The air shifts from crisp to cold, and I bury my hands in my pockets. The last gold of sunset catches in our exhales, turning them into tiny plumes of smoke from fires buried inside us.
“Beautiful,” Kael says.
“It’s the smoke making it that red.”
Kael sighs dramatically. “Beautiful,” he repeats.
“I’ve seen sunsets.” It comes out harsher than the joke I intended, but the wildfire chasing us feels like the more pressing concern.
Kael steps closer, looking back up the mountain.
“Look.” He points toward the peak. “It’s like the mountain’s shadow is chasing the trees, and their shadows are all stretching to escape before they get swallowed.” He traces the dark sweep of it sliding down toward us, then turns back to the valley. “And if you cross your eyes a little, the greens almost turn to gold.”
They still look like trees to me, but he’s mesmerized. The view draws out his dimples, and I can see the sunset clearly enough in the reflection on his glasses, warm and beautiful. He turns and catches me staring, caught again by his gravity.
“What?” He scrubs his nose with the edge of the blanket. “Got a booger?”
“You got it.”
I walk ahead, and the mountain’s shadow swallows us whole.
By the time we reach Inskip Pioneer Cemetery, the disappearing sun has turned the air to ice and made our phone flashlights mandatory.
A few feet off the road, we step under the trees and into total darkness. Kael trips over a low wooden fence, and our beams sweep across the ground, tracing the cemetery’s boundaries.
“We made it.” I point my light at an unimpressive green sign nailed to a tree.
There’s a small inscription beneath it:Those who rest here are known only to God.
I sweep my light across the plot. Everything is buried under pine needles, a few unmarked stones jutting up like gray islands in a brown sea.
Kael’s laugh snaps my flashlight toward him. He’s standing beside a short rock pedestal, his canvas and paint box on the ground next to two rotting wagon wheels.
“They’ve left you a poem,” he says, reading from the brass plaque:
Still grasping in their fingers old
The tools that dug the earth for gold;
Still hoping for that great reward
For which they toiled long and hard
No woman’s loving smile is there
To cheer them in their long despair,
It is the tale so often told?—
They’ve thrown away their lives for gold.
“Very funny,” I say, hand on my hip.
“Creepy.”
My jaw aches from clenching, but it’s the only thing I can do to keep my teeth from chattering. I’m wearing a few T-shirts, one long-sleeve, and my jacket. That’s it.
I’m tired, freezing, and though my phone’s at a hundred percent from charging in my bag, I’m at maybe twenty.
