Ticks on the Mountain

Rocks, Decorative and Otherwise

Photo by Matt Artz on Unsplash

Tires howled like a raptor loosed from a cage.

When Erica offered to pick him up, he said yes, thinking only of her face, her company and not of the potential consequences.

When he left Erica’s place, he knew he’d take Lonomora, winding down the hillside like the asphalt melted without guidance.

Josh Tanacki skittered off the rock he was on as the car and loud tires passed.

Terry Civelt got paralyzed hitting one of the rocks on the side of the road with his car.

Josh wondered if the rock he stumbled off of was it. The rock.

Why would it be? There were thousands of rocks lining Lonomora.

It’s because you always seem so close to tragedy, Josh, it feels like part of you. That’s why.

Every year someone brought up erecting a modern guardrail on Lonomora, and every year the idea was discarded for expense, and because it would destroy the natural beauty of the small mountainside, really a big hill with a good PR department.

Erica’s parents left her their big house on the mountain.

Their picture, taken on the beach in Thailand and emailed before they died that day in a massive tsunami, hung above the fireplace.

Erica spoke of them in the present tense.

Their bedroom was untouched, down to a pair of hose and a swimsuit on the bed that Erica’s mom had left behind before they left for the airport.

She only ate off her parent’s wedding table settings.

Erica went through therapists like gerbils went through shredded newspaper, and none of them could do the thing she demanded: Bring her parents back.

The same parents she hated so much as a teen, the same parents she lied about when she came down into Claver and got in tight with the Dorfman Road punks and skinheads, slamming forties and huffing paint behind RatCellar Records and Glass, touching Josh’s neon yellow mohawk, running her hands over his lip piercings, until she got some of her own.

Josh sat down on a rock, the sole of one of his Vans worn to the point that road dust was filling it as though it was a terrarium.

He put his head in his hands, then yanked it back out. 

In the dark, on this curvy road, someone he knew would see.

That doesn’t make sense either, Josh. They’re more likely to accidentally hit you than pull over to ask what’s wrong.

Shaking the dust and dirt out of his shoe, he slipped it back on and walked down, listening to the hiss of tires on wet pavement above him.

Thought about calling Terry and asking him if he remembered which rock paralyzed him.

They could mark it or something.

Maybe Terry would love it. Maybe he would think it was the shittiest idea ever, shittier, even than he thought Josh going back to Erica was for the third time.

He thought about Erica’s brain, and his own, and the concept of time.

He read an article that time didn’t exist, really. 

But Josh knew there had to be a measure for the intervals between decisions, some were long, and some were short.

Erica had long intervals between her decisions.

Sometimes her companion was Jesus, and sometimes her companion was ridiculously expensive vodka, and sometimes her companion was Josh.

They all overlapped a little, then one would take center stage in the EricaOdeon for months at a time, fall into disfavor, and she would call upon one of the others.

Erica had picked him up, and cooked him dinner, serving him of course, on the plates that had her parent’s wedding monogram on them, and underneath the name of the country club in which their reception was held.

Burning Brook.

When she excused herself to the bathroom after a green bean or two, she asked Josh to put on some music. 

When her feet started clacking down the hall Josh decided not to be in a hurry to peruse the music selection in the room that looked like a hunting lodge.

The noises that came from behind the door were only shocking in their violence, not their presence.

The second round of noises, after Erica took a small nibble of steak and a sip of iced tea that wasn’t, Josh looked more carefully at the papers.

He didn’t understand most of it, but enough.

Erica clearly wasn’t following the instructions, and the date that they were first issued was frightening.

She was in the bathroom for three are you okay, can I do anything? trips, and during one of them managed to demand some music.

Josh put on Gang of Four, a band Terry Civelt had turned Erica onto, and sat back down at the table.

He put his plate in the microwave, and hit some buttons.

He tried to get lost in the music, but he wanted to both hold Erica’s hair and shred the sheet of paper he held from MediScan Hepatology.

Then he heard beeping.

Time exists.

Josh decided it did.

Josh wanted a lot of it back.

He wanted a higher pain threshold, and a smarter brain.

Because in a millisecond, his brain told his hand that the plate was too hot to hold, and he dropped it, the most horrified he’s ever been at the shattering of an inanimate object.

Erica’s feet clacked down the hall toward him, and she screeched in the rage of drunks and duchesses, the rage of people who live on mountains but don’t always know how to get down.

Josh absorbed her punches as he backed out of the door, telling her he was sorry, and that he loved her.

But she only wanted to hear that when she wanted to hear that.

She wasn’t gonna live, not like this, no matter what Jesus, or Josh, or expensive vodka said.

Josh went silent, and walked down the mountain.

When the third or fourth car got too close, Josh sat in a crouch and let himself slide down the dusty, rocky side of Lonomora Road. It was the long way.

I don’t feel like getting hit by a car.

I want to give Erica…that doesn’t make any sense, Josh. Even if you could, she’s in no shape to take it.

Josh wanted to live. 

He knew time existed, that it could be wasted, and it could shatter.

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