Sap glues clumps of pine needles to the wheels of Marlene’s handcart. The wheels slip and drag through the forest floor. The pines south of the highway smell green, the scent piercing although not as high as in midsummer. Above, a raven cries to her mate.  Marlene revels in the raven thought. The good feeling flashes to dread of the town where human thought will complicate her every action. The edge of the highway slopes up and forces her to dig in and haul on the handle. The wheels bump onto the pebbled asphalt and there’s a faded white line and a whoosh of car wind.

A highway. A death-strip running across her path, a place where animals go to die.
She lifts her head, neck bones protesting. A sedan swerves around her. The coast clear,
she pulls on the handcart with tired shoulder and together, rollicking, bumping, they cross the center line. An approaching growl makes her look—speeding metal, the eyes of the headlights soulless and growing. She yanks the handcart over a rock, hurries her joints. There is a rough vibration in the handle as she pushes for the north shoulder, and a horn blast liquifies her innards as the car whips past and the handcart lists to the side. The Doppler sound of the car’s passage is replaced by a high-pitched grind—

Fingernails on a blackboard, fingers running over rough polyester, the sounds and textures of her childhood which would prickle her skin while her teeth clenched, and no one cared. She makes it just to where the asphalt turns to gravel on the north side and looks back. One wheel has fallen off the handcart. Marlene crumples to the ground on the side of the road. The wheel is gone. Everything is in the handcart, everything. The sound of the horn still vibrates her guts like gelatin. She folds around her knees and keens.

***

Ellen steers her BMW through another curve with the ease of cutting soft butter. She loves driving curvy roads, loves how skill can elevate a simple act into the realm of pleasure. Last night she lay curled up with Levi in that space between sleeping and waking where the mind is soft and dissociative. His hand rested on her hip and hers on his shoulder. In the softness, the warmth, his hand twitched in a movement somewhere between a caress and the jerk of an incipient dream. Her hand moved on his shoulder in response—a slight tightening of her fingertips. It had felt like a conversation. Ahead, a silver Lexus swerves without braking and blows its horn. Ellen eases off the accelerator and eyes the side of the road. Halfway over the line, a handcart filled with—things—leans to one side.

Ellen’s brain becomes the field of a brief battle. Compassion and duty war against
impatience and disdain. She thinks forward to retrospect. How will she feel if she does not stop?

Signal, clutch, brake, reverse. Ellen kills the ignition, swings from the car, and
approaches the figure.

“Excuse me? Can I help you?”

The figure stops wailing and rocking. Ellen notes the missing wheel and flicks her eyes
back to the person, noting the tangles of filthy, matted hair—half black, half gray—which escape the stained jacket’s hood.

***

Her keening, her tight-shut eyes, these do not stop the crunch of footsteps.

“Excuse me? Can I help you?”

Marlene falls back into the world—a world composed of painful complications. The
sound she has been making stops, her body frozen rabbit-still. Go away, she thinks. She wants no more complications. Her thought, a wish with the force of an incantation, radiates from her.

***

Ellen stumbles to a stop. This is a bad idea. She should just go away—return to the
comfort of her car. What possessed her? The ghost of her earlier musing returns to her. Shared warmth, wordless communication. Before her, the antithesis of her musing keeps still in the brisk fall breeze, butt planted on cold asphalt.

“There’s a bicycle shop downtown,” Ellen says. “Maybe they could—”

The person’s head snaps up. Leathery skin scored with chasms, deep-sunken eyes, a
mouth fallen in upon toothless gums, a shipwreck of a face now wracked with fury.

“Go away,” the woman says, in a voice of rusted barbed wire. “You take your warm bed thoughts, the hand twitch thoughts, you take them away.”

Ellen’s breath hitches and her heart pounds against the trapped air. The wave of the
woman’s pure, feral anger sweeps through, vicious as a tsunami. The visceral wave combines with her shock at the clairvoyant barb aimed at her. She turns and stumbles toward her car, then runs, head down, past the lone, scarred handcart wheel lying across the white line.

***

The complication retreats. Marlene inhales the scents of evergreen and tailpipe exhaust. A car door slams. Marlene straightens, good hatred seething through her inflamed joints. How dare…

Two ravens row through the air above her head, making for the car on the shoulder.
Marlene follows the gleam and ruffle. A woman sits in the car, holding to a single image from the immediate past.

***

Ellen trembles in her vehicle. The wheel was right there. She had retreated past it, not bent to pick it up, or even pointed it out. She checks the rearview mirror. The woman is walking toward her. Above, ravens dip and swoop. She fumbles the ignition on. Even in her urgency, she avoids peeling out so rocks don’t spray back.

***

The ravens call out. Marlene follows the white line until she finds the wheel, a shape like the curve of the universe, tasting of complicated kindness.

Heather McLoud has questions about what makes people tick. These are the questions which form the backbone of her stories. She is the author of the novels Sage Courage and The Biome Sacrifices.