No-Man’s Land

The weekend comes before the week. That’s what Morel says when I ask her why she invited me geocaching. She means to say I seem depressed. Morel can tell I need some help, but she doesn’t consider that I might not want it. I get these bags below my eyes when I stay indoors for weeks on end. Morel says I’m B12 deficient. As though chewy vitamins could balance my chakras.

She has a specific cache she’s after, way out past the farthest farms. We hit the road at 1 a.m., drive west to the outskirts of town and accelerate, thrusting ourselves into no-man’s land. The lines on the road strobe out ahead, flashing and dying. The open fields smell sickly sweet. I roll up my window. Sometime later, Morel pulls to the side of the road and powers down the Windstar van. She walks around and kicks the tires and looks at her map while I stand on the shoulder hugging myself, surveying the highway in both directions for other signs of intelligent life. I feel for a moment that we’ve stumbled into a liminal plane; that Morel and I are the last dying whispers of something forgotten.

We slide feet-first into the ditch and my socks fill with freezing water. Morel grips the tough grass roots and clambers up the opposite bank. She takes my hand and pulls me with her. On the other side is a thin, wire fence. The hem of my skirt snags on a barb, leaving a snarl of fabric behind. In the field, the ground is swampy. The grass squelches under our feet. Morel points into the darkness, and I follow her finger to a thicket of trees in the distance; a sturdy mass of navy blue, shivering silently under the stars.

It takes the better part of an hour before we realize how far the trees are.

No way, I tell her. No more of this. My shoes are muddy. I’ve lost feeling in all ten toes. Morel stares directly up, reaches an arm toward the sky and says she remembers me as a child. She was a child back then as well. She remembers more than I do. There are gaps in everything when you parse life down to its energy centers. The trick is to make things flow together. I remember pieces here and there. Heartbreak, mostly, and picking up shards of my own broken heart and setting them back in their rightful places only to have them shattered again. Eventually the pieces become so small that you can’t get your fingernails under them, and you’re forced to leave them behind.

I lie on my back in the wet grass and stare at Morel, who’s busy naming constellations. She sets her sights on something new but her words are cut short as a slow rumble begins in the darkness. I prop myself up on my elbows and listen. The sound grows louder, running together as one long drone then splitting and rising, surrounding us both. The ground starts to shake. It’s as though we’ve entered the heart of a storm and the thunder is right there next to our ears. Morel kneels beside me, hugs herself against my shoulder. What is it? she asks. The rumbling sound is thick and rhythmic. Deafening, I think, but note the thrum of my pulse in my ears.

I shrug Morel off and rise to my feet, walk a few paces. There’s a whirlwind around me. The soles of my shoes seem to twitch with each blow. I slit my eyes, stare hopelessly into the night, and at last catch a glimpse of the source.

Horses. A dozen or so, circling us at full gallop. I can hear the whip of their matted tails, feel the steam from their massive lungs. Their hooves churn up damp, earthy smells from the soil. Morel’s voice carries shrill and scared from the ground behind me, but I can’t decipher a single word.

Later on, when the horses are gone, we’ll hike to the trees and discover a dead raccoon in the soil. Plugged full of birdshot and buried quickly, its eyes closed like a Buddhist monk’s. The night will smell of dandelions, and Morel will laugh and kiss my cheek when I say that someone else made it this far.

Read more from Issue No. 37 or share on Twitter.