~~~
“You’re awfully quiet. Something wrong?” Michael, my boyfriend, said over dinner that night.
“No. Sorry.” I twirled my fork in the spinach fettuccine. It made spirals in the golden-green olive oil on the plate. “Thinking about my hike.”
He tore another slice off the garlic loaf I had made. “You shouldn’t go up there by yourself,” he said for the thousandth time.
“I know. You could come with me.”
“You could fall and break your leg,” he went on. “Gangs use those hills to dump bodies and do drug deals. Not to mention the kids that go up there to drag race and drink.” He was mopping up olive oil with the bread.
“I know,” I said again. “But it helps me. I need to—” My voice caught and I clenched my hand around my napkin. Forcing my voice to be even, I said, “It helps me. I promise I’ll be careful.”
“That’s good.” He gave me a smile as I started to clear the table, piling my half-full plate on top of the other dishes. I yanked the breadbasket away from him, blinking hard and forcing a smile until I could get into the kitchen.
As I ran water over the china plates, I thought about the ivory and scarlet of the cat’s fangs, the way its shoulders heaved under its pelt. Even in its stillness it had been all motion.
“You’re still going golfing next weekend at Palm Springs, aren’t you?” I called over the running water.
“What?” he shouted from the living room. “Honey, I’m trying to watch the Masters.”
“Sorry.”
~~~
I made camp by an abandoned firefighting helipad three miles up the trail from where I had seen the saber-tooth. My car was pulled as far off the road as possible into a little dry gulch where a tangle of Christmas berry would shield it from casual roadside view. Hiking is legal up here, but overnight camping is not. Fires are anathema. One spark can set the entire range ablaze, even in the spring.
Before, I had felt nothing, too immersed in the calm under the sky to fear. But this time fear had me. My fingers ached with stress as I laid out my ground cloth and slid the tension rods into the tent’s loops. Fear-sweat soaked my armpits and ran trickles down my spine, but I hurried down the trail with only a can of hiker’s mace and a cell phone in my pockets.
It has rained a few days before. At a low point in the trail, preserved in dried mud, were three perfect cat’s paw prints and my heart leaped. But they were only the size of my palm. Mountain lion prints, too small to be left by the saber-tooth I had seen. I hurried on.
Long black shadows, sharp edged in the brilliant sun, slashed across the trail. Down in the valleys it was already dark, but here on the hilltops the sun still shone. I found the same point on the trail as before, the same sage bush and tucked myself down beside it. As I crouched, the muscles over my stomach tugged, the vertical scar across my belly resisting the spasm of eager fear that ran through my body. I drew my knees up, shielding myself, and waited.
After the sun went down, the air cooled around me. The winds blew up from the valley. The stars came out. Mule deer tiptoed by, following their own path over the ridgelines. A lizard skittered onto my hiking boot to lick the dew off the metal grommets. I waited.
Finally, when the moon had risen and set, I gave up and walked back to my campsite by the light of my cellphone. There I lay the rest of the night, my hand covering the scar across my belly, listening to the rustles and yips in the dark.
~~~
After that, every time Michael went away on a golf weekend I raced my car up into the hills and hiked until Sunday evening. Then I would speed back down the winding, two-lane road to make it back in time. Except it felt more like rushing back in time. Somewhere on that road lay the invisible line between the timeless, stable hills where everything existed and the relentless forward rush of LA. In the lowlands, my past was gone, irrecoverable. My empty future blended with the unrelenting present into a featureless haze, as deadly as the Tule fog that blankets the city on cold mornings.
One Friday night, I curled up on the couch, leaning my cheek on Michael’s arm while he watched women’s golf highlights. “Are you going golfing tomorrow?” I asked during a commercial.
“Nope. I’ve got a half day in-service at work tomorrow, remember?”
“Right.”
We watched stocky women in short skirts paste the ball across brilliant green lawns. I slid my hand into Michael’s. “Want to hear about what I did last weekend?”
“I thought you went hiking.” He didn’t take his eyes off the screen.
“Yeah.” More minutes passed. “I was careful,” I said. “I took mace. And I didn’t leave the trails.”
“That’s good, honey.”
The match ended and Michael’s least favorite commentators came on. He started scrolling through the channels. I tightened my grip on his hand. “Can you look at me for a minute?”
“Sure, babe. What is it?” He didn’t turn the TV off, but at least he hit the mute button.
My palm sweated in his and tremors ran through my bones. “Will you go to mass with me tomorrow? Please.”
He gave me a little smile and a laugh, as if I’d asked him to put on a clown’s nose. “Why tomorrow?”
“Because it’s—” I stopped myself before I said his birthday. That wouldn’t work. “It’s been one year tomorrow,” I said. “I want to go pray for him.”
He let go of my hand, half turning in his seat to face me, a patient frown on his face. “I don’t think you should keep doing this, hon. It’s not helping you let go. Why don’t you go back to the therapist? She did you a lot of good. You can tell her how you feel, get it all out so you can cope better.” He patted me on the knee.
I dug my nails into my palms. My voice still calm, still reasonable, I said, “The two aren’t mutually exclusive, you know.”
He patted me on the knee again, more a rewarding gesture than a reassuring one. “You’re right. You go to church if that helps you.”
“But I want you to go with me.” I need you to go with me.
“Honey,” he said, always patient, explaining it again. “I’m not the one who needs help getting over this.” He turned back to the TV, thumbing the sound back on in time for Iron Chef.
~~~
I slipped out of the house at dawn, my hands full of camping gear. Before the clouds had lifted off the peaks, I was on the trails, tramping across deer paths, descending into canyons, looking for signs. By dusk I was weak-kneed and shaking. I trudged back toward my campsite, one foot in front of the other, too tired to stop.
Until I reached the helipad. A man in a Forest Service uniform waited for me there, feet dangling as he sat on the concrete circle. I gave him a nervous smile and stayed on the far side of the camp space.
“This your tent?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You can’t camp up here, ma’am.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not just illegal. It’s not safe, especially alone. You want to camp, you should go to one of the designated campgrounds.” His voice was more conversational than lecturing.
“I’m sorry. I’ll pack up right now.” He still perched on the helipad, a foot from my tent. I dug my fingers under the straps of my pack and didn’t move toward him.
He shrugged. “I’m supposed to fine you, but you didn’t light a fire, so I’ll let it go. Have a nice hike?”
I gave him a non-committal nod. “Saw some cougar tracks earlier.”
“You sure they were cougar?” he said.
Something in his tone made me look more closely at his face, the eager forward hunch of his shoulders. “Yeah,” I said. “They were only about this big.” I traced my palm and he nodded, the excitement going out of his eyes and shoulders. I took a step closer to him. “Have you seen bigger?”
Now he studied me, his eyes wary under the brim of his Forest Service cap. We watched each other a minute, our eyes locked, each gauging the danger from the other.
Fina
lly, “There are a lot strange things in these hills,” he said. “You never quite know what you’ll find.”
I gave him a slow nod. Let my heart beat twice before saying, “Like a saber-tooth cat.”
Now his grin spread out from his eyes to light his whole face. He patted the helipad beside him. “When did you see it?”
“‘Bout a month ago.” I let my pack slide to the ground and took a seat next to him. The concrete ground into my cold muscles and I braced myself with my hands, sitting half turned so I could see him.
“I saw mine six years ago,” he said. “I’ve been looking for it on and off ever since. I told a few of the guys in the service, once. Won’t do that again.”
I pointed at his gun. “Are you going to shoot it?”
“Not sure I could, even if I had to. It never did me any harm.” He ducked his head, eyes hidden again under the cap brim. “You could say it did me a lot of good. All the time I’ve spent up here, trying to find it again. I could have spent it in bars.”
I drew my knees up and rested my chin on them. The breath of the hills blew over us. “What did you lose?” I asked.
The question sent a jolt through him, brought his face back up into the light to meet mine. His eyes were pale hazel, the color of young sage leaves. Boyish freckles dusted his cheekbones despite the crow’s feet around his eyes.
“My wife. She left me for a buddy of mine.”
“I’m sorry.” This time I meant it.
“What about you?”
The scar across my belly tightened, the muscles shrinking back, flinching from the touch of memory. Tears pricked my eyes in the breeze and I blinked hard. I couldn’t inflict my tears on this guy. I cried too much as it was.
But he’d asked, so I told him. “A baby. And my uterus. It was ectopic and they didn’t catch it in time.”
“I’m sorry.” He reached into his breast pocket and offered me a handkerchief.
“It wasn’t a real baby yet. That’s what the doctor said. It couldn’t have lived, so it didn’t count, I guess.”
“Funny how other people get to decide what’s real and what’s not. Bonny, my wife, she said I wasn’t really in love with her.” He picked a piece of loose quartz off the concrete, sending it across the campsite as I blew into the handkerchief. “Did you have a name picked out?”
“Michael Brandon. I was going to call him Mikey until he got old enough to be embarrassed by it.” I dabbed at my face, smiling at the image. “Did you have kids?”
“Nah, it was just the two of us.” He pursed his lips, thinking, or looking backwards, maybe. “For a long time I used to come up here, just for the silence. Like it could hold me in, keep me from having to feel anything anymore.”
“Yeah,” I said. Dusk had fallen as we talked. The sharp black shadows were gone, swallowed in the creeping darkness that grew up the hillsides. Soon I would have to get in my car and drive back down to the city, to my job, to Michael.
I shivered in the evening wind and curled my arms into my chest for warmth.
“Do you think we’re both crazy?” I said.
“Sure.” He laughed. “If we were sane we’d get the hell out of LA and come live up here in the hills where we can breathe.”
~~~
I still drive down the narrow road into LA nearly every day, crossing the invisible line between the timeless, breathing hills and the city’s rush. But every night I come back into the foothills, to the house where I can smell the chaparral and hear the mountain’s heartbeat. And on weekends we tramp the hills, finding those pockets where time doesn’t exist, where the past and present and future overlap and blend into one another. We haven’t seen our saber-tooth again, but we’re hopeful, Jim and I.
~~~
SARAH ADAMS writes urban fantasy and science fiction when she’s not teaching college English. She was a 2009 Writers of the Future semi-finalist and has sold work to Flash Fiction Online. She’s shopping around a co-written novel about a human changeling in Winter Court London and finishing her solo novel about berserkers in Buffalo, New York. She also writes about books and life on the blog A Hundred Thousand Worlds at http://ahundredthousandworlds.blogspot.com/. When she has a free moment she hikes the hills above LA. She has yet to see a saber-tooth cat — but she’s hopeful.
For millions of years, across countless species, three emotions have always remained true: fear, loneliness and love. Vesna discovers from a quite unexpected source just how old the dance of love truly is.
FOOTPRINTS ON THE BEACH
by Aleksandar Žiljak
Teeth. Sharp and backwards-curving, serrated to better tear flesh. Tearing through the peaceful herd of iguanodons grazing in the early-morning light.
The pack of roaring megalosaurs — grey carnivores mottled in camouflage green — charged through the forest clearing, throwing the iguanodons into mindless panic.
Amid the horrified screams, running on Her hind legs through the scattering stampede, She was aware only of the teeth pursuing Her, of the megalosaur zeroed in on Her, faster than Her, salivating jaws ready to bite into Her.
Instinctively c there was no time to think — She swung Her powerful tail and swerved. The megalosaur deftly evaded the deadly blow that nearly slammed into its head, but lost the pace in the process. Its jaws snapped onto empty air. But the predator didn’t give up.
Nothing else but those teeth on Her mind, She rushed noisily into tall cycads and gingkoes and magnolias, hoping to lose the bloodthirsty beast, using the dense growth to slow it and give Her a chance to escape. She leaped over a fallen, moss-covered log. Her massive body broke through shoots, heavy feet squashing horsetails and ferns beneath Her, frightened insects bursting left and right. Something tiny and hairy scurried into the thicket, barely escaping being trampled.
She heard a scream behind Her — the sound of deep wounds and imminent death. A heavy body collapsed with a thud, its stiff tail thrashing helplessly against the ground. She glimpsed forelimbs waving through air as the hapless creature tried to stab its attackers with pointed thumb spikes. The sounds of the kill faded as She ran. Hungry carnivores snarling and hissing as they squabbled over the best pieces of meat, torn from still-living iguanodon. Hot blood gushing and painting the world red.
Driven by panic, cries of ruthless slaughter echoing in Her mind, She didn’t realize that Her pursuer wasn’t chasing Her anymore — that it had turned back for its part of the carnage. Long after She was safe, She still rushed mindlessly through the forest. Until finally, some trace of reason broke through Her terror and told Her it was over. Exhausted, panting, She stopped and listened over the heartbeats thundering in Her ears.
Around Her, the ancient forest spoke softly. Quiet chattering of small feathered dinosaurs hidden under ferns, clawed feet rustling dry leaves as they searched for anything small enough to be snatched and swallowed. Whistling of pterosaurs hunting dragonflies above Her; their grayish, leathery wings flapping as they maneuvered skillfully between tall trees. Those were all usual sounds; the sounds She heard every day.
Relieved, She decided the danger was past, left far behind.
But where was She? She looked around.
The tall sequoias — thick pillars with reddish bark — seemed unfamiliar. After a short exploration, She realized She had never been in this part of the forest before. Lifting Her head, She took a deep breath and let out a long, sad, piercing call. Then She listened. Every living being in the forest around Her went still, their daily routines suddenly interrupted by the strange, loud call. She called again and listened. Silence. She called a third time — but there was no reply. That could mean only one thing: She was so far from the herd they couldn’t hear Her anymore. And that filled Her with unease. Fear. Alarm.
Throughout the day, She called and listened, called and listened, called and listened. Finally, She only called, growing more and more desperate with every unanswered call. For the first time in Her life, She was separated from the comfort of the herd.
~~~
Vesna sits on the bench under the pines. Sunset blazes above the sea, setting the sky on fire. Behind her, in a laurel bush, a little dinosaur with watchful eyes warns that a cat is on the prowl. The dinosaur has wings, black feathers, and a yellow bill. Next to Vesna, sketched on sheets of paper in the portfolio, rest some other dinosaurs: distant relatives of the blackbird with the watchful eyes, the chirping sparrows and the titmouse above her, and gulls returning from the sea.
A lock of blonde hair falls across Vesna’s eye. She swipes at it angrily. And then the day’s pent emotions erupt like magma from somewhere deep inside her, and her lake-blue eyes fill with tears. Vesna covers her face with her hands and shakes as she sobs. The knot in her stomach – clenched there since morning — threatens to burst loose. Somehow she managed to hold back on the dig, to hide tears from her colleagues, to evade questions and sympathetic looks. But now …
Sobs bring release, and after several minutes she calms down, sniffing, wiping tears from her cheeks, feeling somewhat better. Tissues. She reaches for a package of paper tissues in her bag.
Suddenly, she’s aware of a hand holding a neatly folded, perfectly clean handkerchief.
The young woman lifts her tear-filled gaze. A gentleman in what looks to be his 60s stands before her, his gray hair parted at the center, his mustache neatly trimmed. He’s dressed in an impeccable, sand-colored suit, appropriate for early autumn, with a scarf around his neck and a walking-stick in his other hand.
“Thanks.” Vesna takes the handkerchief, wipes her tears and blows her nose. She returns the handkerchief with an embarrassed smile, as if apologizing for making a fool of herself. How long has he been standing there? she wonders. “I’m afraid —”
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