Spoiler! :
I held my breath. My hand released from the duffel bag to knock the door, but as the hot air pressed down my neck, I almost couldn’t do it. Already a part of me was missing the feeling of the wind that ran down the back of the Montana hills, breezing by dogwoods, fields, and scrubs. It was hotter here in Fuego Cañón, Nevada. There was a reason that it translated into Fire Canyon. The first thing I’d done when I walked outside was pull my blonde hair back into a ponytail to keep it from sticking to my neck.
As soon as I hit the first knock, the door flew open. There was a lady I’d seen in pictures a dozen times, maybe a little older than she was before but still maintaining a head of springing red-auburn hair and a pair of bright brown eyes, ones that looked a little like mine and a lot like my mother’s. “Hailey!” she said, beaming with a wide white-toothed smile. “Oh, look how big you are! The last time I saw you, you could fit in the breadbox. Not that we tried to fit you in a breadbox, but—“
To my relief, she kept talking, so fast that I couldn’t understand a single word she said. I liked her already; she was happy, and as I walked inside I saw her house reflected it. The walls were warm earthy oranges and browns, with deserty pictures hanging on the walls, such as cactus flowers and shaggy wild horses in barren fields. Finally, my aunt took in a second to breathe. “So, what do you think?”
“I love it,” I said instantaneously, a smile fast-forming on my face. People have always told me that I’m surprisingly happy, “considering the circumstances.” When I was little I suppose I’d never really known what they meant. Now I guess I understood the weight of everything, but it didn’t matter. All I ever had to do was grab my Nikes and leave, whether I ran to the borders of my town or just in endless circles at the runner’s track. I would’ve just waited until I could move out, if it weren’t for my little sister. He’d never cared that much about hurting her before. The target had always been me. Up until that night, when the metal tray in the oven went flying towards her. I closed my eyes to blink away the thought. I’d gotten a call from her while I was at the airport; she’d made it to our grandparents’ fine. I’d miss her, though.
“Your room’s over down the hall,” Aunt Amy said, pointing to our right. “It’s going to need some work, we were using it for storage, but we’ll give you money for paint and everything.”
“You don’t have to—“
“No,” she cut in sternly, but her face retained its smile. “I do. Anything you need, sweetheart.”
I smiled again. “Thanks, Amy.”
“Anything for my niece,” she said, wrapping me in a hug. “Everybody’s told me how strong you are.”
I shook my head. “No. I just run.”
“I’ve been told. But you always run back.”
Before I could say anything, we heard a crash from around the corner. “Bryan,” Amy murmured. I nodded. I’d never met Bryan, who was my uncle by marriage and didn’t have so much of a role in our old family photo albums, but I knew enough about him. He was a really nice guy who’d gone to fight in the Vietnam War. They released him from service about a year later, on the grounds that he was psychologically unstable after watching his entire squad be blown from existence only feet from where he stood. Amy loved him. I think he scared me.
Well, after all I’d heard. I hadn’t met him until she brought him over, towing him by the arm. “Bryan, we have a guest.”
He was tall, at least compared to my pint-sized aunt. He clearly had muscles, but they weren’t bulky, more sinewy down his long arms. He wore a camo ARMY SURVIVOR t-shirt, and a pair of khaki shorts. His feet were bare. His eyes were too. They were gray, and contrasted sharply with his deep-tanned skin. His hair was short and black. If Bryan didn’t look tired thanks to drooping eyelids and a weird, lagging walk, I’d say he was completely emotionless. Along with this, an intense scar ran across his face. There was something honestly chilling. Like I was staring at a living corpse.
“Hi,” I said timidly, raising my arm really slowly into an uncomfortable wave. I feigned a tiny smile, one that appeared and disappeared as quickly as the flitting shadow of a hawk as it skulked over the fields. Bryan nodded, then pulled from his wife’s grip and returned to what turned out to be the kitchen. Like the rest of the house, it was stucco, which I’d seen was a trend for most of the houses around here. To keep out the heat? I couldn’t picture living in any house that was insolated in a place like this.
“Well, I’d better go get his medication,” she whispered, and I nodded. I walked to the room where she’d pointed me to before, the one that was mine, and besides a cot and a few boxes it was empty. There was a wooden floor, and the walls surrounded in the shape of a hexagon. Windows made up most of one wall, and another side had a sliding door that opened out onto the deck. Beyond that was a shriveling lawn--a graveyard of grass. There was a strip of soil along the wooden fence, but only the stronger plants like cacti seemed to really thrive. Some brown bird hopped on the ground, shrieked, and bounded into the sky. Stepping outside, I was blasted once again with the pouring heat. I took off my beloved Nikes, and tossed my socks beside them, and it at least felt a little better. I was wearing jean shorts and a red tee that said I ♥MONTANA. It couldn’t get much simpler, but I was already sweating again. The lawn prickled as I sat down, because it was so sunbleached, but the porch itself was too hot. Other houses of the neighborhood sweltered under the sun as well.
I was laying on the grass with my arms shielding my face, when I heard a snuff. Something wet dripped and dribbled on my arm, and I almost jumped three feet in the air. I looked around, but I was alone. Then something nuzzled me in the back.
Turning around, there was a furry face with a pair of gleaming brown eyes beyond a grayed golden muzzle. I smiled. “Amy didn’t tell me she had a dog.”
It was wearing a magenta collar, with the name Mneme on the silver tag. “M...neme?” I tried to say. The name sounded familiar. Then I remembered. The name of one of the Muses. We’d learned it in Theater, a day I remembered well thanks to the fact that it was also the same day and class that I passed out onstage.
And that’s when something stepped in, something I would later be told was Fate. Mneme grabbed my sneakers and ran.
“Hey!” I got to my feet, wiping the grass from my knees. “Come here, girl. Give me the shoes.”
Her eyes glittered wittingly, and with a tail-wag she raced down the street. My shoes! My only shoes. Not to mention what I kept inside the sole of the left one. I raced down the hot asphalt path, blisters more than likely an inevitable outcome as I chased the dog down the street. But even when I chased her, I almost knew there was more to this little game. She was leading me somewhere.
That somewhere, unfortunately, was straight into the woods. She raced between the straggly pines, stopped, her red-gold tail thumping the dry earth, and waited for me to follow.
“Come on, girl,” I pleaded. “Come here. Please.”
Her look said Sorry, girlie, and she took off down a deerpath again. “Oh, boy,” I mumbled, taking off in the same direction. Pine needles stung my feet, and branches reached from the sidelines to scratch my skin. The dog always stayed in view, waited for me to catch up, then ran again. I lunged but missed, half a dozen times or so, and finally fell flat to the ground. “Stupid dog,” I whispered, tasting blood on my lips. She nudged me with her nose, and I saw my shoes were resting only a few yards away. “Game over?” I asked her, and her lick assured yes, it was. I scrabble to get my sneakers, feeling for what’s inside the left toe. It’s still there.
But where am I? I looked around, but like anywhere else I would be it’s completely alien. There was a small house right in front of me, wrapped around by an old brown fence with no gate. Instead there was just an opening ahead, and a dirt road that leads to the direction opposite of where I came from, and a rusty red pickup beside it. I started to take the route of the road, but Mneme grabbed my left sneaker once again and raced into the house. It was also a stucco, but looked older than most others around. Surprisingly as I crossed the threshhold of the fence there was a rush of humid air. It was cooler than the surrounding area, somehow. The grass was remotely greener, too, and plants grew along the side of the house. Moss even clung to the roof, which would probably be a death sentence elsewhere in town. Mneme went to the wooden door, and it opened without a sound.
From inside there were voices, a lady who greeted the dog happily and a lower, quieter voice that was barely audible. The woman laughed. I wasn’t particularly shy, but I felt intruding. But I needed my shoe, and I hadn’t just run barefoot through the woods for nothing. Not to mention the fact that I was more or less completely lost.
I walked up the two steps to the doorway. “Hello?” I called, glancing in slowly. “I-I don’t want to intrude, but your dog—“
“Come in, dear!” the woman insisted. She was old, at least seventy, with long silver-streaked black hair and a pair of queer dark mottled-green eyes. She was sitting at the table with somebody across from her, definitely related because he had the same hair and eyes, apart from lacking the wrinkles and gray hairs. Maybe he was sixteen like me, but he could’ve been anywhere from fifteen to twenty.
“Sorry about Mneme, she hasn’t done anything like this before,” the lady assured me. “Your shoe’s over there, by the jars.”
She nodded to the left, and I found it pretty quickly. There were a dozen jars at least, filled with some goldenish liquid.
“Marmalade and honey,” the woman explained, before I asked. “I sell them at the farmer’s market in town. Well, Caleb here does anyway. I’m getting a little old to be running from the market and back.”
The boy finally spoke, although he didn’t look particularly welcome to conversation. Still, his eyebrows furrowed in a curious way.“You’re new here.”
“How did you--?”
“Cal’s really sensitive to stuff like that. He knows people in a way they don’t know themselves,” the lady said proudly. “The same way I know nature, I believe.”
He didn’t seem like the most social person I’d met, in fact seemed a pretty good mile from being rewarded Mr. Personality, but I didn’t say anything. He looked unconvinced as well, although the woman seemed to be more than expectant of it.
“Well you should probably be getting back, you think,” he said to me.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I need to go back to my aunt…? Her name’s Amy Montelle, on 413 West-Ford Drive. You wouldn’t know how to get there would you?”
The woman nodded. “You could take the road that leads from the house, but that goes into town and then you’d have a good five-mile walk back, and I don’t suppose you’d know how to get to your aunt’s from there anyway. Well, Cal here can take you. His car’s right outside.”
He flashed his grandmother an indignant look, and I quickly stuttered, “N-no, don’t worry about it. I’ll figure it out.”
She waved a hand. “That’s silly! He never drives that thing anyway, he needs to put some miles on it.”
“I drove it here, didn’t I?” he replied dryly, and the lady gave him a humorous but scornful look.
Admittedly, I didn’t like taking anything from strangers. I especially didn’t like being alone with strangers. The fact that I was in their house was honestly a little disconcerting, although I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, considering that most of them seem to deserve it. They both seemed nice enough – them being the old lady and the dog – but I had more than a feeling Caleb wanted to drive me about as much as I wanted to be driven.
Caleb sighed, turned to me. “Fine. You want a ride?”
“Really, I’m fine,” I insisted, reaching for the door handle. “Thanks for the shoe back.”
“Sorry for your shoe taken,” replied the woman. “But I still want him to drive you. You’ll be lost otherwise.”
I was hesitant, but nodded. It seemed like the only way out of the house. “If he really doesn’t care.”
“I guess I don’t,” he said slowly, reading the very clear message on the woman’s face. “Come on, hop in the front seat. The back’s filled with crud.”
The woman nodded approvingly and waved us goodbye, and both of us walked back out into the yard. “How does she keep everything so fresh out here? It’s like a greenhouse compared to everywhere else.”
“Like she already said, nature’s her thing,” he answered, his hands shifting to his pockets while his face turned to the ground.
“And people are yours?” I asked.
Caleb laughed. “Ah, no. I don’t know where she gets that from. I mean, I’m not exactly what you call outgoing. But she says I can ‘read people,’ or whatever. We all have our own thing, I guess, but I’m not thinking that’s mine.”
We made the rest of the walk to the car in silence, and I took the passenger’s seat. Unexpectedly, Mneme took my lap.
“Sorry, I’ll put her inside.”
“No, don’t worry about it,” I said, petting her fur. “I’ve always wanted a dog.”
He nodded, then keyed in the ignition. “She’s a pretty cool one.”
“And the lady…your grandma?”
“Yup.”
“She’s cool too.”
Caleb shrugged. “If you say so.”
“She named a dog Mneme, can’t deny she’s interesting.”
“My grandma’s a little weird that way, but I think she has her reasons. Or thinks she does.”
He turned on the radio and drove through the forest until the dirt met asphalt, and the car minnowed left and right down the relatively few roads until we reached my aunt’s neighborhood. “Right here,” I said.
Caleb stopped in front of her house.“Thank you for taking the Caleb Callum Taxi Service. This one’s on me, but I charge the next one.”
“I promise there won’t be a next one,” I said. “Unless Mneme really gets in the habit of stealing my shoes.”
“I can’t believe you ran all that way for a shoe.”
“I keep something in the left one.”
He stared at me inquisitively. “What? Money?”
“Yeah,” I lied.
Caleb nodded. “Well, see you around I guess.”
“Yeah, thanks for the ride.”
Then the weirdest thing happened. The first weird thing of many weird things to come. His arm brushed mine - and something pulsed through me, like a static shock. It stung, then burned. “Ow!”
“Jeez!” Caleb rubbed his own arm where mine had bumped his. “I don’t suppose you eat high-voltage wires in your spare time?”
“No, but I could ask you the same thing,” I said, feeling the bruise where we’d touched.
I don’t remember what I said after that. “Thanks for the ride anyway,” maybe, or something along those lines. “See you around,” was also said again. I walked into the house. In the mirror I could see the welt where the shock had been.
“Where were you?” Amy asked, walking from the kitchen. “And what happened to your arm?”
“It’s not important,” I said nonchalantly.
“It looks like a burn. Here, I’ll get some medical supplies. I keep them handy with Bryan around.”
“It’s okay, Amy, it doesn’t hurt that bad.”
Amy nodded, her eyebrows raised. “Weird, it’s kind of shaped like a W, isn’t it?”
I looked in the mirror; it kind of was.
I would go through the rest of the day like normal, getting paint and bedcovers for my room, helping with dinner, and explaining to Amy the remoter parts of how I’d spent my day.
I went to bed, and that’s when I felt it.
The pulse.
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