The Falling Down Side

“Garden of Glances Made Awake” by Aaron Lelito (originally appeared in High Shelf Press, Issue XVII, April 2020)

Johanna drives past the fraying seams of brush where Millerton’s flat gray fields meet miles of dense woods. The latest driest-on-record spring has opened in kindling—more like the remnant of a tough season than the rebirth of anything much.

She all but misses the turnoff sneaking glances at Nate. He doesn’t appear to notice. He has rolled the window down and thrust his head into the afternoon whipping past. His eyes are shut. Wind riffles his hair. Johanna’s vision keeps on pulling to the right, toward the flashes of tree shade and sun marbling Nate’s cheeks dark and light. She watches his face change, then change again.

She knows where this knot of switchbacks leads—it bottoms out in the darkest holler of her memory. Here’s where Nate’s brother Jesse crashlanded eight weeks ago, in the house with the falling-down side, to finish the job of dying. Though neither has set foot here in a decade, Johanna and Nate have come now to finish another job: to collect from here whatever might be salvaged.   

Johanna steers the tight descending curves, imagines they are passing instead through a tree’s rings, bearing straight for the oldest core. She feels the press of their lives—each layer of their histories, their families, their bodies—cycling inward through time.

He startles her by speaking: “When Jesse was like eleven, and maybe I was fourteen, we snatched Dad’s truck.”

Nate’s face is a wreck—pale, damp, sketched with lines marking the torsions of grief.  Johanna had privately hoped she’d missed the worst of this when she couldn’t make the funeral. She’d already come down from her fiancé’s apartment in Philly to Nashville for the weekend—two bridal teas in her honor, arranged by state capitol folks. Not optional. This morning she drove the two hours farther east and found herself slammed headlong into change—Jesse buried, Nate coming out of his skin, his mother bawling for the good watch she’d given Jesse on his twentieth birthday.

Nate goes on: “Had to be spring break. Frogs coming out, baby ones, jumping out of every creek. People kept running over them. Frog guts all over these roads like a carpet. Jesse kept bugging me, going, ‘Ain’t right. Rednecks wanna kill them. Frogs just jump. Don’t know no better. They need us.’ So we took the truck. I’d slow way down. He’d get out, run to the back, scoop up handfuls of frogs, toss them in the bed. I’d drive down a stretch. We’d go again. Can you believe that?”

Johanna can believe it. She was there alongside Jesse behind the truck, her sneakers slipping in frog mess. Another day, she might fight the point and elbow her way back into Nate’s memory. Another day, correcting the record might matter. But this is no day to mess around, to pretend they are carefree, or younger, or on a date. It’s a day to be the Johanna he’s called on—a narrow, pure cleft of herself even she can forget exists.

She slips her hand from the wheel and rests it above his knee. She hasn’t seen him in two years—the longest they’ve been apart. “Did it work?”

Nate sets his jaw. He says, “Seemed to, at first. But then we saw they just kept hopping off the side or out the back. Plan sucked. Frogs’ plan sucked worse.”

At the final switchback, her car scrapes the road’s overgrown shoulders, jostles rough washout and patches of gravel leftover from wetter years. No need to ford the creek now, creek’s gone. Johanna questions her car’s mettle, whether it can make the climb out of the gorge when the time comes. Doubts of all kind travel her mind’s nervous wheel, intertwined with chestnuts her granddad once loaded into his sermons. She’s never had to work to recall these handspun proverbs. They tend to come and find her when they please—his voice old, reedy, with a wobble down the center of its tone. Still, she doubts the advice circling her now came from a sermon. These aren’t words for the assembled flock: “Trick to Bereavement Shift? Shut your gob.”

Both sides of the gorge rise in steep slopes of dirt, brush, and exposed roots. Out the driver’s side, the dry creekbed runs below a sharp rise. Two cliff-top houses peer down from above. As for the creekwaters themselves, they’ve found a new path somewhere else.

Nate points to some shade below the houses.

“Sick,” he says. “Just sick.”

Against the cliff, a dull brown horse stands tethered to sloppy wooden rigging, maybe wreckage from washed-out bridges, his haunches so bare they show every drop and catch of their machinery. He bows low, like he’s waiting for the creekwaters’ return.

“Is that the same horse?” Johanna asks, but she recognizes the deadened stare. She drives until the road curves, hiding the cliff and houses from view. Then the woods thin enough to show them what they’ve come to find.

The house with the falling-down side—what Jesse named it years ago—looks worse than Johanna feared. Its wooden boards are shrunken and warped. Flecks of white house paint litter the ground. Every window is broken. Brush has overtaken the yard. The side porch, which always hung low as if on a hinge, now drags down the room behind it, sinking the house to its knees.

Johanna cuts the engine. Neither of them gets out. Nate glances toward the backseat at the plastic tubs Johanna has brought, full of rubber gloves, trash bags, and facemasks. He rubs his thighs and swallows hard, grimacing, like he’s embarrassed. She catches herself wish for his face as she last saw it—on crisp hotel sheets, asleep, each breath warming her shoulder.

Nate points to her feet in the floorboard, clad to the knees in rubber welly boots, and asks, “You expecting a downpour?”

She starts to fire back, then stops. Shut your gob.

Over the years, she’s worn a deep groove trying too hard to clean stuff up, put stuff back together. She’s always let him chide her for it. The circle of intimacies and acceptable scolds between them was defined long ago. Another day, she’d goad him too.

Today she says, “I don’t want to be here in the dark, and neither do you. We should start.”

***

Not twenty minutes from here, on the upstairs landing of Johanna’s house in Millerton, they were eight years old—sugared up and bent on causing ruin. Her granddad’s sermons lined the top half of the landing’s built-in shelves, the life’s work of a travelling preacher divided—Home Games on the left, Away Games on the right. Her mother dusted the black cassettes, but enough years had passed by now that their white labels had begun to lose their sticky.

Johanna and Nate stared up at the high shelves, considering methods of destruction. Jesse, done trying to break into their twosome, lingered outside by the swing set pestering Johanna’s sisters for a look up their skirts. Downstairs, underneath the landing, both sets of parents sipped coffee from the good china and discussed their old classmate, Willard Smart.

“We heard he froze to death in a public park,” Johanna’s mother said. “In Louisville.” People who thought they could do better than Millerton always seemed prone to gruesome ends.

“Froze?” Nate’s father said. “Not hardly.”

Nate planted one foot on the lowest shelf, intending to scale to the top. He mouthed, “Spot me,” a term he’d learned in P.E. class. Johanna’s face soured. Whatever awful thing he meant, she wouldn’t do it. He climbed another shelf.

“Was in a park. Lord knows why, so late at night,” Nate’s father went on. “Had no arms.”

“I didn’t know that,” Johanna’s father said. “In the Service? When did Smart lose his arms?”

“Just prior to bleeding to death, I imagine.”

Nate tossed down a cassette. It rattled against the carpet, and she scooped it up. The label read: “May 16th, 1979: Ye Are The Branches.” Downstairs, her mother uttered a shivery noise loud enough to make Johanna fear they were caught.

“Gone at the shoulder.”

“Poor Willard,” Nate’s mother said, hugging herself. Johanna watched her own mother nestle into the crook of her father’s armpit. His arm seemed ten feet long peeling off the back of the couch, curling around her mother’s narrow shoulders.

Nate’s father shrugged. His thick fingers fumbled with the china saucer. Through a hard smile, he said, “Smart did not go up in the world.”

Johanna looked down at her hands to find that she had pulled the thin black tape loose from the cassette. She tugged a few inches more, thinking how much she’d enjoy winding the tape back into place with her pinky finger. But now she’d tugged too far, it looked like. She felt the grim wash of pleasure that came from having maybe stretched something past its way back. Nate was down on the carpet beside her now, unreeling a tape himself.

When the ruined cassettes were discovered, far quicker than they expected, they let the blame fall where it already seemed to want to go—on Jesse. He had a history. No one doubted them. That night Johanna tossed in her sheets, drawn to light under her bedroom door. She padded over and cracked it open, peeked onto the landing. Crouched in her robe over an antique telephone stand, her mother was winding flimsy tape into a cassette with the tip of a pencil. She watched the twist in her mother’s grip. When she looked up, her face was a red scramble that Johanna didn’t recognize.

She said, “You steer clear of that boy.”

Johanna won’t tell Nate any of this. Tired and confused, she won’t remember much, beyond her mother’s face and the sharp twist of the pencil in her grip.

She can’t see how tightly she’s bound this moment inside herself. She can’t see what’s coming—growing up and splitting town. How she’ll make a hard play for a new family, one made of city-born strangers. How she’ll crave a family pressed into a different shape from the ones around here, not caught on endless loops, but one that strides forward, head up, sure of its clout and future.

She can’t see the Thanksgiving she’ll rush home, breathless, to announce that she will marry one such family’s favored son. How, after the turkey dinner, having soaked up all the praise she can wring from the living, she’ll grow nostalgic for the voices of the dead. Steal a moment alone upstairs to sneak one of the cassettes—Ye Are The Branches—into her mother’s Walkman. Slip on the headphones, expecting the comforting sounds of her granddad’s ancient, reedy voice and instead, feel her stomach turn. Find that the wobble she remembers so clearly never came from his throat at all. Only the creak and waver of the scarred tape itself, a ghost her doctored memory has made.

***

In the gorge, sun pushes into evening, finds cracks and splits along the walls and ceiling, cuts the room in sharp, bright gashes. There’s one empty window frame, the ledge coated thick with bird shit. This is the room where Jesse slept.

Johanna takes careful steps. Clutches of weeds grown up between loose floorboards glint like straight razors in the light. She picks through whatever trash she can stand to touch through her gloves: Miller cans, cigarette butts, pill bottles, hundreds of Slim Jim wrappers. She fights the urge to clean up: that’s not why they’re here. She discovers three blackened pipes made from small chandelier bulbs that end in fancy twists of glass. When she bends to hide them under a Fritos bag, she finds one pipe shattered, blood crusted along the jagged edge.

More than the squalor and rank smells, what claws at Johanna are the meager stabs Jesse took toward neatness, order, and comfort. Outdated catalogues, folded maps, and a paperback dictionary are stacked beside the cleared stretch of floor where he slept. Grubby clothes are piled in what was once a closet. In the darkest, ripest pit he could find, Jesse did try to make his home.

She wonders if it’s true that people work this way—if, no matter how far they stray from their early lives, inside they stay wound just as tight, hands always turning on the same clock. If they didn’t, she thinks, then maybe she wouldn’t hunger so hard for Nate—in his grief, on the brink of her own wedding. But she does.

Only snatches of Jesse’s last year reached her—rumors, implications, and twice, forwarded group-email requests for prayer that made her shudder. The prospect of all your failures, fuck-ups, and sins bouncing from mailbox to mailbox, never erased, never forgotten, sounds worse than never skipping town in the first place. The reach of the past’s arm seems to grow at the exact speed she can muster to flee from it.

She picks up a filthy t-shirt and folds it. In the corner, harsh sun flashes across something silver and long—the shaft of a golf club wedged between floorboards. When Johanna yanks it free, she stumbles backward over mounds of trash. She doesn’t drop the club but stares at the bottom of the shaft, where a long, pale snakeskin has coiled tight. Her heart flails as her granddad’s warning plays back again, and she tries to swallow a cry out.

Johanna holds the club away from her and grabs the trash bag of stuff that she’s collected. Passing through the main room, where the floor slants toward the porch, she pauses to watch Nate standing in what’s left of the kitchen. He’s framed in the window, dust churning slow in the sunlight around him.

He looks like himself now, not distorted by grief. He’s even wearing the torn R.E.M. Document shirt, the one she’s worn, too, on mornings when she hasn’t expected to spend the night—other years, in far-off towns where they’d built other lives. They’ve gone on colliding for a day or two, no matter what degrees they’ve earned, jobs they’ve worked, people they’ve dated. Reuniting long enough to recognize themselves in each other, to share the well-worn stories. And short enough to hedge the chafing restlessness of being seen by hometown eyes.

He doesn’t notice her watching him now, and she can’t bear watching him in secret. She edges past a long wooden table in the main room that looks like it sprouted here on its own. Every straggling human element in this house looks to have made peace with the grip of decay. Johanna tries not to see Jesse sitting here, unwrapping his evening Slim Jims, creeper wrapped around the table legs. She tries not to see him dead, lying here the way she knows he was found, wrecked in some nightmare of himself. She tries not to see Nate becoming somebody different now, somebody dragging this loss behind him.

On the sagging porch, where they’re lining up trash bags, the Keep pile hasn’t accumulated much. Standing over the bag, she wonders whether this is good news or bad. When she hears glass crash in the kitchen, she scrambles back inside, relieved to find Nate looking unhurt.

As he looks up at her, his face closes around a taut smile. He points to the golf club in her hand, snakeskin still coiled. “Dad’s been looking for that.”

Johanna steps around the broken glass on the kitchen floor, reaching for newspapers to cover the mess. Nate clutches her arm and nods toward an overhead cabinet door swinging open. On the shelf sits a large sealed bottle of Johnnie Walker Old Harmony. Nestled in a dark upright display box lined with white satin, the bottle has a silver seal fixed on red ribbons draped over its neck, like decorations earned in a foreign war.

Nate asks, “Why does that creep me out so much?”

Johanna knows Old Harmony. Her father-in-law-to-be keeps a bottle displayed in his tony private offices in Nashville. Gift from a Tokyo businessmen’s association. Old Harmony is tough to get hold of and obscenely priced. She shuts her gob, strains to keep herself aligned to the present.

She turns away from the cabinet to find blood dripping from Nate’s palm. “You weren’t wearing the gloves?”

From outside, they hear a car rumble up, a couple of horn taps. Johanna rummages around for something to clean Nate’s cut. When she reaches for his hand, he looks ancient, older than his father. He steps back to the window. Again he’s doused in light, but his youth doesn’t return.

“Holy hell,” he says, the words pedal-pumps of rage. “Geoff Goff.”

***

In Nate’s open Jeep, they were eighteen, burning up the last summer weeks in unappeasable hungers and snares, dead sure college would spring them for good from the small-time dirt and dark of home. They’d trade up for better roads, upward and outward. But for now, they were lured in, pulled further down than they’d yet gone. Testing loyalty sealed the first day of first grade, they forded hidden creeks, leapt from dumbass heights. They dove into lower ravines and hollers, dove under deeper cover, dove down on each other, on the cold floor of a stone springhouse that must still be out here somewhere in the trees.

Those few summer months, she’d vowed to take what was offered her and feed every appetite. Come fall, when she left home, she would reel herself back in, at least the parts of herself she intended to keep. The end of summer approaching, Johanna zeroed in on Jesse. She made a hard play for the kid who had scuffled in hallways, flung desks at teachers, pissed in the baptistery, taught her the best cuss words, and made up his own. Brother of her closest ally. Boyfriend of her little sister. The hottest chaos she could find.

Johanna stood shin-deep in grass, squinting into the sun. Jesse darted around a ruined house, talking in pressured words about money he’d soon come into. Some relative died, maybe an uncle. Jesse’s inheritance was stuck in the courts, but that was normal. Nate never talked about money—she didn’t know if any of this was true. Nate spoke of nothing but places and times far afield, city sights she also longed for with desire as strong as his.

But Jesse was peering into broken windows, speculating about down payments and fixing roofs. He kept telling her he couldn’t wait to start over.

“Starting over sounds good,” she said, “I just think I’d do it someplace else.”

She thought she knew both brothers: one who inspired confidence, one who kept everyone wary. Now Jesse stood over her, taller and stronger than Nate. She wondered: could they really be so different?

She stepped closer to Jesse and reached for his hand. She drew his lit cigarette to her mouth. Jesse had always worn his darkness openly, but he’d never once turned that darkness her way. She knew what she was doing. She was dragging on every loyalty they’d all tied. She wanted to know just how far she could tug at those binds.

By the time Jesse drove her back to town, he’d turned awkward and tightlipped. She fidgeted, rolling the truck window up and down. She kept reminding herself: her own future had forgiven her in advance. That was the whole point of this summer.

He dropped her off. She took the long way to the hardware store, killing time until Nate got off work. Their usual plan was to drive around, kill more time. That driving did feel like a small kind of death, retracing the same ground. The same sharp turns, creek ruts splashing muddy water onto the windshield, dead eyes of the horse staring back at her as they passed. The late summer had encircled Johanna, tighter and tighter, until she barely remembered what it was like to hunger for things and not grab them.

Nate and she stopped to hike to a springhouse they’d first found years ago. They didn’t say much. Johanna wiped sweat from her eyes, listened to birdsong and the whoosh of tennis shoes in undergrowth. Nate snapped a branch and cleared spider webs stretched across the springhouse doorway. They bent low and slipped inside, where the air was cool and quiet. They sat on the floor and traded smiles until Nate lay down across the cool stone. He ran his hand up her thigh, under her shorts. She started to unzip them.

“You got a tick,” he said.

She looked down and saw the tiny dark spot on her belly, the circle of inflamed skin. Ticks made her panic. She moved to rip away the invader. Nate grabbed her hand. “Not like that. You should wait and do it right.”

He curled his other hand behind her head. She liked when he did that, one of the many surprises they’d discovered about each other in this room. He pressed his face into her neck. The second she relaxed into his warmth, he jerked back and stared into her eyes.

“That cheap shit he wears. Do you know you smell like him?”

His hand squeezed her skull, too tight. She could feel him fight a dark surge. She wrenched free and got to her feet. Nate searched her face like he was trying to piece something back together. She saw too what the shattered thing was—he had hoped for more. That the knotted loyalty between them could ease into a straightforward future together. And she’d wrecked it.

He pushed his palm against the stone floor. “I guess we never promised anything.”

She pulled up her shirttail and yanked the tick from her belly, leaving a smear of blood. She knew better. Part of its body might have retreated beneath her skin. The bite might sicken her, or scar. She’d let the future sort it out.

***

Johanna shuts the cabinet door on the scotch and follows Nate outside. Geoff Goff stands with his arms crossed, leaning against the door of his state trooper patrol car. He keeps on his sunglasses but removes his hat. Goff was one grade behind them in school, Jesse’s grade. She’d heard he became a state trooper, but how prideful he looks in the stiff poly uniform comes as a surprise.

They wade through the thick brush. Nate stops at a distance awkward for chat. Johanna takes one step closer, but the courtesy doesn’t ease much. Goff takes no steps at all.

“Sorry for your loss,” Goff says. He winces behind his shades and begins again. “Sorry, man. For real.”

Nate nods. 

“Jo. Didn’t think you made it down this way much now.”

Memories are turning fast among them now. Johanna marks each one as it whips past. Nate and Jesse shoving a bluegill into the glove box of Goff’s rusted Mazda. The ten-hour dud of an acid trip he’d scored for them. The weird stuff about Goff’s ballsack that for years she’s never been able to un-overhear. And now the brute fact that Goff is the one who found Jesse here, dead three days, in this bottomed-out hole.

“Sure is a waste,” Goff says. “Waste of precious life, when people go like that.”

Johanna watches Nate shift from leg to leg, his cut hand in a fist. She tries to send her granddad’s words along, but now that tape’s worn out. His advice no longer seems sound, just an old man in a cranky mood.

Goff keeps talking: “Most selfish thing you can do. Even if you don’t care none where your own soul goes, how you can leave your loved ones and everybody knowing you’re lost is beyond me.”

A froth rises into Goff’s voice when he goes preachy and pushy. He clears his throat. Even if the sermonizing doesn’t fit him yet like the stiff poly does, Johanna recognizes that soon that tone will slide off him easy, like something he never had to learn. She vows to remember him this way, a bungling rookie.

She steps toward Nate, sensing every muscle in his body clench. Subtlety is impossible. She has to slip her hand around Nate’s forearm to hold him back.

“Sun’s going down. We need to finish,” she says. “You were nice to stop by.”

Goff cocks his head to one side, making plain that he sees her hand on Nate. Turning among them now is the known fact that she is set to marry someone else. A state senator’s son.

“Well, I’m on duty,” Goff says, putting his hat back on and heading for the driver’s side of his patrol car. “These folks,” he waves toward the houses on the cliff, “they called it in.”

Nate finally speaks: “Called what in? What’s their problem?”

“Jumped the gun, I guess,” Goff says. Before ducking into the car, he adds: “Been some bad mess down here lately with squatters. Could be they’re sick of it.”

“Mess?”

Goff disappears into his car, rumbles off. Once he’s gone, Nate says through clenched teeth, “What made us think we could leave?”

All she can picture is the look on Goff’s face. In his eyes, she’s Willard Smart, bled out in a city park, evidence against somewhere else being better than here.

“He doesn’t know us,” she says. She tugs on Nate’s arm and forces open his bloody fist. Her fingers trace the unbroken skin beside the cut. “You need a tetanus shot.”

Nate rubs his free hand across his face, and a shudder runs through him. She pulls away. That rough dark in him she recognizes, and maybe needs. Dark as this place. She sought it here once, from Jesse, and found it, too. As Nate stalks off, she swears he’s growing taller and stronger as he walks away. He disappears inside the house.

Johanna stretches her tensed shoulders. She looks up into the high walls of gorge surrounding her—twisted creeper, roots jutting from the cliff dirt, the whole mess growing dark fast. Past time Nate and she round up what little of Jesse they’ve collected and leave. A life piled up so small, and now she sees that someday she’ll lose Nate too. The future looks strewn with barbs ready to snag him. But Nate, this place—they are irreplaceable facts of her life. No one ever prepared her for this category of bind.

She forces a swallow down her clenched throat and yells: “Time to go.”

She hurries around the side of the house, heading for the trash bags on the porch, calculating how long until the two of them can surface, until she’ll be free of all this, back in the forgetful arms of a city, any city.

But behind the house, she finds Nate standing in the weeds, taking a long pull of Johnnie Walker Old Harmony. He holds out his arm and drizzles scotch over his bloodied palm. He jerks his hand around, howling, his voice half pain and half mocking pain. He stumbles backward and collapses onto the wrecked porch.

Johanna stands over him, fists on her hips. Nate settles against the slanted porch boards as if they were a lawn chair. He drinks more scotch, stares out into the high weeds at the branches of a far tree, and rolls the black bottletop between his thumb and forefinger.

“What do you think might happen if someone set loose that old horse?” he asks.

Squinting, he sits upright and throws the bottletop sidearm. Johanna can tell he’s aimed for the fork of tree branches, but the bottletop arcs low and disappears into the weeds.

She says, “That stuff costs seven hundred dollars a bottle.”

Nate looks up at her—through her, she knows—and he loses it, just the way he would if he were still himself. He laughs his way into tears and then tips the bottle toward her in genteel salute.

“Never, ever tell me how you know that.” He waits for her to drink. “Promise me?”

***

Three rounds in, night sky full on, she has stopped insisting they leave. She lets Nate press his body against her, pushing her spine into the porch’s rough boards. His breath falls on her, whiskey and heat.

“Motherfuckers,” he says into her skin.

Even as he pulls up her shirt, presses his face against her chest, he won’t stop railing about the horse—how people get put away for that shit, how he would call animal control, but they’ve had enough of law enforcement today. She tugs at the waist of his jeans and tries to forget everything but this. Maybe if she can, then he can forget too, and together they can keep from losing anything more. She wants to slip past the reach of every bind she’s made out there in the world, binds she knows won’t let her off so easily.

She stares up into the stars. She’s forgotten what they look like freed from the veil of city lights. There’s no profound release. Her soul doesn’t expand. The sky is just messy and startling. They’re like all these bits of the past, thrown into the present with no pattern, no map to guide her.

“Where do they get off?” Nate pulls up onto his hands and knees above her, his breaths shallow and ragged. “Who put them in charge of anything?”

Johanna watches upside down as Nate staggers to his feet, grabs the golf club, and charges off into the dark.

She rolls over and pushes herself up from the porch, and scotch rushes to her head and legs. She pulls on one of her rubber boots, but its mate is nowhere in sight. She searches the nearby brush littered with paint flecks. They glow like petals in the starlight. She ditches the boot and lurches herself down the road.

Stars are no help where trees crowd the sky. Her foot slips in the ruts. She hears Nate’s footfall up ahead, but she can’t see. Gathering into a run, she has to trust her memory of the road. She barrels toward him and the crooked vow she knows she is making. They’ll stay true to the path between them, go on colliding and parting, making no claim on whatever bright city lives they build aboveground, far from here. Maybe they can be braver in those lives, knowing that there will be someone who can lead them back to the true hub of themselves. A narrow fidelity, maybe, but a vow she can live up to—because this is all you ask of me, I do this for you now, and always.

Trees thin at the creekbed. Enough light shines against the cliff face to reveal Nate tugging hard at the rickety wooden rig and the long ropes around it tethering the horse. Johanna flinches. The arch of her bare foot constricts—she’s cut it. Warm blood wets her sock. Her running falls into messy stumbles as she reaches for Nate, in time to grab hold of the golf club he has raised above his head. His arm comes down in a halfhearted strike as she begins to tug him back into the road.

But then they hear the creaking sounds of the wood giving way. Pieces of the rig topple end over end, snapping and clattering into the dry creekbed below.

Overhead, from one of the houses, a floodlight switches on. Caught in its circle of faceless threat, Johanna and Nate gape at each other. Freed, the horse raises his snout, the first sign of interest he’s shown. He gives them a brief, inquiring look and shuffles a single step backward, receding into the cliff shadow. He has not asked for liberation.

Johanna and Nate take off, half-blinded, stumbling back to the road, gunning for the car. Johanna’s lungs falter and her foot throbs, but Nate has grabbed her hand and she runs.

They pile into the car. As Johanna digs for the keys in her jeans pocket, they start to crack up. The laughs keep coming when they notice Nate is still holding onto the golf club, the coiled snakeskin’s empty face flapping between them.

Johanna drives, picking up speed for the rutted incline. She holds her breath as stray bits of gravel fly up into the wheel wells. She listens for the drop and catch of machinery turning, to signal the start of the climb.

Emily Choate is the Fiction Editor of Peauxdunque Review. Her fiction appears in Mississippi Review, Shenandoah, The Florida Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. She writes regularly for Chapter 16, and her nonfiction also appears in Late Night Library, Bayou Magazine Online, Yemassee, and Nashville Scene, among others. Emily holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the 2017 Sewanee Writers Conference. She lives near Nashville, where she’s working on a novel.