Alternate Realities

Visual Prompt: Bamboo Bayou, Kilorn x Cameron

Submitted by LilyHarvord via Tumblr.

"Doesn't this seem creepy to you?" Cameron looks up while she walks.

She sometimes spins in a circle as if the path behind us won't look the same as the path in front. As if it could change just by us passing through. Or maybe she expects the tall poles to animate and close up, for the forest to swallow us whole. I chuckle every time she does it and she gives me the side-eye that thrills me.

The poles extend so high above that even though we're on a path wide enough for both of us, the leaves come together and shroud us in shadow. It's a stagnant kind of cool. Like the air is still frozen from last winter. There's nothing bu the slight swaying to even indicate the weather out there effects anything in here. It's not creepy, it's wonderfully quiet. Cameron doesn't know what to do with quiet.

Her pace picks up when she sees golden light, the end of the bamboo forest. I tug her sleeve and make her pace herself. I savor the eager, annoyed looks. I am so often on my back foot with her, the one that's left running or retracting or rearranging myself that to see her twirl again, walking backwards, makes me laugh out loud. She spins and plows on, leaving me to watch her dash to the light.

I'm not there when the bayou makes it's first impression, but she can save that moment for herself. She needs things that are all her own. I do get her secondary response, the things that overflow her and she has to share.

"I have never seen anything so blue and yet so clear," she declares.

When she turned seventeen, I persuaded her parents to let her travel with me. It was a tough sell, her being in school and all. In the end, her mother thought she should see the whole of what there is to see. To exercise the freedom she'd worked so hard to win. To justify the nightmares she fought almost every night, I guess.

I took her to the Stilts, to Sommerton. I showed her the house I lived in, the Barrow home, I took her up and down the river on a borrowed fishing boat. I taught her how to braid nets and we caught our own supper. We stayed in a tavern where I expected someone to remember my name, but saw only strangers. A few weeks of backpacking the forests, bartering ferry rides, and crossing farm land and I took her home. She needed school. I needed the road. We both needed those weeks to figure that out.

She's nineteen now, same as I was when we met. I've been through Norta and Montfort, Piedmont, and even on a misadventure into Prairie. Of all the places I've ever been, this is the one I wanted most to share with her.

"Is it even water?" She asks.

"Oh, it's water," I assure.

"Did you see that? Is that what we're catching?"

I follow her pointed finger to the long fish circling beneath, across the gap, another fisher stands with a spear. He waves. I wave back. Cameron is hunched over and marveling, unaware how many paths lead out to the river. The locals gather here in the morning when the big fish migrate past to the shady depths from their shallow, night time feeding grounds.

"Their called pie-fillers. They come in all sorts of colors. All of them tasty." I set the spears down on the path.

Cameron gets down on her hands and knees and then on her stomach. Her fingers reach down to the surface of the water and entice the fish to the surface. She skims the side of one before it flicks away into the depths. She admires them like a child, like she should have as a child. And I no longer care if I catch a single one. She can play like that until all the fish have passed and the sun is high so long as she's smiling.