Wings

It was September, still hot and so humid that she immediately felt as if she’d been wrapped in cellophane whenever she stepped outside. But she’d found a bit of ivy clinging to her brick apartment building, and that vine had a single red leaf on it. No harbinger of autumn like that could be ignored. Fall, the season of death, was her favorite. She wanted to be watching when hit.

She drove three hours to a national park. She hiked several trails that day, leaning down and closely examining every fallen leaf, every nut and mushroom, every wooly caterpillar that trundled across the packed earth. She smoked cigarettes every few hundred yards and put them out in a water bottle in her backpack, to be disposed of later. She nodded and smiled at other hikers headed the opposite way. She stopped to read snatches of Edgar Allen Poe poems. She imagined she had wings. She sweated completely through her tank top and wiped her brow with a rainbow-colored bandana.

In the end, she was so hot and tired she hiked the road back to her car, rather than take the long way around. She was looking at the ground, testing her balance by walking heel-to-toe along the white line painted at the edge of the road, when something small and light brushed her cheek. She looked up to see a brilliant orange butterfly struggling to open its wings and failing. It looked miserable. She picked it up and held it in her hand. She felt like a god.

She placed it gently on a tree branch and turned back to her path.

Battle

Giggling, Brandy stood and staggered across the ditch. The traffic cop, standing ten feet away in the middle of the road, gave me a look as I leapt up after her and snagged her hand. I was giggling, too. “Come back here! Listen, I can hear the bagpipes. They’re coming.”

She subsided next to me in the dewy grass. She laid a finger across her lips and looked meaningfully over her shoulder.

We were camping at the Scottish highland games. There were two groups of campers: the family side and MacRowdy. The family campers took up all the flat space to be found in the area. They got warm showers and went to bed at eleven o’clock. We were on MacRowdy, a mountain across the road. We had two or three drum circles going into the wee hours of the morning; as we slept, we slid into human puddles at the bottom of our tents. But tonight, the family campers were invading, armed with marshmallows, led by a troop of pipers in full regalia. Brandy and I hid, ready to ambush them before they knew what hit them.

The pipers came into view. We waited. Never fire on the pipers, everyone knows that. Stifling a grin, the traffic cop held up his hands to approaching cars; they’d have to wait until the war was over. As the first few campers came into view, Brandy stood, released a shriek of a war cry, and pelted them with a handful of marshmallows. One of them actually hit someone.

I hit one girl in the chest; the marshmallow slid down the front of her shirt. She retaliated. A sticky white pellet slapped into my cheek. Brandy and I ran out of marshmallows before anyone else did and jogged toward MacRowdy under a shower of strangely glowing goo. We held hands to avoid being separated.

We stopped, collapsed into the grass behind someone’s tent, clutched each other, wheezed with laughter. “C’mon,” I said after catching my breath. “Let’s get ’em!”

We helped each other up—an extraordinary feat—and plucked marshmallows from the ground. They were sticky and warm, covered in dead grass. We started throwing our goods at someone. “Stop!” our target yelled indignantly. “I’m with MacRowdy!”

We splayed our hands apologetically. Our fingers stuck together. Then we hid and watched a maniac advance on our mountain. He had taken ashes and smeared them across his face. For camouflage or acne, we would never know. He was roaring mightily and chucking white things indiscriminately. He hit me in the forehead. It stung like crazy. Brandy and I grinned at each other and, without a word, rushed him. We stood ten feet away from him and hurled everything we had at him, screaming defiance.

We missed.

Arms around each other’s shoulders, we retreated.