It sounded like you, but I know it wasn’t. It was almost perfect — had all your little mannerisms down, the soft way you kiss your tee’s, the slight whistle past your missing tooth; the way you linger on your u’s and your ou’s and your double-o’s, inherited from holidays spent back in North Dakota. But I knew it wasn’t you. It missed one detail.
The woods were cold this time around. Not sunny like when you and I went, back then — the calendar date stopped mattering to me sometime after the funeral. After the funeral there was only then and now, before and after.
Before, it was sunny, and the light streamed through the leaves to dapple the underbrush with pools of light and moving shadows, like the running of deer through the sprawling capillaries of dreams; the leaves overhead filled with golden and verdant light, tasting like rhubarb and smelling like coffee and feeling like waking up late to a singing house.
And you were struggling to keep up on that sinuous, root-filled mountain trail; my legs were so much longer but you never once asked me to slow down, never once begged me to stop; only you would run every few minutes to land once more by my side, and smile up at me in that missing-tooth way which was so uniquely you.
After, it was raining. The mountain was covered in mist, playing into every Pacific Northwest stereotype. I almost didn’t make it past the trailhead — grief stood in the way, a black guard against the path forward, armed with stinging memories and clad in the armor of regret.
Are you sure you want do go? It asked. I’ll re-open every wound you have.
I already paid the park fee, I think. You might defeat me today, but the National Parks Service sure as hell won’t.
And so, I pushed past it; and sure enough it reopened everything.
Back then, I saw something by our campsite. You’ll remember the night, though you don’t know the whole of it. I never told you because I didn’t want you to be scared. But I guess there’s no harm in it now.
It was the middle of the night, and you were out like a light, and I should have gone before going to bed. I snuck out as quietly as I could and wandered as far off the trail as I dared to squat in the bushes. The woods are always louder than you think they’re going to be — so many birds and bugs and critters moving through the underbrush and calling to each other and eating each other.
Squatting there in the darkness, silence dropped on me as if falling from a height. I thought the suddenness of it was an illusion somehow — a trick of the ears, overused to the chatter; or a kind of dropping off to sleep, the fatigue of the late hour overwhelming my ears before anything else. But soon I did hear something: the quiet rustling of leaves, the parting of branches of something moving glacially through the trees.
It was far too dark to see, and yet my eyes stretched hard against that dark. Imagined shapes rose to my eyes — flotsam floating in alien depths, or unidentifiable bodies drifting through space. And the unseen something, quietly crushing the foliage, ponderously moving toward the campsite. Toward the sleeping you.
I stood, suddenly. Unsure of what to do, but unwilling to do nothing. I looked toward the campsite, trying to see our tents in the dark, trying to know somehow that you were safe. A pair of eyes swiveled toward me, gathering the scant light of the stars to refract out of the black.
The next thing I know I’m scrambling through the underbrush, careless of rocks and branches that scratch my face and hands to oblivion; careless of my pants, still unbuttoned, threatening to trip me; careless of the thing that might very well give chase. I called your name, and you called back to me. That much you would no doubt remember. And you might remember how hard sleep was for me to find that night, as I watched out the tent flap for hours, making sure that the eyes didn’t come any closer. Even as your voice whispered out to me from the underbrush, as tears of fear clouded my eyes, I watched those twin firefly dots, occasionally blinking, yet never coming nearer. Not that I know what I would’ve done if they had.
And now, in this rainy and cold half-world reflection, I’m heading up the trail, and the woods drop into eerie quiet once again. A soft crunching of gravel behind me mimics my footsteps. It calls out to me — you call out to me — an almost perfect replica.
It only misses that one detail. I dare not turn around.
That night, back at our old campsite, I don’t even set up the tent. I don’t build a fire. I just sit among the detritus and wait for the gloom to become gloaming to become true dark.
Your eyes glimmer in the darkness; two fireflies.
And you call to me, again. And again. And again.
It’s almost perfect.
Raleigh Van Natta is an author and playwright from Alaska. His short stories have been published internationally, and his plays have received recognition across Alaska. He is a dog person
