Anthony glanced at the top corner of his cell screen. Where the bars were supposed to be was nothing but dashes—just a few stitches of white pixels to announce the promise of solitude. He couldn’t suppress a smile as he looked up at the green-gray leaves hissing in the hot sigh of the September afternoon. Not even she could reach him here. He was safely tucked into the soft folds of the Pennsylvania hills—the same rolling land bristled with trees that she had apparently hated so much.
He swiped to the camera and saw his own face blinking back at him dimly in the glare of the phone as he strode on through the woods, the crowns of the trees moving past his head like swarms of flies. He pressed record and held the phone up before him. “So, guys, it’s a beautiful afternoon, and I’m back on the trail again headed for the old railroad track.” He had surprised himself with how quickly speaking to an unseen audience became second nature. It had mostly been a matter of training himself to stare into the dead eye of the camera lens rather than allow himself to be distracted by his own reflection. “If you saw my last video, we had stopped by the bridge to do a little magnet fishing. A lot of railroad spikes, which I guess could have been expected. We also found an old license plate, which was very cool. Cleaned up great. But today, I thought we’d follow the track a little further up and visit the old abandoned station.”
Anthony was sure that all seventeen people who ended up seeing this video would appreciate the intro. But it hadn’t really been about the viewership. It was the mission. A reason to hop in the beat up jeep and put the old farm in the rear view mirror, because the weekends there had threatened to spill into eternities. When Katrina left, she had taken all of the oxygen in the house with her. “You could come down here,” was her wan suggestion. “I miss you.” Every phone conversation, every text thread seemed to inevitably lead to this topic, as if it was Rome itself.
“Can’t do it.” His boilerplate reply. He would let her believe that it was the farm and it’s proximity to his grandmother that kept him tethered there. It wasn’t, really. The house had only succumbed to further decay since they had purchased it together in a moment of optimism for their future. Had the farm been allowed to gracefully age, it might not have been so bad. But Anthony had had a habit of tearing into projects and then quickly losing interest. The knob and tube wiring still stretched through the walls like brittle blood vessels in spite of holes that had been punched in the hall plaster and spools of Romex stacked in the corner of the garage. Lengths of crown molding had been piled behind the living sofa for nearly a year because he had never gotten around to buying the saw. Boxes he had finally managed to haul up from the basement sat instead on the back porch, a seemingly permanent holding area for the unlikely day when he would collapse them and dose them in the recycling bin. No matter the reason or excuse, the farm had slowly become disfigured by his broken trains of thought, like scabs that had been picked at to the point of scarring. He doubted he could even get out of the house what what he had initially sunken into it in spite of a market upswing.
No, it wasn’t a love the farm that kept him from transplanting himself into the South Carolinian clay. Nor was it his grandmother, who no longer recognized him when he stopped by to check her gutters or make sure the fridge was stocked. The fact was that Anthony couldn’t forgive Katrina for entertaining the notion of relocating without so much as mentioning it to him. At least not until she had gotten so far into the idea that she had actually secured herself a job offer. And accepted it.
And so the woods near the farm was a welcome distraction from the house and a refuge from Katrina’s reach. The same indifferent and unflappable trees under which Katrina had once loathed to amble beside him, to hold his hand, had now became his solace. As the crickets trilled summer’s last breath, Anthony left the worn path and began to plod through the undergrowth toward the place where the smell of the drying leaves gave way to the hot tang of the creosote rail ties.
Brandon clicked on the overhead bulb at the bottom of the basement stairs. It’s inadequate light brought some context to the heavy scent of earth and wood rot that sat in the still air like stagnant pools. A requisite cobweb that hung from the rough hewn joists caught the light and filtered it through feathery tendrils. The amber glow of the ancient tungsten filament weakly washed over sagging shelves. Rusty, forgotten paint cans stood expectantly next to plastic coolers, whose garish colors were subdued under a layer of the fine brown dust that sloughed off the exposed rock walls and stuck to everything.
Brandon looked down at the floor and saw a second lightbulb reflected dimly behind his bewildered face. “Shit,” he murmured, setting down his laundry basket on the step. He hopped gingerly across a skim of black water that meandered across the uneven floor. It had indeed rained last night, but this wasn’t exactly where he had hoped to accumulate the water. He groped through the wet darkness for the next pull chain, tripping over a relic of a dehumidifier and cursing. When he found it, onto which Anthony had tied on a bright yellow nylon rope after what must have been a similarly frustrating hunt on a previous occasion, the harsher white light of an LED revealed a gentle flow of murky water from the sump pump well at the back corner of the house. The accompanying silence indicated to Brandon that the pump itself was wholly indifferent to the predicament.
Now what?
Brandon stood in the center of the slowly flooding basement and surveyed the low, grimy room. He could tell by orange crust that dotted the bottom of the washer and dryer and the way each of the old workbench legs were blackened and swollen on the ends that this had happened before. He pulled his phone out and hovered his thumb above the illuminated phone symbol next to Anthony’s name. Aside from the odd text, they hadn’t spoken in weeks. Surely, a basement flood was a worthy reason to break the silence.
Anthony’s thoughts suddenly scattered the way springtails flee a person’s tread through grass. The ground beneath his right boot had suddenly given way with no resistance. In his trek that cut through the woods to the place where the railroad ties paraded across the hillside, he had blundered into a boggy mire. The foot was in a brief free fall as it cut through the soft layers of decaying forest detritus. Clusters of brown bubbles murmured a welcoming chorus, a sulfurous loamy smell curled around him.
“Shit,” Anthony chuckled as his lifted and examined the sodden hiking boot, the bottom half coated, lumpy and misshapen. He raised the phone to his face once again and tapped the red circle. “So, I’m almost to the old railway and got a little sidetracked. Do you remember in an earlier video when I talked about my Under Armour hiking boots? The Newell Ridge, I think they are called? Well, I think what I just stepped into perfectly demonstrates why you need a good pair of waterproof boots when you are hiking the countryside.” He swung the camera’s focus down to his foot. “Just check out the mess I came across.” He slowly panned his phone over the boot. “This boot got plastered but good. Wasn’t looking where I was going. But I gotta tell you—” he spun the screen back to his face— “I can’t feel a drop of water.” He shook his head for emphasis. “My foot is totally dry. These things are worth every penny. I’ll be sure to link to the product page in the description.”
He paused and glanced at the ground before quirking a smile and looking back at the screen. “Should we push their limits and see just how waterproof they are?” The camera spun back to the ground, his mud-coated boot cracking in the dry leaves at the edge of the mire. The saturated laces crisscrossed over his mid-foot like gleaming earthworms. He flexed his foot, releasing a tiny grid of air bubbles from the mesh that enveloped the boot, before stepping forward and sliding it back into the gooey earth. A satisfying belch issued wetly from under his boot.
Anthony snickered. “I feel a little like a kid again,” he narrated as he lifted his foot up and down in a succession of even louder squelches. “Like I’m being kinda naughty here and any second my mom is going to appear and start yelling at me.” He pivoted the camera toward himself and spoke conspiratorially into the screen. “I don’t see any signs of her, or anyone else for that matter. Let’s see if the left one is equal to the task.” He made a show of glancing around between the trees and waggled his eyebrows before spinning the phone back to face his feet.
Shoe Horny 