fog

The sun dawned bright behind me, illumining the little town where I'm hiding out: through my widow, I watch the shadow of the slope I sit on shrink down the face of the hill opposite, heading for the spring that trickles between us. But fog is boiling up from the lake on the other side, threatening to swallow the homes and outbuildings over there.

So: a life. Or part of one, anyone's, at any given time, this fleeting refuge between flight and flight...

The fog is winning, and the sunlit walls on the houses snugged up against their mountain have begun to pale, as if taken ill. The fog may engulf us all, but that will not stop the roosters, or the dogs, or the echoes of footfalls going up then down the crooked lane below me as the day grows on.

My neighbors' generations all live their life here. I see them in the square, walking arm in arm, four across: each with different hair or hat, but under that, the same face at different ages. A lovely place to live, and because of this, perhaps, everyone is generous and friendly, apparently unbothered by my strange appearance and incomprehension of their speech. But even the children here smile to me, and if any are shy at first, they are soon reassured by the others, who think me harmless.

I am not harmless. I should be able to get out, if need be, before my pursuers find this blessed place — or so I tell myself, when the thought of those terrible entities strangles my will to flee yet farther.

But not yet. The water-wagon creaks by, far below, the old driver with no voice beating his wooden bell, setting the pace for his ancient mule, toc-toc, toc-toc, toc-toc, lulling my silly heart into the same placid rhythm.

Only two roosters contesting now, yelling 'O be quiet, you!' like boys in the schoolyard, and one dog woofs sleepily, trying to remember what set him off not long ago. A big-eyed cat picks her nervous way along the roof tiles, leaps a chest-high wall, then vanishes under a ragged tarp. I know that kind of running.

No wind: the clothes strung along the same rooftop hang straight down like dead men — the way I will hang, like as not right soon, as my mother would have put it.

She too was a stranger in that land, far away now, where she brought me into this life; however that came to be, she told no name nor laid no blame (another of her sayings), but you don't have to live long in this world to understand the ways a child comes to have only one parent, or none. With her I needed no father to teach me to fight, and what to be willing to do to win, and how winning turns to disgust the next moment, a stain going cold on the stones.

Ach, I miss her so. She was my champion, and she required that I be hers as well, even when I was small, training me to it finely: waste no rage on fools, but make them pay respect, to her, to me, and to themselves, if that can be managed. At the last she was an elder of our village, grandmother to the whole town, and when she died every last soul mourned, the dogs howling.

I inherited her courage, her cussedness, and some measure of her cunning, but not, in the end, her gift of command. Not for me, it turns out, the life with others, the helping, the healing, the patience — nor, in fine, the love. With one exception, but I won't speak of that. Not yet. If ever.

The fog was drawing back a moment ago, but now it once more pushes down the hillside towards me, a host on the march. Chills the bones, withers the heart, does the fog, but it will hide me from my foes another hour yet.