Uncharted

I dig myself out of my house to start my patrol. When I emerge, the path I’ve made is already filling back in with fat, wet snow, blowing in all directions. It is ever trying to buffet me about, to billow me to the edge of town, to strike me snow-blind and wind-deaf so I lose my way, but I got my snow legs a long time long ago. The flakes come quick and steady in clumps that smell of sugar glass about to break. Once, I might have made a snowball, a snowman, a snow fort. Once, it might have seemed beautiful. Today, I trudge through it until I find my first extraction.

Toe-curling things happen down at The Lake House. Sex, of course, and howling and injuries and a couple of disappearances, drownings, and once a kid hanged himself from the loft banister and another time a handful of teenagers tore out of there claiming that the walls had started bleeding, and no, they weren’t high, why would you even ask that. People say things live in the lake. But of course, things live in the lake. Fish, April thinks, ducks, algae, frogs. Lakes always have things living in them. Not like this, people say. Not like our mermaid. The mermaid who doesn’t need air or water to breathe. No, she breathes souls, they say. She breathes death.

We were lost in the woods. He held the map sideways, trying to decipher which path we were on. Charles Bailey Loop or the connector? The David English Trail or the Wessel Castles? Which old dead white man who donated to the park service fifty years ago could lead us back to the parking lot? Mushrooms popped out of the ground, some light brown, others neon orange. He liked to squat down, snap a photo of the white stems and underside gills. He said he was a naturalist in the vein of Charles Darwin. Great American beech trees towered over us, bare bark carved with hearts and initials of people who have walked the same trails as us and who, hopefully, had found a way out as well. If he were in a better mood, he probably would have taken out his knife and added our names to the list. The more cuts, the more damage to the tree, but he was a naturalist and what did I know?

What are your writerly obsessions? What theme, idea, or image do you often gravitate towards? As a mixed-race writer (Black and white), I feel myself coming back to the idea of in-betweenness again and again. In fact, I think I gravitate toward the speculative because it allows me to grapple with human issues of love, fear, prejudice, violence, power, etc without having to limit myself to one specific real-world identity. I am neither-nor—or both-and—so writing from non-human perspectives based in irreal settings lets me get past all of the categorization that can be so confusing to those of us in liminal spaces.