Two Miles, No Signal

The branch snapped thirty feet uphill — a single dry crack, then nothing — and she didn't stop.

She had already pulled the bullet from the hip pocket. Already wrapped her left hand around the pack strap where it rested against the fir's bark. Already felt the particular weight of two miles of trail behind her and two miles of trail ahead, and the way that distance made her feel, not free exactly, but unaccountable. This was the part she had stopped pretending to herself she didn't plan.

The fir's roots had lifted a shelf of earth at its base, and she'd backed herself into the angle of it — pack propped to her left, the tree at her back, the slope of the hillside visible through a gap in the canopy where the light came through in pale, moving columns. October light. The kind that felt more like memory than illumination. The wind moved through the upper branches in slow pulls, and the cold in the air had settled against the back of her neck and into the strip of exposed skin above her waistband where her base layer had ridden up. She was aware of the cold the way she was aware of her own pulse — steadily, without alarm.

She pressed her back harder against the bark. She had not yet turned the bullet on.

That was the part she returned to, every time. The moment before. The small silver weight of it in her right hand, the seam of her hiking pants running down through the center of her, the knowledge of what was about to happen accumulating in her chest until she had to let a breath out slowly through her nose — longer than she'd drawn it in, the exhale arriving before she decided to exhale, her body making that decision on its own. She was used to that by now. The body moved ahead. She followed.

Her thighs were together, the softshell fabric pressing them into a single warm pressure. She could feel the inner seam's faint ridge against her, just present, not insistent — a reminder, not a demand. The waistband sat across her hip bones with the specific weight of a garment that had been worn for hours, slightly damp at the inner band from exertion, warmer than the air around it. She pressed the back of her right hand against her outer thigh and felt the cold of her own knuckles against the fabric.

Uphill: nothing. Wind. The slow creak of the fir above her.

She turned the bullet on.

The hum was low, contained, something that existed in her hand before it would exist anywhere else. She pressed it against the front seam of her pants — still through fabric, still outside of everything — and her left hand tightened on the pack strap without her meaning it to. The sound that came out of her was small and involuntary, not quite a breath, not quite a word, clipped short at the back of her throat before it could become anything she'd have to acknowledge.

Her knees shifted. The space between her thighs opened a half-inch, no more.

Somewhere uphill, in the direction of that earlier crack of wood, a second branch moved — not breaking, just settling — and the sound carried down through the cold air and reached her, and she felt it register, and then she felt herself not stop.

The light shifted through the canopy. She stayed.