Chapter One: Mountain
Fiction Posted: 2,101 words
I had not been to the mountain since she died.
I was born in its shadow, and my mom was born in its shadow. Mimi was born someplace else in Currahee, but ended up here, when she was eighteen and carrying my mother.
We’ve been here ever since. The mountain gave the town its name: Currahee. The military used to use it for training exercises, but ever since they left the mountain has just sat there, empty. It presides over the town.
If you’ve never been, I won’t be able to describe what it’s really like to you. Sure, there’s plenty of civilization up there. A gravel road, cell towers, and decades of teenagers’ graffiti on every exposed rock. And yet, Currahee stands apart from that. It towers hundreds of feet above anything else around it. It’s the last real mountain in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and thus, the Appalachians: the oldest mountains in the world.
All of this spun through my head as the car crunched up the gravel road. I heard the thunk of pebbles hitting the sidewalls, and I coaxed the beat-up baby blue station wagon around the last curve. Ahead of me, the cell towers and their chain-link fence came into view.
The sun quivered at the horizon, already invisible from where I parked the car. There was no one else on the summit.
It was fall.
She had brought me here, before, in the fall. The leaves were golden, mixed in with the sharp, blue-grey pine needles.
“It’s all right, Jessie,” she had told me. “You can trust me.” I did trust my grandmother. Every day that she raised me, she gave me no reason to ever disbelieve a word that came out of her mouth.
Splendiferous. That’s the word I’ve always used to describe the mountain since that day. She took my hand and led me out onto the rock platform at the summit of Currahee.
“I need you to see this,” Mimi had insisted.
The first time I walked the tiny dirt trail and came out onto the overlook, it was like the entire world had fallen away into a snowglobe. I stood at the crest of it and watched — I could have shaken the entire earth and seen flakes of snow fly up, summoned by my hands.
“This is our portion, Jessica,” she whispered in my ear. “The Georgia green. Always come home to Georgia green.” Mimi’s hands were warm on my shoulders. I was just a girl.
I had not yet seen the currents dance in vivid colored threads in my eyes. I didn’t know then what Georgia green meant, though I would learn more over time. The lessons would come, and in time I would swim in the currents with strong, powerful strokes.
Then, I just stood there on the rocky, graffitied summit, and watched the clouds across the dim sky. There it spread, for miles around, across the whole front half of my vision. Thousands and thousands of green trees, bright green fields, small creeks of blue, fading away into nothingness at the eternal gray haze of the horizon.
Mimi says I was shaped here, on the mountaintop. My mother carried me in her womb underneath the flowing crowns of ancient trees, whispering the stories to me, bringing me to fullness a day, a week, a month at a time.
But when I was born, my mother decided that she’d had enough. I had never known the reason. She left me a bag of diapers, the trailer, and Mimi.
Mimi was my grandmother, I found out later, my mother’s mother. She lived on this land for eighty years, tucked away on the lowest slopes of the mountain like it had been planted there by God himself. She was the one who raised me.
Now, alone, the view struck me as melancholy. I took a deep breath and shouted over the empty space.
“I am not alone.”
I reached out a hesitant arm. The threaded strands of color swirled and parted before me in gold, and green, and amber, and blue. The currents: I felt for their edges, and nuzzled into their soft familiarity. I tried to feel for a thread of color that might have her presence, so that I could ask her something — anything. Instead, I felt nothing.
Just then, a bright light flashed at my back, startling me out of my reverie. The colors vanished, and I whirled around. Tall headlights made their way up the gravel curve, and a large, black SUV rolled to a stop next to my Taurus.
I balled my fists up and stumbled back from the cliff’s edge. I had thought about pirouetting over empty space, defying the earth and testing my balance against the open sky, but with others on the mountain, the thought just seemed silly.
Instead, I crunched through the browning leaves on the trail back to the tiny parking lot. A man had gotten out of the SUV, wearing a bright green scarf that stood out next to his light hair. He was pale, bookish, with a face that reminded me of a hawk’s.
He smirked when I reached my car.
“What is a beautiful woman like yourself doing out here all alone?”
My fists balled up out of habit. I shook my head and mumbled, “Sorry.”
“Oh, no offense taken!” the man said. “It is a rather fascinating singleton formation, isn’t it?”
He frowned and took a step closer.
“I suppose you’re worried that I’m going to do something awful to you. Let me put your mind at ease about that.”
He looked me over with his grey eyes, and I suppressed a shudder.
“Did you know this mountain has ties to time travel? I’ve been following the thread for months.”
At the mention of ‘thread’ I couldn’t suppress a visceral reaction. How could he know? He wasn’t here to molest me or take advantage of me. No, it was much worse.
Mimi! I called out into the currents. I needed help, but she was gone. Gone, empty, withered and worn-out husk that we’d buried at the Stephens County Cemetery, with the pastor who had sad eyes. Emily had come with me–
Focus, Jessica.
“Madam,” the man said, and took a few steps closer. “I asked you a question.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and shook my head. “No threads.” I worried he would think I was lying. “I don’t know anything about that.”
Or that somehow he had seen me, dancing like a fool on the boulder. How did he have any way of knowing?
He lunged for my arm, but my hand was on the door handle and I jerked it open. I slid into the car.
“…Let’s speak again soon,” he said with another odd smile, as I slammed the door shut.
I put the key in the ignition and prayed the starter would take on the first time. It did, and I jumped into reverse and tore off down the gravel road back to the rest of the earth.
Andrew Jackson was defeated in the shadow of this mountain by the Cherokee. The United States later promised that no white man would ever cross west of it.
“Some promise,” I said aloud, then checked the rearview mirror for the fifteenth time.
No black SUV loomed behind me. I couldn’t get his eyes out of my memory. Pale, harsh, grey eyes. I had never met anyone with grey eyes before. They stared into the back of my head and I saw them even with my eyes closed. The silence of the car was grating, so I switched on the radio.
When I reached the pavement of the highway, I called Emily. I drove to WalMart because I didn’t want to go home. Any black SUV that pulled onto the road made me jump. She met me at the store and we bought a six-pack. Then, she took me home with her and we watched game shows and drank beer until one in the morning.
Her house was a reasonable refuge. Her husband was a decent man who worked swing shifts at the Coats and Clark and had no problems with me spending the night now and again. I didn’t often, but this seemed like a good occasion for an exception.
No black SUV ever rolled up, and the man with the grey eyes didn’t come after me.
I could only catnap that night, and woke up at seven. I grabbed the kitchen scissors, then tiptoed into the bathroom.
If Mimi had been there it all would have turned out different. She could have finished teaching me. The currents— how to swim in them. . .
Time threads. He didn’t know they were called currents. Those grey eyes!
Knocking.
I heard Emily’s voice outside, calling to me, and she shook me out of the reverie.
“I need in there before work, Jess!”
I murmured some sort of excuse and returned to my task at hand. Jessica peered back at me from the mirror: short, skinny, and with ratty brown hair gathered in a loose ponytail at the nape.
With the scissors in one hand, and the hair in the other, I pulled back and sliced across with three short chops. The hair came loose in my hand and I held it, looked at it, and then threw it all in the toilet and flushed.
I opened the door, and Emily tumbled inside.
“Jessie, the ponytail!” she blurted out, before I could say anything.
“I cut it all off,” I said.
Emily grasped at the empty space behind my head as if she could summon it back. “I can see that. You wanted a ready-made hair emergency? What did you do with it?”
“It was getting in my way.” I retorted.
“What did you do with it?” Emily repeated.
“I flushed it down the toilet.”
I felt the back of my own neck. The hair was cut jagged, hanging down in small strips almost to the bottoms of my ears.
Emily leaned against the sink and began to brush her own hair. “I just hope the septic doesn’t clog. Austin will be livid—”
“I’m sorry,” I said, too quickly. “I can square it with Austin later.”
Emily stopped brushing and smiled. “Well, it’s all right. At least that guy won’t be able to recognize you if he sees you again.”
She set the brush down and grabbed my shoulder.
“Come, come,” she commanded, and shepherded me out the door.
“I can pick you up when your shift is done. I should be done at the school by then. Four o’clock all right?” I nodded, and we got in the car.
“Tell Austin it’s my fault you got smashed,” I murmured.
“He knows, baby. What else would he think we were going to do, after you called me afraid that a guy was going to rape you on top of a deserted mountain? I’ll settle it with him tonight after he gets off.”
She smiled. “You tell me if any more creeps show up around you. That’s my job, to keep the guys off your pretty little ass. I’ll see you after work. We’ll take you back to the trailer and you’ll be just fine.”
When we were twelve, Emily and I promised ourselves our lives, in a blood sisterhood. It was a very solemn affair. Emily poked her thumb with a needle, and I poked my thumb with my own pin, and we held them together and chanted solemn oaths to one another. All that to say, that Emily was an excellent sister to me. She even tried, in her own way, to mother me after I lost Mimi. But she was no Mimi.
Still, she got me to the back door of the Quick Lube off of 17 highway at 7:49 sharp, and tore off for her own job at the county library. I stood in front of the heavy, metal door, and felt at the rough, cut edges of my own hair. Rain was just beginning to fall.
“You are not alone,” I whispered, to steady myself, and pushed open the metal bar.
This is an excerpt from my new novel, Currahee. I’m experimenting with web publishing and thought putting the entire first chapter online would be an interesting way to make a ‘free preview’ available to readers.
Currahee will be available to purchase in ebook form in August, and in paperback form at a later date.
Enjoying what you read? Let me know at hello@intothebook.net, I’d love to hear from you.
Currahee is is a story about time travel and opportunity, set in the distant but imminent past-future of Northeast Georgia. And, after 7 years, it’s finally available for you to read.