The summer was hot, too hot. And dry. Too dry. The sun scorched furrows across a sky that seemed to be melting, an uncanny hue of beige and wavering with heat-haze. The adults hunched together at night around the fire that had already been extinguished while they talked in whispers like they thought they could keep the awfulness of everything a secret. Like they were the only ones who knew crops needed rain or that dry heat spawned flames.
If there was anything he had less control over than the weather, it was the crazy things old people did. His eyes lingered on them sometimes in the evenings while they clustered and murmured, but he never tried to breast their conspiracy. Never approached them with his logic, wasting words explaining he had figured things out for himself. No faster way, in his experience, to prove to grownups you weren’t one of them than tell them that you were.
He had the best job there was and didn’t want them to take it away from him.
The sun had just broken the horizon when he took the goats in search of pasture. The sky was pale and yellow in the east, like it ought to be at dawn; it wouldn’t turn blue, though, like it should as the day wore on. It was like the whole world had been burnt and there was no coolness left to it.
He’d meant to go east today, toward the stream. It was more dangerous over that way—better believe wolves were smart enough to spot the place where the prey was gathering—but there was grass that still had a bit of green in it. The area was crowded with all the life flooding in, but it wasn’t hard to chase the antelope back with a bit of shouting and a stick. It would be a month or more before the big boys with their big horns got the crazies and started trying to fight anything and everything. Other antelope, antagonistic trees, human boys with sticks and not enough wits.
Instead, he went north. Wasn’t all the way sure why. Sometimes plans just changed. Maybe more than anything, it was because he hadn’t wanted to walk into the sunset, where the sun was getting ready to burn the sky again.
North was okay, but better in the spring or after a rain. North was hilly and rocky, so much of both that trees didn’t like to grow there. North was lots of up and down, and he was starting to question the decision as he felt sweat prick the pores on the back of his neck.
The goats didn’t care that he was hot. They must be hot too and their coats were long and matted, but grass was all they were thinking about. They walked with real urgency, sometimes hurrying ahead a few steps like they thought he couldn’t be trusted to get them to their food without a little encouragement. The small, seed-filled gourds each wore around its neck kept the rhythm of their worry with each step, and he wondered yet again how the adults thought they were keeping anything a secret. If the sky and the air and the sun and the ground beneath your feet hadn’t clued you in, the goats were telling everyone.
They got halfway up the big hill you could see against the skyline from all the way back at their settlement when he knew he had to take a break. He’d already drunk half his water and it was still early, it would have to last him the rest of the day. The hill was a funny shape, tall and sloped, okay, not too much of either or too little. What made it weird was the fact that it had faces like a tent. They weren’t oriented to anything that he could tell, and that was for the best, in his opinion: if one of the sharp ridges running from its peaks had pointed at the sun at dawn or at the rising moon or something, he wouldn’t’ve set foot on it.
The goats were nothing like so choosy. They let him persuade them around onto the western face where the hill’s bulk shielded them from the rising sun, then fell to. While they ate, he wandered between them, telling himself he should sit down and relax, save his energy. Not able to. More than once, his eyes fell onto the crackly yellow grass and thistles as he thought longingly of milk that smelled like clover and cheese that smelled like wildflowers. If they got any milk at all from this fodder, it would taste like dirt and prickles.
Soon, the sun was peering over the shoulder of the hill, casting its blasting light across them. He flicked an uneasy look at it before turning his face away, raising a shoulder between them. His eyes fell on a few big rocks not far upslope that had hoarded a last patch of shade at their feet, and he made for them.
The rocks were rough without being jagged, flecked with pretty glitters. The sun hadn’t mostly touched them yet, and he placed his hands on their shady flanks, enjoying what felt like the first cool thing he’d touched in as long as he could remember. It hadn’t been this cold last night or in a long time, like the stone was holding onto different memories. Frosty nights and wintertime when the snow piled high.
He felt a cold breath against his lower legs and dropped to his haunches. He might’ve thought he’d just got so wrapped up in dreaming about being chilly, about what that was like when fire and hot food were precious and not a torment. But no: there was a tiny crack at the base of where these rocks were piled together, shaped like a triangle standing on its shortest face. Placing a hand between his feet to steady himself, he leaned forward.
He told himself there’d be nothing there to see but a deeper patch of shadow backing onto dirt, and let out a startled gust of air when the shadow just kept going. Penetrating deeper and getting darker by the inch. Like it was leading somewhere. He was so shocked by this discovery that he let go a startled oath, one of the ones he wasn’t supposed to know.
Down on his knees now, he poked his head into the hole. Cold air continued to breathe out around him, tickling at his face. He squinted, but there was nothing to see: all the light was behind him, all the darkness ahead. He titled his head, then edged forward on his forearms as far as he could go, wondering if there was something in there. Some amazing slumbering animal like from the stories the old people told around the fire at night, or a real-life slumbering animal that would be pissed to have some human disturbing its nest. He couldn’t see anything.
He laid down flat on his belly and pushed himself forward with his toes. It wasn’t just cool in there: it felt like moisture. Not rain-on-your-face wetness, but it might as well have been when you compared it to the dust-dry withering of everything that was happening outside the tiny cave.
Cave. The word had a magic to it as it sprang to the front of his mind. A glamor. Like the blossoming of a flower made of mica. You might find anything inside a cave. A monster, maybe, but maybe a portal to another world. A god in hiding. Treasure.
He felt like his heart had coughed when he saw a sparkle off to left. He told himself he must have imagined it, but he twisted his head and there it was again: one last tiny ray of intrepid light had found its way into the hollow over his head and shoulders and caught on something. Something that threw the light back, something shiny.
One arm snaked out ahead of him, questing. He’d forgotten the risk, forgotten how much likelier it was that this was an animal’s den and it was going to bite him. A snake, or a whole nest of them. One bite enough to kill him dead before he could take a second step toward home and help, and he’d not get bit once, they’d sink a hundred fangs into him. Moaning through his teeth in effort, he stretched, drumming his toes against the soil while the pinching rocks walls scraped his shoulders raw.
When his fingers brushed up against something slick and cold, it gave beneath his touch, sliding farther. He caught his breath in a sob and struggled harder, thrashing and reaching until he had bleeding patches on both shoulders. His fingers brushed it again, found an edge. The end of the middle digit slipped over, hooked, pulled so-delicately while the rest of him kicked and writhed like a man being crushed by a massive serpent.
It slipped into his hand, and he gave a loud, “Ah-ha!” Clutching his prize in a greedy fist, he wriggled backward away from the tiny cave. Once he could straighten, he sat on his backside with a thump, heart drumming. He opened his hand and stared at the beautiful object on his palm, barely able to believe that it was his.
He studied it while he rubbed the back of his smarting head, which he must’ve smacked on the rocks at some point. It was small, carved of some spooky black stone that had a greasy sheen like butter. There were little white circles across its flanks—bone, he wanted to say—beautiful stone of striated blue in their centers like so many staring-wide eyes. He wanted to say it was an antelope: four legs it had, all the same length, backward-curving horns atop his head. A treasure, it was. A treasure like he hadn’t dared imagine. He was mud to the elbow and couldn’t remember how it happened.
He made to stand and a swooping sensation caught him, flipping him in its grip like a leaf in the wind. He was running and knew he must keep running. They were right behind him. He must only keep on, they would grow tired before he did. They could stand to preserve their strength: there would be other chances for them. For him, it was keep running or death.
The sun was a pale disc in a white sky, faint and distant. The cold was a knife that slipped down his throat and cut his lungs. His blood was thundering, but over the sounds of pursuit closer-to came the sharp report of trees shattering. The ethereal tinkling of ice settling out of the air every time the wind fell still.
He could hear them behind him, the crisp snap-snap, snap-snap of their footfalls punching through a layer of snow. No hollering now, not when all breath must be saved and spent on running. He didn’t dare look over his shoulder, but a rocky abutment right ahead forced him to change his trajectory and he could see them from the corners of his eyes as he turned. Definitely closer than they had been.
The change in directions hadn’t been a good one: this way, the hill he had unwisely chosen to climb was growing steeper, forcing him to curve right and right again, slowing while his hunters drew closer. The hill’s face hit a hard angle beyond which he couldn’t see, and as he came to the crest of this downward-trending ridge, his feet slipped. He cried out as he stumbled, then lost his footing completely and began to tumble down the hill. His heart was in his throat and he couldn’t get his bearing or his feet as his hunters closed in.
With an almighty gasp like he’d all-the-way died and been brought back to life, his eyes sprang open. Panting so hard he might pass out from it all over again, he shoved himself into a sitting position. Here he was, in the dirt and dying grass on the side of a semi-familiar hill, sun just peeking over its shoulder. Hot and sweaty from the dream he was trying to convince himself he’d dreamed while taking the nap he was trying to convince himself he’d taken.
His eyes went to the goats, picking about amidst the thorns and briars, chewing with that fevered speed they brought to the table in even the most bounteous of seasons. He noticed the way they couldn’t totally fix their attention on it, though. Like they had something else on their minds. They kept picking their heads up to look over their shoulders, and when he noticed all of them were looking the same way, he followed their gazes.
Upon the northern horizon: a bank of clouds as tall as the sky, as black as the heart of a dead fire. The kind of clouds that didn’t make promises and give hope: that followed through. Ahead of the coming storm, a wind was rising, flattening the grass, pushing his hair back off his brow and cooling the sweat on him. For a time he couldn’t measure, he just sat there, looking at the sky in dumb surprise.
His eyes were drawn onto the object in his hand. So lovely, so mysterious. So small he could have kept it a secret forever, even from his mother and oldest brother. He had planned to.
Decided, he spun where he sat, going back down on his forearms and edging forward carefully. Gently as he could, he tossed the object back into the tiny cave that had kept it safe, trying to get it nice and deep where no one could note its presence. Where no one but him would hopefully ever be aware of it.
Standing, he called out to he goats, clapping his hands to call them in. Casting one last look over his shoulder at the sky, he stretched his legs back toward their settlement, the goats following him in a rattling, clattering mob. There was going to be a storm and it wouldn’t do to be out in it.
Note from the author: Back in undergrad I purchased from an art fair a pottery tile. The artist had painted a selection of vegetables arranged in such a way as to resemble a female nude lying on her side, seen from the rear. Beneath this striking image, the words: Reclining Salad. As objets d’art went, I thought that was pretty nifty, and it turned out my parents were taken with it, too.
Ever since, they’ve been bringing back tiles from their travels to add to my collection. The tiles range from abstract images to human figures, all of them necessarily small. Evocative, for such modest works of art. In this series, I’ll be writing a short story for each, my very own miniature Pictures at an Exhibition.
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