Pervasive

When a curious young woman finds herself lost in the wilderness, a mysterious hermit with a haunting past saves her.

Summertime rolled around, hot and much needed and Grace, a young junior in college, found herself in the wooded outskirts of a small town situated in the Canadian Rockies, a place that she had dreamed of going since she was a small girl. So enraptured by the romantic idea of returning back to the wilderness at a young age, Grace’s parents indulged her and bought their daughter a children’s camping kit on her twelfth birthday. Nearly every evening she attempted to spend a full night in her tent out in her backyard underneath the large bougainvillea bush that encapsulated the south-eastern corner. This was the furthest away from the house she could get and in her corner it was harder for her parents to supervise and interfere in the experience she was attempting to imitate from the books she read. However, Grace never made it through the night, always ending up running up to the house to get away from the blood sucking mosquitos that hovered outside the nylon blue and yellow tent, occasionally brushing up against it. 

The forest she was currently in had her facing her old foes once again, except this time there was no material separating Grace from the little devils and they were landing on her arms and legs and leaving red bumps that became irritated as she scratched at them. She swatted her hands about, hoping to scare them off or to kill a few, but she was unsuccessful and quickly became fed up and accepted their bites. It wasn’t until 2 o’clock that Grace was settled into her lodging at a quaint bed and breakfast that had taxidermy up the walls and a cat that hissed at her every time she passed into the foyer to get out the front door. Seeing as it was what she came for, Grace made her way out on a trail leading into the brush and forest that surrounded a towering peak that was blue and grey and looked down on the main street of the town. It was about a mile out that she spotted an interesting path that was naturally formed by the placement of the skinny white barked aspen trees and the firs that were scattered between them. 

The path seemed to snake around off into less populated areas where trees didn’t stand. Grace decided to go about hiking it, feeling that it was the appropriate thing to do when trying to awaken the simplistic hidden spiritualism that came with naturalistic endeavors. Perhaps what was needed to fully realize her childhood fantasies would be at the end of the path wherever it would lead her. A hour in and the deep dark night rushed in, filling every crevice and crook, leaving no breathing room for light and Grace realized her mistake. She rustled around in her pack, searching for her flashlight, but when she came up with nothing she assumed she must have left it back in her room. Her stomach growled angrily and she realized she had forgotten to eat during the excitement of it all. The panic arrived rather quickly and soon she was stumbling over unearthed roots, blinded and looking fruitlessly for her way back. 

“F**k,” she said aloud slouching down in front of a tree. She held herself, her hands rubbing her exposed arms as it had gotten colder as the night wore on and Grace was becoming increasingly worried that she’d wind up frozen and dead or at least dead and eaten by wolves. As she sat, huddled in a ball, the world spun with the dark shadows of trees bending together and twisting unnaturally. When she felt her stomach grumble in pain of hunger, Grace turned and clasped around the tree, hugging it. Her disheveled blonde hair caught onto the peeling bark and it hurt as some of the hairs were ripped out when she turned her head and noticed a figure coming towards her from beyond a few trees. It was tall and broad and it passed through with such an easiness that Grace half wondered if it was real or not. Grace blacked out before she could know what it was that found her and as she drifted into the bottomless dark she didn't much care.

~~~~~~~~~

The blood, once cold and stagnant, was now fluid and had been warmed by the heating pad and layers of blankets that Grace was wrapped in as she sat in a chair beside the cast-iron stove in the small living room of Walt’s cabin, the man who had saved her from where she clung to a tree. She had awoken, pulled back from her near tragic end, and was greeted by a large polar bear like dog and its owner, Walt, who explained to her that he had saw her pass his home obliviously as he was sitting on his porch and had a feeling that she would end up dead the next morning if he didn’t help her. He looked like he was in his late thirties maybe even a little older, brandishing a beard and dark hair that reached his shoulders. Walt reminded Grace of her father, save for that her father wore wire rimmed glasses and had cropped hair while Walt was something out of one of the books she read as a child. The mountain man who lived in deep isolation and was so in tune with the sights, smells, and sounds of his surroundings that he could survive even the most sinister of conditions out of pure will and spiritual understanding of what he enraptured himself in. The ascetic of transcendentalism. He left her there, as she got her bearings and the life came back into her drained body, and he milled about down the short hallway behind her, preparing a spare bedroom for her overnight stay. At one point Grace peered back, her muscles protesting, and spotted him carrying cardboard boxes from the spare room to another that she assumed was his own. The dog sat at the mouth of the hallway, its tail brushing up dirt and dust from the floorboards as he watched Walt. 

Thirty minutes later after Walt finished moving boxes and putting clean sheets on the bed, he helped Grace into the room. Her hand clung to his shirt to steady herself as her legs refused to work properly, but it only took a few steps till she was able to lean up against the partitioned door of the closet next to the bed as Walt grabbed some pillows from the other room. In the seconds he was gone, Grace noticed the glossy texture of a polaroid that must have fallen out of one of the boxes and onto the floor, slipping part way beneath the bed. She could only make out that it was of a woman before Walt walked back into the room with two pillows that he threw on the bed, he didn’t notice what Grace was looking at because he was too preoccupied with getting through the night so that he could get rid of his guest. 

“Is this your wife?” she asked, picking up the picture from the floor and plopping down on the bed.

Grace looked at the woman in it, the dark hair mingling with the white flowers of the bush that backdropped her. The eyes looked forward, severe and young. Walt snatched the photo from Grace’s fingers and stuffed it into his shirt pocket.

“Go to sleep,” he commanded and made his way out the door. But just before he closed the door Grace, seemingly unaware of the dangerous memory lane she was daring to travel down stopped him.

“She’s pretty,” Grace said her fingers digging into the bed sheets. 

“Reminds me of Hattie,” She smiled awkwardly and then looked down, too aware of Walt’s attention. 

“Who’s Hattie?” He asked from the door.

“She was my older sister. Died from cancer. I don't remember being around her. I only know her through the photos my parents show me.”

Walt watched as Grace made star shapes in the linens with her finger. The thickness of melancholic reminiscence pervaded the room and threatened to pull tears out of Grace’s eyes, but she persisted. She could feel his gaze on her and wished that he would leave.

“Goodnight,” Walt left and closed the door, but he lingered in the hallway for a bit, feeling the weight of what was shared with him and the intimacy that came with sharing such personal information. This was something he hadn't felt for a while and he found it painfully strange that he missed it. 

The dog trotted into his bedroom which was across the hall, knowing full well that it was bedtime and Walt followed finding his room, the smallest out of the two bedrooms, to be swamped with the brown boxes filled with the objects and past that he was finding that he couldn't leave behind. He stood in the dim light of his room, absorbing what he had stuffed into the spare bedroom years ago after he retired and isolated himself in his cabin in an attempt to start over as the hermit he chose to be. Now with Grace here and her invasive questions about the photo that laid over his left breast, Walt had doubts and he was worried that he couldn’t make them leave even after she was gone. The dog laid waiting for him on the bed, already half asleep. Walt had the old urge to dig up the liquor he had stashed away in his pantry, but denied that urge and forced himself to sleep.

~~~~~~~~~

The next morning proved more difficult for Walt to endure than he had originally thought. In the night, his dreams became snippets and forms of fevered memories that left a familiar lingering scent of honeysuckles that he tried to cure by deeply inhaling the strong coffee as he sat at the breakfast table. Grace stumbled in, moving much better than she was last night but not quite to her full vigor. She told him good morning and Walt nodded his head in acknowledgment as he sipped his coffee. Grace got her own coffee after Walt directed her to where the cups were from where he sat and when she figured that there would be no cream to dilute the liquid she resolved to drink it black. She sat across from Walt who felt much better and took a swig of her coffee. To say the least it was strong and the concentrated caffeine struck her like lightening, speeding up her processes. It was possibly the most difficult swig of coffee she had ever had to force down. Walt watched, intrigued by the boldness of the girl to take such a big gulp of coffee that he himself had only ever sipped. Grace felt proud as it trickled down her throat, believing that her impressive display had somehow made the man she looked to as an example of a true master of wilderness living respect her as a worthy confidant in which he could impart his secret to finding the spiritualism she was seeking. Walt felt pity for her.

Grace cleared her throat and set her cup down with a resonance that suggested conversation.

“Thanks for saving me,” she said and the dog’s wet nose tickled her foot as it laid underneath the table. She twitched and nearly hit the dog, but managed not to.

“Sure,” Walt answered. He then asked her about why she was in the forest so far from the town and Grace explained to him that she had gotten lost while taking a hike. A silence ensued after the exchange as both of them took sips of their coffee. 

“So,” Grace began, “how did you come to live out here?”

Walt craved a cigarette that he hadn’t had for ten years and felt that he was teetering on the edge of a pool, ready to lose his balance and jump in. 

“Health reasons,” he lied, drank the last bit of his coffee and put his cup in the sink.

“The sun’s up. You better get going before anyone starts worrying and comes looking for you,” Walt said looking out the small window above the sink and into the daylight woods. 

It was bittersweet for Grace to hear. She peered down into her empty cup, disappointed. This was a rare coincidence, she supposed, for her to come across her childhood dream and something pulled at her heart. Walt took her cup out from under her nose and studied her quizzically. Grace looked back at him.

“Your stuff is over there by the radiator,” he said and gestured with the cup in hand over into the sitting room. He turned around to the sink and began rinsing out the cup. Grace watched Walt’s back and when he turned his head a bit to glare she looked away and got up from her seat to go get her things.

The radiator was dormant, pointless in a pleasant summer, and Grace’s pack laid up against it, slouched as if it too were sleeping. She kneeled down in front of it, grasping the brown itchy canvas in her hands and opening it, rustled around inside to ensure that all of her things were still there. She pawed at each object, feeling what they were and went down the checklist in her mind. The small smooth lighter left her hand and she was sure she had everything. She began to take out her hand when her fingers grazed something rough and metallic. Grace’s brows furrowed and she clasped it in her hand and pulled it out. It glinted, catching the light from the kitchen doorway, and it fit neatly in Grace’s hand. A folding knife with a wood grain handle rested in her hand and she was perplexed. She held it upward, as if she had just found the Excalibur and pulled it from its stone, and twisted it around to study it. The light disappeared and Walt walked into the doorway, his boots shuffling and kicking the wood floors. 

Grace still held the knife up and looked over her shoulder to Walt to say, “This isn’t mine.”

“I know, it was mine,” Walt stepped further into the room, flicking the light switch to the hallway.

“Was?” Grace lowered her arm and the knife.

“Noticed that you didn’t have one,” He put his hands in his pockets and kicked up the dust on the floor as he shuffled over to her, “It was one of my old ones. You need one if you’re going to be wandering around here.”

“You went through my things?” Grace looked at the knife in her open palm.

“Well, uh,” Walt was flustered, but Grace didn’t seem to notice. 

For a moment there was pause in conversation and the silence in the cabin was more present than ever. 

Grace gazed up at Walt who had regained his composure, “Do you think I could do this?”

“Do what?” 

“What you do. Live in the middle of a forest, alone, you know, with only yourself to depend on,” she gripped the knife more confidently as she said this. 

Walt found Grace amusing but didn’t show it. Instead he answered, “I don’t know you, Grace. You’re just a kid I found lost in the woods.” 

“Yeah,” Grace sighed, “ I thought maybe you could see if I had what it takes.”

Walt rubbed the back of his head, feeling as though he had disappointed her, and decided to remedy the situation, “But everyone’s got to start somewhere. And getting lost, dare I say, is a good first step.”

Grace turned to him and smiled and Walt felt himself slipping back into the hole that Grace had reopened. He stood stiff and didn’t smile back, but that didn’t sullen Grace’s mood. She got up in a hurry, grabbing her pack and slinging it onto one shoulder and stowing her new knife in her back pocket. She had the excitement of a child that Walt tried to ignore. 

“Well then, lets go,” Grace exclaimed and Walt followed her out the front door. He took the lead once they were out and led her to the trail she had lost the day before. They said their goodbyes and Walt watched her go, making sure she got a good ways down before turning and walking back. 

~~~~~~~~~

Early morning dreariness hung in the air of the grey cloudy beginning of a new day. Walt could practically see the humidity all around him, pressing in on him and making it difficult to breathe. The red crank radio crackled beside him on the pile of collected logs propped up next to the house. It was shouting out the weather forecast and Walt caught bits and pieces of it in between each ax swing and split log. A summer storm was coming with heavy rain and it was going to hit later that night. Walt stopped for a moment, letting the axe swing idly by his side. He looked up at the sky and let the sweat roll down his neck and face. Birds squawked, settling into the tree limbs and darting out into the sky, like black paper airplanes. Two of them twisted about. Weaving around each other until one chased the other into a nearby tree. The sun was constricted by the dense clouds, suffocating and hazy. Walt gazed at it, the droning of the weather becoming a dull whisper in the back of his mind. He squinted and then the weather forecast turned to the cheery voices of two radiomen bantering and he switched it off harshly. 

Walt leaned the axe against the chopping stump and bent to gather the logs piled crudely next to him. It was then that he picked up a rustling coming from the open back door of his cabin and he froze, listening for the sound again. He heard it and slowly stood up, careful to not make any sound. Footsteps sounded heavily on the floors and echoed out into the open air where Walt picked up his axe and begun to glide across the grass to the door. The footsteps stopped and a rhythmic thumping started up. Walt took a few more long steps and sidled himself beside the door, out of view of anyone who was inside. He felt the smooth wooden handle of the axe in his hand and he made sure he got a  good grip on it. Breathing in, Walt swung into the doorway and took a formidable stance only to find his dog sitting, thumping his tail as Grace scratched behind his ears. Walt relaxed and lowered his weapon to a more friendly level. 

“Grace,” Walt called out. His face was emotionless.

She looked up and smiled, getting up to address Walt, “Hey, I’m sorry I didn’t come find you first.”

Walt kept his gaze sharp and stayed in the doorway, “How’d you find your way back?”

Grace felt that Walt was perturbed and maybe a little angry that she had come back, but she couldn’t let that stop her now. She pushed her hands into the pockets of her dull green raincoat and looked back at Walt as if nothing was wrong, “That knife you gave me. I made notches in the trees that I could follow back to the cabin.”

“Why?” he said tersely.

Grace wavered and smiled awkwardly. She was tongue tied and didn’t know what to say. What she had rehearsed back in her room had escaped her mind. 

Walt set down the axe at the door frame and sighed heavily. He lumbered into the kitchen from the door and started soaking a hand towel in cool water. Grace cleared her throat and wandered over to the chair at the dining table, looking down at her feet.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said yesterday,” Grace explained, “about how me getting lost in the woods was a good start.”

Walt didn’t say anything and kept soaking the towel. Grace felt uncomfortable and she ran her hands over the top of the chair anxiously. 

“I was just thinking that it would be good for me to,” she trailed off as Walt shut off the water and wrung out the towel. He began patting his face.

“Walt, it would be really cool if you would,” Grace began again and paused when Walt stopped patting his face and looked at her. 

There was an awkward pause and Walt filled it, “Yeah?”

Grace began for the third time, trying to get her wording right, “Walt, would you teach me how to live like this?”

Again, there was a pause, and then Walt chuckled and the tension in the room dissipated. Grace smiled hesitantly, hoping he’d say yes.

“You’re something, kid,” Walt proclaimed.

“Will you do it?” Grace prodded with confidence.

Walt eyed her and a faint smile laid upon his lips. Then his mind went back and his eyes didn’t hold the same energy as the smile. He could see her, the woman from the picture, pulling a throw blanket over the sleeping body of a girl a few years younger than Grace. The girl’s blonde hair was cropped short to her scalp and she was peaceful. Then the woman looked to Walt and he was thrown back into the present. He was haunted and he looked to Grace, considering her proposition. He knew letting her visit him would only push him further, but with the memory came a push that whispered to him to do it.

He thought about it a few more seconds and then said, “Alright.”

“Really?” Grace was bubbling with excitement. 

Walt nodded his head and Grace kept herself from jumping. Her heart flipped in her chest. She thanked Walt repeatedly and the dog bellowed. 

  

~~~~~~~~~

The storm had come that night that Walt agreed to help Grace and the two of them had found that the roof leaked water like a sieve. Pots and cups scattered across the sitting room and in the hallway and bedrooms, collecting rainwater. It had been three days since then and the radio told of another storm heading their way, so Walt and Grace went about fixing the roof. Walt had kept the leftover shingles from years before when he had built the cabin in the small shed that stood in the back over by where the wood pile was and where the wood was chopped. They both were perched on the roof, steadying themselves on their knees. It wasn’t as muggy as the last day it had rained. In fact there was a cool wind that swept over the woods, causing the trees to shiver. The sky had been continuously getting darker throughout the day. It was nearing the point of looking like nighttime rather than the day and the birds were rushing across to and from trees. Their chirps mingled with the steady hammering of Walt and Grace fortifying the roof. They had been working on this since the early morning after they had completed the daily chores needed to sustain a comfortable way of living. It was there that Grace learned the basics of survival and even after three days she was showing promise. Walt felt that she still had much more to learn and practice and that he wasn’t totally sure whether or not if their arrangement was going to be confined to the month of July. A month felt like a short amount of time.

A big fat raindrop hit Grace’s forehead and caught her attention. She looked over to Walt, a little dazed by the assault and used the back of her hand to wipe off the water. Walt half-smiled but kept on hammering.

“How’d you learn about all of this stuff anyway?” Grace asked, referring to everything he had been teaching her in the past few days.

Walt paused in his hammering to grab another shingle from the dwindling pile up a little ways on the roof, “I grew up like this. My father was a logger and built our family a cabin outside of a town not too far from here. Near a lake where we would go ice fishing.”

“Can we go ice fishing sometime?” Grace went to grab another shingle to hammer and positioned it where a worn out one had inhabited. 

Walt looked at her and a fullness swelled up in his chest, “Yeah, kid, we could do that sometime.”

Walt took Grace’s question as an intention to stick around for longer. The lake wouldn’t get iced over until after the summer was gone and surely even with her limited knowledge she knew that. 

“Have you always lived out here alone?” Grace asked the question already knowing her follow up question. Her and Walt were cleaning up the nails and tools and putting them back into their shed. There was a slight misting and the sky was dark. The storm was ready.

Walt zipped up the tool bag and didn’t think too much into the question, “Yeah. Just me and my dog.”

Grace pushed further and boldly stated, “I thought maybe you and Rose had lived here.”

The breeze nipped at the slivers of exposed flesh on both of them, but it only caused a chill to go down Grace’s spine. 

Walt steadied himself and asked, “How’d you know her name?”  

Grace wrung her hands and Walt paused in his storing and stood halfway in the shed wiping his hands on his pants. It was now time to give up her secret, “I stumbled into your study the other night when I was looking for the bathroom. I saw the picture with her name on the back, sorry.”

Perhaps it was the little sorry at the end that helped keep Walt level headed and forgiving about the invasion into his privacy. The wind carried the honeysuckles with it and Walt breathed in deeply before saying, “That’s fine.”

~~~~~~~~~

As the afternoon progressed into the night the storm came over the little cabin with a fury that worried Grace to the point where she was shivering from the anxiety. She was sitting in one of the chairs in the sitting room when Walt noticed her clawing grip on the arms of the chair and told her that everything would be fine. Grace nodded, but Walt could tell that she didn’t believe it. He got up from his seat and went into the kitchen to dig up something from the pantry.

“How old are you?” Walt called out from the pantry.

Grace hesitated and called back, “21. Why?”

Walt spotted the bottle of whiskey he was looking for that he had stowed away a year back when things got tough. He took the bottle to the kitchen table and got two glasses from the cabinet. He called for Grace and she shuffled into the kitchen.

“Maybe a stiff drink will calm your nerves,” he lifted the glass with the caramel liquid sloshing at the walls towards Grace. She pondered it for a moment and then took it from him.

“I hope so,” she announced and then raised the glass to her lips to have a sip.

That night they got drunk. Grace’s phosphorescent laugh bubbled from her mouth and filled up the kitchen. Her cheeks were red, her face lively, the whiskey was giving Grace a run for her money. Walt felt warm as he watched, nearly finding himself in a fit of laughter. He choked on his drink as he let out a snort that he tried to quell. Walt buried his face into his elbow, still holding his drink, coughing with a smile tugging at his mouth. He looked across to Grace, who stared back with a grin.

“You okay?” she asked, giggling with each syllable.

“I’m fine,” Walt coughed a final time and then cleared his throat, returning to a resting position.

Grace blinked and then reached out to grab the flat glass bottle, nearly empty, at the center of the table. She began to pour it into her glass but Walt stopped her.

“I think that's enough for one night,” he set his drink down and moved to grab the bottle from Grace.

She hesitated, eyeing Walt and considering his point of view, but then relented and handed him the bottle. He took it and screwed the lid back to the top. 

“Water?” Walt asked as he got up from his chair and hid the bottle away into one of the cabinets. 

Grace nodded her head, but then realized that Walt couldn’t see her answer since his back was turned. So she stumbled a few more words across her lips.

“Yeah, that’d be,” she hiccuped and tried covering it up with her hand, but was too late. She slouched further in her chair, afraid that she might fall out if she moved an inch more. 

Taking a glass from beside the sink, Walt filled it up for Grace. His mind was clear and unburdened and a small smile occupied his face that he still hadn’t notice. If he had he would have probably made sure to remove it and keep it locked away, but the night had been good. Walt was tricked into being happy.

Grace had a dangerous glint in her eye and she ventured into a wilderness she hadn’t disturbed in a good few days,”Did you do this for Rose?”

Walt turned, the smile gone, and caught off guard he blurted out, “What?”

Their eyes met and Walt stayed by the sink with the glass of water in his hand. Grace looked at him with disturbing clarity.

“Did you take care of Rose like this when she got drunk?” Grace repeated her question.

Walt blinked a few times, composing himself, and looked down at the water in his hand then back up to Grace. He tried to quell the tension in his chest, but could only do so a little bit. It was Rose’s name that was suffocating him. Walt walked back over to Grace and set the glass in front of her. Grace didn’t break her eye contact, while Walt avoided it.

“No,” he said tersely,”she didn’t drink.”

“Oh,” Grace watched as Walt reclaimed his seat across from her,”did she leave you because you drank too much?”

Walt, with a rage bubbling up inside himself, looked at Grace with a purpose and a furrowed brow that pinched the skin. Embarrassment at being so bold and garnering this reaction from Walt made Grace want to hide. She wanted to scoop the words up and put them back into her mouth and she imagined that she did, but she couldn’t deny it when Walt answered her question.

“She didn’t leave me,” Walt said with an eerie calm, “there was no relationship that either one of us could leave.”

“You didn’t tell her,” Grace let the words slip and she cursed herself for doing so. 

Walt considered her and with a grim look said, “Drink the water and go to bed. You can sleep here tonight.”

Before Grace could try at getting up from where she sat, melded to the chair, Walt ripped himself from his and got a new shiny bottle of whiskey from the pantry and then went out the back door. Grace stayed there for a bit until sleep tugged at her eyelids and she stumbled back to the room she had stayed in the first night.

~~~~~~~~~

After the feeling of life came back to him when the numbing effects of the unprecedented amount of alcohol he had consumed faded, Walt had the fiery urge to go visit the apartment. He strode out into the dark from the bar that was down the street from where Rose was, seeing no one and hearing little. He rubbed the side of his face and he could feel the stubble coming through and he made note to shave when he got home. The honeysuckles, incensed by the heat, could be smelled from where Walt was and pervasive thoughts of Rose entered his psyche. He continued on as though they hadn’t appeared. 

The door was unlocked and the room dark, save for the gloom of the cream moon. She was out on the balcony, Walt could tell by the open doors and the glimpse of her foot, as she was presumably laid out on the outdoor recliner. He took the few steps to get to where she was, avoiding tripping on the coffee table on the way there, and found Rose with her thin body stretched out on the recliner cushions. Her dark hair pooled around her head and her eyes closed meditatively.

“Moonbathing?” Walt asked, standing in the doorway with his hands in his pockets. A warm breeze passed over the leaves of the trees and shrubs and they rustled in a chorus, almost resembling the gentle roar of a calm ocean. 

“Yeah,” a sweet smile spread across her face, making her cheeks round out and protrude. Walt smirked, blowing air out of his nose in amusement. He took a cigarette out of the pack he produced from his pocket, stuck it in his mouth, and lit it. He then took a seat on the recliner next to hers.

Silence ensued and they were both comfortable in it. Then a whiff of alcohol lethargically passed by Rose’s nose on another breeze.  

“Don’t blame yourself so harshly,” her words floated to him where he was perched on the edge.

He considered her for a moment, the soft moon rays making her skin luminous and her eyelashes rested upon her cheeks. 

“If I hadn’t had intervened then maybe Lisbeth would still be here with us,” he sighed, the cigarette still burning between his fingers and his head drooped, ”I’ve been thinkin that I should have left at the beginning of the summer like I said I would.”

Rose’s eyes opened, and she studied the glittering cold stars.

“I’m not angry at you. I’m just sad, Walt, but you know that,” Rose placed one hand over her heart and the one closest to Walt fell off the edge of the recliner. ”It wasn’t you who took her away. You could drive yourself crazy with obsessing over the what ifs.” 

Walt looked back up at her, coming out of his self-loathing, and put the cigarette back into his mouth. Rose’s head fell to the side so that she could look at him.     

Walt then eyed Rose’s hanging hand and he took it into his own, grazing his thumbs over the bumps and crevices of her knuckles and fingers. His hands were sure and warm�"real and rough. His brows knitted together in contemplation. 

Walt took the dangling cigarette from his mouth with his right hand and then let it fall to the ground where he squashed it with the sole of his shoe. He pondered it for a second more, not looking up at Rose, and then he pressed his lips to her hand. Rose’s painted nails scraped at the inside of Walt’s palms, feeling the calloused grain of his hands and with his lips still pressed against her skin, they wrestled free and grabbed hold of his left wrist. Walt watched her now as she got up from where she was laying and began to lean into him, her hand gliding over his forearm. He laid back in the recliner, his gaze leading up to the stars, and Rose laid on her side beside him, her hand still clasped onto his arm with assurance. They held each other and unbeknownst of Walt, Rose’s heart swelled in her chest and she felt an unexplainable gorgeousness of being entrusted with his ailing yet well meaning heart.

~~~~~~~~~

The dream plagued Walt. Lisbeth lying there, shot in the lung, gasping calling out for Rose. Rose takes her in her arms, the dark hair falling around her face as she looks into Lisbeth’s dying eyes. They whisper to each other and Rose stays strong, holding her as if she were an infant, comforting her as she suffocates. Walt watches, stumbling and falling over himself, his knuckles coated in fresh blood from the man he just beat. The murderer is crumpled on the asphalt. Lisbeth dies and Rose tells Walt that she was too young and that resonates in both of them like a concise bell. Walt tries to form Lisbeth’s name with his mouth but he hears himself say Grace. 

Walt awoke, his face plastered to his desk where he had passed out sitting at last night. The empty bottle of whiskey had fallen and one of the boxes from his bedroom sat beside him, opened. Old letters and pictures littered the desktop and Walt surveyed the damage spread out before him. Looking down he found a newly started letter addressed to Rose that he had started last night in his drunken state. It didn’t say much and what it did say was incoherent and unreadable. He sat there staring at the shaky scrawl on the page and didn’t notice Grace as she appeared in the doorway. 

“Walt,” she called. Her voice was soft so as not to catch him off guard. Grace felt for Walt. A deep pit filled with pity sat in the center of her chest.

He looked up, regaining energy and comprehension with each waking second. He furrowed his brow and put down the letter. Regret overtook him.

“I’m sorry, Grace,” Walt managed to get out, “You shouldn’t have seen me like that.”

“I shouldn’t have,” she matched Walt’s gaze, “pushed you on the subject.”

Walt accepted the apology with a lazy nod. His brain felt like it was expanding in his skull and he rubbed his temple. 

“I think, maybe, my time here is over,” Grace admitted. Walt understood and his head drooped from the pressure building inside of it. Grace walked further into the room and grazed her fingertips on the desk. She stopped and watched as Walt massaged his cranium. 

“I think maybe mine is over too,” Walt said, “yeah, I think it’s time I go back.”

Grace placed a hand on his shoulder and Walt looked up at her, “Yeah.”

~~~~~~~~~

Something inside of him had broken. A dam crumbled and the past he had tried to keep back flooded and filled the gaping hole that it had left. He felt full and while he could feel the weight of the memories and their implications, Walt found having them back a relief. 

Grace was gone. She left a final note on her bed that told him that she was thankful for everything he taught her, but had realized that she didn’t want it anymore. She had found the experience of confining oneself to a small cabin in the woods alone was sad. Walt smirked at that. 

The photo of Rose was tucked into the frame of the bathroom mirror, where Walt was shaving his face. Water ran hot and fast from the faucet and the blade passed over his skin with an ease that told him he was on the right path. It was time, he figured, to face what had been holding him back. It was time to make amends and tie up loose ends that were frayed and old. 

After he was done and the hair on his face was gone, Walt observed himself in the mirror. Nostalgia rushed at him at the sight of his face after years of covering it with a beard. He had forgotten what he had looked like without it. Then the photo caught his eye and looking at it he remembered who he was and the life he wanted back. With a sweeping gesture, Walt plucked the picture from its resting place and placed it in the pocket of his shirt where it warmed against his chest.  

Author's Note

looking for feedback of any kind! I feel like I always have trouble with construction of stories and making characters more vibrant and real, so please let me know what you think!

Reviews

[JayG]

Well, you did ask, so you have no one but yourself to blame for this. 🤣

Still you did ask, and since the things that jumped out at me aren’t related to how well you write, or your talent—and is something you share with most hopeful writers, though it’s anything but what you hoped to hear, I thought you’d want to know.

Think back to your school years. There, for more than a decade, you practiced a skill called writing, primarily by producing reports and essays, with perhaps a fiction piece, assigned, now and then. So what did you become really good at? Reports and essays, which have a goal of providing an informational experience But is the goal of fiction to make the reader know what happened to some fictional people? Do you, for example, read a horror story with the expectation that the author will tell you that the protagonist feels terror as s/he discovers the “creature?” Or do you want them to fill YOUR mind with that terror, for the same reason the protagonist feels it? Do you want to be informed, or involved? Know, or be made to care and feel?

My point? How much time did your teachers spend on how to involve the reader, emotionally? If the answer is none, what are the chances you’ll do that with your stories? As E. L. Doctorow put it: “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.” And isn’t that what you want a good story to do to you? Don’t you want to live the story, as-the-protagonist, in real time, from within the moment that character calls “now?” I sure do. But our teachers spent zero time on how to do that because Fiction-Writing is a profession, and all professional knowledge is acquired IN ADDITION to the general skill-set we’re given in school. We pretty much all forget that we don't leave school ready to write a script, or work as a journalist, but believe we are ready to write fiction.

But...since our teachers learned their writing skills in those same classroom, and no one ever told them that fiction has a very different goal from the report-writing skills they were given, they, like you, left school not aware that they were exactly as prepared to write fiction as to remove an appendix, successfully. And like you, if they turned to fiction, use the skills of nonfiction, that are fact-based and author-centric—which doesn't work for them, either.

The problem, aside from not working because if we use report-writing skills for fiction it reads like a report, is that because the author knows the story intimately, they’ll leave out context they see as obvious, but which the reader needs. Then they supply that needed context as they read it—something the reader can’t do. And since you can't fix a problem you don’t see as being one, when they seek publication, they'll become one of the 99.9% rejected.

To better see the problem, look at a few lines of te opening, not as the author, but as a reader, who lacks context you don’t provide, “hears” no emotion not suggested by punctuation, and must take the meaning the words suggest to them, based on their life-background, not your intent:

• Summertime rolled around, hot and much needed and Grace, a young junior in college, found herself in the wooded outskirts of a small town situated in the Canadian Rockies, a place that she had dreamed of going since she was a small girl.

Since you can hear yourself reading this aloud, you read it as if there’s a comma after the word, "needed," that’s not there for the reader. Have your computer's Narrator program read it aloud to hear what a reader does.

But that aside, this is a report, and highly generic. Who needs the heat, and why? No way to know. Why does it matter, and who’s noting this? You’re not in the story or on the scene. So obviously, we’re with you, not Grace. But is that were a reader wants to be, reading a storyteller's script without the performance notes?

And “In the Canadian Rockies" could place her on a peak, or in a town, She could be driving, walking, or in a tent sleeping. So what does the reader learn from this that meaningfully sets the scene? Nothing. For you, though, it calls up the setting you envisioned when you wrote the words. That's why, though you write from your own chair, you must edit from that of a reader.

• So enraptured by the romantic idea of returning back to the wilderness at a young age, Grace’s parents indulged her and bought their daughter a children’s camping kit on her twelfth birthday.

This is a story about Grace, who is in college. Why do I, a reader, care in the slightest that someone brought her a “children’s camping kit,” years before? It’s irrelevant to the story taking place. Every word that’s not relevant to the scene in progress serves only to slow the narrative and bore the reader. Movement is not necessarily action, and detail isn’t story. Your reader is seeking action, not lecture. They want the methodology to be emotion, not fact-based. They want it character, not author-centric. But here, the only one on stage is the author, talking TO the reader ABOUT what matters to that author, not her. She’s in the mountains, living and experiencing. But we’re not with her, we’re with you, hearing an overview.

As a minor point, I have to comment, as a scoutmaster, that you’re obviously not a camper, and so are making mistakes. No one would go into the woods in summer, in Canada, without insect repellent on before they stepped outside. But not only do you have her do that, somehow the insects magically evaporate and leave the story without her applying any repellent. Nor does she worry about it, when she goes out, in spite of being badly bitten the day before. How smart does that make her seem? How smart is someone who goes into the woods with no map, no way to make a call, no food or idea of what time it is, or the most basic of hiking skills

Simply put, write what you know, or do sufficient research to make the situation real to a reader who's been there.

Another minor point… This site does not accept either leading spaces or tabs as paragraph intent. Instead, either double space between paragraphs, or use the top ruler in MS Word to indent. That will work.

So, how do you fix the problems? Simple. Pick up the tricks the pros take for granted and you, too, can write character-centric and emotion-based prose.

Will that be a list of, “Do this instead of that?” Naa… You'll be learning the techniques and knowlkedge of a profession. Simple and easy aren’t interchangeable words, and any profession takes time, study, and practice to master. But on the other hand, leaning more about something you like doing isn’t a labor, it’s more, “So THAT’S how they do it!” And once you do own those skills, the act of writing becomes a LOT more fun.

My suggestion is to begin with a few books on the techniques of fiction. You work at your own pace and when you have the time. There's no competition, and, no tests.

The library’s fiction-writing section is a great resource, and time spent there is time wisely invested. But as luck would have it, the best book I’ve found on the basics of writing has some out of copyright protection, and is available to read or download, free, on some archive sites. The address of one such is just below. To get there, copy/paste the address into the URL window at the top of any internet page and hit Return/

https://archive.org/details/TechniquesOfTheSellingWriterCUsersvenkatmGoogleDrive4FilmMakingBsc_ChennaiFilmSchoolPractice_Others

So…at this point I’m certain you’re not happy with my news, not after all the work that went into this. But as Mark Twain observed: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” And the first step in fixing that is to learn what the “just ain’t so” issues are.

So dig in and give it a try. You’ll probably enjoy the learning. And if not? You’ve learned something important. So it’s win/win.

For what it might be worth as an overview of the things found in that book, and others like it, the articles in my WordPress writing blog might clarify.

Hang in there, and keep on writing.

Jay Greenstein
https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/