![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
okaywolfSometimes The Mountain Buries You is a queer novella about the monster that threatens your attempt at a much-needed quiet life. Check out the about page here.
The third time you hike to meet Sheppard on the packed dirt service road, he nods back towards town and starts walking the direction you came. You turn around and walk next to him. Not knowing if talking is some part of it—It—you wait until Sheppard speaks first. “I was going to show you the salmonberries coming in.”
He sounds miserable, you pat his shoulder, “Next time?” You don’t know what to ask for clarification when he shakes his head. Later, once you’re in town and he’s settled onto your couch, he explains It moves things around. He emphasizes that It doesn’t destroy the flora and fauna It rearranges, but It does rearrange them, as though the whole mountainside was a flower bouquet or a scale model to fuss with. He’s pretty sure Its rearrangements are beneficial to the hillside and all those plants and animals, but he hasn't found and observed long-term that many rearrangements.
He's been in your cabin before, before it was your cabin even. While it's been yours he's put venison in your freezer, chopped firewood, rehung the clothesline, carried out the old fridge, and moved the heavier furniture for the arrival of a "new" couch from the town with the hospital. "It's a good couch," he calls, while you make tea in the kitchen. He really hasn't been here since before winter, you call back to him.
Much of the walls are insulated by full bookshelves. One is packed with the pocket-size paperbacks you burn through in idle moments, stacked and two layers deep and more read than to be read. You've made a pretty good friend in both the librarian in town and the cashier of the general store in the town with the hospital that's sold no small contribution to the shelf.
"One time," he explains, "It relocated the path of moose that had been by the creek north of the old town most autumns." The old town is the spread of shacks he built the exterior of his cabin with. "Never saw it there again. Since then, I've caught it crossing the service road sometimes."
You hand him a mug of tea and hope nothing in your cupboard is poisonous to him. "And?"
"And I've found two people It's killed."
You purse your lips together and nod.
You don't have anything like cats to ask him about, any pressing subject changes. He sits quietly with his tea and your bodies slowly migrating into each other and your bodies slowly sinking into the couch.
With ferns in season, you invite Shepaprd to leave marks with his mouth. He puts a trail of them down your spine, brushing his teeth against your vertebrae as he goes. After a couple days of sitting very straight, you struggle to reach every patch of stinging.
As the weather warms, the part-time residents that stay around longer outside of winter boost town's population. This means more dogs, cats, and even guinea pigs to look after; more faces to remember and wave at; more twenty-somethings and dirtbikes in the contingent of the twenty-somethings with dirtbikes; less produce to pick from at the gas station general store until the gas station general store starts stocking more produce; and sometimes a line at the coin operated washing machines that sit on the gas station general store's front porch.
The first artist in residency of the season you recognize from last year. They're an Indigenous comic artist and you add several zines to your bookshelf as well as a personal copy of the book they had been working on during last year's residency that you borrowed from the library when it had been published. It's nice to see someone come around again, to learn what they've done and are doing.
The second artist in residency you also recognize. You wish you didn't.
The green of their hair had grown even further out and they had swapped their lip ring for one that didn't flop around oversized so much. They apparently didn't have a change of clothes. When they spot you, they sink behind the shelf of movies for rent—VHS and DVD—in the gas station general store. You wait outside with a fruit leather from a company in the nearest city that sourced fruit from the even hotter summer valley area around and sprawling away from the nearest city. They come out with an eclectic mix of groceries and a six-pack.
"I'm sorry."
You are remarkably pissed. Your body language is an eye-searing manifestation of how pissed you are.
"It sounded familiar but I wasn't sure and I needed a place to stay."
Because you don't want to have this conversation in one of the few places in town people actually walk by sometimes, you tersely tell them to follow you. At the monkey bars and swings along the not street-facing wall of the town hall, you remind them they were supposed to never come back.
They look glumly down at the bag of groceries between their shredded sneakers. "I'm sorry really. I wasn't gonna come back. I—" They start fidgeting with a thin woven bracelet while explaining that they respected Sheppard's 'whole deal', including the part where they were not supposed to come back. Then they had found the hiker's cabin they had been living out of after their snowbird squat's snowbirds came back was swept away by a snowmelt flood. They'd tried hitchhiking in any direction past at least two regions with no luck. So when someone in a coffee shop in the second nearest city saw their poems and suggested the residency, they had applied without the due diligence to ensure the town as not this town. "Again I'm sorry."
It's only two weeks, but it's two weeks of someone who can't be trusted living in town knowing the way to Sheppard's cabin and, presumably, more about Sheppard than should be said out loud where other people in town could hear.
"Not a word about him to anyone." You pull off intimidating with the fruit leather wrapper you're brandishing.
"Oh yeah of course."
Their name is Murre, 'like the bird'. You hope Sheppard doesn't have to come into town for the next two weeks.
The third time you hike to meet Sheppard on the packed dirt service road, he nods back towards town and starts walking the direction you came. You turn around and walk next to him. Not knowing if talking is some part of it—It—you wait until Sheppard speaks first. “I was going to show you the salmonberries coming in.”
He sounds miserable, you pat his shoulder, “Next time?” You don’t know what to ask for clarification when he shakes his head. Later, once you’re in town and he’s settled onto your couch, he explains It moves things around. He emphasizes that It doesn’t destroy the flora and fauna It rearranges, but It does rearrange them, as though the whole mountainside was a flower bouquet or a scale model to fuss with. He’s pretty sure Its rearrangements are beneficial to the hillside and all those plants and animals, but he hasn't found and observed long-term that many rearrangements.
He's been in your cabin before, before it was your cabin even. While it's been yours he's put venison in your freezer, chopped firewood, rehung the clothesline, carried out the old fridge, and moved the heavier furniture for the arrival of a "new" couch from the town with the hospital. "It's a good couch," he calls, while you make tea in the kitchen. He really hasn't been here since before winter, you call back to him.
Much of the walls are insulated by full bookshelves. One is packed with the pocket-size paperbacks you burn through in idle moments, stacked and two layers deep and more read than to be read. You've made a pretty good friend in both the librarian in town and the cashier of the general store in the town with the hospital that's sold no small contribution to the shelf.
"One time," he explains, "It relocated the path of moose that had been by the creek north of the old town most autumns." The old town is the spread of shacks he built the exterior of his cabin with. "Never saw it there again. Since then, I've caught it crossing the service road sometimes."
You hand him a mug of tea and hope nothing in your cupboard is poisonous to him. "And?"
"And I've found two people It's killed."
You purse your lips together and nod.
You don't have anything like cats to ask him about, any pressing subject changes. He sits quietly with his tea and your bodies slowly migrating into each other and your bodies slowly sinking into the couch.
With ferns in season, you invite Shepaprd to leave marks with his mouth. He puts a trail of them down your spine, brushing his teeth against your vertebrae as he goes. After a couple days of sitting very straight, you struggle to reach every patch of stinging.
As the weather warms, the part-time residents that stay around longer outside of winter boost town's population. This means more dogs, cats, and even guinea pigs to look after; more faces to remember and wave at; more twenty-somethings and dirtbikes in the contingent of the twenty-somethings with dirtbikes; less produce to pick from at the gas station general store until the gas station general store starts stocking more produce; and sometimes a line at the coin operated washing machines that sit on the gas station general store's front porch.
The first artist in residency of the season you recognize from last year. They're an Indigenous comic artist and you add several zines to your bookshelf as well as a personal copy of the book they had been working on during last year's residency that you borrowed from the library when it had been published. It's nice to see someone come around again, to learn what they've done and are doing.
The second artist in residency you also recognize. You wish you didn't.
The green of their hair had grown even further out and they had swapped their lip ring for one that didn't flop around oversized so much. They apparently didn't have a change of clothes. When they spot you, they sink behind the shelf of movies for rent—VHS and DVD—in the gas station general store. You wait outside with a fruit leather from a company in the nearest city that sourced fruit from the even hotter summer valley area around and sprawling away from the nearest city. They come out with an eclectic mix of groceries and a six-pack.
"I'm sorry."
You are remarkably pissed. Your body language is an eye-searing manifestation of how pissed you are.
"It sounded familiar but I wasn't sure and I needed a place to stay."
Because you don't want to have this conversation in one of the few places in town people actually walk by sometimes, you tersely tell them to follow you. At the monkey bars and swings along the not street-facing wall of the town hall, you remind them they were supposed to never come back.
They look glumly down at the bag of groceries between their shredded sneakers. "I'm sorry really. I wasn't gonna come back. I—" They start fidgeting with a thin woven bracelet while explaining that they respected Sheppard's 'whole deal', including the part where they were not supposed to come back. Then they had found the hiker's cabin they had been living out of after their snowbird squat's snowbirds came back was swept away by a snowmelt flood. They'd tried hitchhiking in any direction past at least two regions with no luck. So when someone in a coffee shop in the second nearest city saw their poems and suggested the residency, they had applied without the due diligence to ensure the town as not this town. "Again I'm sorry."
It's only two weeks, but it's two weeks of someone who can't be trusted living in town knowing the way to Sheppard's cabin and, presumably, more about Sheppard than should be said out loud where other people in town could hear.
"Not a word about him to anyone." You pull off intimidating with the fruit leather wrapper you're brandishing.
"Oh yeah of course."
Their name is Murre, 'like the bird'. You hope Sheppard doesn't have to come into town for the next two weeks.
