Ambedo
An early work of short fiction.
Burnt red chips flutter through the mid-afternoon sun as her heels pound the walls of the squat auburn building with an inconsistent cadence. She traces Rorschach designs in the melting tar with a twig.
“Sonder — a noun: the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.”
She likes big books with bigger words. A young man who must work for the railroad is mowing the parcel of grass between two tracks. She slips over the edge of the rooftop, landing nimbly on the sleeping bag below. She rolls the polyester cocoon and buckles the straps to keep it shut. It is late November, but the sun still sets slowly in Georgia at this time of year.
She skids down the gravel embankment that separates the wilderness of Appalachia from the steel braces that force resisting small towns together like unruly molars. Each step yields a new rhythm of natural procession, set into motion when the Blue Ridge was first coated with foliage about three weeks back. The leaves are as cracked as her lips.
She reaches the mountain’s crown just after the persimmon sun drops behind the unfailing blue haze that rises off the mountains. She pulls a hammock and small propane stove from a nearby spicebush and builds her camp just south of the bald rocky outcrop.
The wind roars through cresting trees along the ridge. The sound shoots through her spine. She attempts to nestle deeper into the sleeping bag and tugs the folds of the hammock over each other. The moonlight refracts iridescent through the nylon fabric and she thinks of the man she saw mowing the grass on the tracks.
It must be between four and five o’clock in the morning. The sky is still dark, but her mind in its semi-twilight state manages to extricate itself out of the sludge of odd dreams that come with sleeping amongst the sounds of nature. The wind has stopped. She hears a light rustling to her southwest, in the direction of the path that leads to a campground parking lot about three miles way. She pictures a sedan with scratched varnish and a booster seat in the back sitting in front of the trail map at the genesis of the path. It is a shade of fuzzy cerulean or periwinkle, and the hubcaps have been recently cleaned. She imagines two boys, one younger than the other, trudging outside with slippers on. The morning’s dew tickles their ankles. They diligently scrub, pausing only for the occasional yawn. Finished, they pour the bucket of suds in the driveway and trek back inside. Pancakes are waiting.
She drifts back into sleep, but the rustling has not ceased. She wakes again, this time somewhat irritated. Poking her head out of the hammock she finds her campsite blanketed in thin fog. She resists the urge to slip back into her shell. From the glade at the southern end of camp there emerges a figure in an ash-grey fleece. Two more shadows appear out of the mist and their voices carry across the clearing. She hears the viscous drawl of a Georgia farm-boy mixing with the distinct dialect shared by the 436 occupants of Hilda, South Carolina. She spent a few weeks just outside of the town and recognizes the gentle hum that comes with each pronunciation of the letter “m.”
They hang the deer from a birch tree branch about seven feet off the ground. She cannot see the glassy eyes or the neat hole in the right side of the neck. As they clean the carcass the saltiness of its blood travels across the clearing. She lies in her synthetic sheath breathing sporadically. She squeezes her eyes shut, thinking of the man mowing the grass. Thinking of the sedan with the car seats. Thinking of the cracked yellow sulfur on the main street of Hilda, South Carolina, where a leaky fire hydrant glumly sits, a sign of the township’s inadequate infrastructure.
The sun crawls across the sky, intrusively peeking through the natural blinds of the trees that dance across the mountain’s rim. The cocoon stirs. A girl emerges from its body. A burgundy stain, hardly distinguishable from the fertile soil of Appalachia, is the only shadow of the deer carcass from the preceding dawn.
She likes big books with bigger words. She thinks of the man on the tracks, the small town of Hilda, and the fading sedan. She grapples with the procession of events, not solely of the past seventeen hours.
She replaces the camp stove in its designated alcove. Re-summiting the peak she marches south, back towards the rails and the paintings in the tar. Back to where the smoke from the Blue Ridge and the exhaust of coal trains mingles.
“Ambedo — a noun: a kind of melancholic trance in which you become completely absorbed in vivid sensory details.”