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The last part of the trail was the steepest, as far as she could recall froet that ankle-bending climb? Rocky and steep and dark She had entered the section of woods people called the Christo in some scheme that never panned out The air suddenly felt colder The fir forest had its own spooky weather, as if these loo passed over What had she been thinking, to na place? Roe day of toting kids and dredging the floor of doll babies She could have s easy on herself and wrecked her life in a s were tired and her butt ached She could feel blisters welling on both feet The boots she’d adored this ned for parading your hindquarters in jeans, not real walking She watched her step, considering what a broken ankle would add to her day The trail was a cobbled ht uphill in spots, so badly rutted she had to grab saplings to steady herself

With relief she arrived on a level stretch of ground carpeted with brown fir needles But so dark loomed froht, or a swar for a new ho She approached slowly, hoping to scoot under it, with or without a positive ID It bristled like a cluster of dead leaves or a down-turned pine cone, but was ht, with no notion of how large that would be Scaly all over and pointed at the lower end, as if it had gone oozy and ht drip She didn’t much care to walk under it For the second tilasses she’d left behind Vanity was one thing, but out here in the damn wilderness a person needed to see She squinted up into dark branches backlit by pale sky The angle s were all over, dangling like giant bunches of grapes frous was the word that came to mind, and it turned down the corners of hernew diseases now Cub had mentioned that The wetter su in new pests that apparently ate the forest out of house and home She pulled her jacket close and hurried underneath the bristly thing, ducking, even though it hung a good ten feet above the trail She cleared it by five And even so, shivered and ran her fingers through her hair afterward and felt childish for fearing a tree fungus The day couldn’t decide whether to warus brought tothe mildewed shower curtain with Mr Clean, one of her life’s hts, concentrating instead on her reward at the end of the cli hi up on hiht of his backside in jeans He’d proht even be naked when she arrived With a big soft quilt and a bottle of Cold Duck Lord love a duck, she thought After subsisting for years on the remains of toddler lunches and juice boxes, she’d be drunk in tenof desire, not the chill of a wet day and a dread of tree fungus Should it be so hard to tell the difference?

The path steered out of the shadow into a bright overlook on the open side of the slope, and here she slae The trees above her were draped with more of the brownish clumps, and that was the least of it The view out across the valley was puzzling and unreal, like a sci-fi movie From this overlook she could see the whole mountainside that lay opposite, from top to bottom, and the full stand of that forest was thickly loaded with these bristly things The fir trees in the hazy distance were like nothing she’d ever seen, their branches droopy and bulbous The trunks and boughs were speckled and scaly like trees covered with corn flakes She had ss covered with corn flakes Nearly all the forest she could see froe, looked altered and pale, the beige of dead leaves These were evergreen trees, they should be dark, and that wasn’t foliage There was movement in it The branches seemed to writhe She took a small automatic step backward froh they stood far away across the thin air of the hollow She reached into her purse for a cigarette, then stopped

A sht, and the whole landscape intensified, brightening before her eyes The forest blazed with its own internal fla for help, she and Jesus weren’t that close, but putting her voice in the world because nothing else presentits warmth across the land, and the htness of a new intensitywave, like the disturbed surface of a lake Every bough gloith an orange blaze "Jesus God," she said again No words ca bush Moses came to mind, and Ezekiel, words from Scripture that occupied a certain space in her brain but no longer carried honest weight, if they ever had Burning coals of fire went up and down a creatures

The flame now appeared to lift fro the way a pine log does in a campfire when it’s poked The sparks spiraled upward in swirls like funnel clouds Twisters of brightness against gray sky In broad daylight with no comprehension, she watched Froh and sailed out undirected above the dark forest

A forest fire, if that’s what it ould roar This consternation swept the mountain in perfect silence The air above re howl She stopped breathing for a second and closed her eyes to listen, but heard nothing Only a faint patter like rain on leaves Not fire, she thought, but her eyes when opened could only tell her, Fire, this place is burning They said, Get out of here Up or down, she was unsure She eyed the dark uncertainty of the trail and the uncrossable breach of the valley It was all the salow

She cupped her hands over her face and tried to think She was miles from her kids Cordie with her thu-lashed eyes cast down, soaking up guilt like a sponge even when he’d done no wrong She knehat their lives would beco happened to her here On a mission of sin Hester would rain shaht their mother had just run away and left thehts clotted with the vocabulary of news reports: dental records, next of kin, sifting through the ash