Understory

Hey friends ~~ This is a short story I wrote for a class last semester (is that cheating? I could say I re-found it...) that relates to my feelings about up, based on a hike I took over the summer.
It is approx. 1500 words.

The smooth veneer of the lake was interrupted only by the projection of nearly one hundred tree stumps shooting up from the mirrored water, forming ‘v’s with their reflections.

“They look like little birds,” June said, as if a child had drawn a flock of simple black marks against the water and spawned a new species. If June wanted to count the stumps, she would have had to separate them from their reflections, and the more closely she observed the scene, the more confused she became. There had to be nearly one hundred of them!

Jeremy said, “What,” but was attempting to screw the gas can onto the stove, and she didn’t think he was listening, so she didn’t explain. If she only could have seen the bottom of the lake, she might have understood her growing horror.

Jeremy had always teased her about her fascination with Seattle’s underground tours. She would outline the history over and over - when the waterline rose they simply built on the second storey and filled the streets in - with lashes fanning out from her excited eyes.

“But we are already the second story,” June would say in these conversations, focusing emphasis on the narrative ‘story’ rather than the levels of a structure. “We’re already building on top of something we don’t talk about.” She had worked in preservation in college, and worried her research had focused so much on the land, ignoring the people whose histories informed it and building on top of them as a cassette is easily fabricated by re-taping.

Jeremy worked with computers, and knew that nothing on a hard drive could be overwritten without a trace. He preferred this analogy, and the couple had wound their way into several fights because of it. Jeremy would say, “We know enough of our ghosts,” assuming he understood where the bodies of history were buried.

June would go on the underground tours alone, looking up at the small skylights that opened to the city sidewalk, and know that there was something farther down. If only there was another staircase descending into the earth below Pioneer Square, if she could find the door to a tunnel, a slide, some underground cave with wet walls and ancient inscriptions... It could be so easy to access. When June was sick of such cavities in her mind, she would drag Jeremy out here, where the ghosts had been driven back to. They were not in the city.

June was not highly conscious of any of these convictions, but she knew she told herself stories, and Jeremy knew it too, and when he was getting into the philosophy of the thing, he sometimes wondered if they lived in completely different worlds. He told funny stories, but rarely to himself.

June had gone to pump water from the lakeshore, and when she was gone a long time Jeremy began to worry, and started looking up for her while he set up camp. He couldn’t see her by the water’s edge, but it was a ways from their site. It had been an incredibly dry year and the lake had retreated a good twenty feet from the muddy line it usually reached, revealing jagged tree stumps hidden in all the photos he’d seen in his research of the hike. It was eerie, waiting for his out-of-sight girlfriend, still thinking about what she’d said about birds, and how the projections seemed merely the beginning of something also out of sight.

He called her name several times, but she had to have been behind a small hill or a corner or a cluster of trees he couldn’t see. It was getting dark and one of the few remaining families was packing up on the other side of the lake. When he called out June’s name, a child reached out to wave and the shadow of the small arm stretched grandly across the muddy bank.

Jeremy was irritated, because the season’s wild fires had prevented him from backpacking in the North Cascades, and the forest was too dense here to remind him of his childhood in the Adirondacks. Switchbacking up to this first lake, he had felt as if they had been walking on the same section of trail for hours, repeating each step over and over. He could only see the trail a few hundred yards beyond his feet, and then it would turn and etch its way back a bit higher in the opposite direction, and he would have to remember that only a few minutes before, the hill had been on his left, and now it was on his right. The children they had encountered that day were so carefree against his claustrophobia.  

Jeremy abandoned the stove and began to make an attempt at the tent. He hummed to himself as he snapped the poles together. They had meant to reach the second, higher lake by nightfall, but June kept falling behind and stopping for water and pressing fingers to her temples in a way that didn’t require explanation. He didn’t want to ask if she was alright but when he finally did she said, “if we could just rest for a while,” and they spent a long time on a log at the side of the trail without saying anything. Whatever it was, she wouldn’t talk about it, but she agreed without protest when he suggested they modify the plan and stay at the more popular, accessible lake for the first night of the trip.

The family opposite the shore from him had retired into the trees and it was deadly quiet as night fell, without a single scratch from the branches or a call from the settling birds. Jeremy finished erecting the tent, and shook out the sleeping bags while the air pads filled up naturally. At the bottom of June’s stuff bag, he found the satellite phone he’d asked her to carry a few months ago when she set out alone for a short section of the Wonderland Trail.

“I have to go out there and face it by myself,” she’d said.

“Face what, June?”

They were standing in her kitchen. He’d come over for some menial reason, just to see her, and she was already mid-pack. She’d hadn’t bothered to mention her spur-of-the-moment trip to him but when he asked her what she was heading out to accomplish, she’d turned and pressed her head against his chest and held on to him and breathed one big breath as if she’d been holding it in for ages, as if whole histories could open up in the air between them, all the ghosts they hadn’t met and couldn’t understand. Jeremy had had no clue what was going on with June, but he had driven straight home and grabbed the satellite phone and driven back and pressed it into her hand. In the tent, he stared at the screen. Where had she gone?

On their way home from backpacking a few days later, June was delighted by the advertising billboards just outside the park. She’d been away so long, she could barely remember. She was thinking of a stretch of highway in Oregon where all roadside advertisements are banned, where, driving into the setting sun, she had once felt obliterated by the natural evening. She’d passed out of radio signal and had driven on in silence without changing the dead cassette tape. Hers was one of the only cars on the road, and she almost could have disappeared into the undergrowth on both sides, abandoned her belongings and found a place to stand and grow mossy.

Jeremy, sleeping, pushed his damp socks against the windshield and June watched as it fogged over with the heat from his body. She read every advertisement they passed, wrapped her tongue around the casino names under her breath until she could pronounce them all. Her headache was coming back but she ate on-brand artificially-orange chips from a loud plastic cylinder without tasting them and reached over with her sticky fingers to turn up the talk radio.