A year in the making, and a dream come to fruition. The universe has long been whispering to me to write, write, write, and at the urging of people who love me I have done it. 111,000 words later, here is Mother. A story about the future, sacrifice, conspiracy, aliens, and most importantly, the true healing power of love.
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The late afternoon sunlight cast itself in thick rays through the trees down to the forest floor, the golden light so dense that you could hardly see through it. Evelyn stood in a moment of quiet, surrounded by the hush of the rich forest all around her, listening for the occasional flap of wings or burrowing creature. The soft floor was covered in a layer of thick pine straw, dotted with ferns and low brush in shades of green more intense and varied than she had seen in a long time. Where have we come to? she wondered, looking ahead at the path so obvious to her yet completely unmarked. She didn’t have time to figure out why this place looked at once so familiar and completely foreign. They had to keep moving.
Evie willed herself to put on a mask of calm and look at her daughters, one on either side, their sweaty hands tucked tightly into her own. Lizzie, fourteen and remarkably centered, returned her gaze with eyes full of encouragement and resolve.
“Emily,” she whispered fiercely, leaning across her mother to address her younger sister, “you have to run faster this time, okay? You have to.”
Emily was only nine, but she was nearly as tall as her older sister and faster than all the boys in her third-grade class. She knew she was not the one slowing them down, but now was not the time to point out that Mother must be getting tired.
“Okay, I will,” she whispered back loudly, and with a touch of attitude. Her signature.
At that moment Evie heard the crack of a branch, still a ways behind them, and a distant whirring that sounded almost mechanical. She had wondered if it was better to move slowly, making little noise to throw her pursuers off their trail, but her instincts made the choice for her. “We have to go, now!” she whispered fiercely to her girls, setting them off at a run along the path that she was following instinctively. Evie let go of her girls’ hands so that they could run more quickly, jumping over bushes and navigating around the scattering of thin pine trunks, staying as close to one another as they could in the dense forest. They ran as silently as possible, breaths almost in sync as they moved in near unison, each girl seemingly connected to the heart of her mother. After a few minutes they came across a pile of downed adolescent pines, crisscrossed over one another directly in the path. Evie turned around to help Emily navigate the way across, knowing it would take too long to go around, and she stopped suddenly, her heart climbing up into her throat. Emily was not there.
“Lizzie, where is Em,” Evie called ahead to Lizzie, who hadn’t noticed that her mother had stopped running, her voice monotone with dread.
Lizzie stopped and whipped around. “She was right here mom, I swear,” her face was beginning to betray her, visible panic rising to its surface. “Two seconds ago, she was right there!”
“Emily,” Evie whispered almost inaudibly, her lungs wrapped in terror. She reached out and grabbed both of Lizzie’s forearms, looked in her eyes, and turned away. Lizzie knew what to do and followed suit, turning in the opposite direction, and began silently searching the area around her for her sister. Evie and Lizzie spread out as far as they felt comfortable, running low to the ground and with soft steps, searching behind the trees and bushes. It wasn’t long before they came back together where they had started, faces flushed with effort, limbs shaking with horror and adrenaline. Emily was gone.
“Mom-“ Lizzie started, but Evie held her finger to her lips and turned to face behind them, ears perked. Her pursuers were getting closer, and they had lost a significant amount of distance and time looking for Emily. The mechanical whirring was moving nearer but Evie couldn’t locate exactly where it was coming from, perhaps from above? She heard the rapid crunches of twigs breaking underfoot, pausing for a split second to see if she could figure out how many of them there were. More than one, for sure. Maybe even many, and they were moving quickly.
Fuck being quiet, Evie thought to herself. It was time to run like hell.
In that moment Evie made the decision, perhaps in self-deceit, that Emily must have gone up ahead, seeing the obstacle of downed trees and going around without telling her mother. Or maybe Evie just didn’t hear her? She couldn’t protect her girls if she was dead, so she had no choice but to move, and now. She grabbed Lizzie and pulled her forward along the path, eyes stinging with tears at the thought of leaving Em in danger, her heart ripping into pieces as though she could somehow protect Emily if she left a bit of it in this space. Can you turn off being a mother? Obviously, no, but she focused on the path ahead and moved herself and Lizzie forward at a rapid pace, each of them leaping over stumps and around trees like they had been practicing for years.
Even in her panic Evie took a mental picture of her eldest daughter to save for later: her dark, straight hair blown behind her by the force of her run. Her body, strong and fit, launching her quickly and deftly over obstacles. Her brilliance, fortitude, and concern for her mother and sister visible on her face, eyes brimming with intensity and strength. That face, so like her father’s, whose countenance Evie trusts more than anything.
They ran and ran, Evie unsure if her perception of time was slower or faster than reality, pushing herself and Lizzie to move faster than either of them knew they could. They barely felt the cuts and scrapes they were collecting from running through the prickly cedar branches and tall rhododendron bushes, turning along the winding path with the confidence of Evie’s purely intuitive connection to this place. A clearing began to be visible above the bushes up ahead, the sun illuminating a large area free of trees, the brightness of it jarring after so long in the dark shelter of the dense forest. Evie knew that her path was leading directly to the light, and before she weigh the risk of running through it and potentially being seen- she stopped dead in her tracks, Lizzie running into her from behind.
There she was.
Emily was standing up ahead of them, directly in the center of the clearing, illuminated by the late afternoon sun, the tops of rolling mountains visible behind her. She was smiling at them.
It’s odd that a parent’s reaction to finding their lost child is always equal parts rage and relief, and Evie felt both feelings intensely as she took off in a sprint towards her wayward nine-year-old, Lizzie close at her heels. But as she got closer, she noticed something different about Emily. She slowed down to a jog- was it her smile? Emily was beaming at them so steadily as they neared her, holding a genuine, effervescent smile for what felt like hours. She was so beautiful. At ease. And instead of calming Evie, it unnerved her.
Emily couldn’t hold a smile to save her life, her natural expressions always shifting like the mountain wind across her face. Matt and Evie have a stack of her school pictures, having purchased each one at a high price (a practically ancient thing, paper pictures) for the sheer hilarity and anticipation of what each years’ pictures would deliver. Poking fun at Emily’s manufactured grin, vacant eyes, and lawless hair had become a yearly tradition, even for her, and in recent years she had leaned into the fun by delivering increasingly weird expressions to the camera. Emily was so like her mother in every way: the same not-quite-curly-not-quite-straight hair, the same twinkling dark brown eyes and olive complexion, and the same penchant for silliness and wit that was her own constant source of delight. The biggest difference between them may have been that Evie had a natural gift for performance, knowing how to make herself lovely and pleasing to her advantage, while Emily was, generally, unable to not be authentic. She couldn’t pretend to like something, or someone, or feel anything differently than she was feeling to save her life.
Evie stared at Emily’s face, reading it like an emotional map, as she and Lizzie steadily closed the gap between them. Yes, it’s really Emily. She walked more quickly towards her daughter, pausing just a few feet away to take her in. It was Emily, but she was in her fullness somehow. The light of so much wisdom and light behind her eyes. Almost as if she was holding lifetimes within them-
“Mother,” she said, her voice full of confidence and tenderness, “Don’t be afraid. This is the step that must be taken.”
And then, Evie woke up.
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“It’s time to go, girls!” Matt called up the steps, carefully balancing one of Evie’s famous cakes in one hand and a green bean casserole in the other as he headed out the front door to the car. Thankfully green beans had come in the latest SunRay box, and Evie had rescued some forgotten cake mix from their pantry that had likely fallen behind the shelves years ago. How long had it been there, maybe ten years? Or longer- since right after they bought the house? Evie squealed with delight when she found it a few days ago, running through the house with the box screaming, “Oh my god Matt it’s DUNCAN HINES CAKE MIX BABE! LOOK AT IT!” Though Evie liked to peg Matt as the dramatic one, her enthusiasm for life’s small joys was generally unmatched. The twinkle in her eyes was refreshing to everyone in the family, and her energy buoyed Matt’s spirits as they tried once again to capture the holiday magic of their own childhoods for their girls.
Evie had been in a lovely mood yesterday while she was cooking in preparation for Christmas dinner at Teresa’s, adding to her found treasures with home grown ingredients from their back porch garden, and with eggs from their chickens. Whenever Matt came into the kitchen, she would smile at him like she had years ago, her eyes shining with delight and…desire? For purely selfless reasons of course, Matt found a lot of excuses to come into the kitchen yesterday. Just the smell of the cake baking made everything feel less heavy, and somehow it was easier for Matt and Evie to pretend that life was easy again. Sometimes the only way to keep your spirit intact was to gaslight yourself by whatever means necessary.
So Matt knew that as he carried the food out to the car to share with his family, he wasn’t really carrying food- he was carrying gold. He was carrying hope.
Emily came bounding out of the house at his heels, and with her usual force and exuberance ran ahead of him to block his way to the car, sticking her right foot out towards him. “Dad, look! They fit!” she said and flashed him the kind of grin that melts hearts, happily running off in her new shoes. There is no one more apt to run as fast as possible than a child with new shoes on their feet, and she circled the front yard like a puppy, leaping over puddles and dodging the islands of azaleas under the gray December sky. Matt watched her warily, stopping himself from ruining her moment with a warning about keeping the shoes clean. He was glad that she didn’t know how difficult they were for him to get, but as with most things recently, he found it impossible to share her joy. Even as she frolicked, he felt the weight of providing for his family grip his mind, and he couldn’t help but think, How will I get the next pair when she outgrows this one? Matt shook his head, shelving his thoughts as best he could. He needed to relax- it was important to everyone that today felt special, or at least normal, and if he was lost in his worries his girls would feel it. Maybe a day of ease and distraction was the best gift he could give to them.
A few moments later, Evelyn and Lizzie tumbled out of the front door towards the car, laden with bags of gifts and containers of homemade fudge, punch, and cooked carrots. Though Lizzie favored her dad, she and her mother mirrored each other’s expressions as they walked, catching up on the latest family gossip. Lizzie’s straight brown hair, intense demeanor, and athletic build all were unmistakably from her father, or perhaps from her grandmother Teresa. But the real likeness was in personality: stubborn, intelligent, witty, and stalwart. Though Matt was proud of his daughter and of the characteristics that he had passed to her, he could do with a little less of her indomitable fortitude. No one else in Matt’s life had ever been able to endure his moments of intensity before Lizzie. Matt, and his mother before him, had been known to feel all emotions with a characteristic openness, passion, and expression. Some may even use the word dramatic to describe these moments of feeling (which Evie did once early on in their courtship, only to not hear from him again for three whole days- case in point). However, not only could Lizzie enter into his moments of frustration or anger without fear, but she could match his energy with her own. He knew that the universe had given him his counterweight, a reflection of his own way of processing the world that he could watch in real time. She was a sobering blessing, and had unlocked a sense of freedom in him once he realized that sometimes he built his own cage.
The ride to Matt’s childhood home was loud, all three of his girls brimming with energy and gossip while he did his best to stay awake, forcing himself to drink a cup of coffee which had long since gone tepid. His shift last night had been quiet, thankfully. There were several candlelight Christmas Eve services held in makeshift locations, all letting out relatively early, and then folks just went home. Where else was there to go? Downtown Asheville no longer was a destination spot, most of its restaurants and bars having closed a few years ago, the rest only open sporadically. There were a few places that managed to stay afloat, but they catered to the wealthy and could practically be considered private dining. The hilly streets felt like a ghost town most days, having once been frequently full of tourists and colorful locals. After the HOME Act, the streets slowly began to fill with more and more homeless as the economy shifted drastically, seemingly overnight. Many previously middle-class people were surprised to find themselves without work after being promised a boost to the struggling financial landscape of the country. They had created a new class, the nouveau pauvre, who struggled to keep their homes and their health without work or government aid. The stores and restaurants closed one by one, the tourists and locals stopped coming, and the homeless abandoned the empty streets for more sheltered places to live on the edges of town. Matt was glad to have been assigned the downtown district last night, as he and everyone else knew that the real work happened on the dark outskirts of city: down unlit beaten paths in the woods, at the multiple homeless communities (that the locals called “Walkertowns”, eponymous for President J. Walker who had passed the HOME Act ten years prior) that had sprung up and had attracted hundreds of people, and in any of the many deceptively cheery homes lining once-idyllic streets that were hiding painful examples of human desperation and depravity.
Matt drove without thinking, the familiar roads from Asheville to Candler having painted the backdrop of his entire life. The soothing lilt of the voices in the car blurred the edges of his awareness as he drove, occasionally allowing his vision to settle on the stunning mountain views all around them. One would think that a scene so familiar would eventually cease to stir the heart, but a soul born into the healing and grounding grandeur of a place humming with the heartbeat of the earth is attuned to its birthplace like a baby attuned to her mother. The mountains before him rose gently like the swell of a mother’s breasts- the first desire of every infant, the first place of safety for our tiny bodies when we leave our nested womb. The world had changed dramatically throughout the course of Matt’s life, especially in the last ten years, but these mountains remained unchanged. They had been here for millions of years, and he was sure that they would remain for millions more- their familiarity like a soft bosom above a beating heart on which to lay your head, assuring you that you are home.
Matt noticed the boar who was standing directly in the lane, staring straight at him, at the same time that Evie yelled “MATT!” and hit him, hard, on his right shoulder. He expertly and automatically swerved to the left of the massive animal into the lane of oncoming traffic, his brain having registered that the shoulder to the right was too narrow and that the lane to his left was vacant. They had passed maybe three cars the whole drive. Right ahead of him to the left was a driveway into the Enka-Candler fire station, and Matt turned and drove up the small hill into the nearly empty parking lot. Emily was crying, Lizzie was yelling “HOLY SHIT DAD”, and Evie’s face was ashen. He pulled the car to a stop, put it in park, and started to get out.
“Babe, what are you doing?” asked Evie, knowing exactly what he was doing.
“You know I have to get it. It could kill someone. It’s still just standing there in the middle of the road like a stupid motherfucker.”
“I’m coming,” said Lizzie as she unbuckled and opened the car door, clearly thrilled.
“How are you gonna get it off the street first?”asked Evie, the color coming back to her cheeks.
“I’ll aim first for his back leg. It’s harder because then they’re a moving target, but I’ve gotten really good at this.”
“Dad, are you winning this month?” asked Emily, grabbing onto Matt’s seat from behind and popping her head up between her parents, the excitement having shifted her mood from terror to her usual impish joy. “How many do you have? Will this put you in the lead?”
“I haven’t looked at everyone else’s tallies lately but this’ll at least put me in the top two. The prize this month is a basket of oranges from god knows where, honestly it’s probably evidence from a black market deal or something, but I don’t care and I want them. I gotta go get him before the firemen catch on, they may have their own game going.” Matt jumped out of the car, and as he headed to the trunk to retrieve his rifle he heard Evie say, “Emily honey, I want you to stay here with me.” No matter how common this had become, and how destructive and terrorizing these animals were, Emily’s animal-loving heart always bled along with the boars.
Wild hogs, once a delicacy in Canada in the early 2000’s, had once been intentionally bred with pink swine to grow bigger, and more quickly, than their wild predecessors. When the market for boar meat dried up, many farmers cut the fences, and their losses, and let their herds free. Thousands of those animals moved south into the United States to escape the unpredictable harsh Canadian winters, and over time crossbred with groups of American boars that had been introduced from Europe to the country with its first settlers. What had resulted were animals ranging from five hundred to a thousand pounds, on average, with patchy coats of wiry fur that shed almost completely in the summer, and with a penchant for the total annihilation of anything in their path. The American boars had also been growing in number, and had ravaged huge areas of Texas, Alabama, and Louisiana in particular. Residents were encouraged to shoot to kill, but with ammo harder to get and with no natural predator, the herds were quickly growing in number.
As the climate changed rapidly, the boars seemed to adapt easily to the weather. It was not long before every state on the continent reported herds taking up residence, and the North Carolina landscape seemed to be a particularly agreeable home base for them. Huge colonies of boars roamed the lush forests of the mountains and sandhills, leaving devastation and destruction in their wakes. A few years ago they had made their way up into the mountains, and immediately got to work clearing areas of forest right outside of Asheville for rooting and wallowing. Everyone knew how to identify a boar nest, which usually was a large mound of pine straw with an entrance hole. Often located close to favorite trails and camping spots, these aggressive animals had deterred people from visiting the area’s most beautiful spots so thoroughly that parts of the famed Appalachian trail had become overgrown and almost impossible to pass. Driving the Blue Ridge Parkway was a dangerous sport, as dodging a bold hog who decided to run into the street on a hairpin curve with no shoulder had sent more than one car plummeting down the mountain.
It was possible that no group of people hated the boars more than the local Police. Every officer, on every shift, went to a call about a boar. For years they had been at war with the herds, going so far as to arming and training civilians who previously were not gun owners in order to quell the growth. The only, singular benefit that the boars had brought to the area was that they were a source of food for those living in the Walkertowns on the edges of the city and scattered throughout the area. Though their meat was sometimes tough, not reliably without disease, and had a distinct fecal aftertaste, folks had learned to cook the meat in ways that made it palatable, and even sometimes delicious. You could tell how close you were to a Walkertown depending on whether or not you could smell bacon cooking. The meat often caused gastrointestinal distress and food poisoning, but a few days of suffering was far better than dying of starvation.
As Matt stood at his trunk and loaded several rounds into the magazine, he noticed two men walking his direction across the parking lot from the firehouse. They were both about Matt’s age, wearing uniform pants and navy t-shirts with the Candler Fire Department logo on them. The hems of their pants were wet and their shirts were splashed with water, and as they approached Matt they were silhouetted by a shining red fire engine behind them, clearly freshly washed. The water drops on the huge engine glinted in the sun that was doing its best to peek out from between the heavy clouds, and someone had affixed a huge Christmas wreath to its grill, complete with a massive red bow.
“You gonna get it? Need any help?” one of them asked as they approached Matt, eyeing his huge gun with interest. Matt recognized both of them vaguely, almost certainly from working a scene together despite being in different jurisdictions, and he held out his hand to shake theirs.
“Hey guys, Officer Fisher with Asheville Police. This motherfucker just about ran us into the ditch, so I’m gonna do my best to get it out of the way. Do y’all have Control loaders running today?” Each district had a small fleet of front-end loaders that were employed by Animal Control to remove the boars in urban areas. Sometimes there were just too many to get rid of, and a boar that was hit by a car or shot on site would simply rot on the side of the highway or in someone’s yard until the carrion birds picked it clean enough that someone could remove and burn what was left.
“Yeah man, let me radio it in,” said one of the firemen, taking a few steps away and speaking into the radio that had been clipped onto his pants pocket.
Lizzie suddenly appeared at Matt’s side, slipping her left hand into his right, and the fireman laughed in surprise. “Are you sure you want to see this?” he asked her, and Matt could feel the steel inside of Lizzie harden.
“I’ve killed two all by myself,” she said, putting her other hand on her hip. The fireman laughed again.
“That’s more than me, I usually leave it to the other guys. I hate to say it but I’m not a great shot, don’t want to waste the ammo.”
“Well you can watch my dad. He’s the best,” said Lizzie with a grin. There was zero doubt, especially in moments like these, that she was Matt’s daughter.
The group turned and walked to the edge of the parking lot facing the road, and sure enough the boar was still there, standing in the middle of the lane and swishing its tail.
“Is there anyone over there you think?” Matt asked the man, nodding towards the junkyard and shack across the street from them. It was surrounded by a chain-link fence and was littered with brown, rusted machinery parts and old railroad equipment.
“I’ve never seen a soul over there,” replied the fireman. “You’re good.”
Matt brought the gun up to his face and rested his cheek against the stock, centering his aim on the back left leg, certain that if he missed the shot the angle of trajectory would keep the bullet on a path moving away from them. The fireman and Lizzie instinctively took a few steps back, Matt took a deep breath, and pulled the trigger. Before the blast had time to properly echo off of the mountains around them, the boar scurried to its right and onto the shoulder of the two-lane highway. Matt quickly shot again, this time at its neck, and the huge animal fell on its side, motionless.
“Goddamn brother, your daughter wasn’t kidding,” laughed the fireman, slapping Matt on the shoulder in congratulations as the group turned back towards the firehouse.
“I called it in, Control should be here soon,” said the other fireman, returning to the group. “Thanks man, that’ll be one less call the guys’ll have to go on. Merry Christmas!” and he shook Matt’s hand, both firemen turning back towards the station for what looked to be a quiet day.
As Matt removed the magazine from the rifle and put everything back in its case, he wondered how many hours he had spent hunting, trapping, stalking, and killing boars since they had arrived in these parts. A few years ago the department had made it a monthly contest to see who could get the most during their shifts, offering prizes as small as a box of real Ritz crackers (which, to everyone’s surprise, was inspiring enough to result in one of the highest combined monthly records) and as sought after as a full set of new tires. The department, which had been short-staffed for years, saw a sustained uptick in officers taking extra shifts. Everyday things were increasingly expensive, elusive, and sometimes just impossible to get unless you were wealthy. No one knew exactly where the prizes came from, and no one asked, but everyone was glad for a diversion, however slight, from the difficulty of the job. Whether it was for a bite of nostalgia or an item of usefulness, Matt and his co-workers couldn’t help but look forward to every month’s offering, and the winners always shared their bounty. As silly as it seemed, it was a bright spot in a life that had begun to feel like a long, dark night.
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