Cabin Trip
by MARSHALL PIOTROWSKI
by MARSHALL PIOTROWSKI
Daddy and Momma booked a cabin. Long weekend. Daddy and Momma drove Sister and Brother up into enveloping, elephantine mountains. Momma bristled in honeyed, anxious anticipation of gold, crimson, violet, cerulean wildflowers, of hikes, of potential encounters with massive mammalians, moose, elk, maybe even bear. She brought her fauna track and flora identification books, her trusted tools for feeling in place where objectively out.
They kept driving.
World? World’s Dark. A blackberry nighttime, and they kept driving.
A trance fixed, enswathed them all, and they kept driving.
“Hey, have we been driving too long?” asked Brother, feeling the hundreds of hours passed. “We’ll be there soon,” assured Daddy. Momma and Sister and Brother watched tall evergreens go by all tenebrous and ominous in that blackberry nighttime. What’s in there? they wondered. Momma met a mean moon.
They kept driving.
Daddy yawned a little yawn, stood in his seat to stretch a little stretch, only possible for the cruise control. Sister needed to pee. They pulled over in blackberry nighttime. She peed behind the first line of trees. Nothing bad happened.
They kept driving.
After several years Momma excitedly asked, “Hey, think we’ll see a moose?”
“I think we will, yes, I think we will,” chimed Daddy. Momma smiled real big.
Sister and Brother did their puberty, grew in their seats, burst in their clothes, tore the constricting things off and borrowed Daddy and Momma’s extras. They reread their books many times over, memorized the rhythm, the prose. Momma and Daddy traded driving duties.
They kept driving.
Momma fell asleep at the wheel ten years later, almost killed the whole family. Swerved into a ditch. Somehow nobody was hurt. They abandoned the sorry, mangled wreck, put what they needed in backpacks, and journeyed into caliginous, unknown woods. Brother grew a beard. Sister grew breasts. “It’s normal,” Momma and Daddy assured them. Sister and Brother appeared sort of like miniature versions of Daddy and Momma, but more like grown versions of themselves.
They kept walking.
They met a moose. Momma first. Alces americanus. They all cheered, danced, sang a little song. She was happy; they were too, especially for her. Daddy reminded them how right he was of the moose. Momma found some pretty purple wildflowers. Chicory. Cichorium intybus. They all celebrated, danced a little circle dance, put little flowers in their hair, stems tucked behind cheerful ears.
They kept walking.
They found a stream. Sister first. Heard the trickling trickle with her superior ears. They followed it up, climbed.
They kept climbing.
Took forty-eight hours of climbing in blackberry nighttime to reach the stream’s highest source, a lake in the alpine. A small island sat just offshore. They changed into bathing suits and swam to it, sat on the island. Eight feet floated in gelid water, but they weren’t cold. Daddy saw a fish ascend into gaseous matter. Then Daddy broke way down. He was sad to be so old. His hair had grayed on the climb. They were all sad to get so old, changed. They hugged, arms wrapping arms, heads nuzzling heads, Sister squeezed-in tight in the middle. Felt better after that. They decided to vamoose, climb over the towering northern ridge, curious of the other side. Sister and Brother let Daddy and Momma set pace; they took it slow.
They kept climbing.
Reached the top. Daddy first. They couldn’t see much in that tenebrous nighttime, but there below, were at least three more lakes. They decided on a sparkling one down to the left. It too had an island to swim to, to sit on. Momma found cougar tracks, fresh ones. Puma concolor. They all cheered, danced, sang.
At the second island in the second lake, Momma pulled the wilted Chicory from her hair, cast it with a strength into the water. The lake lit up, like some lapis lazuli light laid on the lakebed, and they all peered down, Brother first, into the bright sapphire pool: teemed with trout, bugs, and there was the body of a man down there, an ancient, Dead Man, and they saw his phantom float. They wished his phantom well, then the lake went dark again. They all cried at the beauty, the opportunity, hugged again.
They remained there several weeks, in that crying hug, then, thoroughly aged, hiked back to the car. Was fixed when they got there. Was the phantom who’d fixed it. He’d left a real kind note. They got in.
They kept driving. [END]