The air is thinner up here, and hazy too, so that when you sit and kick your feet off the edge of the cliff, it’s almost impossible to see the other side of the ravine through the fog. You sit like this often because this is the only place where you and her meet, and it’s hard to find too, off the edge of Humbleton Road which turns from pavement to gravel about a half mile back. There’s a turn-off from there, and that’s where you leave mom’s truck with the squeaky brakes and cracked windshield. Then there’s the fence, cutting through the line of evergreen and fern with the sign on it, NO TRESPASSING, and the hole that’s been cut in about ten feet to the left. From there it’s a stomp through the crackling leaves and around the fern beds and under the long, green fingers of trees which drip, drip, drip onto your jacket all winter long. By the time you get to the edge, your shoulders are patterned in drops, and your feet have kicked a path through the trees, and she is there, waiting for you with a bag of chips and two tall iced teas from the mart on the corner of 1st and Main, and so you settle into the rocky edge and let your hands rest among the fallen pine needles. When you kiss her it is with lips that are slightly sticky, and bits of dried leaves catch in the curls of her hair.
This time is different.
It starts the same. The road, the truck, the woods. Squeezing through the hole in the fence, one of the sharp barbs of metal snags the left leg of your jeans. It rips through the fabric and lets loose a sharp line of red, which blooms into the stray threads. You pause for a moment, but continue walking. It has begun to rain, and the trees are starting to bow down, arms weighed heavy by the falling sky. She is there, waiting in the usual spot. There’s a smile, and her hand folds itself into yours with a soft squeeze. There is also an invitation, one that has come from her mouth many times.
Come, look what I found.
The air is clearer today. She points down, down into the ravine and you peer over the edge for the first time in many weeks. It is not a straight drop, like you thought. There’s a path, slim, on the edge of the rocks. It goes down for what you think is about thirty feet. She pulls your arm. You step off the edge of the ravine and the cut on your leg begins to pulse slightly.
The soles of your boots are worn down enough that you feel every bump and prick beneath your feet, rock and dirt and moss. She steps in front of you, left hand tracing the side of the cliff, right held carefully out in tandem. The tiny rocks slip forward as you step, but you cinch tight in your stomach and keep your knees bent. You think of what animals may have climbed this before, goats or cougars or deer, and wonder why you have never noticed it until this day. The rain drips down through your hair and begins to soak into your shirt.
She stops. You stop too, and brace your foot against the slick rock. She bends down and you see it, a small opening into the side of the cliff, barely big enough to crawl through. You do not want to go in. But she insists that this what she was trying to show you. She takes the small flashlight that she keeps looped around her belt and turns it on, clamping it between her teeth. She ducks her head and shoulders into the opening and then squeezes through. You watch the mud stuck on the bottoms of her boots until they disappear.
You kneel down. The water soaks through the knees of your pants and you begin to shiver. You see the light inside, reflecting part of her silhouette. It looks dry, empty, dark. You push yourself through the opening. Inside the air is musty, the ceiling low. You sit with your head slightly bowed against the top of the rock and strain your eyes. She sits a few feet away and points the thin beam of light across the space. The cave is small, barely bigger than the back of the truck. But it’s dry and abandoned and might be a good spot to get out of the rain, sometimes. She waggles the flashlight to get your attention and points it toward the back of the cave, across from the hole where you both crawled in. There, another opening, to what looks like a tunnel leading further into the mountain. You shake your head, and then realize she cannot see you, so you laugh slightly and tell her, no. But she is already crawling towards it, and so you sit back on your hands and watch as she squeezes her way into the tunnel. When you can’t see her feet anymore you turn around and look out into the ravine. You can almost see to the other side, now. You stare out at the rain falling by and listen to the soles of her boots dragging across the ground in the tunnel behind you. It’s kind of peaceful. The light outside is grey and soft, and you feel your hair beginning to dry.
The shuffling of her boots stops abruptly. You think that maybe she’s reached the end, or at least as far as she can go crawling in a tiny tunnel. You turn your head around, but without the flashlight you can barely see behind you. You call out, find anything? She calls back, and her voice is very quiet, like she’s very far down and she says
no but I —
And then it cuts off. Not with a scream or a grunt but very suddenly, as if a switch has been thrown. You sit perfectly still for a moment, straining your ears. There is no sound. You can barely hear the rainfall outside. You call her name. There is nothing again, and so you begin to move slowly towards the back of the cave. You run your hands against the back wall until you feel the entrance to the tunnel, smooth under your fingertips. You call again, and your own voice echoes back to you.
You stick your head into the tunnel. It’s narrow, so you shove one shoulder in front of the other and wriggle forward on your stomach. The stone wall scrapes against the sleeve of your jacket, pulling it down your arm. You push your hands forward so they’re not pinned under your chest and reach out into the darkness. There’s nothing there, so you dig your knee into the bottom of the rock and push yourself forward again. With another push your whole body is now in the tunnel. Your hands stretch out in front of you, and if you bend your elbow your knuckles brush against the rough ceiling. You push forward again, and you can feel the cut on your leg scrape against the rock. You blink your eyes back and forth as you continue to push, push, push forward, but you still can’t see anything. You call out again but there’s no answer.
One more push, and your hand suddenly brushes against something small and hard and a wave of dizziness passes through your heart. Your hand tries to shoot back out of reflex, but that just jams your elbow into the wall of the cave. You reach out again, your elbow now throbbing, because the thing you touched was cold and small and you think you might know what it is. You brush your fingers across the ground until your fist closes around it, and you find that there’s a small nub on the side. Your heart begins to pound faster and faster as you push it in and the tunnel is filled with light.
There is a wall six inches ahead of your face. No cracks, no holes, no exit. Just a smooth, stone wall with nothing around it. There is no room to turn around. There is nowhere that she could have gone. The beam of her flashlight flutters in your hand, and you look down to see what is on the ground in front of you.
They are arranged so neatly, two little half-circles set on the stone and dust, a complete set, the light reflecting off of them because they are still shiny and wet and the bits that hang off the bottom have tinged the surrounding stone pink those — teeth.
At some point you lose the flashlight. Maybe it is during the scramble back, back, back, back through the stone tunnel because there is no room to turn around, so you shove your elbows into the rocks again and again until your shoulders have pressed back into the cave, or maybe it is in the frantic crawling towards the grey, rain-filled light or as you fling yourself out of the entrance and almost catapult straight over the edge, only saving yourself by windmilling your arms and falling back onto the stones of the path. Or maybe it is in the running back onto the ledge nearly on all fours, through the woods with the trees whose branches will not get out of your face, slapped away with hands which are covered in speckled blood and rock dust until you clamber into the truck with the squeaky brakes and the cracked windshield.
It takes you three times to start the ignition and two to put it into the right gear and then you’re back on the road, skidding across the gravel and lurching around corners until the dirt road turns into a real road and you whiz along the highway, trees turning to a green blur on the edges of your vision.
You are back in front of your house before you even think about where you should go. You stumble out of the truck, some numb part of your brain thinking about the black rotary phone resting on thick yellow formica kitchen counter, and then your mother is shaking your shoulder, and you are standing in the middle of the living room dripping mud onto the carpet.
“What happened? Are you alright?”
You sputter out an answer. Something like
She’s there, in the woods, in the cave, all that was left were —
“Who? Who are you talking about?”
You say her name. Your mother knits her eyebrows together.
“Who?” She asks.
You begin to feel sick. You say the name again, clearer. Your mother shakes her head, and you feel like you’re about to faint. There are two hundred and thirty seven people that live in the town hidden between two tree-covered foothills, and your mother can list every single one of them without ever opening a phonebook. You open your mouth to say her name again when, like dust, dirt, sand through your fingers, it slips from your mind.
Your mother cleans the cuts on your hands and tells you not to run around in the woods alone. You stay silent as the antiseptic crackles on top of your knuckles and try to picture her face. You remember the dirt caught in her hair. You remember the soles of her boots disappearing into the dark entrance, mud and twigs jammed between the treads. You remember the flashlight, clamped between her teeth, shiny and white (and circled into the dust and dripping ––) but the rest of her is thin, hazy, nothing.
You leave the bathroom and go into the kitchen to pick up the receiver of the phone. It’s heavy in your hand and you realize that you do not know the number to call. You can’t remember if she ever gave you one. Your finger veers toward the 9 but then stops, shaking, above it. You do not have a name. You do not have a description. All you have is your own admission to trespassing, and a story that is sounding more fictional by the minute. You put the phone back down and push on the door to your brother’s room. It’s empty.
“He’s working,” your mother says. “He’ll be back later tonight.”
You nod, and cross the hall to your own room to sit down on the bed. Your eyes scan over the cramped space, desk overflowing with papers and pencils. No photos, no notes — you couldn’t trust your mother not to dig around in your room when you leave so there’s nothing here that would indicate that she existed at all. You pick up a piece of paper and a pencil from the desk. It’s an algebra worksheet that’s been half filled in. You write along the top: Curly hair. Muddy boots. Flashlight in teeth.
Even as you write those words they seem less like memories and more like a strange and vivid dream. You write the last sentence.
Human teeth Wet in a circle on the ground.
The lead of your pencil snaps into the paper and scatters a pale dusting of graphite. You crumple the paper, and shove it into the pocket of your jacket.
To be continued…
You hear the front door creak open and the sound of your brother exhaling, deep. You listen to the sounds of his fork scraping across the plate over your mother snoring in the next room. You step out through the hallway, and into the kitchen. Your brother stands silhouetted in the dim light over the stove, still in his heavy jacket and cargo pants, black grease smudged around his fingertips. He smells of sweat and iron.
You begin to speak. You tell him about the woods. The fence. The ravine. You don’t tell him everything. You tell him that you were meeting someone, someone who never showed up.
“I just want to check,” you say. “Just to be sure.”
“Where’d you meet him?” your brother asks.
“School,” you say.
You don’t say that it’s not a boy. You don’t bother to make up a name.
“Can we go check?” you ask. “Please, you owe me.”
Your brother exhales through his teeth. He probably thinks you’ve been stood up. Pities you, maybe, but you hope that he is also remembering the amount of times you’ve let his ex-girlfriend crawl out through the small window over your bed at the crack of dawn. After a moment he puts his plate and fork into the sink and nods.
The truck rumbles back to life, headlights flashing against the bushes that border your front yard. You sit in the passenger seat with a nearly industrial-sized flashlight in your lap and your brother’s hunting rifle in the backseat. You direct him to Humbleton Road. He is quiet, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. There is no one else on the road. You grip the flashlight as the pavement turns into gravel, until at last you reach the fence. Your brother looks over.
“This the place?”
You nod, and he shuts off the ignition, grabbing the rifle. You switch on the flashlight and step down from the truck. The temperature has dropped, and you shiver underneath two layers. Fog from both your mouths spills out into the beam of light as you approach the hole in the fence. You slip through, and then, with some difficulty, so does your brother. He stays a half step behind you through the woods, and you hold the flashlight ahead with both hands. It’s not hard to find the way to the ravine, you can even see some of your own frantic footsteps from earlier. After a few moments the trees clear and the ground is silver with moonlight. You step out over the ridge, sweeping the beam of light back and forth, looking for the little hitch in the stone where the path began. You don’t see it. You step closer to the edge and kneel down. The flashlight extends down, down into the ravine. You move it along the face of the cliff and it is a smooth drop five, ten, twenty feet down the edge. There is no path. There is no opening. There is just stone and moss and deep black.
You hear a twig snap. There is something standing on the edge of the cliff, about twenty feet away, a black shape barely moving. You swing the light up and the wide, blank eyes of a doe stare back at you. The doe, slick and wet with rain, flares open its lips. Out of the corner of your eye your brother steps forward past you, and the light shakes in your hands but all you can see is the deer’s mouth. Inside it there are things much smaller and whiter than they should be on a deer this size, and the shape of its mouth is all wrong too, it’s round and wide instead of narrow.
It turns to face you head on and the teeth in its mouth are so small and pink-tinged and familiar and then you know that they are hers and they are her teeth inside its mouth, which has now begun to open fully, stretching and stretching wider than you know it should be able to and it is so far away yet you can see the light gleam off each tip of the pointed canines and wide incisors and low, crevassed molars. You are frozen in place, you cannot tear your eyes away as its mouth is opening wider and wider and you do not remember what her eyes looked like but the eyes that are looking at you now are not the eyes of a deer. There is a strange buzzing in your ears and you feel as if its head is getting closer to you, or you are moving closer to it, and even though your feet are planted into the earth, its face is all that you can see, large eyes and wide-toothed smile.
In an instant there is a crack that rips through the air and you find the light falling from between your fingertips.
Your ears are ringing. There is an acrid smell in your nose and you kneel down to grab the flashlight from where it landed among the damp moss. You swing it up to see your brother squatting down next to it, and its chest is heaving up and down, dark thick blood trickling into the grass. You stand up and begin to walk towards it.
“Just a deer,” your brother says.
Your knees give out about five feet away.
You crawl up close to its mouth as it gurgles and quiets, rain soaking through the fabric of your jeans. Its mouth is long, triangular, fur-covered. Its eyes are bulged black, side-facing and motionless. You reach your hand out and slowly push up its lip. It is warm and feels of rubber. You lean forward. The teeth are jagged, yellowing and too wide to be human. Saliva bubbles in the corner of its mouth, and you let the lip ooze back down.
Just a deer.
“You alright?” Your brother asks. “Let’s get out of here, I don’t think he’s coming.”
He pulls you up by the elbow and hands you the rifle. He leans down towards the carcass and you feel a small spasm in your chest.
“Wait,” you find yourself saying. “Can we leave it here?”
Your brother looks back to you. You glance from side to side, but outside of the beam of light you cannot see anything.
“Waste of good meat,” he says.
The flashlight shakes in your hands. You do not look down towards the body.
“Please,” you say, “let’s just leave.”
He exhales and pushes his hand through his hair, grabbing the flashlight out of your hands and turning back towards the wood. You stand for a moment facing inky black. There is a strange, gripping feeling in your chest. You do not want to turn your back on the ravine. You do not want to look away. You do not want to blink.
A frigid raindrop slides down the back of your neck, causing your head to jerk back suddenly, breaking your stare. You hear your brother huff impatiently behind you, and so you turn and hurry towards the treeline. You don’t look back at the ravine.
You stand with your fingers curled around the rusty chain-link as your brother squeezes back through the hole in the fence. You pass the rifle to him, and then push your left leg through the opening. Bending sideways to fit your torso through the gap, you see something white tumble out of your coat pocket. You reach for it, then stop, your hand hovering over the crumpled ball of paper. You catch a glimpse of smudged writing along the top of the page.
Muddy boots. Flashlight in teeth?
You withdraw your hand and squeeze the rest of your body through the hole, leaving the paper to soak into the muddy ground on the other side of the fence.
You climb into the passenger seat with shaky legs and stare through the windshield as your brother steers away from the fence and bounces down the gravel road. You are both silent for several minutes, as the fence and the turnoff towards Humbleton road disappear in the rearview mirror behind you.
Your brother shifts in his seat, glancing over at you once he’s pulled onto the highway.
“Sorry about your date,” he says. “I bet he was a real piece of shit anyway.”
A gust of rain smacks into the windshield, and you watch the droplets pour across your window in tiny streams.
Outside the window is a blur of grey and green; street lights reflecting off slick silver guardrails and the deep, shaking boughs of evergreen trees.
You don’t say anything.