Looking Out

There’s a chill in the air outside, and I’m still angry, mainly at Bram but also Walker and also my own mother and, you know what, probably Darian as well. Everyone is too much and not helpful and I just want some goddamn peace.

Bram tries to catch up with me, but I scream at him until he retreats, and I continue down the street, away from the inn and away from the coffee shop. After a few minutes of walking, my mind as empty as I can make it, I hear a car driving down the road to my right, coming from behind. When I glance over, I see a grey SUV slowing down to match the pace of my walking, and I squint into it.

An arm is waving at me out of the driver side window. "Hey!" I don’t recognize the voice or the face of the woman leaning out the car window to look at me. She’s got tan skin, freckled from years of sun, and a thin red and orange scarf covering her hair, tied under her chin. Her arm and the back of her hand is wrinkled, much like the skin around her eyes, and I’d judge her to be in her sixties, though she smiles with a youthfulness that even I don’t possess.

I look behind me in case, by chance, she’s calling out to someone else. No one else is around.

“You need a lift anywhere? We’re headed to Jacaby’s Peak.” The woman is alternating between smiling at me and glancing in her rearview mirror, presumably checking up on the other people in the car. I can’t see them all, but I can see at least an arm in the passenger seat and a thin, white, blonde teenage girl staring at me through the middle row window. She looks eerily like I did at sixteen.

“I’m fine,” I tell the woman, waving a hand dismissively and continuing down the sidewalk.

The SUV’s engine idles. I can still hear some kind of psychedelic rock emanating from the car’s radio. I look back.

“We’ve got space in the car. It’s a Windthrow Point tradition, to picnic at Jacaby’s. You’re welcome to come.” I stop, and I don’t know who the hell has a picnicking tradition, but my stomach is suddenly reminded that it needs food. It doesn’t need a picnic, but it does need food.

“No thanks,” I say to the car. It rolls forward so that the woman and I are side-by-side again. The figure in the passenger seat leans around the woman and into my view, and I see that it’s the guy from the bookstore.

“Hey, Masie! I’m Keigan, remember?” He gestures at his finely-sculpted face, aesthetically framed by his shoulder-length blonde hair, which is half-up-half-down in a very elven way. “You sure you don’t at least want any food?”

I scoff. Keigan has eyes as innocent as a child’s, the woman driving the car is bobbing her head to the music on the radio, and the teenage girl in the middle seat is chewing on the end of her hair and watching me. “Why? Why on earth would you offer me food?” I don’t have the energy to be polite, and I end up yelling the question on accident. The woman’s face morphs into a frown.

Then her expression clears, and she stretches her tanned arm out towards me, palm up. “Why wouldn’t we?”

I resist the strange urge to step forward and take her hand. No one in Windthrow Point has any reason to be trusted, but I look at her face and any more arguments I might’ve had die on my tongue. I’m too tired to keep fighting. “If there’s room,” I concede. I’m rewarded with charming smiles, the woman’s and Keigan’s matching each other perfectly.

I’m seated in the back of the car, next to a large wicker picnic basket and a bundle of fire pokers. The middle seats are occupied by two (roughly) sixteen year olds, who are called Wynne, the blonde girl, and Roshni, a brown-skinned girl with a heart-shaped face and round glasses. Keigan informs me that the woman driving is Gerti, who is his aunt, Wynne’s great aunt, and also, apparently, the mayor of Windthrow Point. Not sure how to respond to situations involving kind strangers, children of any kind, or mayors, I sit silently in the back seat, legs pressed together and hands tucked in my lap.

The rest of the car doesn’t seem to mind my discomfort. Wynne and Roshni are having a conversation about some video game that involves shape-shifting and werewolves, and Gerti is driving with one arm while the other dances like a snake through the air outside the window. Keigan has a hiking-boot-clad foot on the dash and an open book on his lap.

The ride isn't long, but we pass by a few different areas of Windthrow Point: a series of small houses, a view of the river, and trees that get closer and closer together as the road curves up and around. We continue up the winding road until it spits us out at a tiny gravel parking lot at what I presume is the top of this hill. Probably Jacaby’s Peak.

What follows is a flurry of movement. Everyone exists the car, chattering about the radio and the food and the weather and, still, werewolves. The trunk of the car is popped open, and suddenly Keigan is passing me a bundle of fabric and a small cooler. I grudgingly but silently accept, then follow everyone else down a trail through the trees.

It's beautiful here, I have to admit. It's a different kind of beauty than the beauty of the ocean; there's so many intricate details in the woods that it almost feels claustrophobic, whereas the water is always so vast and open. Here the sun is filtered delicately through the trees, only revealing certain plants to the warm light, while the rest is cool and shaded. Moss grows up the tree trucks and red berries dot the scraggly branches at our waists. Small white flowers grow in random patches on the ground and bees flit from one to the other. Birds and chipmunks disturb the plants ahead of us, making clicking and rustling noises.

I find myself walking next to Gerti, who's holding the fire pokers like she's going into battle and has an orange backpack slung over her shoulder. Small branches from the bushes at our ankles keep catching on her long, billowing skirt, but she doesn't pay them any mind. Part of me admires her just for this; or maybe it's just some kind of kinship I'm feeling as I look down and see her burnt-umber skirt next to my white one. I note that my tennis shoes are more practical than the delicate brown sandals she has on.

"Masie, Masie." She says my name like she's getting used to it, like it's a test. I look into her face, and it looks so round with the patterned scarf tied around her head. "You're far away from home?" This question could've sounded condescending, but her tone is even. No judgment.

I give her one of my best smiles, which means I probably look like an angry bitch, and scoff, fingers digging into the blanket I'd been given to carry. "Uh, yeah, I guess."

We're at the edge of a clearing, some kind of cliff almost. Gerti nods at the clearing. "Alright. Now, this is Jacaby's Peak."

I follow her gaze out over the cliff, which really isn’t too steep, but does appear to drop off pretty significantly at the bottom. The view is of the river down below, with the shore on the other side lined with trees and dotted with a few small houses. The rest is sky, perfectly clear.

And in front of us is a roughly circular area, mostly clear of trees, where the grass is worn down to loose dirt from use. Keigan is dragging a wooden picnic table to the center of the space, and the girls have stopped to look at a charred pit in the ground.

Gerti herself squats down by the pit, and the girls disperse to help Keigan set out folding chairs and take food out of bags. Out of her orange backpack Gerti procures a set of matches and winks at me. "I never was a girl scout," she tells me. "But I am a woodland creature at heart. What about you?"

I blink down at her, and she looks up at me and stands again, reaching out and relieving me of the cooler and blanket in my hands. She takes them over to the picnic table and sets them down, clarifying over her shoulder, "Are you a woodland creature? Or more of a sky-being? A water serpent? Something else?"

So she's some kind of weirdo mystic. "Yeah, I don't know," I cross my arms, not knowing what to do with them now that I’m not holding anything. The girls are standing at the edge of the ledge, looking down at the water. I feel a bit sick suddenly, while simultaneously trying to remember their names.

Keigan, standing nearby, is looking at me, and I accidentally catch his eye. I make a face at him that says 'this lady, am I right?!' but he just has this calm look about him and I’m not sure he understood what I mean.

Gerti is somehow at my elbow. "Bring me some wood," she says, pointing. There's a stack of chopped fire wood at the edge of the trees, blending into the shade.

I look down at myself–silk, white, corset–then back at her. "Yeah… Maybe Keigan should." I wave a hand at my torso to emphasize the point.

Gerti’s expression doesn’t change, but she does chuckle and start gathering up loose twigs. "Aren’t you capable?" she asks.

I hold back a rude response, click my tongue, and, when Gerti doesn't even look up at me, I stalk over to the wood and pick up a log, holding it straight out in front of me so it doesn't touch my clothes. I bring it to her, and she just thanks me and points to the wood pile again. I bring her four logs and am about to get a fifth when she stops me. "That's enough for now," she says while adjusting the wood. "Not a woodland creature, then," she adds to herself.

I watch as she lights a match and starts up the fire. She sits back on her heels and we both watch the flames grow, wrapping around the large logs but not consuming them just yet.

"Who else is coming here?" I ask suddenly. What I'd really like to say is, “How long is this event and when would it be polite for me to leave?”

Gerti checks her watch. "Technically all of Windthrow Point is invited, but knowing the townspeople, I don't expect a huge turnout."

"But you said it was a tradition?"

She nods, her mouth pulled into a smile. "Every Tuesday afternoon of the summer, rain or shine. It was Portia's idea. Keigan and Wynne's mother, my sister." She’s looking at Keigan, but I can tell she’s seeing more than just him; she’s looking past him, into a memory.

"Is she…"

"She's not with us anymore," Gerti clarifies easily. Her eyes are so clear when they look at me. "It's not quite the same anymore. Only some of us still do it. But more people will come, we're just early to set up."

I give her a second big, fake smile.

Thirty or so minutes later the food is set out, the picnic blanket is spread on the ground, and chairs are set up by the small fire that Gerti is poking carefully, enticing into the perfect flame. Only two more people have arrived, one of which I recognize from the Briarstone Café–the old woman. She's with a man that must be her husband, and the two of them are chatting with Gerti beside the fire.

I've sat myself down on the picnic blanket, consigned to my fate with a small plate of fruit cubes and graham crackers. Keigan had been chopping more wood–of all tasks–but has since stopped, rolling his shoulders. The tattoos on his arms look deliciously touchable out in the open air; he’d abandoned his thin leather jacket on a chair and now is only wearing a loose and very open-necked short-sleeve shirt. He sits down next to me with a little ham sandwich, which apparently the old woman had made.

"So what do you do?" Keigan asks me, taking a bite of his sandwich. His face has that warm sheen of just-exercised-but-not-too-sweaty, and I try not to acknowledge that I find him quite attractive.

I shrug, chewing a cube of watermelon. “Do?”

He raises an eyebrow. "Blogger? Model? Russian spy?"

I laugh charmingly. “Those are vastly different jobs,” I tell him, positioning myself on the blanket to face him more straight-on. It gives me a good view of the way his hair sticks lightly to the perspiration on his forehead.

Keigan’s smile is all pearly-whites. “You never know. I think you’re capable of doing all three.”

Capable. Just what Gerti had said. My smile falters. “You don’t know a thing about me.”

He’s not put off by this comment. “Ok, so what do you do? I’m a bookseller, if that helps. In terms of pleasantries.”

I inspect him out of the corner of my eye as I pick at the fruit on my plate. “I’m a writer,” I say. I don’t know what compels me to tell the truth.

“Neat,” he says, going in for another bite of sandwich. I glance at him, honestly offended that’s his only response. Usually people either say things like ‘How do you make any money doing that?’ or ‘Oh, I could never’ or ‘What else do you do?’.

Keigan chews, then his eyebrows shoot up and he reaches out and presses his fingers to my knee. I can feel the warmth of his fingers through the fabric of my dress. “Hey, I’ve just thought of something–if you’re available, we’re actually looking for help writing a play. Would that be something you’re interested in?”

A play. I cough; the honeydew chunk caught in my throat, my stomach suddenly lurching. I haven’t written a play since… well, since those days at the lake house. A wave of nausea rolls over me, and it’s the same feeling I felt this morning, like there’s water in my lungs, in my throat, behind my nose. I stumble to my feet, swaying, trying not to retch.

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(next chapter)

pt 14: https://www.theprose.com/post/774071/melodic-pressure

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(previous chapter)

pt 12: https://www.theprose.com/post/768088/the-edge-of-exploding