the path back home
When she was a little girl, The Woman lived in a landlocked place, a town with more cows than people. She knew only the faces of her mother and the two neighboring households, and of the flowers in the yard — Blood Sage, Virginia Iris, Partridge Pea…These she studied with her entirety, spending little time with anyone but her mother and the plants.
The Woman’s mother was known for her nerves, always in a state of near or realized panic. In these fits, she clung to the heart-shaped locket which hung around her neck. On the day she died — pneumonia, age 62 — The Woman’s mother passed on the locket and her nervousness with it. These two things The Woman would take with her on her move West, and neither ever left her side.
She was prone to rituals, only eating tomato soup and sourdough bread, walking to the ocean every day at exactly 4 in the afternoon. The Woman fell in love with sand when the wind was strong. She sat on the beach in a spot only she knew, free of umbrellas and stares, and watched as each gust blurred the sand into fuzzy airspace. It stung her bare arms in turns of South West and North East, but her attention never strayed from the shoreline. Hours passed here, in her isolation, and she would return home when the sun began to set. Changes in this routine made her hands shake and her body sweat, and she clung to the locket that lay perpetually between her collarbones, waiting for it to bring her back to normalcy.
But in the years of the men with guns, nervousness took second place to self-preservation. They started without guns, just suits and smiles and a promise of betterment. They appeared in press conferences, with international leaders and domestic politicians, all discussing a new wave of society. Not capitalism, nor socialism, nor anything else with a name, but an economic rebranding, one which would make poverty extinct and opportunity for growth abundant.
The men with guns never clarified how this would be done, failing to provide answers for where the resources for such a project would come from. People grew paranoid, with some extremists asserting that the government was planning a mass genocide of the lower class. These believers took to the streets, and protests erupted throughout the globe. The Woman unplugged her TV and began clutching her mother’s locket tighter. She left her house less frequently, only taking the walk to the place where she watched the sand blow, once a week, the grocery store once a month.
Then, the protests grew nearer, and The Woman could hear the yelling and the firing of guns from the window in her bedroom. This she boarded up with plywood, doing the same to all the other windows in her little wooden beach house. She stopped turning on the lights at night, fumbling her way with an oil lamp in hand and a knife on her hip. It was a Thursday night when everything fell silent. There was no more yelling, no more gunshots, and so the woman took off the plywood from her bedroom window to observe the outside. There was nothing, only the sound of the water and a seagull’s wings beating against the wind.
The Woman left this night, heading east, called back to the place she lived as a child with her mother and the flowers. Familiar with the trails through the hills and the mountains near her western home, always preferring the natural world to the secular, she took these as her guide out. She said goodbye to her tomato soup and the little, wooden beach house that had been her home for the past 30 years. Goodbye to the peeling wallpaper, goodbye to the ceiling beams, goodbye to ritual.
With her, The Woman brought one backpack. In it was a pair of garden scissors, her identification papers, and a humble stack of money. No spare clothes, no tomato soup, no sourdough bread, and no means of connection with the outside world. Cellphone towers were no longer operational, and news stations were severely understaffed or abandoned, with those who controlled the men with guns corrupting what was televised. There was no use in attempting to contact anyone, or to stay in touch with politics, because there were no answers.
To reach the hills which would carry her east, she needed to cross the freeway, silent and unseen, and so The Woman left on foot, leaving her four-door sedan parked on the empty street. She was the last of her neighbors to leave, and she peered into the windows of their abandoned houses where sideways furniture and forgotten belongings lay. The Woman imagined the lives of these people she had never spoken to, and wondered if they, too, were headed back to places they called home. She pressed on.
Helicopters whipped overhead and The Woman brought a hand up to her locket. She thought of Southern wildflowers and the blur of the sand on the beach as she walked across the freeway, past cars with doors left open in hurried panics. There was no light save for the moon, and The Woman cast anxious eyes left, right, behind, keeping watch for the men with guns.
The buzz in the sky grew closer, and The Woman slid beneath a still-running car, choking in its exhaust. She laid there through the night, drifting off at times, but her mind never resting. Her thoughts raced between survival and giving up. The Woman was not young, and she was not brave, and she was not prepared for a life without a roof and a garden. But morning brought new light, and she was charged with a desire to live to see the home of her youth. And so she continued.
The Woman walked for many days and night, snipping away leaves and berries with her shears, learning to start a fire with a bundle of gathered sticks, and occasionally finding rabbits dead from old age. She survived like this, hiding from helicopters and sleeping in makeshift structures, without ever seeing another person — no men with guns, and no people like her, on a desperate flee. She was alone, as she had been for most of her life, and this did not bother her. There was a peace to be found in living to survive, and The Woman was not unhappy. New rituals began, and a certain routine shaped her days — wake up, walk, pause, eat, walk, sleep, and then do it all again.
Winter entered and brought disruption to The Woman’s new life. The plants which she ate grew sparser as she walked on, and there were no more rabbits to stumble upon. Fires became near impossible to start, and she found herself unable to sleep most nights, shivering not from nervousness but from cold. She dreamt in her waking state of the warmth of the beach and of being 8 years old, drinking lemonade on the porch. These reflections kept her alive into December, before she laid down for the last time.
The Woman died holding her mother’s locket, rigor mortis setting in and keeping her fingers bound to its metal. Men with guns would find her body days later, preserved by the cold, and they would break her fingers before removing the chain from her neck. The locket now lay surrounded by similar treasures, waiting to be melted down, but The Woman stayed alone. When the snow began to fade, and the sun stuck around for longer, her body fertilized the wildflowers which Spring had birthed.