Zazen - By Vanessa Veselka Page 0,59

“There aren’t too many busses that go all the way out to Breaker’s Rise.”

In the car were two of the people I’d met at the Cycle. The man with the light hair, Jules, was in the front seat, and the woman, Britta, was in the back. Jules watched me get in but said nothing. I climbed in next to Britta. When I got settled, she handed me a thermos of yerba mate and we pulled out onto the highway, now a white alley where the sky and road met. Steering between the dark underbellies of trees shrouded in snow and the hazard lights of stranded trucks, we headed for the pass. Tamara’s hands were the color of bone on the ochre steering wheel.

“I told them all about you,” Tamara said when the pitch of the road lessened.

Jules glanced away. I could see freckles faint on his cheeks and his blond hair was ashen in the snowlight. Tamara slapped him in the stomach and he smiled. They had the same bone-colored hands. I wondered if they were related. Britta pointed to an abandoned DOT truck on the shoulder.

“That’s a bad sign.”

Jules rolled his window down to wipe more snow off the side mirror and I thought I heard a dog yelping but it was just a harmonic created by the wind and it went away when he rolled it up.

Closer to the pass were more parked state vehicles, ploughs and salters buried in the whiteness. I closed my eyes. Tamara was telling a story about some guy she knew who was so afraid of snakes that he broke up with his girlfriend because she got a snake tattoo.

“What a fucking coward!” Britta said.

I went to sleep wondering what tattoos scared me that much.

We came through the pass when I was only half-awake. It was dark and they were talking about what to do if we got stuck and had to make it through the night. I raised my head. The dashboard was a constellation of vectors and points and the view through the windshield was a gray parabola. Tamara said it would be fine as long as no one got out to go to the bathroom. Jules said it would be fine even if they did, just colder. Britta laughed and said she’d rather use the thermos. Their lips were teal. They might have been speaking Yupik or Estonian. That’s how foreign I felt among them.

Grace once told me that the easiest way to radicalize someone is to isolate them and that I should make sure that never happened to me. It might be that what she said was true. But I didn’t really mind being cut off from everything.

24 Deer Teeth

I woke up in a wooden bed under layers of quilts with the idea in my head that something was about to change. I sat up and looked out the window. Everything was covered by a thin layer of snow except for where the goats had beaten muddy paths into the ground. There were several outbuildings, rounded cob structures with embedded color tiles in geometric patterns. One looked like a woodshed and to the left of that was a brick structure with dark gray smoke curling up into the sky. I put on my clothes and went downstairs. The kitchen was empty. A bag of coffee sat on a large oak table and someone had been baking bread. There was a note from Tamara saying that she was out back and to come find her.

I set the note back down and got some water. I had been with Grace and Miro in a hundred kitchens like that. Everything was wood, metal, paper or glass; nothing was disposable. I knew where to look for cloth filters, tea, compost buckets and co-op containers of peanut butter, honey and tahini. I knew how the bread would taste, how the clay mugs would feel and how cold the kitchen would be until people came and it got warm from the bodies. I knew someone would have to boil the water for the dishes and someone would have to bury the trash at night so the bears didn’t get it. And if you couldn’t feel the despair that was in everything, if you were numb to the intense loss at the center of it all, it was like stepping right into a children’s story. Fresh milk and cozy fires on the cusp of a wild wood.

I walked out back to where I had seen the