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She walks down the road, making nearly constant eye contact with the ground beneath her. Her arms hang at her sides and swing back and forth to the rhythm of her beating heart. She hears the light breeze whisper around her, rustling the green leaves of the trees. Every so often she whips off the baseball cap she is wearing to swat at the flies that are attracted to her head of golden hair. She must look like a madwoman, flailing her arms like that. Her recently purchased hiking boots scuff the concrete, every so often catching on some raised portion of the road and making a sound that shatters the surrounding silence. Her breath is irregular. Sometimes she holds it without meaning to, especially if she thinks she can hear a car.
Her eyes rove the shrubbery lining the road. Her grandmother asked her before she left if she wouldn’t mind looking for some bell heather. Her grandmother is a photographer who specializes in closeups of flowers. But she now only sees Queen Anne’s Lace, and purple thistles, and here and there, a Black Eyed Susan.
The curved figure she so dislikes casts a six-foot-long shadow that splays out in front of her. It is taller than she actually is, as most shadows are. Her shadow looks like it is wearing a dress, an illusion caused by the olive green sweater she has tied around her waist.
Her breath catches in her throat as she hears the distant rumble of a car. She swerves into the grass on the side of the road to make room and doesn’t exhale again until the car has zoomed past her. She focuses on the ground, while inside her rib cage, her heart goes as wild as the overgrown grass under her shoes. She is shaken and she doesn’t know why. She lives in the city. She should be used to this kind of thing. But the three days of isolation at her grandparent’s house, seeing no one but them has taken a toll on her socializing abilities. She has forgotten how to interact with humans. So soon.
Her thoughts are a whirlpool, and they race around inside her brain, jostling for space, for recognition, for their turn in line.
She tries to stay calm as she hears another car in the distance. Or perhaps it’s only the wind. She can usually tell the difference, but not today.
She tries to remember what she knows about herself, to focus her thoughts on one thing. In one area.
Her name is Melissa Dunn. She is eighteen years old. College bound in less than a month. One of the only two people in her graduating class going to an Ivy League school. Straight A student. 4.0 GPA, but not Valedictorian, or even Salutatorian. Worked three times as hard as everyone else, but still got the same grades as them. A line from the Kurt Vonnegut novel she finished the previous day pops into her head: “So it goes.”
She is a bookworm. An artist. A bird lover. A country girl trapped in the big city. Suffers from moderate to severe anxiety. Struggling with early symptoms of depression. Daughter of loving parents, with the rest of her family fraying at the edges. She has her entire future ahead of her, yet she has never felt so lonely. So lost. So sad.
This time it really is a car that is approaching her from behind. She resists the overwhelmingly strong urge to dive into the trees and hide. Instead, she holds her breath and swats at a passing fly. The car is a blue Toyota Camry that looks brand new. The license plate is from Massachusetts.
She continues walking down the path. Earlier that morning, she saw a red tailed hawk perched on the back of a bench outside her window. Now she hears a bird call that does not sound like any songbird. She looks up, searching for the source. The road is empty now, and she has passed the stretch with all the houses. She hates walking past them. She feels like she has a spotlight above her, inviting stares and furtive glances. There are only four houses along this path, and cars don’t frequent it as often as they do today, which is why it is her walking path of choice.
She cranes her neck, but still cannot see the source of the mysterious bird call. She is halfway across the road before she does see it, concealed in the brown and green foliage of a tree in front of her. High above the ground on a branch is a red tailed hawk. Or at least, that is what she thinks it is.
Old friend. She thinks as she stares at it. It opens its beak and calls again. She creeps closer to the foot of the tree, but as she draws near, the magnificent bird spreads its wings and flutters to another branch on a neighboring tree. She continues to watch it, continues to hear it call. She forgets for a moment that she is standing in the middle of the road, and when she realizes, she scurries to the other side of the road, still watching her new best friend.
The hawk calls still, stopping to listen for replies. She is fascinated, almost happy, but knows she must move on. She told her grandmother she would only be out an hour, and that amount of time has nearly elapsed. Reluctantly, she turns and walks away. She wonders if this is the same hawk that alighted in front of her window that morning. She desperately hopes that it is. What she would give to be able to communicate with it.
She was a bird in her past life. She is certain of this fact. She longs to fly again. The desire to do so builds in her chest like an inflating balloon.
The light begins to fade, and the flies keep coming. Nearer to her grandparents’ dwelling, she notices a clump of thistles poking their heads out among a sea of clover. It isn’t bell heather, but she hopes it will satisfy her grandmother’s need for purple flowers. She bends to pick a couple, despite the flies.
As her fingers gently close around the stalks, she notices something half buried in the dirt. She claws away the dry earth clumped to the thing and carefully extricates it from the ground. It is a shimmering piece of rock that looks as if it has been hewn from crystal itself. It glitters in the half light of summer dusk. She clutches it in her hands, feeling its grooved texture against her skin. She resolves that she has to take it, for no reason immediately apparent to her. It will momentarily replace the worry stone that she accidentally left at home in the city. She stands again, clutching the stone in one hand and her flowers in the other.
She continues to walk, turning the lump of rock over and over in her right hand. She is nearly at the intersection where her road crosses the main road. There is a crab apple tree nearby, so she crosses again to see if any tasty apples remain on the branches. Of course a truck veers down her road at the exact same moment. Her hand tightens around the worry rock until it is digging into her flesh. She doesn’t care. She wades deeper into the tall grass, trying to control her breathing, trying to act normal, trying not to get run over by the massive truck now barreling towards her. She stares down resolutely as the huge vehicle passes in a whorl of gas emissions and dust. She is left coughing.
Her heart rate has skyrocketed again, and she only breathes again when she sees that there are no more cars on the road yet. She is alone again with the flies and the trees and the stone.
A sparrow hops into the road ahead of her, bouncing along on its tiny feet.
How are you so brave?
She tries tiptoeing around it, but it flies off.
She is on the main road now, and feels much more exposed.
Keep breathing. Keep breathing.
Relieved, she finally makes her way onto the dirt road leading to her grandparent’s house. Flies begin barraging her from all sides. She swats at them the best she can, but they come back within seconds. She feels a slight pinch on her right arm, and looking down, she notices a big fly (that honest-to-god looks like it has bulging red eyes) attached to her. She shakes it off, suddenly furious. She takes her cap off (a gift from her grandfather) and swings it around her head with all her might, beating away the flies and the thoughts alike. Her arm does not stop windmilling until she has gained the safety of her grandparents’ backyard, where the flies finally give up their fight. She is still breathing hard from the attack. She hates flies. She wishes they were all dead. They were the only thing that prevented the birding trip she had taken a year earlier from being one of the greatest experiences of her life.
She walks slowly across the backyard. She realizes she has squashed the stems of the thistles in her anger. She loosens her grip and climbs the stairs up to the back porch. Through the sliding glass doors lies her grandparents’ bedroom, where they are currently watching the news on television. She hands the flowers to her grandmother with an apology that they aren’t bell heather. Her grandmother smiles, and insists that it is fine. She asks Melissa if she wouldn’t mind putting them in water for her. She’s just too tired. Melissa nods, and goes to the kitchen to find a tiny glass in which to place the delicate flowers. Her grandfather tells her she looks very nice as she leaves. She smiles, even though she doesn’t agree. She’s been trying to accept compliments lately instead of brushing them off. There were too many positive notes in her yearbook for her Inner Critic to make a case against.
She finds the perfect glass for the thistles, and goes back to the bedroom to give them back to her grandmother, who has become the source of at least 60% of her daily worries since she arrived. Her grandmother gets flustered about everything now, even something as small as answering the door for the postman. It upsets Melissa more than she cares to express to the 87 year old woman. She loves her grandmother more than anyone else in the world, except perhaps her parents.
She gets so flustered about everything now, are the first words she says to her mother that night over the phone.
She returns to the kitchen and rinses off the rock she found. It resembles the geodes that her aunt, now deceased of course, was so fond of. She uses copious amounts of soap in an attempt to scrub the dirt off. Some of it is stuck under layers of glittering crystals. She realizes that by washing it, she has just stripped it of its earthiness, replacing it with the scent of green dish soap. It’s like when she felt she was stripping away everything that made her feel alive when she took a shower after gardening. She hangs her head in shame, fist closing around the still-damp stone.
Later, she sits at her computer and pours out her soul into a Pages document.