Nora kept walking until she reached the modest street where both of her grandmothers lived. She might be one of the only people in America whose grandmothers from both sides of her family shared a house.
Down here, the houses weren't trying to be showy and neither were the people. The land spread wide and flat and unmanicured, painted dusky red in the San Juan Mountains sunset. Wild grasses waved around her like sequins.
This was Nora's happy place.
Holiday Ranch sat on twelve acres of land snugged into the base of Trapper's Peak, willows marking the pockets of shallow ponds where frogs croaked sleepily. The street smelled like summer and sagebrush and desert dust. She often came out here in the fall to watch the colors turn on the mountains overhead. She just as often walked the wintertime grounds, stamping footprints into unbroken snow. Nora was just as much a part of this place as were her grandmothers who lived here. It had been a second home since her mother's passing, since the day she found she could scarcely breathe inside her childhood home.
And from June to August, Nora didn't have to pretend to live here, she could actually do it. The property transformed into a summer camp for eight weeks every year; eight glorious weeks during which Nora would not have to see her father, and he would not have to see her. She had years ago graduated from camper to counselor, leading skittish campers in song, teaching them where to catch fingernail-sized frogs in the tall grasses of the wetlands, introducing them to the gentle camp horses.
As she walked by, Nora tiptoed her fingers along the wooden enclosure. The not-yet-sleeping horses eyed Nora from behind the fence. Her phone flashlight carved a cone of light up the packed-dirt driveway down which the ranch house lay, framed against the dark shape of Trapper's Peak. Atop the mountain ahead were nestled the dappled lights of houses she'd passed an hour ago, the MacGowan mansion somewhere among them.
It was ever-strange to Nora that these little human legs, these wobbling chopsticks, these patchwork rigs of tendon and muscle and bone, could carry a body such a long way. It seemed impossible that moments ago she had been atop that mountain.
Something about the simple act of walking had always made Nora feel powerful. Perhaps it was because she had once been incapable of it; perhaps it was because she was still fairly bad at it. The motion, one foot in front of the other, defied the dysfunction of her own tendons and muscles and bones, crushed in a car accident when she was ten, re-connected by surgeons and stapled together with hospital implements and "synthetic bone," whatever that was. Walking was something she wasn't supposed to be able to do. And yet. The miracles of modern medicine.
An old camp song surged into her head – an occupational liability.
Oh I love to go a-wandering,
Along the mountain track,
And as I go, I love to sing,
My knapsack on my back.
Humming, Nora opened the health app on her phone and scrolled down to the "walking" sub-header. 9,378 steps. That was... what? She brought the number into an online calculator and it spat out a conversion: four and a half miles.
Well. That didn't sound very far at all. She much preferred the sound of nine-thousand-three-hundred-and-seventy-eight steps.
"Val-deri, Val-dera," she sang, a little disappointed. "Val-deri, Val-dera-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha."
Callum used to like her songs. He used to like all the childishness, all the magic, in her. Liked her stories, liked her strangeness, liked that she'd show up to school with paint on her fingers from helping Grandma Spiers with her evolving assortment of crafts. He liked pulling straw out of her hair from her time spent trotting the horses around their pens. He liked being the levelheaded one; he liked bringing her back, holding her down to Earth, like he thought she'd float off without him.
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Closer to the Sun || A Fairy Tale on Hiking Trails
Fantastik🌲 🦊 🐭 Campbell was ten the first time he turned into a mouse. The only person he could tell was his best friend Shea, but on that same day, she vanished into thin air. And when she returned, she was... different. They both were. They'd seen place...
