The sand colored sky swirled and began to migrate towards the purples and pinks of the spectrum. Fingers of color spread out across the sky like tendrils of a tiny vine creeping up a sandstone wall, reaching into the cracks to hold on for dear life.
The wind began to pick up a little. Michael hugged his guitar to his chest as he walked past the place of arrival. He watched the sky with curiosity, and a bit of apprehension. Calista was agitated. Something was coming.
He walked along the barbed wire fence that had grown up from the ground overnight. It was new, but it didn't look new. Its points were rusty and caked orange with age, its posts weather beaten and grey. Although the evening was warm, Michael suddenly felt cold. Something was worrying Calista, or she never would have put up this fence. The only thing he could not understand was whether it was to keep something out, or to keep them in.
The fence stretched out for miles. The mountains that had dominated the horizon a few weeks ago had shrunk into dusty rolling hills that made the horizons seem further away. And the fence, this new fence, marred the landscape, cutting it in half with an ugly barbed wire scar.
The only thing that remained the same was the tree. He could see it now, just beyond a little dip in the land. She was trying to hide it from him, but he knew where it was the same way squirrels remember where they've stashed their nuts, or the way monarchs know to return to the same trees on their trek south every year. He felt it. In his bones.
As he crossed the rise, he suddenly saw a figure sitting beneath The Tree. She was huddled near its trunk, knees clutched to her chest, staring out into the uneasy sky. Michael felt his pace quicken.
When Sara saw him approaching, she quickly stood.
"You felt it too," she said. A statement, not a question. He nodded. "I thought I should come here," she continued, but then found she couldn't think of anything else to stay.
As Michael moved towards the tree, he noticed that the fence had driven itself up straight through the trunk. A wave of hot anger passed over him. What before had been an unsightly manifestation of Calista's whims was now a personal affront to him.
"Doesn't she hold anything sacred?" he asked loudly, fingering the barbs he could see pressed into the tree's thick outer flesh.
"She's worried," Sara replied, as if that explained, or excused, the atrocity. Suddenly, a cold burst of wind blew at them, and Sara hugged herself against the cold.
"Don't take it out on us," Michael muttered. He looked around. "What are we waiting for?" he asked Sara. She shrugged.
Near the tree, the fence posts widened horizontally, creating a sort of bench. Michael took advantage of it, laying his guitar across his lap. Silently, Sara joined him. And they waited.
They did not have to wait long.
Before long, the silence was broken by an eerily familiar yet totally foreign sound. Michael looked around, startled. There, on the other side of the fence, two lights were visible in the evening gloom.
"It can't be," Sara whispered. Yet it was. Trundling towards them slowly was a sea green mini-van, headlights on, illuminating the strange evening. Sara suddenly grabbed his arm. "Michael -- it's your mom!" she hissed.
The mini-van slowed to a stop with a squeak of the breaks. For a moment, the engine idled, then died. The lights, however, stayed on.
For one brief moment, Michael thought it might be a dream. He wondered if Calista had brought them here to see this, another of her creations. Yet even as he wondered this, he knew it wasn't true.
The driver's door swung open with a creak, and a short, stout woman with curly brown hair and just a few streaks of grey emerged from the van. She stepped gingerly out into the dusty brown landscape and peered around in the gathering gloom.
"Michael?" she called, tentatively.
"Yes mom." She looked slightly relieved.
"There you are! I was afraid I wouldn't be able to find you in the woods. Hello Sara. Come on home with me, Michael. It's getting dark." Michael looked around despite himself. There were no woods that he could see. Only the single, big old Tree that was always there.
"I can't come home, mom," he said. "I've tried, but I guess we're not through here yet." He marveled at the vision in front of him. It was his own mother, not a day older than the day he had left. He remembered her pouring his orange juice that morning into the juice glass with the red rooster on it. He could still smell the blood of the valencias flowing into his glass, could still see the drops of orange liquid on the red and white plastic table cloth.
"Don't be silly, Michael," his mother replied. "Get your friends. I can drop them all off home so they won't have to walk in the dark." She paused squinting at him in the light of the headlights. "Their mothers will be worried, too."
Michael shook his head. "We can't." Suddenly, Sara sighed softly, and rested her head on his shoulder. He put an arm around her.
His mother looked doubtful. "Well, all right then. Not too much longer though. And don't expect me to keep your dinner hot for you." She turned and went back to the van, opened the door, and got inside. The engine started with a rough growl, and the headlights grew momentarily brighter. They heard her shift the car into reverse, and slowly, the sea green monster backed away from them into the darkness until the headlights were gone.
Michael found himself hugging Sara closer to him as the darkness pressed in around them. She snuggled her head into his neck, and he suddenly realized that she loved him, and that he loved her, too.
"Let's go home," he said.
-----
Linda turned off the radio in the mini van. The bubble gum pop and ingratiating DJs were suddenly too much for her. She thought of her son. That short, dark hair, his solemn face and his friend Sara with her bright blue eyes. They had seemed awfully close. She squinted, trying to remember. In fact, she had been resting her head on his shoulder. She suddenly had a flash of her son, but tall, with a man's broad shoulders and a man's beard. But that was ridiculous. He was only ten years old.
Linda didn't think much more about it as she fixed dinner, nor as she sat and ate with her husband. Michael often stayed out late on warm summer evenings. He would come in smelling of grass clippings and ozone from water on hot cement, and he would let the cicada songs in as he burst through the screen door and let it slam behind him.
She didn't think about it again until she was drying dishes after dinner. Two forks. Two glasses. Two white china plates. She paused, her damp flour sack towel in one hand, the last plate in the other. It occurred to her, that Michael wasn't coming home. She gasped with the suddenness of the realization and dropped the plate. Her husband came rushing into the room and she fell on him, sobbing for her lost son.
"Honey," he soothed her, "it's been almost five years since Michael left. I thought you'd gotten over the worst of it now." And she realized that it had been five years since she'd gone to look for him in the woods. He and his friends had never come home.
-----
Michael and Sara walked back to the village with their arms around one another. It felt good, Michael thought. It felt right. That's where she was meant to be, in his arms. But as they reached the first of the little huts, he realized that she would go into her hut, and he would go into his, and he would have to be without her.
"Sara," he said, stopping still a few feet from the first huts. "I... I don't want you to go back to your house. I want you to come to my house." He paused, trying to remember the words that had been forgotten. "I want you to marry me. To be my... wife." Sara smiled.
"I know," she said. They continued to walk, and they passed her hut completely, and he felt a surge of strength.
He realized that seeing his mother had caused him to remember something they had all forgotten. He remembered love.
