She patted Taylor’s arm before she fell asleep, to soothe away his worry about whether she felt hurt by his intention to leave her behind the next day. She remembered the terrible posters with empowerment quotes at the group home. One of them said, “You can learn something from everyone you meet.” She smiled to herself because regardless of how obnoxious it was, she was finding it to be true. Taylor had taught her something. He was teaching her how to cut her losses without cutting loose her hope.

The last thought that went through her head that night before falling asleep with her blankie was, “You never know, something could get worse. And you never know, something could get better.”

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 13

Past the anemic pallor of discarded surgical gloves, the cigarette boxes and the beer cans torn and crushed, a shallow stream cleaved the woodland by the car lot. Luke led Aria upstream, past where the people in camp who cared less drank, did laundry and occasionally urinated. He said next to nothing. The careful progress of his footsteps was occasionally impeded by whatever lawless path Palin’s nose took her down, her tail curled up over her loin. Occasionally, she would lie flat on her belly and hold her head low in the grass, staring straight ahead as if stalking a phantasm neither Luke nor Aria could see.

When they stopped, Aria stuck her fingers deep into the cold air hovering inches above the flowing water, deep into the mellow of the earth’s own breath. The green of better days was brighter than the green that flavored the landscape. The sun’s hands ran over everything, the wet wings of a moth as they opened and closed, the crown of oak leaves and the water that was older than the flow of human blood.

They quickly and silently confirmed their mutual comfort level with nudity. They washed their clothes with a mint green bar of pumice lava soap that Luke carried with him in a ziplock bag. Almost no discourse floated between them. Aria mimicked Luke, draping her clean clothes over the branches of one of the nearby oak trees. The heat of the sun censored the chill of the air.

Aria sat on a rocky outcropping near the stream, waiting for her clothes to dry. She watched Luke run the bar of soap across the scope of his body forcibly. The water below him was tainted with a streak of powdery white from the soap. He used his hands to cup the water and saturate himself. Aria felt warmed by the primal image of him. Luke was a traveler. His body and dreadlocks had been chiseled by the necessity of migration. In many ways, when he was naked, he looked how she imagined a primitive man might have looked thousands of years ago. She smiled, picturing him hunting through the woodland with a loincloth and a spear.