window.

I braced both hands and vaulted out of the Jeep.

He wiped frantically at his cheek to get my spit off. “You filthy, illiterate, no-name, fucking outlander!”

“You fucking ignorant pussy-livered flatlander!”

He opened his driver’s side door. Walked toward me in his mud-caked thin loafers with a wired-on smile. Jabbing his finger toward me. “Your first check should get here in a week. You owe me, mamacita. Bigly.”

 She came roaring out of nowhere. Barreling between us. Her shaggy dreads streaming. Brown bears can clock thirty miles per hour. A rank hurricane of greasy hair, mud, sour milk and caked blood. Blinded, I stumbled backward, fighting to stay on my feet. Mr. Gideon’s scream came high and undulating, like a red-tail crying on the wing.

I wiped my eyes. She had vanished. Mr. Gideon was moaning like his video-packing predecessor. Careful not to look too closely at him I reached into the Jeep for his cell-phone, which was not much different from the old kind I remembered. I punched in 9-1-1. Here high on the ridge, turns out, there’s pretty good reception.

I dragged the trunk of papers inside. Locked the doors and windows. My kids were pawing at me to pick them up. I hugged and rubbed and soothed them so we could listen for the ba-dum ba-dum pulsing engines of the MediVac.

It landed right out front, shaking our walls. Somebody banged and rattled on the door. We stayed crouched under the windowsill. Somebody cursed a stream and went away. Finally we heard the copter lift off. And then the Jeep start up and rattle downhill. After an hour I lit the fire. The kids took turns feeding it all that fancy paper, dancing and laughing.

*

It’s three days since I found the surveyor mauled. My nails have grown too hard to cut. In our tarnished mirror all I can make out of me is shadowy features, bright eyes and my hair that’s grown out, thick cocoa-colored locks twisting down my neck and shoulders.

Indoors, Girl is right, it has become harder to breathe. Though I don’t stray too far from the cabin, in order to keep watch on them, I’m not nervous about going into the woods alone for a short while. Like I’m doing right now, in need of air. I walk with long strides, pushing away notions of what a person could do, might have done, with that kind of money. Even leave the long hills. Murmuring to myself, arguing, telling myself it was some kind of scam anyhow, a bait-and-switch, and soon enough I’ll learn the real reason for the surveyor’s solo hike, and Mr. Gideon’s visit. We all will, soon enough.

My eyes throb from automatically scanning the trees for a glimpse of her golden coat. I sniff the air for her complicated, comforting smell. Thirsty, I pull off my boots and set them on a stone and splay my bare feet in the cool leaf litter—like this—before starting down the steepening spiral to a round, dark pool.

~~~

Kai Maristed is a novelist, playwright and translator living in Paris and the U.S. She studied political science and journalism at the University of Munich and holds a M.S. from MIT. Her books include Broken Ground, a novel of Berlin praised by John Coetzee, and the story collection Belong to Me, starred by Publishers Weekly. Stories and essays have been broadcast by Germany’s WDR, and appeared in the Kenyon Review, Zoetrope, The American Scholar, Southwest Review, StoryQuarterly, AGNI, The Michigan Quarterly, Iowa Review and Ploughshares (forthcoming).

The Offices of Jude

Every morning the reception area smells of window cleaner and cinnamon. My boss likes to wash the front windows while the cinnamon rolls are baking.

“A good roll will make anyone open up,” he says. Jude believes in counseling with baked goods but he looks like a long-distance trucker, a man with thinning gray hair that's covered by a sweat-stained ball cap. His jeans fray at the bottom, there are cookie crumbs in his beard, and he usually holds a mug of coffee with two creams and two sugars. He looks more like great-uncle Bob than a psychologist, but maybe that's why his calendar is always full.

Jude brings me a roll while I check the phone messages from last night. Cancellations. Requests for callbacks to schedule an appointment. Inquiries about whether we're accepting new patients. Jude loves people but hates the rote organizational duties of managing records, insurance paperwork, and the constant flux of our calendar. My job is to keep those gears oiled.

“You have the patience of a saint,” he says.

“You're a bad influence,” I say, tearing a piece off the roll.

“And you're a slip of a thing,” he says. “Eat a few extra calories. You have nothing to worry about.”

I have everything to worry about but I don't contradict, just check my cell phone to make sure my husband didn't call. He hasn't needed to while I'm at work, but I fret over the inevitable someday.

*

The first bleed was two years ago. July 5. Thad stumbled into the kitchen, red drops raining from his palms onto the mauve floor tile. He ran to the sink and dripped there while I turned on the faucet. I didn't have time to gasp, just wondered if he'd touched an unexploded blasting cap from last night, but I hadn't heard so much as a pop.

“Dammit.” He gritted his teeth. “I was catching lightning bugs with the girls and holding an empty peanut butter jar, then I got these shooting pains.”

I rummaged in a drawer for an old towel to staunch the blood, then ran next door to the neighbors and said we had to go to the ER, so could they watch the girls for an hour please, thank you.

At the hospital we couldn't get answers, the doctors only told us the wounds weren't holes exactly, just hemorrhaging blood vessels. They didn't know what else to say.

“Has your husband been suicidal in the past?” one asked while another doctor examined Thad's palms to determine if he required stitches or a skin graft.

I shook my head. No thoughts of suicide or history of depression, as far as I knew. It made no sense. The bleeding also didn't make sense, since it was profuse for twenty minutes then stopped. Thad was left with two quarter-sized wounds. The doctors peered at each other, applied gauze and beige bandages to each palm, sent us home with a prescription for extra-strength painkillers, and said to call if it happened again.

“There are many medical conditions that can't be explained,” one said to me, “but that's the nature of the body.”

“That was unhelpful,” Thad muttered when we got back to the car.

“What were you doing?” I asked again.

He sighed. “Catching fireflies. Then I felt this awful pain in my hands. That was worse than the blood. But it's mostly gone.”

I called the neighbors when we got home. They said the girls were watching a movie with their kids, and they'd be finished in a half hour.

“It doesn't hurt anymore,” Thad said slowly, experimentally, like it might start again if he spoke too loudly. When he turned to me his eyes were so large, so scared, I wanted to hug him hard enough to squeeze whatever had caused the ache out of his body. The bandages weren't apparent unless you looked at his hands closely, but he was exhausted.

Thad was lounging on the living room couch when the girls came home.

Brittany, who was in third grade and perceptive, marched over to her father and gave him a hug. “Are you going to be okay?” she asked, peering at him and me with a serious expression.

“Yes, I'm fine,” said Thad, which was true enough at the moment.

Alexia, who'd just finished first grade, wanted a hug, and to show him the jar of fireflies she'd collected, then take them to the backyard and release them again. Last summer when she hadn't put air holes in the top, the fireflies died, and she cried all the next day. She was a sensitive kid who shifted emotions easily, from joy to fear and back again. She'd probably cried if/when the neighbors said her daddy went to the hospital, but now she was all sunshine and wanted a sundae. We had ice cream that night, needed it after surviving the evening, fingers crossed behind our backs that it wouldn't happen again.

*

The spontaneous bleeding has occurred at least thirty-five more times in the past two years—I might have forgotten to mark it down once, but usually I note it with a red X on the calendar. We've stopped going to the hospital. Thad has stopped taking anticoagulants and pain relievers because “they worked for shit.” We've stopped looking for new specialists because they send us to other specialists who are equally confused, and aren't covered by insurance.

I've called Thad's insurance company three times to protest a decision not to pay some bill. Sometimes being a thorn in the corporate side gets them to cough up a little extra, but after the last two specialists muttered to me that they thought this might be self-wounding, I said to hell with them. We're trudging through well enough without a cure. Thad's hands ache for a day after a bleed, then he's okay. When he feels the first twinge of pain, he knows he has a minute to stop what he's doing and wrap his hands in gauze or hold them over the sink. I've researched other instances of spontaneous stigmata, though Thad shakes his head at me since we're not Catholic or particularly religious. He says it's a medical condition, which I debate.

“What does it matter?” he says. “I'm bleeding and they can't do shit for me.”

“It does matter,” I say, because I'm asking the usual miracle-related questions: Is this a portent of something? Does it happen when someone we know is about to die or be injured? Is there a pattern to the dates? Is it a kind of calling? Will he need to leave home and go on a mission or do something else equally important? I want to think the pain and annoyance is good for something, or has a larger meaning. Thad is less romantic.

“Irritating things aren't always redeeming,” he says.

I say they should be.

“I don't want to be a saint,” he says.

“I didn't say you were,” I say.

I don't know how it works, but sainthood seems to be a job that chooses you, not a career you select without divine intervention. Thad says he doesn't feel holier now than he did two years ago when the messy business started.

“I'm not Jude,” he says. “I wouldn't have the patience to listen to people talk about their problems and then heal them or something.”

“I'm sure saints do other stuff, too,” I say.

“I thought you said I wasn't a saint,” he says.

“Why not keep your options open?” I say.

“God, I need a beer,” he sighs.

We've explained to Brittany and Alexia that things have been very busy at work, and there may be times when Daddy needs to be left alone for a while, so don't open the bedroom door if he's closed it. Thad says it doesn't hurt as much as it used to, but the wounds still exhaust him and he gets cranky.

“There may be times I don't want you to see me, either,” he says.

“Tough,” I say, remembering the for-better-or-worse part of our vows, though this is easy to say when he's in remission.

“It's like my body is a time bomb,” he says, looking at his palms.

I just hug him.

*

Thad brings me lunch almost every day, usually sandwiches from the deli. He says it's good to get out of the “office,” meaning the spot at the kitchen table where he works at his laptop. His company designs online platforms for libraries and archives, and after Thad was diagnosed with idiopathic hemorrhaging, he arranged to work from home, call in for phone conferences, and drive in for occasional meetings.

“I've been getting more done without the office buzz,” he says. “And I don't have to deal with weak coffee.” Thad squeezes my hand and strains a smile. All his smiles are strained anymore. I've explained things to Jude, who says we can talk after work if I'd like, maybe even do some family counseling. 

“Thank you,” I say. I haven't taken him up on it yet, continuing to theorize and look for the silver lining. I know it has to be there if I squint hard enough. Maybe his blood has miraculous properties (though I don't use that word around Thad), and could be used to heal people. Thad thinks I'm gross for collecting it in little bottles with an eyedropper to do highly unscientific tests.

“I don't think that's safe,” he said the last time he was bleeding and I held a measuring cup under his hands to collect a sample. But he didn't stop me.

I add one drop of his blood to the dead bird I find in the backyard. I put a drop on my cheek after I have dental surgery. I add a few drops to the potting soil around my spider plant because it has mites and I think it's dying.

The bird doesn't come back to life. My mouth still hurts. The spider plant has to be thrown away before the mites spread to other plants. So much for magic. Thad rolls his eyes when I wonder aloud if sainthood could be a reason to file for disability benefits.

“I can still work,” he says, “and I don't want special treatment. We're getting along fine.”

He's right for the most part, and I'm not worried about him dying, but I don't know if he'll have to carry gauze bandages for the rest of his life, or if there's a medical as opposed to a miraculous explanation and this could be cured.

At work I distract myself with the problems of others, which isn't difficult since Jude has at least two group therapy meetings every day. Our clients don't usually talk with me about their problems, but I hear snippets of stories: trying to cope with a cancer diagnosis, working through depression, deciding whether or not to file for divorce, dealing with kids getting bullied at school, wondering if they're getting bullied at work and what does that look like when everyone wears suits and ties?

I pretend not to listen, just mind the phone and my files and offer sweet rolls or cookies or brownies or banana bread from the plate on the coffee table in front of the couch. I check my box of tissues to see if I should grab another from the supply closet. I ache for our clients and myself, and nod without moving my head.

I too wish I could be blank and void of emotion for an hour every day.

I too know how every hour, every minute, is elongated when you're confronting a crisis.

I too understand how it feels to slingshot from wanting to scream my anxiety to feeling sorry for myself to being viciously, searingly angry at why this happened to us and not some other faceless family.

Yet when I turn on the radio I listen to all the ways the world is in pain, and recall how my family is lucky. I wish my husband were blessed with something divine because we need miracles for people who have no jobs or can't feed their kids or are lost in someone else's war zone. I eat another cinnamon roll, feeling guilty and helpless.

*

It happened at recess, the school nurse says. Alexia must have fallen and skinned her hands on the cement. She was bleeding for a while and is feeling better now, but the nurse calls me to explain her accident and say I'll want to put some disinfectant on the wounds later.

“I was swinging on the monkey bars, then my hands started hurting,” Alexia says when Thad brings her and Brittany to Jude's office after school. “Then I slipped off and saw all this blood and thought I was dying and screamed.” She shudders. “It was really gross until it stopped, and it still hurts a little but not as much.”

My husband and I glance at each other. Alexia will need to understand that she might bleed and ache again but we can't do anything about it, just bandages. It sounds like the talk my mother gave me when I started my period, but then all other girls were going through the same thing, and there was a biological explanation.

Thad takes Alexia to his doctor who wrinkles his nose at another case of idiopathic hemorrhaging and asks if we don't want to see another specialist.

“I said we'd think about it,” says my husband, but we have thought about it. None of the eight specialists or fifteen-odd tests were helpful. And who wants to to put their eight-year-old kid through that?

We take Alexia and Brittany out for ice cream, because the whole family needs to be holding drippy cones and sitting around a picnic table when we explain this is the same thing that's been happening to her dad. We don't know what it is, but he's had it for two years and he's not dying.

“So that's why you go into the bedroom?” Alexia says.

Thad nods.

“And it hurts you this much?” she asks. He nods again.

“We can go to other doctors if you want,” he says. “They might say something different to you.” He smiles hopefully. We don't want to be bad parents. We don't want to scare our girls.

“Why do I have this and Brittany doesn't?” says Alexia.

“Why do you have green eyes and Brittany has brown ones?” I say, which is an awful analogy because it takes pain out of the equation. Is this a medical condition or a hereditary miracle? If my husband and daughter start hallucinating demons and angels, will that be a manifestation of the divine or schizophrenia? Four hundred years ago everyone would have called it the former, but now it's the latter. This is the wrong time and place for such a condition. If you walk around bleeding spontaneously and talking to angels, people will stick you in an institution, not make a pilgrimage to ask you for prayers and build churches in your honor.

No, wait, a few might. I can't ignore how the battle between science and religion has never abated. This is the light at the end of the tunnel. No, this is your brain dying.

What if it's both?

We send Alexia back to school with a note from her father's doctor. She knows to go to the nurse if her hands ache. She keeps gauze in her backpack. I tell myself this isn't that much different than a diabetic kid doing daily finger sticks and carrying around a piece of candy for when they start feeling off. You have to be prepared. But I explain to Alexia that she shouldn't mention the condition to her friends. They might tell their parents, and who knows what stories could blossom.

She nods. “I'll be okay, Mom. I wasn't going to tell anyone.” She wrinkles her nose. “It's too gross.”

“I know,” I say, and cross my fingers. She's still a sensitive kid, but a sensible one. And we don't have to figure out everything right now. She's not visibly freaking out. But not all kids or parents would be that calm. The disastrous play dates seem inevitable. At some point she'll startle a friend or the friend's mother when she tries to hide in the bathroom until the blood slows. Will she not be invited back over? Will friends turn away from her, or nod after a reasonable explanation? Will she ever cry because the pain is so bad? We'll figure out a standard script she can repeat to explain this isn't contagious. We'll memorize that complicated medical term to make people shut up.

“Bad morning?” says Jude when I walk into the office.

I tell him about my daughter. He nods like he isn't surprised, says we can talk after work if I like, and repeats his offer of family counseling.

“I could also just see your daughters,” he says. “This a lot for kids to handle, and sometimes it's helpful to talk with someone who's not your mom or dad.”

I say I'll think about it. Today our clients are young parents like me who have coalesced into support groups. One for people who have lost kids or spouses, another meets late and is for people who are dealing with cancer in their families. They'd envy me if I told them my husband and daughter were alive and healthy-ish. It's not the end of the world. It's a reconfiguring. But it hurts.

Thad brings sandwiches and his laptop at lunch, and says he needed a change of office scenery since the kitchen is a bit...boring. I've noticed his waves of melancholia, the high and low moods, and wonder if I should read more about the lives of saints. Did they feel crappy between miracles?

“I'd been having good days lately,” he says, folding his arms. “Now this.”

He opens different spreadsheets and web pages, switches from one to another without seeming to read them.

“You can take a day to relax,” I say.

“I don't want to.” His voice cracks. Thad rests his laptop on the couch and wobbles down the hall, probably to the bathroom. I hear a door close. He emerges twenty minutes later, reclaims his laptop, starts typing. So many silent episodes of bravery as he confronts the dragons in his hands, but that is always the way of illness and disease. It is the everyday bravery of living with our bodies, the constant negotiations, the shifting truces.

Jude made him take a loaf of banana bread home to wait for the girls to get back from school. The support group for parents dealing with cancer lets out just after six-thirty, when I'm packing up to go home. A long day, but sometimes it’s soothing to bury myself in paperwork and not think about anything else. My files of patient records can be tidy, if nothing else. Jude comes out as I'm shutting off my computer, and asks if I want to talk.

I shake my head and turn to tell him no, not tonight, I'm tired and want to go home, but when I open my mouth a sob comes out. My shoulders shudder, and the grief of two years that I have tried to contain, through thoughts of miracles and purpose, is released. Jude hugs me gently. I cry. And cry. And cry.

“But nobody's died,” I say, choking out the words as I break free to grab a tissue from my desk. I don't want to get snot on his shirt. “I shouldn't be doing this.”

“It's okay, you're grieving,” he says, and I know he's right. I'm mourning our life two years ago, two days ago, when we didn't realize we had it easy. Now we're trying to reassemble the pieces of ourselves and see how they will fit together in a new shape. We will find it, we will adjust to it, we will shift again. Everyone who walks into this office is doing that in one way or another, realizing how quickly small things can turn into luxuries, like the tiny assumptions I make every day: I will get home tonight. My kids will return from school. We'll have something for dinner. Things will be okay. And boring.

Jude hugs me again and I let myself sink into that warmth for a moment, the comfort of another person who can see me cry, before I return to my husband and kids and half-eaten loaf of banana bread, before I ask the usual questions about school and homework, before Brittany begins her nightly crusade to extend her bedtime since she's ten years old and that should count for something. We will bask in the knowledge that, for the moment, everything feels normal. Blessed is the mundane.

~~~

Teresa Milbrodt grew up in Bowling Green, Ohio, which is not a bad place to be even though it is a former swamp. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Bowling Green State University, and her PhD in English from the University of Missouri. Milbrodt is the author of two short story collections, Bearded Women: Stories, and Work Opportunities: Stories; a novel, The Patron Saint of Unattractive People; and a flash fiction collection, Larissa Takes Flight: Stories. She believes in coffee, long walks with her MP3 player, face-to-face conversation, and writing the occasional haiku. Read more of her work at: http://teresamilbrodt.com/homepage/

The Death Cart

My mother erected the sticks on the mesa when the village was only a few dozen adobe houses scattered across the hillside. That was before roads or cars came here, before the power company put in towers across the tops of the arroyos and brought in light and misery. She walked down the path to La Cienega every morning, six miles, where she cleaned houses for Anglos and, in summer, sold braided rattlesnakes, baskets, and whips she made for tourists from places she’d never heard of. She returned on the same trail in the evenings, sometimes in the dark, through piñons and junipers and under the sandstone cliff, climbing six zigzags to gain altitude. She arranged the sticks on the top of the mesa to resemble a raven against the sky so she could tell from a distance how far she’d come and how far she had still to go.

The road was built only twenty-five years ago, when I was eleven and wore dresses and braids. It was sixteen miles longer than the path because it contoured the canyons and followed a gentler drainage. Coming uphill was a left turn to Los Huerfanos and a right turn to our village. The road brought us into the world of truck deliveries, government inspections, and curiosity-seekers. Should I complain about progress? On that road was how Esteban arrived one Thursday in May, while the streams were high with snowmelt and the blossoms of the fruit trees were open to the sun.

He’d graduated from the university with a degree in ethnology and, for his PhD, had secured a grant to spend several months in different villages to research us, the people abandoned when, in the 1700s, the Spanish retreated to Mexico. He’d asked in the plaza, by the fountain that no longer had water, where the city offices were. Lupe Ramírez laughed because he was drunk, and we had no city offices. Lupe directed Esteban to me.

I was alone then in my parents’ house. My sister had moved to Albuquerque and worked as a maid at the Super 8, and my life was without a plan. I transcribed medical records online for a clinic in Santa Fe—a woman’s struggle with fibromyalgia, a man whose broken foot gave him sympathetic pain in the other foot, a woman who slept three hours a night. I took care of Luisa Olmedo next door, who was in her seventies and had taken care of my mother when my mother was a girl, and Antonio Vega, up the hill, who was eighty-three, and the confused child, Lavida, whose mother one day had forgotten to come home. Evil was a shadow without a body, and the old and the sick and the helpless were touched by the shadow.

Esteban was twenty-seven and muy guapo—long black hair, a soft mouth, eyes that asked questions without words. “I am here to tell a story the world should know,” he said, “but I need the help of the local people who know more than I do.”

“But there is no story here,” I said. “We are poor people. A story must look to the future.”

“We all have a future,” he said.

“We have only one child in the village,” I said, “and she thinks every minute the world is about to end. I am the next youngest, thirty-four, and I’m left to take care of the old ones.”

“History is where the story begins,” Esteban said. “I want to talk to anyone who remembers.”

“I can give you names,” I said, “but I cannot tell you who will know anything.”

Esteban smiled. “Even you know more than I do.” 

*

Part of the evidence of history is what Esteban called “artifacts”—what people made and used and left behind. I had a few baskets my mother made, worn now from use, and I showed him the snakes and whips, which were in a cardboard box in the corner of my mother’s room. The flaps of the box were folded in on one another, and when I pulled them apart, we looked at a writhing mass of black and yellow, with a few bits of red.

“We had to eat,” I said. “She made these for money.”

I dumped the contents on the wood floor, and the shapes became more definite—fibrous yucca whips with handles, and red and yellow snakes. One whip was weathered and frayed and more tightly braided, and Esteban picked this one out from the others.

“That was the sample my mother worked from,” I said.

Esteban examined it more closely. “It has blood on it,” he said. “Who used it, do you think? Did she make it? How did she get it back?”

“I don’t know.”

Esteban touched the whip to his cheek. “You can see how easily stories can be lost.”

*

In the spring of 1542, Diego Roma Alvarez led one hundred and sixteen men and women, along with more than a hundred other hirelings, north along the Rio Grande. Indians were conscripted, too, to care for horses and carry provisions. Scouts, sent ahead to reconnoiter the terrain, found a wide and gentle river valley inhabited by agricultural people. To the west were low hills and dry plains, and to the east foothills and higher mountains, which harbored game and provided clean spring water. At intervals, Alvarez established encampments charged with procuring game and growing corn and beans so that, when the weather changed, the explorers could fall back to these places for refuge.

Farther north, Alvarez discovered another country—sandstone canyons with rivers flooded red with snowmelt. The natives in these places were not pueblo dwellers but nomadic warriors. Deterred by the Indians’ resistance, Alvarez pushed west across the dry canyons and mesas. Many of his men died from thirst, infected wounds, and exhaustion. When the band turned back, they were too far west and missed their encampments along the foothills.

This was what Esteban told me that first week he camped in the plaza in his VW van. Many of the towns abandoned by Alvarez died out or coalesced with nearby communities. A few—Las Umbras, Santa Gertrudis, Los Huerfanos—persisted into the present, villages like mine. We were unaffected by missions in Santa Fe and Taos and ignored by the settlers from the East. For three hundred years, we were neglected in the backwaters of what we thought of as another country.

*

Those first weeks, Esteban was there and not there. He drove to other towns, spent several nights away, but returned. Though the fountain didn’t work, we had a spigot of fresh water, so we connected there. I invited Esteban to sit on my terrace of rough stones, and, looking west toward the Jemez Mountains, we drank the wine Esteban supplied. The layers of hills and peaks were shades of blue and gray, and Esteban encouraged me to talk about what I knew—my mother and father, the old people still alive, the events I remembered from childhood. I was flattered, but also eager to review my own life, how I had come to the impasse I found myself trapped in. I know my voice was simple and soft in the dusklight, my telling, his asking, and the sunset far off cascaded pinks and oranges, the white clouds higher up brilliant in the sunlight we couldn’t otherwise see.

But of course it turned darker. Lights came up from the valley below us, from La Cienega, Chimayo, and Española, and Los Alamos on the opposite hill. How easy it was, after the wine, and a simple dinner Esteban provided, to continue our conversation in my bed in a different language.

*

Our village was the most remote, the last to get conveniences, such as they were, and the only one with a morada. The morada was at the edge of the arroyo and had been boarded up for almost thirty years. It was a long, low, windowless adobe, with a tin chimney sticking up from a flat roof. Everyone in the village knew what had gone on there. We heard sounds of anguish and pain, men vanished from their houses and didn’t return for days.

One afternoon, when I was eight or nine, I was sent into the arroyo to gather piñon nuts. It was a year of little rain, so I wandered farther than usual from the path and stayed out longer than my mother expected. When the sky raged orange, I closed my sack and hiked back among the darkening trees and shadowy boulders. I came up the hill behind the morada and heard low voices and men chanting. I edged closer and hid behind a rock. The men were wailing like coyotes, and now and then someone screamed. Men with torches danced in a circle around a half-naked man and lashed him with whips. The man in the middle of the circle was my father.

He staggered and whirled around and was struck on the legs and shoulders and arms until the blood made dark marks on his body. Once, he fell to his knees and cried out, and even then he received more blows. After a few minutes—I was too frightened to move—my father was hoisted into a wooden cart along with what looked like a child-sized bird, a raven. Two yoked burros pulled the cart, and the other men followed up through the junipers, chanting and singing, and snapping their whips.

Esteban, naturally, wanted to visit the morada, and I took him to see El Hermano, who worked maintenance at Los Alamos. We found him one evening on his stoop, gaunt and tired, drinking a Budweiser. “La morada es cerrada,” El Hermano said. “There’s nothing to see.”

“Then there can be no harm in looking,” Esteban said. “I’m doing research for my thesis. Is it not a good thing for the living to know about the past?”

“Would you wish to release the spirits of the dead?”

“The dead are at peace,” Esteban said. “I know of the rites, but I need evidence.”

“It’s better to leave the dead alone,” El Hermano said.

The next day, I persuaded Esteban to hike with me into the arroyo to gather piñon nuts for the old people of the village. It was a morning with a few lazy clouds, and we took the grown-over path my mother had used on her way to and from La Cienega. I brought a cloth bag, and for an hour or so I felt like a girl again, assigned a chore. The farther we descended, the more nuts we found, and the scent of piñon and juniper was heavy on the breeze.

The chore was sweeter because Esteban was there. He pinched his mouth with his teeth in concentration, aware of the moment but not of history, though, at the same time, he was at the university in another life. We wandered off the trail, and once a raven flew overhead, passing from sky to cloud and back to blue.

I pointed out to Esteban the sticks my mother had put on the mesa. “She arranged them up there. You can see them from here.”

“They look like dead trees,” he said. “Do you want to go up there?”

“It’s too steep.”

“If she got up there, so can we.”

Esteban led the way through the scattered boulders at the base of the cliff, and we worked up a fissure, now and then using a tree in a crevice to pull ourselves ahead. Only one place was dangerous, near the top where the wall was nearly vertical. I went first and picked handholds and footholds. Esteban was below, ready to catch me if I fell.

But I didn’t fall. He climbed up easily, and after that we found animal trails among the junipers and rocks. We ascended through a slot between two outcroppings of sandstone and came out on the top of the mesa into stunted piñons, sage, and a wide sky.

At the edge of the mesa we found the so-called raven my mother had made, but they were three dead piñons close together in a rough line, and a fourth tree that had been shattered by lightning and had burned.

*

That evening Esteban typed at his laptop, and when we went to bed, he announced he was leaving to spend time in other villages. “I have to see how weaving and pottery evolved in other encampments,” he said. “These places were isolated from one another.”

“You didn’t tell me you had an agenda.”

“You didn’t ask.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“It depends on what I find.”

“But you’ll come back?”

“Of course I’ll come back,” he said. “I have more to discover here.”

And so I resumed my ordinary days. I did two food runs to La Cienega, spent hours transcribing records, and sat evenings with Lupe Ramírez, watching the shadows sweep over the arroyo.

I slept alone, as I always had.

But I noticed a change: I was more curious. Esteban had challenged me to ask questions. To let questions go unanswered, to not ask—or to allow time to pass so as to make the answers meaningless—this was what I had allowed to happen. I hadn’t asked where my father went, and now he was unknowable. I hadn’t asked my mother about the sticks on the mesa. I’d merely believed what she said. Questions came to me now, one after another—whose blood was on the whip? Where had my father gone, riding with the raven in the cart? What had my mother felt when he disappeared?

“She was taught to be silent,” Luisa said when I asked her. “We all were. What could we have done? She walked to La Cienega every day and walked home.”

“But there has to be more.”

“She was so tired. You should talk to El Viejo. He worked at the foundry then, and he often walked with her.”

“I’d forgotten that.”

“He quit the foundry, of course,” Luisa said. “He was the dark one, always troubled.”

*

Esteban called several times and told me how much he’d learned. “I met Señora Gallegos,” he said. “She was the best weaver. And Maria Ochoa made the most beautiful pots. These villages traded more with Chimayo and Española, so more is known of them. The weavings contain dyes from lichens, and others are woven from grass instead of yucca. I spoke to a biologist, who said, even though the towns are only forty miles apart, the snakes here are different.”

“I’ve seen timber rattlers,” I said, “and diamondbacks.”

“And the pots—the women got clay from the red hills. Each woman had her own style.”

“I’m glad for you,” I said. “You’ve made progress.”

“Weavings and pottery had little to do with the rituals in the mountains. They’re what the women did as consolation.”

“Is that what you think?”

“What I need to know—have you been in the high mountains?”

“My father took me once to a lake high up in a cirque, but I don’t remember any snakes.”

“People died,” Esteban said. “It would help if you remembered more.”

*

El Viejo lived in an adobe hovel on the way to the morada. Everyone called him El Viejo, but he was younger than Luisa Olmedo and Lupe Ramírez, younger than my mother. But more than the others, he lived in the past. His house had no electricity or running water and only a barrel stove for heat. He had no wife or dog. He was grizzled and foul-smelling and silent.

The townspeople left a few clothes at his doorstep, along with vegetables and canned goods, but he never acknowledged our gifts or thanked anyone. Mostly he gathered mushrooms and edible plants from the forest, trapped rabbits and squirrels, and picked berries. Occasionally we saw him gathering firewood in the arroyo or at the water spigot in the plaza. Every so often, we heard a rifle shot, and we knew El Viejo had shot a deer.

One cool morning, ten days after Esteban had left, I walked the half mile to El Viejo’s house. The sun angled through the trees, and ravens called in the air. A dirty blanket hung across his doorway, and the tin roof was bent and held down with rocks and tires. The adobe was frayed and needed plaster. El Viejo wasn’t there, but I had brought cookies for him and a book to read. I waited.

The morada was a few hundred yards farther, on a track no one in the village had occasion to use. Save for Lavida, who moaned and whooped instead of speaking, there were no children to explore and discover what was beyond the morada, and that was what I thought of then—what was beyond.

A little before eleven, as the day warmed up, El Viejo appeared at the edge of the clearing holding a dead rabbit by the ears. He was dressed in filthy jeans and a dark shirt and was breathing hard with the effort of climbing from the arroyo.

“Who are you?” he asked. He pulled aside the blanket over his door and tossed the rabbit into his hovel.

I had a glimpse of the outline of a chair on the dirt floor.

“Elena Marquez,” I said. “When I was a girl, you were in charge of the morada.”

He looked at me closely. “I don’t know you.”

“You prepared the carro del muerte,” I said. “I saw it once. My father was riding in it.”

El Viejo gave a brief nod.

“This cart is valuable to others,” I said. “Is it in the morada?”

El Viejo shrugged, as if the cart had disappeared into the air.

“It’s in the mountains?”

“No se,” El Viejo said.

“And my father?” I asked. “You remember him. Where did he go?”

El Viejo looked at the ground. Then he pulled back the blanket and went into the darkness in which he lived.

A few minutes later, he came out with a locked wooden box and gave it to me.

*

That evening, Esteban called again. He was in Las Umbras, fifteen miles to the south, but fifty by road. “I’m parked at the edge of a ravine,” he said. “It’s like your arroyo, but it has a stream in it. The moon is out.”

“The moon is here, too,” I said.

“The peaks have new snow.”

“Here, too.”

“I found photographs of the rituals. Photos were forbidden, but a few were taken anyway. It’s not as if this happened before the camera was invented.”

“Long enough ago to forget,” I said.

“The photos show a procession of men in rags holding torches,” Esteban said. “One man is carrying a cross.”

“When I was young—eleven or twelve—my father took me into the mountains.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. Today I talked to El Viejo. He’s the one who might remember.”

“And?”

“He gave me a pine box.”

“What’s in it?”

“I wanted to wait for you to open it.”

Esteban paused on the line. “I’ll be there tomorrow,” he said.

*

I knew Esteban was coming back because of the box, not because of me. He was beautiful, and other women must have allowed him to stay with them in other villages because we were taught to love beauty and intelligence. We hoped for more than we got. It was hard to fault Esteban, though. He was doing his work. I didn’t expect anything from him. He was younger than I was, from the city, and impermanent.

The next day Esteban was there early. I made coffee and showed him what El Viejo had given me. The box was old, and all Esteban needed was a hammer to pry off the hasp and the lock. He raised the lid. Inside were many whips, snakes worn and broken, and a raven sewn with black cloth and filled with straw.

“Usually, after the death, the raven was burned,” Esteban said. “Here is a new one.”

“Maybe it’s for the next time,” I said. “The one I remember was much bigger.”

“Should we trust what you remember?” Esteban asked. “You remembered your mother’s sticks as a raven. What else do you not know?”

“I know what my father told me,” I said. “Every seven years, one man was chosen to be punished by the others and to ride in the death cart with a raven beside him. The procession of men followed the cart into the mountains, where, above the trees, the man was burdened with a heavy cross. The chanting went on, the whips came down, the man dragged the cross higher and higher to a place beneath the cliffs. There the man was tied to the cross, the cross raised up and supported by a pile of stones. After some days, the raven carried away his soul.”

Esteban was quiet for a moment. “When did he tell you this?”

“When we went into the mountains.”

“And you think that is what happened to your father?”

“No. Late one night I heard his voice.”

“After you saw him in the death cart?”

“I called to my mother, and she said I was dreaming.”

“You don’t think so.”

“It was a long time ago.”

Esteban nodded. “What about the whips and the raven,” he said, “can I take them to study?”

“I can’t say no,” I said. “You need them to do your work.”

“Not this minute,” Esteban said. “Can we hike up into the mountains? Can we follow the path from the morada?”

“I haven’t been up there in a long time.”

“But you remember it. Is that a yes?”

*

At the morada we turned uphill and walked the path. It was rocky but wide enough for a cart to pass. At the top of a ridge, we came into a clearing, where the cart path ended. Years before, some of the trees at the edge of the clearing had been cut down with an axe. The trail continued on through the trees and, higher up, over stones and roots. The terrain was steeper and changed from piñon and juniper to ponderosa and aspen that were turning yellow. A stream ran past us that must have cascaded down to Los Huerfanos. Shortly after the stream, the trees fell away. We followed the path across a hillside of dying grass and paintbrush and lupine gone to seed.

By then, clouds were boiling up above the peaks, and thunder boomed in the distance. Esteban angled upward through a field of boulders, following what he guessed was a path. My father had taken me to the cirque ahead of us and to the left. I followed where Esteban led me. We came to a tarn I remembered seeing from higher up, but we found there no signs of human activity—no cross, no stones piled together, no death cart.

Lightning flashed behind the cirque, and rain swept across. We had no shelter, so we retreated the way we had come.

*

Esteban took the whips and the raven back to Albuquerque for closer scrutiny, and while he was away, on a clear morning, I went back up into the mountains to the place my father had taken me, a little higher than Esteban and I had gone, and in the shadow of the cirque. There, beside a pile of stones, I found the rough-hewn on the ground, lashed together with whips made of yucca. On the way down, I searched the clearing and in the brush that had grown up was the cart. It was weathered and its axles were rusted, but it was intact. It must have been the cart my father had ridden in, because, after that year, the ritual stopped.

Farther down, beyond the morada, at the edge of the village, I stopped at El Viejo’s hovel. He was sitting with a knife on a crude bench, carving what looked like a raven.

“Years ago I saw the death cart,” I said. “I was coming up from the arroyo with a sack of piñon nuts. The men were chanting and dancing, and my father was in the center of the circle.”

El Viejo paused in his carving and looked at me.

“I’ve been to the mountains,” I said. “I found the cross and the death cart.”

El Viejo examined the raven he was carving.

“I want you to tell me what you know,” I said.

 He set the piece of wood beside him on the bench and looked at me. His eyes were filmed with gray. “Pain is to be expected,” he said. “Pain must be endured for the reasons we know.”

“I do not know the reasons.”

“No one before ever refused the final burden.”

“Until my father.”

“He had come so far,” El Viejo said. “We didn’t want him to escape from us, but we let him go.”

“So I did hear his voice.”

“What could we do?” El Viejo said. “He didn’t believe.”

He picked up his piece of wood and resumed the carving.

*

I wake now before daybreak, having dreamed an uncanny power has entered my life. I fumble in the dark for my clothes and shuffle to the bathroom. In the mirror, there I am: gray streaks through my hair, the skin loosening around my mouth, my eyes tired. I wash my face and comb my hair and put on my maid’s uniform. In the kitchen, I turn on the coffee maker, pour cereal and milk, and eat looking out toward the arroyo. My mother and father are still present in this house, in my blood, and from the past I sense what I should call hope—what other word would describe my waking hours? I put on a windbreaker, for, at this hour in March, it’s cold outside. I pour the coffee into a thermal mug and stand for a minute longer at the window.

Memory is silent and often wrong. I wonder whether my car will start and get me to my sister’s and whether her car will start to get to the Super 8. Lupe Ramírez has died, but others need to be taken care of—Luisa Olmedo, the child-woman Lavida who will never grow up, and Diego Saenz, El Viejo, who can speak but never does.

Esteban finished his thesis and took a job as assistant professor of ethnology at the University of California at Santa Cruz. I read his thesis, and it was neither complete nor true, but history never is. There are too many stories.

Sunlight streaks into the arroyo, over piñons and junipers and scratches of snow. A raven crosses between darkness and light, though what I see is the space it’s abandoned. I sip the coffee, turn from the window, and leave the house unlocked because I live in the world as it is now.

~~~

Kent Nelson has identified 767 species of North American birds and has traveled to the most remote areas of the U.S. and Canada, including Attu (the last Aleutian Island), the Dry Tortugas, and Newfoundland. He has birded also in New Zealand, Australia, Europe, Bhutan, Ecuador, and Uruguay. He has run the Pikes Peak Marathon twice: 26.3 miles, 7,814 feet up and down. He has published four novels, six story collections, and 156 stories in magazines. His collection The Spirit Bird won the 2014 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. He lives in Ouray, Colorado.