Synesthesia: Chapter Forty-Eight

serial fiction

Image: Alex Haney, Unsplash

The hike back up was hellish and hot, made worse by the weight of the injured girl slung across my shoulders. Did I say she was lightweight? Ha! No, she was small but dense, all muscular legs and hard edges.

I’d picked her up without a word or an explanation. I was far too thirsty to dry my mouth out further with unnecessary talking. When she’d realized what I was doing, the girl had screamed, then beaten at me uselessly with petite fists and unbroken arms.

“I’m taking you to get help,” I’d said to shut her up, and it had worked.

Now she was still and mostly silent, sometimes letting out a little cry or yelp when I moved her broken leg too much with my climbing and my stumbling.

Her fear had subsided a bit, overshadowed by the trickling juices of mango pain, the vinegar burn of hope, and something else, something I hadn’t smelled since Amber.

Vanilla.

I thought about Amber as I took step after endless step up the sloping canyon wall, hoping to reconnect to a trail. I thought about her green eyes, her cackling laugh, the way she’d folded her arms around me, the air around us blossoming vanilla.

No, not anymore. I pushed it all out of my mind. Only the girl on my back was real now, the cactuses and thorny shrubs that nipped at my shins, the canyon in which we moved, slow and small as ants.

Amber was a memory; that was all.

Sweat rolled down my back, pooling at my waistband. I tried to turn my brain off, to move forward and up, forward and up, a machine.

I allowed myself to think ahead just far enough to make plans for that night: a sturdy wire dog kennel, an anonymous motel, a shower and a change of clothes. I could almost feel the scratchy motel sheets against my bare skin as a future version of me lay in that dark room, drinking in the smell of fear.

Up ahead, a ribbon of faded rust-red unwound across the rocks and brush. I stopped, and the girl on my back let out an exhausted whine and a little burst of mango as her legs jostled against my hip.

The trail. I was glad to see it, but I needed to exercise caution here. How could I get her to the car without being questioned by prying hikers?

I scanned the path from one end to the other. No other humans in sight.

“Help? Soon?” the girl begged, the mango scent of her pain taking on a desperate patchouli edge.

“Yeah,” I said, continuing toward the trail ahead of us. “Soon.”

---

I watched my feet move mechanically up the trail. Left, puff of dust. Right, puff of dust. Left again. Right again.

It was the hottest part of the day. I cursed my own stupidity at having put myself this far down in the canyon at what must have been early afternoon, but I was also grateful to not be encountering any other hikers on my way back up to the parking lot. I envisioned myself walking across it, reaching into my pocket, pulling out the keys—

I stopped short again, triggering another agonized whine from the girl on my back.

Where were the keys to the car? I didn’t remember putting them in my pocket.

I thought back. Amber had gotten out of the passenger seat, then pulled Jacob out of the back seat. They’d stood hand in hand waiting as I’d tucked my CDs safely away into the glove compartment. And then…

I remembered it clearly now: Amber’s upturned palm, me dropping the keys into it absentmindedly. Because why not? We were going to leave together anyway.

“Oh my god,” I groaned through dried-out vocal cords.

“What is it?” rasped the girl on my back, erupting in orange blossoms. My body tingled with the delicious, perfect scent of them, and again I felt the scratch of motel sheets, envisioned a whole night like this, maybe a whole lifetime.

I didn’t answer her. I just increased my pace, hurrying to get my quarry away from here and into someplace more private, where I could enjoy it the way I wanted to.

---

The keys were going to be a problem. I had to get them back somehow. But how could I explain the girl to Amber, or to Jacob, for that matter? Maybe I could drop them off in Flagstaff. They’d be safe there, wouldn’t they? Maybe Amber could find a job there, rent one of those little suburban houses with a brick facade facing the street and painted wood on the other three sides.

We were almost out of the canyon now, and the sun was making its way down the western sky. A couple in hiking boots passed us, heading down the way we’d come, staring a little but saying nothing. Then a family of three, the small boy gaping wide-eyed as his parents hurried him away and into the canyon. But no one tried to stop us.

My throat felt as dusty as the trail beneath my feet. It felt like I’d sweated out all the water in my body, like I was just dry bones walking up and up and up. Even the girl across my shoulders had stopped her whining, and the mango aroma of her pain had dried up into just a faint suggestion of discomfort. A sudden worry sent a shiver up my spine. Was she dead? Was I carrying a corpse?

I didn’t have time to explore the thought further. As I crested the rim of the canyon, I saw something there at the trailhead I’d never expected and certainly wouldn’t have asked for.

It was Amber, clutching the sign marking the trail with one hand and Jacob’s scrawny arm with the other. And behind her, just feet from the trail and rapidly approaching, was a team of search and rescue agents decked out in highlighter yellow.

I froze. The girl on my back made no noise, even as her broken leg knocked against my side. Should I turn and run back into the canyon? Should I try to walk past as if nothing were wrong?

But I didn’t get any more time to think. As soon as she spotted me, Amber burst into a cloud of shit and pepperoni. She released Jacob’s arm and ran toward me, barreling into me and grabbing me around the waist.

I lost my balance as she clung to me, and the the three of us fell, a jumble of legs and arms, broken bones and whole ones, sweat and dust and overheated skin.