(Since Metaphor doesn’t digitally publish, the story is posted here)

May, 2016

The rusty pickup rattles along the faintest idea of a path, its gears gripping out-of-sync before rolling over the hill’s crest. Grasshoppers spring from tufts of brown weeds and prickly shrubs. Their speckled wings sometimes catch the odd ray of the late citrus hued light.

Hours of driving have taken their toll. After pushing the truck into park, the driver opens his door and hops off the running board, scattering another thick cloud of insects.

Lighting a fresh Marlboro, the man surveys what once was his, what is still his if the realtor is right. It isn’t much, but it will be enough for the time being. The acres of hollow grass, scooped low into the mountain and ringed with mature trees, is the perfect place to start again.

The man takes a long drag of his cigarette. When he exhales, the smoke is caught by the wind and pushed into his grizzled hair and shorn beard. He thinks about smiling, but the muscles in his face have forgotten how to move just right. He thinks about smiling because of the irony. The irony of time. Time is anything but fair. The landscape around him has not changed, but the years have beaten him into the creature he is that day.

Fifteen years is a long time. The man feels the weight of that time down to his aching bones, aching from the time spent in a space hardly as big as his green Chevy. An intimately familiar heat ignites in the man’s chest. There is nothing righteous about this burning.

Fifteen years. One year for each of his carefully crafted bombs they found; his own special recipe. One year for each tick on the map of the coast; targets of his superior’s choice.

The judge had called him a domestic terrorist, but the man knew better. He was a freedom fighter.

✾✾✾

“I have got to take you to Kamiah one of these days,” I say to my husband as we cuddle on the couch.

These words are out of the blue, random. I don’t know what makes me think to say them again. It surely isn’t the flaking layers of white paint on the wall of our small apartment living room, or the wet humming of the sixty-year-old swamp cooler. It surely isn’t being curled up on our plaid couch with my head propped up against my husband’s lap.

“Maybe over your spring break,” he says absently, his fingers rotely brushing back and forth over the top of my head.

This isn’t the first time we’ve had this conversation, but this is always as far as it goes.

Someday I will take him. Someday we will drive along the winding asphalt shores of the Snake River. We will travel north through gorged cityscapes and lean farmland until the flat is torn apart by trees—green, lush things that guard the last truly wild places of the world.

Camouflaged behind these ancient sentinels are even older mountains. In the rocky fortress of these mountains are nestled small frontiers of civilization, only called ‘towns’ out of politeness. One of these small towns I claimed as home for a few of my formative years. I remember standing on the precipice we called our front yard in northern Idaho looking into Washington State. Only a couple of hours in the car would take us over the invisible border and deeper into untamed, unpredictable territory—Canada.

I want the man I share life and love with to see this place of native majesty. I want him to crane his neck looking up at the stately pines peeking out of golden morning mist, to lay beside me and gaze into a night sky so pricked with stars that it’s almost impossible to see the black beyond. I want him to experience a spring so green that he’ll wonder how he isn’t green too, or a winter so laden with white and ice that he’ll forget all about spring and the immortal green.

Yet I hesitate.

It’s not because of those things, I tell myself. I hesitate because I once lived on one of these heaven-reaching mountains, in these timeless woods, with monsters. Not the monsters I strained my ear by my bedroom window to hear howling and prowling at night, leaving behind furrows and craters in the dirt with their paws. Not the monsters that bit or stung my skin until it stretched and swelled, feverishly bright over my bones. Not the monsters that screeched in blood-curdling triumph as their claws sank into the flesh of livestock and pets.

It was the monsters who dressed in human bodies and smiled with human mouths, but cried for blood all the same. Behind closed chapel doors, they cried for the blood of elected politicians; men and women who threatened the monsters’ way of life with campaigns supporting gun control and taxation. Assassination and acts of terror were topics of casual conversation, the latest wave of unrest stirring impotent discontent into viral stratagem.

These monsters didn’t live huddled in caves. They lived in homes, just like me. These monsters didn’t pull away muscles and tendons or suck marrow from bones. They ate with forks and spoons. These monsters lived complex lives and loved their families, just like me.

Unlike me, some of these monsters, sick with blistering sexually transmitted infections between their legs, freely spread disease. No one was safe, not even youths barely thirteen. Wives had cried while their snarling husbands and baby faced sons waved weapons in honor of anarchy. Parents fretted as their children fought against the status quo by learning to march, hands raised out in an intolerant salute. Children watched bleary-eyed as their parents shouted descriptions of the cruel fates awaiting government supporters. All this done in the name of jingoism; nationalism gone wrong.

✾✾✾

He knocks the ashes from his cigarette, pretending that he doesn’t see the name tattooed on his wrist. The name of the wife who did not wait. Instead, the man stares at the fresh ink job by his elbow, a coiled snake waving its rattle and brandishing its fangs. Words of warning to anyone who would tread on its back crown the serpent’s head. A warning that the man believes—always believed—has been ignored for too long.

While the rest of the nation sits in blindness to injustices imposed by the very leaders promising fairness and free speech, the man sees clearly. Picketing and petitions aren’t enough. It’s time to build an army more dangerous than any protest.

Free from his fifteen years of penance, the man has revived the rallying cry that started it all before. Websites for like-minded fighters for minimal government intrusion have been his most successful recourse. Faded phone numbers have been less helpful. Few old friends have answered, many of them still in hiding or irreversibly protected by death. But thanks to technology’s ever expanding reach, the man has recruited fresh blood. Blood that has not gone stale caged in a backwater penitentiary.

The man knows that they aren’t far behind him. It won’t be long until their work begins.

✾✾✾

Making time to plan the trip is not a problem. I already spend hours on my rickety laptop writing papers and sending countless emails. A few extra finger strokes, and it will be out of my hands; we will have to go.

Instead of guiding my spastic cursor, I let my attention be lulled by the sickly sputter of our air conditioning unit. The formless water stains on the decrepit wall flicker to life, animated by the single yellow bulb in the room. A sorry replacement for the sun.

I sigh.

“Still can’t decide?” My husband looks up from his lunch, the Bachelor’s Delight. A plate of microwaved chips and cheese drowned in salsa.

I can tell that he wants to go. But I’m not sure that I do.

I don’t hesitate because of Nez Perce traditions as old as the trees, the mountains; the bearers of a glorious heritage dancing in swirling feather cloaks of vibrant color, spinning so fast it seemed as if the tribal dancers would take flight. Impossible to forget are those moments I heard the chiefs and shamans sing; giving voice to the songs that call the beast, the land, and the rain. My reservations aren’t because of the bushes along every road bulging with succulent berries begging to be picked, or the spring gushing from the mountainside so clear, so clean that you can drink it right from Mother Earth’s breast.

A scenic drive up our mountain, a turn onto an unassuming dusty road framed by leaf-weary boughs, and you’ll believe that you have landed yourself right into the middle of some epic fantasy. A picturesque country with an endless forest dotted with meadows seasoned with exotically colorful flowers that look too beautiful to belong in this world. Any moment a dragon, an elf, a werewolf, even a knight could come dashing out of the trees and it wouldn’t look a bit out of place.

Like mushrooms, sweat-built homes speckled the hills seemingly at random, but connected under the decaying surface were devouring roots of whispered words such as “off-grid,” “government,” and “secrets.”

I’d heard these words hissed to my father by a friend smoking a Marlboro outside our front door after dinner. My father’s friend scared me, smoke leaking from his lips as he muttered.

As a child, these problems had been too big, too evil, for me to fully comprehend. My small child-brain only understood that I wanted to act out innocent stories of adventure and quests across wild terrain with my sisters and eat berries with my brother that were so juicy they stained our lips sweet purple. It wasn’t until a few moves and many years later that my curiosity got the better of me. Leisurely research led to an earnest dive into everything the Internet had archived about the people spattered along background of my past. Confirming my findings with my mother revealed, I realized how close I’d been to real-life monsters—and then I felt fear; retrospective fear, but fear all the same.

✾✾✾

Burned to the filter, the Marlboro has lived out its purpose. The man drops the orange butt and grinds it into the dirt with his boot. Night is rising, the bravest stars peeking down at the deeds of men and monsters.

After glancing in the truck bed at the bags bulging with poisonous pellets that make plants grow, the man releases the pickup from park and steers the belching vehicle farther down into the clearing.

Behind his seat, containers of diesel fuel slosh sharply. A white grocery sack sits demurely in the passenger seat, hiding the boxes of hardware bits inside.

The man knows that it isn’t much, but he is too content to care. They may have to start small. He will be patient. He will succeed where their leader before failed. The man will not resort to escape with the aid of a bullet.

His predecessor’s goals are too soft—too small—in the man’s eyes. The obliteration of official buildings of towering glass is pathetic. Petty governors and judges don’t garner the attention that a disintegrated senator or congressman will. Soon they will have men and women searching under their beds and in their closets for the gifts he will leave them. Powerful puppets will crumble as the masters die holding the strings. If everything goes as planned, the man’s band will grow, repopulating the woods with the predator humans fear most of all: themselves.

It has only cost fifteen years.

✾✾✾

“Look.”

I’m smiling as I set the open laptop down in front of my husband. Our swamp cooler has taken a moment to rest. He squints his always-some-shade-of-blue eyes at the screen. After a moment, he is smiling too.

“A motel reservation. To the same one you’ve told me about, right? The one that serves homemade biscuits and gravy for breakfast?”

I nod. The memory of those warm, buttery mounds and spicy sausage set my mouth watering like there is a fire inside.

“When do we leave?” He asks.

Plans are set. There is no turning back now.

Time, the great anesthetic for all wounds, has passed. Tears have been forgotten and the battle cries of men have dissipated into the air with the black smoke of an anticipated Armageddon.

The monsters have mostly disbanded, dying or moving away after their leader, alone along a gravel road, ate an ounce of lead.

As far as I’m concerned, there is nothing left in those mystical mountains to hunt the ignorant and the innocent. Fifteen years is ancient history to me; over half a lifetime ago, almost a dream. I can’t imagine that the monsters from my past could every surface after years of dormancy, crawling back to their sanctuary—my destination. All I can imagine is the beauty of that wilderness framed by nostalgia’s artful hand. Now I realize that I do want to see that green spring again, drink that pure mountain water, and stare up into that glittering night sky.

And that is enough to convince me.

I no longer hesitate.

I will go back to the woods where I once lived with monsters.