“Oh, Mike! You’re bad! You’re so bad!”
It hasn’t rained in a long time.
The mother exits the highway. Her e-toll pays the debt.
The town is a remote mountain holiday spot in the off-season. The shops are closed except for a grocery. The mother pulls over for human supplies. They will need food. They will need water.
The tires stop spinning, stop lulling. The daughter wakes. Alone in the car, she reaches for her phone without thought. It’s what she does. She texts a boyfriend. It’s late. He forgets himself. He writes, Send me dirty pix. The girl considers his request. A shadowy breast shot might be nice. Mother returns. Daughter hides her phone.
“Where are we, Mom?”
They arrive at a cabin deep in the woods. It’s surrounded by infinite pines, maples, oaks, trees of all sorts. There are no other houses. No power lines. Just the woods. Underneath the trees, deep in the soil, fungi attach themselves to the trees’ roots. These mushrooms, though really it is one big mushroom, suck some of the tree’s sugar from the roots. In return they serve as a telephone operator for the forest. They connect one tree’s roots to its neighbor’s to its neighbor’s. Trees communicate through the fungus. They do not speak English. They do not speak in words humans would understand.
The door to the cabin is padlocked, so the mother smashes the lock with the lip of a shovel left on the landing.
“Mom!” The daughter’s surprised her mom had it in her. Like a professional bad guy. Breaking and entering.
The lock gives easily. Mother and daughter inch into the dark cabin.
“Where are we, Mom?” Again.
“Shhhh.”
They sleep wrapped like spoons in a room where mounted deer watch the bed, watch them sleep.
The sun rises. The daughter takes a short walk to a dock on a quiet lake. No one’s there. She snaps some photos of the lake and attempts to post them but there’s no coverage. There’s no connection. The starlings soar overhead. Her mother joins her at the dock. They drink coffee. The birds obey silent commands. The birds make their murmur without even trying. It’s a chorus, a group, a pixelated mob blurring to one.
Near sunset, mother and daughter prepare a small meal. They build a fire in the cabin. They burn wood. They warm a can of beans and nibble on some cheese.
“Before GPS,” the mother says, “lost was possible. You could not know where you were. No one could find you. Before. You have no idea.”
The daughter nods. “Where are we?”
Mother ignores. “Also,” she says, “clocks could be wrong. Like, the clock in your car might be ten minutes fast or a watch could run slow. Things could be inaccurate. Different. Not like now.”
The daughter’s cell phone rings.
“I said no electronics.”
“It’s just Tony, Mom.” The boyfriend.
The mother grabs the ringing phone. There are no bars, no connection. The mother’s hand trembles. She answers. “Hello?” No one’s there. Or no one who speaks is there.
The mother throws the phone into the fire.
In the night the mother wakes. Someone is in their room. The past does not have to try hard to find us, especially not at night. So the mother isn’t surprised. “You found us,” she whispers. “The phone?”
“I’ll always find you,” the person says.
The mother pulls the bedcovers up over her body, making a poor shield.
“I am you.” The stranger approaches the bed. Her face is revealed in the low light. The stranger is not a stranger. She is the mother, only younger and skinny as a junkie.
“Please,” the mother says. “I’m clean now. I’m a mother now.”
Junkie shrugs. She sits on the edge of the bed, prepping a syringe. “You tried to kill me,” she says. She pulls down the bedcovers, like a lover accessing the mother’s body, her body.
“Don’t. Please.” It’s a whisper. But the mother lies still. Maybe she is crying. Maybe she is grateful. She hasn’t had a hit of anything in years.
The mother does not fight. The drug enters her blood. She convulses, a worm. She nods off, asleep or asleep-like. Her arm is pierced by the syringe and a history that never leaves, a history so haunted. The arm lands across her daughter’s sleeping body with a hard thud.
The daughter wakes to two mothers. “Who are you? What are you doing?” she asks the younger one.
The junkie smiles.
“Mom?” The daughter shakes the mother in bed beside her, trying to wake the mother she knows. “What did you do?” The daughter lunges at the intruder. She attacks, but the junkie mother is cruel and desperate. She fights viciously. And the daughter can’t bring herself to fight very hard at all. What if she hurts her mother? What if she hurts her mother before her mother has a chance to become her mother?
The junkie has no such restraint. With full fists the junkie swings, beating her daughter horribly, saying awful things to her own child, things like, “We never wanted you.” She hits and kicks and spits. The daughter, bloody and bruised, tucks into a protective curl on the floor. The junkie laughs above, landing another boot in the daughter’s side. She pulls back again, ready to strike.
But then, an unsettling crack, a vessel split open like the padlock, like a memory. The junkie crumples to the ground.
The daughter uncurls in the silence and looks up to see her protector, a young girl, only seven years old. The shovel is raised in the little girl’s hand. The daughter squints
