wouldn’t know. You probably know more than I do. I don’t think my mom knew him, either.What’s to know?” She shrugged. “What I mean, though, is I understand. I don’t see much of a point in trying to please the unappeasable. Life’s too short.”
“Jerks are too jerky,” he agreed, amused. The line dropped it like an old lyric, the repetition of familiar advice. As they converged with another footpath, he nudged the piece of metal hammered to the ground. “We’re almost there.”
Someone’s been here a while.
Everything had fallen against the elements, destroyed and mudsoaked. She made out discarded cigarettes, greeting cards, old clothes, and cardboard signs – the only intelligible ones holding something along the lines of, ‘wish you were here’ or ‘anything helps, God bless’. Even a few washcloth hand puppets were integrated with the rubble. She couldn’t decide whether to call it a landfill or a graveyard, inevitably electing for the latter.
The more she stared, the more organic the scene felt. It was beautiful in a crumbling way. Her gaze traveled ahead of her, far along the tracks as they stretched on only to curl into the wooded mountains.
“They’re been some really hard times out here,” she observed.
Noah nodded. “Yeah. It’s always been hard for locals. The town hasn’t been… well, flourishing, since World War II, back when everyone worked in this big factory that mass-produced and handpacked cans filled with protein. Mostly fish, I guess. Ashland’s pretty new compared to most of the area. Or in general.”
Aly felt her jaw slack and closed it, nibbling her lip as though it would lock in place. “What do you mean?”
“These tracks are older than this town. A lot of the land here is blown out of rock, so there’s not much history for this area. There are a lot of natives that migrated from other little tribes, but that was a few generations ago. Therearen’t any pure groups, not ancient or anything. We’re not even considered a reservation, though some people call it that anyway. The families are old, but we don’t do powwows or potlatches or anything like that. Some people do, but because of where they’re from genetically. It’s why it’s so hard to narrow down the legends, because most of them were adopted and distorted from other people.” His voice trailed off, racing past her distant stare, melting into the horizon. As he spoke, he went somewhere else – wherever his stories came from. Realizing he returned from the silence to wait for a response, she nodded dumbly.
Where do the words go?
“I mean, Ashland is pretty westernized, but it’s not like we have no tradition at all. We still have elders, even though they’re practically self-appointed. We have music, dance troupes, art. And of course, legends.”
“Like the bigfoot thing?”
“Yeah. There’s plenty about that – most call him Hairy Man because of some old newspaper article. There are tribes that call it Omah or Gigit. You’d say bigfoot or sasquatch.”
“Actually, we’ve got other words for it too. There are myths where I come from, too. Kingsley is a city, but it’s a city in the middle of nowhere. The Adirondacks are infamous for it. My grandfather used to say they lived in abandoned watch towers.”
“It seems like the Hairy Man is stalking you, then.” He grinned, squinting to the sky. “They say the stars do too.”
“I get that. It’s like when you’re a child, and you expect your car to pass the sun, but it’s a tease, the size of your thumb, just dipping behind trees.”
“I did that too,” Noah laughed, raising his hand and closing one eye to cover the beam in the sky. “Have you heard of the sun thieves?”
She shook her head.
“It’s one theory, I suppose. The sto ry of where the stars come from. There was once a man who was terribly wise. Going into his village, he spoke about the worth of all people. He said, ‘the Sun is made of gold and the Moon of silver’, because equality by nature is meant to unchallenged, never influenced by men. A group of thieves fled to the woods, where they climbed the highest tree on the mountain, and ran along the rays of light through the sky, to the Sun.”
“That’s one way to go about it,” she noted, filling the lapse in his words.
“When the Sun saw them,” he continued, “she grabbed the thieves, crushing them in her hand. She kissed the earth, and scattered them across the sky with a breath of