Chapter Text
High up on a grassy hilltop littered with wild flowers, above the ranch and the country road in northern Oregon, I plopped down, facing east, my eyes dazzled by the rising sun. Moments before, I’d removed my running shoes and my ankle-high socks, first having examined what was left of my left shoe. It had sprung apart during my uphill jog, causing the top flap to completely detach from the bottom sole and landing me facedown in the grass and dirt, perched awkwardly on the side of the steep hill. I’d lain there stunned, though I’d been in possession of them for several years and by then a minor hole had already started to develop near my left big toe, leaving me to even expect that this would happen. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t shocked when it did.
My shoe was gone. Actually gone.
I sat with its mate cradled in my lap like a baby, though of course it was futile. What is one shoe without the other shoe? It is nothing. I pondered launching them both down the hill, after all they were but a big lug of a thing, a shoe and a half of genuine heft that I otherwise would have to carry with me all the way on my three-mile trek back to the ranch. I lifted them high—preparing to catapult them both into the lush trees below—but then abruptly settled against it and instead lowered them back onto the grass at my side.
I was alone. I was barefoot. I was twenty-two years old and an orphan too. My mother died when I was eight. In the wake of her death, I moved from the city to live with my aunt to whom my mother had been estranged from for years.
I looked down at the trees below me, the tall tops of them waving gently in the dawn wind. I’d chosen to rest in this place because of the view—regardless of my now shoeless feet—I would have stopped here anyway. From my high point of vantage the ground fell away to the east in broken undulations and steppes. I knew even without being able to physically see it that over the series of hills in front of me—just before it reached the low level of the stream and the meadows a few miles away, there stood the ranch house.
There would be no sign of life about the place. Too early yet, I thought. Jodie had likely just fed the dogs and now was getting breakfast started on the stove.
I fastened my eyes on the point where I envisioned the tack shop was, were it not for the steep hill covered in black pine blocking it from my vision. It was a short distance from the wooden front porch, across the gravel walkway, through the fence gate, just beyond the gravel parking space, hidden under the gently sloping peaked roof.
Beside it lay one of our four pastures for the horses—they would be standing about the gate—waiting for me to come and feed them. After they were fed I would let them out the gate to the east, where they could wander across the meadow to the stream and stand during the heat of the day under the tall hemlock trees towards the north.
I gazed at my bare and battered feet, with their thick growth of callouses on the underside. My calves above them were muscled and pale and hairy, dusted with dirt and a constellation of bruises and scratches.
I looked toward the east, in its direction—the very thought of the ranch like a beacon to me. I looked north, to where the country road weaved in between the hilly landscape, and considered my options. I could dance in and around the broken hills and cliffs, or I could take the more direct route via the country road that passed by our property. There was a chance that a car would come speeding down the gravel road, but only rarely did that happen. Usually the only cars that used the road were customers, unless they were distant neighbours. It didn’t matter whether a car came along anyway. There was enough room for them to pass me by without difficulty.
Holding my shoe-and-a-half by the laces, I went through a couple of stretches before springing into a jog down the sloping hillside.
I had pulled out my ponytail, and the wind made a tousled mop of my frizzy straight ginger hair, and whipped colour into my pale cheeks that forever seemed to be dotted with a map of orange freckles. I wished, not for the first time, that my skin would golden instead of just accumulate more of the ever-present mass of freckles scattered across my nose, cheeks, and shoulders.
“Sun kisses,” my mother had called them adoringly.
As I ran across a field of thigh-high grass and down again, stems swaying in tune to the wind, intending to run a mile out to the edge of the country road, I felt so wondrously alive.
Above me, all the clouds in the sky had caught the colours of the sunrise, and there was a mingling of pink and red and gold and a crisp blue; and a wind that was wild, like the landscape itself was breathing, and it whipped and blew over the grass and my hair, making everything look so alive—
Suddenly, as I was passing a cluster of forty-foot, green pine trees growing at the bottom of the next hillside I was to ascend just before I reached the road, I felt as though I was no longer alone. I saw no movement, and I was unaware of any sound other than the wind, and my raspy breathing and thudding heartbeat; only instinct told me that I had company.
I was not alarmed at first, for I thought perhaps a deer or some other animal was nearby. But when I stopped and turned and looked back the way I had come, I glimpsed the figure of a woman standing in the thigh-high grass, near the upper half of the hill.
I was uneasy but not afraid. Perhaps if I got closer—
I headed west again, up the grassy hillside, quickly finding my rhythm. I went only fifty yards, however, before the figure vanished seemingly into thin air. I halted and, looking all around, wondered what I had glimpsed. Had she simply collapsed in the grass? I ventured farther up the hillside; looking intently into the grass for signs that someone laid between the tall stems.
At last, when nothing was found, I turned to head east again, only to glimpse someone standing near the northern end of the hill, looking at me. I broke into a fast run just as the woman vanished in the blink of my eye.
I never gave serious thought to that possibility that I was in any real danger. Aside from the occasional animal, I never saw another person this far out here. I was miles away from civilization in every direction, and people driving down the country road rarely ventured out of their cars to wander around the rugged landscape.
I topped the hill and stood staring. From here I looked north over a hundred miles of broken undulations and steppes. Below me a forest of tall trees guarded the edge of the next incline, rippling in the wind—
The woman stood just in front of those trees, staring at me. Though I couldn’t make out the details her face, I was not so far away that I couldn’t make out the red locks of hair framing her head and neck, and her burgundy tank top and dark green shorts—
At this an uncomfortable feeling seized me. Her appearance nearly matched my own, and I found myself wondering if I was awake. Perhaps this early-morning run was indeed part of a dream, and perhaps I was actually asleep in bed, sprawled across lavender sheets.
Then our eyes met. They were a softly radiant green like the eyes of a person that had a beam of light pointed at them.
For a moment, peering directly down at her, her gaze transfixed me. I broke into a jog without realizing it, and soon I was running down the hillside toward her. I was almost to the bottom when she suddenly vanished, just as she had before, and I was left running towards nothing. I halted, and listened for any sounds aside from that of my footsteps and laboured breathing. I felt strangely as though I was being led somewhere by visions of my doppelganger, and since the woman had yet to try and hurt me in any way, I felt curious rather than frightened.
Standing still, sheathed in a film of sweat, I presently began to shiver in the chill spring air. To maintain body heat, I jogged to the tree line, watching all around, expecting to see the woman appear some fifty yards away from me again. I glimpsed her further into the trees, and ran toward to where she was standing.
I made no attempt to imagine who or what the woman might be. Analysis of this weird experience would have to wait for later; now I simply accepted that, be it all a dream or not, the impossible was very much possible at this moment.
I was less than ten yards away when my doppelganger vanished into the air again, but when I glimpsed what lay directly ahead of me, sticking out of the dirt and grass, I stumbled to a halt. It was shaped like a cube, but enormous, spanning larger than even our ranch house, and covered in all sorts of weird glyphs. The mysterious woman was nowhere to be seen, and I marvelled at the sight of what was most likely some alien artifact—its very existence unknown to all but myself.
Rounding the cube and returning to the spot from which I had first laid eyes upon it, I decided that it appeared to be harmless enough. I had not even an inkling as to what it might be, but cautiously ventured closer to it anyway; the pine needles poking the bottoms of my bare feet. Standing at the base of the cube and looking up, I felt smaller than a weed growing at the trunk of a pine tree—and I wondered, not for the first time, whether I was truly awake or not.
Then I pressed my hand against its surface, feeling a jolt of electricity pierce my entire body, trying but failing to tear my hand away as the entire cube seemed to erupt into a million fragments, shrinking down, down, down—
And then—just like that—in the blink of an eye, it was over.
For a moment, sitting in the pine, I stared at the now portable-sized cube in shock. The jolt had knocked me backwards onto my rump, and I sat there wondering what I should do now. I looked at my hand that had come into contact with the cube, observing that it appeared perfectly fine, excluding a few tendrils of blue that lit up my veins before vanishing altogether into my body.
Now fear seized me.
I had no idea what the hell I had just come into contact with or what would happen to me or whether I should turn it into the police or—
I wondered what time it was now. It wouldn’t be long before breakfast was ready. Standing on the porch, Jodie would ring the bell, letting me know it was time to come inside and get washed up. The bacon and eggs was sizzling on the stove top, the table was set, orange juice poured.
I couldn’t very well sit here all day—Jodie always lectured me if I was late. And that wasn’t all, there was still the list of chores that needed to be done around the ranch too, all before my shift started at the tack shop.
I broke my paralysis, stood up off my bed of prickly pine needles, and gazed hard at the cube sitting at my feet. What to do, what to do—finally I bent down and picked it up with both hands—one of which was still clutching my dangling shoes by the laces. Relief washed over me when nothing freaky happened upon my touching it again, and I tucked it under my arm before turning and running back the way I had come.