The Wizard's Herbarium: The Wolf Child

Part 45

Colt slept on the floor of the dining room of the restaurant. It wasn't uncommon for owners of small eating establishments to purchase buildings with living space above it. Opening a restaurant was an expensive endeavor, and though Colt was saving quite a lot of money buying in such a small town, he'd be in debt for many years. In the summer, Colt would get extra customers from the tourists that came through, but he would also need to please the locals year-round if he wanted to stay afloat through the long winter. He'd need a plan for keeping his business going during the off-season. In the meantime, sleeping in the restaurant was a good way to save money, but wasn't sustainable. The restaurant didn't have a shower for him to wash up in. This wasn't the city where an easy way to shower while being technically homeless was to get a gym membership, preferably to a gym that was open 24 hours a day so he could shower whenever he wanted.

Maybe 'sleeping' was the wrong term. 'Laying awake all night traumatized by the fire' was closer to what he experienced. When he did manage to doze off, Colt dreamed about the fire that had ripped through the forest and the screams of the woman he didn't even know the name of. And that was if he managed to fall asleep. More often than not, Colt would lie awake, tossing and turning. It was on one of these nights that he gave up.

Colt got up from the floor, struggling only a little on the wobbly air mattress, and slowly made his way to the bathroom, feeling his way along the walls of the restaurant. He hadn't yet managed to memorize where all the chairs and tables had been put. He knew that he'd pushed everything back against the walls, but not being able to see also meant that he didn't know if he'd accidentally left a chair in the middle of the room for him to stub his toe on, or run into it stomach-first later. He thought about all the crap they put in the aisles of grocery stores around the holidays, and Colt had both a newfound appreciation for people who couldn't see and a newfound hatred for those corporations who put all the stuff just to make a few extra bucks.

In the bathroom, Colt didn't bother to turn on the lights. At the very least, he'd save on his electricity bill, he supposed. He felt for the fresh bandages he kept by the sink and changed the bandages around his eyes. His fingers brushed the scarred skin there and made his stomach flip. From the feel alone, he had a good idea what he looked like and Colt was sure that it wasn't pretty. He wondered if the colour of his sightless eyes had dulled like he'd seen in movies. He didn't know anyone who couldn't see and he was beginning to realize just how much his ideas were influenced by the media, but that wasn't much different from what he'd gone through with Julien. There had been so much he hadn't known, and so much he still didn't know.

There was another challenge: Colt never knew what time it was unless he asked someone. This was something he needed to remedy if he were going to open the restaurant as a legitimate business. At the time of opening, he'd also need an alternate place to live and thereby racking up even more debt. No one would want to eat at a place the owner lived in. There were those apartments he could look into buying, but he worried about not being approved for another mortgage so soon. This was why he couldn't sleep, his mind going around and around. He would estimate that it was the middle of the night and there wasn't anything that could be done anyway.

Colt grabbed his cane and stepped out of the store. He had a mental map of the town, and he knew which direction to go in. He got a few paces from the restaurant, paused and then went back. Saving on electricity bills was all well and fine, but a hazard of living in the sticks was still the wildlife, especially in the middle of the night. It wouldn't take much to run smack into a bear. It was late in the season and most of the food high in the mountains has been eaten already. Colt couldn't walk three steps into town without hearing the locals comment about seeing a bear or running into a bear. Colt wasn't going to chance it.

He kept a flashlight right by the main door of the restaurant on top of the bar. He shuffled his feet forward and stuck his hand out, feeling along the bar's surface.

Colt often felt unbalanced, especially if he was trying to find something. His mental map of places such as the restaurant was good, but he sometimes mixed up his positioning. There were times he thought he was a few paces forward than he actually was, or closer to a certain surface. When he would lean forward to grab something he was so sure was there, only to miss and pitch forward. He hated the falling sensation he experienced in the pit of his stomach then.

The back of his hand knocked into the flashlight. Colt heard the heavy thump as it fell over and then the rhythmic sound of it rolling across the surface. He all but flopped over the bar, frantically grabbing for the flashlight before it could fall onto the floor. If it did, any number of things could happen: the batteries could pop out of it, scattering everywhere or the flashlight could roll somewhere unknown where he'd have no hope of finding it.

He caught the flashlight like he might have caught a grasshopper as a kid, his hand smacking onto it and he held on for dear life. It was amazing to him that something as simple as grabbing a flashlight could stress him out so much. All of the things that had once been easy to him were now herculean tasks.

He turned the flashlight on, pushing the switch and feeling where the light was, hoping that he could feel the warmth of the bulb inside. As he left the restaurant for the second time, Colt wondered if he were a moron. A flashlight wasn't much of a deterrent to bears, maybe other animals, but the alternative scared him even more. The alternative to getting eaten by a bear in the middle of the night was to live a life where he never went out at all. It wasn't too difficult to picture; he wouldn't go for a walk in the middle of the night because it was too dangerous, but then he wouldn't get on a bus because it was too dangerous, and then he wouldn't go to the store and on it would go until he lived the rest of his life as a shut-in. So, he left the restaurant, swallowing his fear of bears.

Colt followed his mental map of the area, walking left from the entrance to the restaurant. He didn't want to chance tripping over a crack in the sidewalk, so he walked down the street. He followed the street until the thump of his shoes on the pavement scraped against gravel. Here was the tricky part. Colt had to follow the gravel parking lot, avoiding breaking his leg in any one of the many potholes and come out on the wide dirt path. The problem was that the parking lot curved gently around a bend. If he misjudged, he could end up at the beach or simply getting turned around. He navigated the area slowly. The potholes might as well have been live mines that he was trying to avoid. He felt in front of him with his cane, then shuffled his foot forward, trying not to step down. A few times when he moved his feet forward, he'd hit a pothole and his stomach would drop in that awful way.

Colt couldn't describe the relief that he felt when he hit the dirt path. The scrape of his shoes against the gravel turning into a dull thud on the dirt felt as good as though he had just climbed Mount Everest, and not only walked down the street.

He'd walked down that same path many times. As Colt moved, he could remember the way, what the houses and trees looked like. He wondered whether the memory he had matched up with reality, and how much had been affected by the fire. It was possible that the fire hadn't quite reached that far, as the authorities had already said, and that it was exactly as Colt remembered it to be, but it could also be completely changed. He wasn't going to know unless someone else told him. How much else was he going to miss out on because no one was around to tell him? How much else was he going to notice because no one was around to tell him?