“Are you hurt?”
“I’m…checking,” she said, moving very slowly.
He closed his arms around her, hugging her upper body against his chest. He did it without thinking, and just held her there against him, feeling her heart beat on the side of his chest where his didn’t, and a yin-yang symbol flashed white-hot in his brain.
When he released her, her face was near his, and he looked at her mouth and almost kissed her.
She looked right back at him, and he was pretty sure she’d have let him.
Then he looked away and broke the spell, releasing her, as she was sitting upright on her own.
She looked at her arms, moved her legs, and nodded. “I don’t think anything’s broken. And I don’t see any blood. But yeah. It hurts.”
He got to his feet and reached a hand down for her. She clasped it and let him pull her upright. As she stood there looking up at him, the wind came and lifted her hair like a golden cloud around her. He got lost in it for a second, and she leaned a little closer. Then the wind died and her hair settled around her shoulders, revealing the shape of a broken-down structure in the distance behind her.
Camellia
His hands were still on her shoulders and his eyes shifted to hers.
“What?” she asked.Is he going to kiss me or not?
He shifted his gaze to what stood in the distance behind her, then turned her around until she saw the shack, or what was left of it.
“Holy— Do you think that’s it?” she whispered.
“Has to be,” he whispered back.
It felt to Camellia like if they spoke too loud, the illusion might shatter.
They made their way to the shack, which was farther than it looked, but eventually, they stood outside the broken-down remnants of the small building. It’d once had four walls and a roof. It currently had two walls leaning inward against each other, and the roof appeared to have melted into the ground where the other two walls had collapsed. An entire eco-system of vegetation covered most of the exposed wood, and some kind of moss or algae clung to the black roof.
Wolf stood there staring at it, and his eyes were filled with shadows of the past.
“Do you remember anything, Wolf?”
“I played here,” he said. “There was a shed there and shaded gardens out beyond those rocks.”
He nodded, spread his fingers near the side of his head. “Memories fade in and out like ghosts. Like they’ve been in there all along.”
“Tell me,” she said. “It might help you to not forget them again.”
He nodded, looking around. “There was a small shed—we called it a barn—over there.” He walked to the spot and knelt, brushed dirt away with his hands.
“We should’ve brought shovels,” Camellia said. “I didn’t know we’d be doing archeology.”
“I was going to become an archaeologist from third to seventh grade,” he told her.
“Yeah?” She was smiling up at him. His shock seemed to be wearing off. He was getting excited now. “And what happened?”
“I discovered girls.”
She laughed, then clasped his shoulder once, before kneeling beside him to begin brushing dirt away. Eventually, they uncovered a few rotted boards, enough to confirm his memory.
He got up slowly, turned, and said, “There was a spring in those rocks.” Then he jogged toward the cluster of boulders anchored deep in the earth, and the spring was there, bubbling up into a tiny stone basin within. “We kept food cold in here. There was a deeper well with a hand pump closer to the house for drinking water.”
“And there’s the view of the river she mentioned,” Camellia said, holding up a finger to measure. “But where’s the Wile E. Coyote formation?”
They both looked around for a long moment. Wolf spotted it first and nudged her shoulder with his. “There.”
