by Lydia Kang
But I’m not alone.
The memory of that girl in her parka and nightgown won’t leave me. Worry seeps into my bones, but I can’t let it stop me. In the meantime, I’m starving. Again. Maybe today I should start fishing, since the food I packed is only for emergencies. I’ll also have to start exploring the rest of the island, maybe the ranger’s quarters and the camp store. There might be an ax and leftover food supplies. I’ll need to build a fire, since I have no intention of becoming a sushi lover anytime soon.
Cracks and snapping twigs echo in the forest, but they’re mostly from me. And yet I stop in my tracks constantly to do a three-sixty. I don’t see the girl, or any other animals, but I can’t shake the feeling that there are eyes on me. Through the far trees, the lake ripples with a twinkle, as if winking at me. A few gulls cry out far above, circling. Somewhere on this hunk of island, there are wolves.
I spend the rest of the time hiking back to camp gripping the hilt of my knife.
The temperatures slowly rise to the point where I’m a sweaty mess after half an hour. Soon, I recognize the clustered trees where I hid my stuff. An empty plastic bag lies on the path only a few feet away. I pick it up, shoving it into a pocket. It could come in handy. I can’t waste stuff that other campers left behind. A few steps farther, and I see more plastic on the ground. This time, it’s a Ziploc bag. It’s riddled with puncture holes, and a scattering of peanuts roll around inside.
Wait.
Oh, no.
I tear through the brush to my hidden camp and glimpse a flash of orange and black fur. A fox scurries away into the brush with a tiny yip of glee.
“No, no, no, no.”
It looks like a cherry bomb exploded in my bag. The zipper has been tugged open only a few inches, but it’s enough. My stuff is everywhere. The jerky bags have been ripped through, and some are empty. My bathroom stuff has been left alone, but the food baggies have been tossed everywhere. Oats and curly dried apples mingle in the dirt.
I howl a string of curses at myself and the fox, but mostly myself. How, how could I be so goddamned stupid? Who knew foxes could get into a bag like that?
Well, I should have known. I’d punch myself in the face if I could right now. I deserve it. Stupid fuckup.
I collapse onto the pine needles and drop my head in my hands. Panic rises in my chest, hot and acidic, and my head feels like it’s going to explode. A voice chants inside my head, but it’s not my own.
How could you be so careless, Hector?
My shoulders hunch over the pine needles. I can only make myself so small, but I try, even if there is no uncle pacing back and forth before me. I hunch over further, cringing, shaking my head, but I hear it anyway.
“How could you have lost your job? This house costs money. The food you eat costs money.”
All I want to do is go to my room, lock the door, and pretend I’m dead. That would be a relief compared to this.
My mouth is so dry, but I force the words out anyway. “Maybe we can ask Dad for more money.”
“No. No. He does enough for us already.”
I say nothing. When he gets like this, there is nothing I can say that won’t make him more furious. Even my silence fuels his anger. Though I’m almost the same height as him, he’s twice my weight. He has the same intense eyes as my dad, the same strong nose, but being half brothers, my uncle always passes for white. People who don’t know us always ask if I’m adopted. They look at my uncle like he’s a saint.
When my uncle sees the clothes hanging off my lean frame, he tells me I’d be more of a man if I didn’t have my mother’s piss-yellow blood in me. And then inevitably after his tirade, he’ll apologize. He’ll beg for me to forget all about it. I’ll find him staring at me in that greedy way that makes me want to crawl out of my skin. But he’s not at that point yet. He has more anger to spend before he gets there.
He yells and yells, and eventually, all his complaints empty out. His feet stop pacing and land in the square of rug where I’m staring. His hand rests on my shoulder.
I like it there. I hate it there.
“Look. I’m sorry.” He sighs, but I refuse to look up to see his face. “I lose it sometimes, since money’s a little tight. I don’t want to stress out your dad more than he already is. Take this.” He hands me a few bills. “Go pick us up some TV dinners and two beers. Fill out a few job applications while you’re at it.”
I nod and walk quietly to the truck, while my uncle paces the living room behind me. I take the truck and drive down the street, parking in the lot by the FoodMart. In the cupholder, there’s a crumpled pack of cigarettes with two left. A book of matches has been shoved into the cellophane wrapper.
I love the smell of a freshly lit match like I love the smell of gasoline. I could incinerate the truck, but that wouldn’t get him out of my life. I could have made him angrier and tempted him into pounding me with a golf club. But no, he’d never do that. He’s too clever for such obvious violence. He gets money from the foster agency for keeping me, even though we’re family. He’ll lose that if he hits me.
On the record, everything is my fault. I’m the one who skips school. I’m the one failing English and history. I’m the one who won’t listen to teachers, always on the cusp of throwing a punch. I’m the one who got dragged to the doctor every month for a year, because I was throwing up daily for no reason.
He never takes me to the doctor after the blackouts, though.
Every time I’ve run away, the police have just brought me back. I could go out and pick a fight, but there are quieter ways to contain my fury. So he leaves the cigarettes for me.
It’s the kindest thing he does for me, and he has no idea.
I light a cigarette and take a few deep puffs, letting the smoke curl deep inside my lungs. Maybe it’ll kill me from the inside out. I push up my left sleeve and read the scars there. Ten round burns, each one more healed than the last. Within me, the fury boils and scalds, waiting for release.
I take the cigarette from my lips, aim, and close my eyes.
My eyes snap open.
My whole body is shaking, and it’s not cold out. Inside, a craving turns itself over and over in my stomach, different from the hunger I’d felt before. There are no smoldering cigarette butts out here. It’s just me, but the compulsion to quiet my anger claws incessantly.
My hand falls automatically to the knife at my waist. I unsheathe it and watch the flickering light through the treetops reflect on the blade’s edge. My thumb tests the sharpness, gently touching it all the way to the tip without pushing hard enough to draw blood.
I roll up my left sleeve and rest the blade against the skin just above my last scar when a cry pierces the quiet.
Chapter Six
ANDA
I understand, in a split second, what he’s going to do. I’ve done it a hundred times in my own lifetime, but never with a knife. I don’t need a blade. But it’s like watching the act in a mirror: witnessing the breaking of another human is somehow altogether obscene.
Every day, the push and pull of life around me is a harmony I struggle to curate. Everything—the microbes, the fungi, the bats—everything trying to consume and destroy each other. Relentless. Human death is an inevitable fragment in this cacophony. My sisters surrendered, well before I ever set foot on the Isle, to the simplest part of the cycle, the most giving part—the ending of things. They beckon for me to join them, and in November, they sing most sweetly when I’ve taken a ship.
Father is glad that I wait until November, but it’s November that waits for me. The winds and temperatures and decay, they restore me like no other month of the year. But now, here—I couldn’t have ignored the rift in the lake-tinged scents in the air. I’d followed the coppery tang that came from this warm body, this boy.
I came here to tell him to leave. To say that he didn’t belong. But the sight of the knife on perfect skin—it incites me to emotions I can’t process. I understand what I must do, and not do,
and the clash of the two is a massive wall of hot air hitting a cold one, swirling together to make something bigger, more frightening.
No, Anda.
The boy presses the knife harder against his skin, and finally I unstop the word that has lodged in my throat.
“No!” I scream.
My body shrieks at me for speaking. It’s angry, and a punishing, twisting sensation in my back makes me gasp in pain. The wind rises and whips against my cheek. He jerks his hand away, but the sudden movement causes him to nick his skin with the blade. A welt of red blooms upon his arm, followed by a tiny trickle that winds down his wrist and drips onto a plastic bag at his feet.
The boy stares at me, and I stare at the ruby drops on his skin. This blood does me no good. What I need now can only be found at the bottom of a lake. Blood on land only satiates normal human needs, like lust, or hate. And I am not normal.
“Jesus! What are you doing here?” he asks. The words sound like an accusation. I’m too shocked by the blood to flee or answer. He’s still standing there, unmoving. Fatigue wears on him like a hundred years of rain on sandstone. The backpack gapes dumbly, its half-vomited contents of torn plastic bags strewn about.
“Why did you do that?” I know part of the answer already, but I’m desperate to own the rest.
The words shock him into movement. He hastily sheathes the knife. His body is so tall that even the trees seem respectful of him. His hair is thick and curly, though disappointingly, it is trimmed short. For a moment, I wish I could tangle my nails in it. I shake the thought away.
He pulls his sleeve down, and the droplets of blood seep through the dark green fabric. “It was an accident.”
“But you’re lying!”
He pauses and his head ticks back. “What are you doing here?” he asks again. He’s dodging my answer, as I am his. We’re both stones skipping on the lake, trying to avoid sinking into the depths. It’s inevitable, though. Maybe he knows it, too.
He takes a step closer with a crunching boot, and I take a step back, almost simultaneously. As dance partners do. We’re still the same distance apart, and neither of us has gotten anywhere with this conversation. My heel hits something hollow, and I look down to see a water bottle that must belong to him.
The shard of sunlight that had been brave enough to show itself suddenly disappears, and the grove of spruce becomes shaded within seconds. The NOAA forecast woman’s voice echoes in my mind.
Pressure is dropping rapidly
The air around me begins to change, imperceptibly at first, but then prods me with a knowing gust of cool air. It’s coming. Not a big storm, but big enough I can already feel its strength gathering about me, pressing me to seek the shore. I turn away but hear footsteps in my wake and realize he’s following. The air swirls and hits him straight in the chest. I watch him stagger back and blink dazedly, holding his arms to shield himself from the dirt and dead leaves pelting his face. The water bottle skips and dances over the rough ground, rolling away to clonk quietly against his shoe.
Tell him to leave. Make him go, Anda.
I open my mouth and take a deep breath. Instinct tells me to listen, to do what is right. The pain of resistance twists again in my back, making me wince.
Do it, Anda.
When silence continues to scream inside my brain, she pushes a little harder. The wind whips the dying leaves around us in a slow whirlwind. He doesn’t see her, but I do. The brown leaves rise and take shape behind him. There is a head, a matronly dress. She takes this form because it’s what Father tells me she looked like. She is as motherly as the dead tresses of trees could be.
Anda. Tell him to leave.
“The wa…water.” It hurts to speak. I swallow and clench my fists. “Boil it, or the parasites will eat you alive.”
The leaves fall unceremoniously to the ground in a faint whoosh, the spell broken. I spin around and head to the shore. This time, he doesn’t follow me.
All the way to the lake, I hear nothing but the lamentation of the rising wind and her voice, scolding me.
Chapter Seven
HECTOR
Parasites.
Man, I always worried about the hell that surrounded me every day in Duluth. The school administration, my uncle, my bosses, the punishing winters, the infrequent letters from my dad—they were always trying to kill me, bite by bite. Now I have to worry about being a different kind of victim.
The girl’s footsteps recede into the woods as the wind rudely smacks my face. Well, I guess she’s not trying to kill me. I blow out a breath and pause to touch my sheathed knife when a sliver of pain on my arm reminds me—I’m cut.
I was this close to slicing my arm open on purpose. And then she showed up, and I ended up cutting myself by accident. I actually forgot what had upset me so much, which never happens. The only times I forget are when I black out, but the thoughts that fill the void after that are far worse than what went missing. But this girl—she made me forget myself, in a good way. There’s nothing in my life that’s ever worth distracting me away from…me.
Under my sleeve, the wound is shallow and already wears the darker red stain of dried blood. It stings, though. I’ll have to keep it clean so it won’t get infected. I laugh, and the sound startles me. I can’t believe I care. And yet here I am, trying to survive. The contradictions have always confused me. It’s easier when I have a clear thing to run away from.
Things like my uncle. Him, and everything that house knows—I will always run away from them.
I’ve got to survive until May. I must.
I spend the rest of the afternoon picking through and retrieving the cleanest bits of food left over from the fox attack. I find one of the nearby camping shelters. There’s no bunk bed, just a wooden floor and no mattresses. The front of the shelter is just a screen nailed to a wooden framework. The wind still slices into me just as easily as before.
It’s a roof, at least. Not bad.
It’s not good, either.
One thing is for sure. I need to get more food, or else I won’t have much of a body left to protect this winter. I put all my stuff in the shelter, then leave with my fishing rod and a few obnoxiously colored lures. The gray clouds above are close and heavy, as if they’re too wiped out from the effort of staying aloft. If they slammed to earth and swallowed everything up in fog, I wouldn’t be surprised. I wipe a sheen of sweat from my face. I thought that being outdoors wasn’t supposed to make you claustrophobic.
After a half-hour walk, I’m back at the dock in Windigo. It’s so strange to stand on the wide planks without a single person in sight—a contrast to the busyness only hours earlier. Somewhere out there, the Duluth police are searching for me. For a moment, my uncle’s distressed face fills my head. He’s worried. Genuinely worried. He’s holding his phone, ready to call my dad in Germany to tell him what’s going on. The phone shakes in his hands. But what I hear isn’t him talking to the police. It’s his voice from only a few months ago, after one too many shots of Jack.
You’re my best friend, Hector.
Your father leaving you with me—it’s the best thing that ever happened.
Sometimes I get mad, but I’m not really mad. You know I love you, right? Right, buddy?
I squeeze my nails into my palms, forcing the thoughts away.
Stop it, Hector. No pity.
I jog over to the visitor center, which is shut up and closed, but I peek through one of the doors to see if there’s anything worth stealing.
A taxidermied wolf sits in a Plexiglas box in the corner. It rests on its haunches, stuffed and sewn into a stiff, howling position, facing a seven-foot-tall skeleton of a moose. The tip of the skull is pointy as a spear, and the dead teeth grin permanently at a joke that’s probably not funny.
It’s all for the sake of education, but the whole thing creeps me out. The enclosed wolf howls silently for what it can’t really howl for anymore. Maybe it’s sad the moose is dead. Maybe it’s sad that the moose can’
t be eaten. Who the fuck knows, but it’s depressing as hell.
I walk away to the end of the dock as fast as I can.
I put the fishing rod together at the joints and study the lures. I’ve got three that came from a kit, along with a bobber and some weights. I choose between a dopey minnow, a baby frog with a hook sprouting out of its ass, and a Day-Glo orange worm with green sparkles on the smashed end. Hooray for variety.
I tie the worm to the end of the fishing line, along with the weights and bobber. I watched a few videos about fishing, but I don’t actually know what I’m doing. The one and only time I went fishing was seven years ago. I got invited to a fishing birthday party. My uncle was in a rare mood and actually let me go. I was the only kid who didn’t know how to fish, and the birthday boy’s dad had to show me everything.
“You hold it in your right hand, like this. Put this finger down on the release button.” He stood behind me the whole time, showing me how to cast, congratulating me when the worm I’d crucified on the hook actually plopped into the water, a reasonable ten feet away.
I didn’t smile at my success.
“So…I guess your dad’s not much into fishing, huh?” he’d asked kindly.
“My dad loves fishing.”
“Oh.” The dad had shifted in his sneakers. I could practically hear the wheels of confusion grinding inside his blond head. “So…why didn’t he teach you?”
I couldn’t say a word. Imaginary cracks fissured in my chest. Dad had sent me letters every six months, ones that I couldn’t understand for years because I couldn’t read a damn word until I was eight. By the time I could make sense of the pages, it was an explosion of information. Stuff I didn’t want to know, and stuff I really didn’t want to know.
He was at this army base, and then another. He was fishing in Florida on leave, catching tarpon for the third time. He hadn’t heard anything from my mother, had I? Was I being a good boy? Was I being respectful of my uncle, who was nice enough to give me a settled, normal life?