“I’ve been thinking a lot about water,” my grandmother said. “And, oh, it’s so good to hear your voice. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about water, and I was wondering if you, Irene—if you think about it too?”
I balanced the phone on my knee. The bedsheets were twisted around my feet. “Hm, Oma. Could you tell me a little more about what you mean? Like, what kind of water?”
“Oh, I just mean, I am always around and using water, but maybe it’s bad for me? I thought you might know about that. With all of your wonderful environmental activism.”
“That’s nice of you to say. Do you mean drinking water? Like, drinking water safety?”
“Yes!” The relief in her voice was unmistakable. “I watch this show, Blue, Blue… Blue something. Something like, Blue Orb. Or no. Ball. No. Not that. My words are bad lately. But. It’s about, well, this guy, he’s amazing, Irene. I think you’d love him. He goes all over the world, and he meets people who are living to be so old, over 100 years old, and he sees how they are doing it, and I thought, maybe it’s the water, because I think I read something about the water being bad for us, and maybe that’s why I have so much trouble lately, and I, well, I’d like to live a good long healthy life.”
Calls like this had become more common since my grandmother’s dementia diagnosis. For a long time, we sat on the phone while she tried to find the word “agriculture,” saying over and over again: architecture, architecture, architecture. There was nothing I could do to help her, as I did not know the word she was searching for. Over time, “architecture” began to lose all meaning, taking the shape and form that “um” might take in another person’s sentence, so that I found it impossible to even suggest other words. It was as though the word fell from her mouth in a shape outside of her control each time. Finally, she described the word, saying “the thing where you grow, it’s like, farms,” at which point I yelped “agriculture!” We rejoiced, but her frustration lingered. She asked to end the call.
“Tell your sister I send my love, okay?”
“Sure,” I said. I told her I loved her and hung up.
Through the window, I could see men on ladders fixing up the building next store. All afternoon their voices had drifted into my room—they were singing along to the radio, laughing at each other. I had pretended not to see them when they happened to be level with my window. The church bells were ringing now. It was 5:38 pm.
I heard the door slam, which meant Sophia was home. We’d been friends since we were five and had both moved back to the Hudson Valley that year. Sophia had returned for an art residency, which she had been accepted into most likely because of nepotism. This is not to say she was not a talented artist, but her parents knew people and were both sculptors. I had moved back partially because I liked it there, partially because Sophia was moving back, and most significantly, to escape the small city in Vermont where I had previously lived, where I’d had my heart broken.
Our apartment was next to the old church, in a dusty brick building. The entire kitchen (minus the refrigerator) ran off of one light switch, which meant that the light had to stay on most of the time. Sophia and I, despite insisting that we were full adults, both returned to our respective parents’ houses once a week to do laundry, as the building had no machines and visiting the nearest laundromat involved twenty-five minutes of driving and eight dollars in quarters. All this is to say that the town was small.
Sophia appeared in the doorway of my room, scratching her nose. There was paint on her right nostril. “You’re not working tonight, right?”
“No,” I said. “I’m just four nights a week right now.”
“Cool,” she said. “I just bumped into Charlie. He says he and Naomi are going to the Red Brick tonight and they want to get drunk. Do you wanna join?”
We had gone to high school with Charlie. He had been my first kiss, back when we were fourteen. Now he was gay and essentially married to an older man. Naomi was a Brooklyn transplant and tattoo artist who we both had mixed feelings about, only because of the transplant thing.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m in. What time?” I liked the Red Brick because it was approximately 800 feet from our apartment, and for this reason was an easy social space to escape from if need be.
“Like nine-ish. I’m having dinner at my parents’ in twenty. Do you want to come? They said they’d love to see you.” She moved out of my room and across the hall, into her own room. I could see her changing her shirt through the doorway. There was more paint on her stomach.
“That’s nice. I think I need some alone time, though, before the bar. I want to do some cleaning. And I might catch up with Ari on the phone.” I had no idea why I told this lie. Ari and I were not in the habit of speaking on the phone since we’d broken up—nor had I been planning to call him.
Sophia stared at me through the doorways. “Hmm, okay? Are you feeling okay about chatting? Like, is that a good idea, I mean? Last time y’all talked it kind of knocked you on your ass for a week.”
“Totally,” I said. “I’m feeling totally okay about chatting. It’s nice, being friends now. Obviously, not always. I mean. But yeah, I’m feeling good about it.”
“Okay, you know yourself best. But Irene, don’t hurt your own feelings, okay?”
“Yeah, I know. Tell your parents hi?”
She applied deodorant and left. I changed into gym shorts and a t-shirt. Laced up my sneakers. I walked out to my car and decided to drive to the closest free trailhead. It was a healthy decision, I thought, going for a walk out in the woods at the end of a day where I’d done nothing at all. I would call Ari.
On the day he left me, the universe had sent me signs. First, in the morning, I came back from a run to find our front door crawling with flies, some occasionally flitting away only to land again on the wood. They scattered as I approached.
Later, cleaning our apartment, I found a hummingbird trapped in the storage room. I could not think of how it had gotten there—the room had no windows—but spent a good hour trying to trap the tiny bird. When I did, I held it in my hands. Its whole body hummed. I tried to send it the right energy: I’m trying to help. I know it doesn’t feel like it, though. I walked outside to our porch. The street was quiet. The spring light silvered the road as the sun lowered. I opened my hands for the bird and it sat there for a while, calm and still, and then flew away.
An hour later, when I went out to grab groceries for dinner, I found the bird dead, splayed across the windshield of my car. I held its body. Then I left it at the base of a shrub in the backyard.
On the trail, I put in my earbuds. I stared at his contact in my phone for several seconds before dialing.
He answered the phone after one ring. Since he had gone on T about a year into our relationship, his voice had changed. When he picked up, I was surprised that it was deeper still—startled at how different he sounded from the last time we’d spoken on the phone, just a few months earlier.
“Hi,” said Ari.
“Hi!” I said, and then either forgot or lost my ability to say anything else.
“It’s so nice to hear your voice,” he said. “Are you just calling to say hi?”
I kicked a rock up the trail. “You too, and I guess so! Sort of. How are you?”
He half-laughed. “Um, good, I guess. I’m just getting back from the lab.”
He was in grad school researching invasive insects—specifically the emerald ash borer. The ash borer is smaller than a penny, with a shiny emerald body and coppery abdomen. The bugs tunnel through the bark of ash trees, feeding on their inner layers and damaging their vascular tissue, eventually killing them. If you peel back the bark of an ash tree, you can tell if ash borers are there by the S-shaped larval galleries, like rivers on a topographic map, across the inner wood of the tree. In college, I’d taken a class on trees with my school’s arboriculturist, a brilliant man with a heavy stutter. He’d especially struggled with words that started with vowels. I always thought about him when I said the insect’s name out loud: the way the words “emerald” and “ash” had gotten stuck in his mouth, had turned around there over and over.
Ari had said something about his lab partner, which I’d missed.
“Cool, yeah. I’m not working today,” I said. I pushed the palms of my hands into my eyes. “I’m on a hike, kind of.”
“Got it. Nice,” he said.
A silence stretched.
“Do you ever think about water,” I said, before I could stop myself.
“What? Dude, are you okay?”
“Yeah, dude.” I said. It was as though the words were dropping from my mouth. “My Oma called me earlier and she’s worried about water safety. Like drinking water. I think she probably read an article about PFAS and she can’t remember the details, just that she should be worried. And then I started wondering, should I actually be worried about that? I don’t know. You think about this kind of stuff a lot. So I was wondering if I should be filtering my water, or if there’s even any point, or if probably the damage has already been done, like, you know, we used nonstick pans for years. And if it hasn’t, probably we’re fucked in some other way. Fires or floods or tsunamis or famines. Police state, fascism. Asteroid, if we’re lucky.”
The line was silent.
“Hello?”
“I’m here,” he said. “Is this really why you’re calling?”
I wanted to laugh but didn’t. “I just wanted to commiserate, about, you know, existential dread. It helped to talk to you about this stuff. Doesn’t it get to you sometimes? And you’re just like, what am I supposed to be doing? Like, I wake up and the world is burning and then I go to the grocery store. How can everything be happening at the same time? It’s so twisted.”
“I do know what you mean.” His voice softened a little. “But I just don’t know if I’m the right person to call when you’re feeling this way.”
“I just don’t know,” I said, ignoring him and hearing the catch in my voice.
“I know it’s really hard to deal with these things,” he said. “Can you call Sophia, or Miyo, or someone? I’m worried about you. And I just don’t think I’m the right person for you to talk to about this.”
“Okay, yeah,” I said. “Yes, you’re right.”
“I’m going to hang up now,” he said. “Will you call one of your friends?”
“Yes,” I said. “Sorry. I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry, Irene. I just think it’s important for us to have boundaries. It’s not because I don’t care about you. I hope you’re okay.”
“Yes,” I said. “You’re right. I understand. Sorry.”
The line disconnected.
The trail was a weak line in front of me. The blueberries had all shriveled in the heat of late August. Crows were crying. Through the pitch pines, out past the cliffs, I could hear the drone of a truck on Clove Valley road. My hands were shaking and my eyes weren’t taking much in. I sat down on one of the rocks. I tapped my hands on my arms and closed my eyes. When I opened them, I could see more clearly and feel the borders of my body again. I got up and started back towards the trailhead.
In high school, my sister and her friend Claudia swore they saw something—a ghost, a monster, a cryptid, something—on that trail, at the edge of the Shawangunk Ridge. It was near dusk when they saw it: that time of evening when out in the fields and roads it is still bright, but in the forest, all shape and color begin to blur to darkness.
The thing stood in the middle of the trail some five hundred feet away, facing them. It was huge and stood on two legs: the exact shape and proportions as a human. But it was all white, Izzy had told me, and too large and fast to be human. She’d been frozen, and next to her Claudia had screamed and the thing had turned suddenly and sprinted away, away from them, up the mountain, and it ran just like a person, they both said. Izzy and Claudia had turned and fled together, back down towards the trailhead.
I was thinking about the two of them sprinting down the trail as I decided to turn, noticing the light starting to fade. I was not in the mood for a cryptid encounter. I imagined Izzy in her trail runners—which still sat, collecting dust in a closet at my parents’ house—hurtling down the mountain. I knew she must have been laughing. Izzy was the kind of person who laughed when she was afraid. I felt as though if I were to move only a little faster, I might turn the bend and see the two of them. It was as though time were collapsing. She had been there seconds ago.
When I got to the bar at 9:30, Sophia, Charlie, and Naomi were halfway through their first drinks. I ordered a beer and sat next to Naomi.
We said our hellos, exchanged brief overviews of our days, then lapsed into a discussion of Charlie’s relationship issues, then of high school, which Naomi loved, having grown up far enough from here that stories of bored teenagers getting trashed in the woods or in someone’s basement were entertaining.
The bar was full of other young people, which was a new phenomenon as the Hudson Valley continued to gentrify, attracting 20, 30, and 40-something-year-old ex-Brooklynites eager to raise chickens and make art while living off the land. An hour passed. I was not being myself. I was vaguely aware of this but couldn’t get grounded. The light fixtures were all I could look at. I was acutely aware of each moment transitioning from present to memory.
A celebrity had died that week. I came back to earth while Naomi was saying, “Do you think he committed suicide?”
“You’re supposed to say ‘died by suicide,’” said Charlie. “Because, like, ‘committed’ makes it sound like a crime. Carceral logics, etcetera. But yeah, I do. I feel like whenever there’s no pre-existing health issues and it’s someone young and they mention mental health in the articles it’s like, definitely that. Or an OD.”
“Oh, thanks. Sorry. Fuck, that’s so sad.”
I could tell from Sophia’s movements that she was kicking Charlie under the table.
“I’m going to the bathroom.” I left the table.
In the bathroom I read a text from Ari: Srry I couldn’t b there 4 u earlier. U ok?
He’d always texted like he was in middle school. I found it endearing. I responded: Yes!! At the bar w/ friends. Sorry about earlier. Have a good night!
I looked at myself in the mirror and touched my cheeks and fantasized about leaving.
Approaching our table, I slowed down when I heard Sophia speaking quietly: “Listen, I’m not saying she isn’t okay. I’m just saying sometimes I think we need to be a little more aware about how that shit affects her. I know it’s been four years and she seems fine, but that’s not the kind of thing you ever fully get over. You know? Like, maybe don’t bring suicide up at the bar, generally as a rule? But especially not in front of her? Seems like that’d be obvious.”
“Hey,” I said, and they all turned around. “I think I might go now. My social battery is dead.”
Everyone looked guilty. “I’m really sorry,” Charlie started to say, but I cut him off:
“All good, truly no need to apologize. I’m just tired. Promise.”
Sophia said, “Can I come with you?”
“Sure.”
As we left, Sophia said, “Want to go up Joppenburgh?”
We stopped at our apartment to change into sneakers and long sleeves. It was starting to get cooler at night now, the first hint of fall coming. It felt late but was not even 11 pm. Sophia grabbed a pack of cigarettes and a beer from the fridge on our way out of the door. The mountain looked like negative space this late at night—nothing more than a deeper black part of the sky. We started on the trail near the old kilns.
In the 1800s, the town, nestled between Joppenburgh Mountain and the Rondout Creek, had been a cement mining town. The cement had gained a reputation for quality and was used for the Brooklyn Bridge and the base of the Statue of Liberty. They’d hollowed out the whole mountain. The extensive mining caused a massive cave-in in the winter of 1899. By some miracle, the collapse happened while all the miners were eating lunch outside—they were lucky. By the early 1900s, the industry had fallen into decline, and now the whole area was dotted with abandoned dolomite mines. The mountain was still unstable, occasionally prone to shaking and rockfalls.
There were trails all over the mountain, some leading to views, others to the caves, which in the summer released freezing damp air. We used to run around by the caves as teenagers. There were places where everyone knew to roll down their windows while driving on Route 213 in the summer. “Cold spot!” we’d all yell, then try to shut the windows quickly enough to trap in the cold air. On the trails, at certain places, you could see snow nestled in the cracks of rock even on the hottest July day.
I had kissed a boy named Sam on a trail by the old kilns when I was sixteen. We’d climbed around the rusted-out mining equipment, up onto the side of the mountain. I remember his mouth tasting cold, like mint, from the schnapps we had been chasing with chocolate sauce.
Just down the road, behind the old baseball fields, the banks of the creek became rocky. Growing up, we would swim there, crossing the deeper parts of the river to the rope swing on the other side. Upstream were the cliffs, another popular swimming location until my final year of high school, when the death toll seemed to surpass an acceptable number and they erected massive fences to close off the area. In my early 20s, I had found out that the entire area was downstream from a superfund site, around which contaminated water had been found in at least 70 homes. There were drinking water advisories from time to time, which had prompted my parents to install a reverse osmosis pump several years earlier. We were all aware now that there was no way that water was safe to swim in.
My feet moved the leaves on the ground. Through the trees, the moon looked like a dimmed lamp. The crickets cried all around us and the wind was soft. Beside me, Sophia was sucking on a cigarette, exhaling off to her left. She was drunk, I could tell. I was entirely sober. I wanted to say something to her, maybe about the phone calls I’d had that day, about how I sometimes missed being a teenager, but I couldn’t figure out how to turn it all into a narrative.
I left Sophia behind, pushing forward until I was a couple hundred feet ahead of her. All at once, I stopped. The cold from the caves touched my face, and my mind was shifting around, and suddenly I felt the loss of Izzy, fully, like something heavy and dark spreading through my throat. I felt it more acutely than I had in a long time.
When it happened, it was all at once. There was a loud noise that snapped the night in half. I felt myself wince, my muscles tighten, my arms rising in front of my face. The tree had fallen around five feet in front of me, across the path. The whole forest seemed to curve away from it. I stood there, staring.
Behind me, Sophia said, “Oh my god. Oh my god. Holy fuck. What the actual fuck? Are you okay?”
I didn’t say anything. I recognized the ash tree, of course, and was searching already. Approaching the trunk, I peeled back an outer layer of bark, pulling out my phone and turning on the flashlight. I traced my finger over the serpentine larval galleries across the inner wood.
Later, we walked to Stewarts and got a bag of chips and a plastic bottle of root beer, like we were in high school again. I wanted to go for a drive. Sophia obliged on the condition that she had the aux, and once we were in the car, she lit another cigarette in the passenger seat.
There is so much more in motion than you’d expect, driving in the mountains at night. You have to pay attention. Deer darting out into the road just as you approach them. The tail of the fox low and swift over the dark concrete. Sometimes you see larger shadows move outside of the headlight beams. Raccoons climb the roads’ shoulders. Their eyes gleam like pennies in the dark.
“We’ve had a near death experience,” Sophia announced, turning down the music for a moment. “Or you have, at least.” She offered me the cigarette, which I took.
“Near death by emerald ash borer,” I said.
“Sure, if you say so. But we came out unscathed! Not a scratch! You, my friend, are really lucky.”
The night was empty of color. Sophia lifted the root beer bottle in a toast, tapped it against the cigarette I held. “A toast! We’re fucking alive!”
I was laughing and Sophia’s hand was on my arm. Ahead, I saw the guard rails that signified we were passing a cave. We rolled down the windows and together inhaled the cold air.
Cora Kircher is a writer and artist from New York’s Hudson Valley. Cora’s writing has appeared in BRUISER Magazine, Joy of the Pen, Tilted House Review, Canned Magazine, and elsewhere.