by Dakota West
The timestamp on the voicemail was 3:53, and it was 4:28.
I hope he hasn’t left yet, she thought.
Seth answered on the first ring.
“Jules!” he said.
“Don’t go to Salt Lake City,” she blurted out.
“I have to,” he said. “The records office there might have the deed that Hiram got for homesteading—”
“They don’t,” Jules interrupted. “It burned down a hundred years ago.”
The line went silent for a moment before Seth spoke up.
“Shit,” he said, and then, “How do you know that?”
“Can I just come over?” she asked.
In the daylight, the mesa looked even bigger, towering over everything around it. Jules watched it suspiciously as she drove up the driveway, then parked her truck.
Seth was already waiting for her on the porch, and she took a deep breath before getting out, not really knowing what to expect.
Did I fuck up last night? She wondered. Did he? Are we just friends now?
As she walked up, Seth started smiling, his dimples sinking into his face. Jules found that she couldn’t help but smile back.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey yourself,” she said.
They looked at each other for a long moment, both smiling but wary.
“Are we okay?” he asked, finally.
Jules closed her eyes and took another deep breath.
“Did you only take me on a date because you wanted info about the mine that’s on your property and you thought I’d give it to you if I had a good time?” she asked, all in one breath.
Jules opened her eyes to see Seth looking horrified.
“No,” he said. “Not at all, not even a little. I asked you out because I really, really wanted to see you again.”
Jules pressed her lips together, trying not to cry, and Seth took a step forward, taking her face in his hands.
“I really like you,” he whispered. “When you laugh it feels like the sun is shining right onto my heart.”
“So like you’re having open-heart surgery?” she whispered back.
“Outdoors open-heart surgery,” Seth clarified.
They looked at each other for a moment.
“Well, kiss me,” Jules said.
He did. His lips were warm and just a little rough, and when she moved her hand gently to his waist, she could feel the heat radiating out from his hard muscle, and deep inside she felt a funny twisting feeling that she’d never felt before.
When their lips separated, Jules looked into his eyes, flashing gold, and smiled.
“Would you accept help with the mine anyway?” she asked.
Inside the house, the dining room was a flurry of papers: some old, some new, some handwritten, some printed. In the middle of it sat someone who was obviously Seth’s brother. The two men had exactly the same eyes, though the brother’s hair was lighter and shorter, his nose different.
“I’m Zach,” he said, standing up. He hopped from where he’d been sitting to another bare spot on the floor, and shook her hand.
“I’m Jules,” she said, and thought she caught Zach exchanging a glance with Seth.
Did Seth tell him about me? She thought.
The thought of boys shouting I love you like plants love the sun down the halls of her high school flashed through her mind, but she forced it out.
“So what’s the news?” Zach asked, friendly but all business.
Jules told them the whole thing, about the deeds probably not existing, and then about the archives burning down. By the end, Zach was sitting on the floor again, his head on one hand.
“Maybe we never owned it,” he said, tapping the eraser end of a pencil against a sheet of paper.
“Mom was so sure, though,” said Seth, who’d pulled out a dining chair and sat.
“What if she was wrong?” Zach asked. “What if she just thought that because her father told her that, and his father, and so on? What if they all just thought there was a deed, and there never was?”
“When did this highway go in?” Jules piped up. “Did the state of Utah have to buy any land from your ancestors? Maybe we could use that bill of sale to prove that at least they owned it then. Or the state considered them the owners.”
“Or when they put in the electricity?” asked Seth.
For hours, they tossed around ideas. Around eight, the three of them stopped and Seth made them peanut butter sandwiches, and they chewed in silence.
It’s not going to work, thought Jules.
Chapter Seven
Seth
Seth stared into the center of his sandwich as he squeezed the edges, making the jam squeeze out and then recede. He tried to think about the deed, or receipt for payment on it, or anything that might prove their claim.
Instead, he was thinking about the dream. He’d had it again last night.
Ever since he could remember, Seth had had the same dream. He’d always liked it, because in it, he was flying high above the earth, looking down at all the people and buildings below, watching the serene curve of the river, seeing the vast landscape that he knew so well from a completely new angle.
He’d always chalked the dreams up to the stories his mom told him, about her own father who could turn into an eagle and fly off, coming back with flowers for her mother, flowers that didn’t grow for hundreds of miles. There were stories about his grandfather’s father, who Seth had never met, but who his mom said had built a nest high on the mesa where’d he go to watch over the town.
When Seth asked his mom if she could turn into a bird, she’d just laugh.
Last night the dream had changed, though. It had barely felt like a dream, and had felt more like reality: the sharpness of the cold air, the scent of the earth rising to meet his nose. For the first time, Seth had been able to see everything on the ground with perfect, crystal clarity, and he’d been able to stretch his feet out, grasping at the air with his toes, until he’d looked to his right to see a long, light brown wing.
In the dream, he’d wiggled his arm, and the wing had moved.
Then he’d woken up.
“Earth to Seth,” Zach was saying, waving a hand in front of Seth’s sandwich, and Seth blinked and looked up.
“There you are,” Zach said.
“Sorry.”
“I think we should check the attic again,” Zach said. “We got all the files down from there, but there’s all these chests and suitcases and bags. It’s probably worth a shot.”
Seth just nodded, still trying to shake the dream off.
“Sure,” he said, then took a giant bite of his sandwich.
The attic was a mess. Seth had only been up there a few times as a kid, but he remembered being amazed by the sheer amount of stuff up there. Stuff that seemed like it hadn’t been touched for a hundred years at least, that probably still bore the fingerprints and perfume of whoever had owned them.
As an adult, he quickly realized that no one had visited the attic in generations except to shove more stuff up there, and looking around, his heart sank.
“Where do we start?” breathed Jules.
“Well, I think newer stuff is by the door,” Seth said. “So we start at the other end, by the far wall.”
It was as good a guess as any.
For hours, they plowed through boxes and drawers, going through bags, pulling out delicate old clothes that seemed like they might fall apart at any moment, thick boots with mud still caked on them, and everything imaginable in-between.
“Our ancestors were packrats,” Zach finally muttered. It was nearly one in the morning, and Seth could tell his brother was tired and starting to get irritable. “This is all just trash.”
“It’s cool trash,” Jules said, picking up a picture frame. Two kids stared into the camera, their serious faces a little blurry. “Who’s this?”
Both brothers shook their heads, and the silent work went on.
After another hour, Zach sto
od and stretched.
“I have to go to bed,” he said. “I’m going to fall over up here if I don’t.”
“Go ahead,” said Seth. “You’ve been up almost twenty-four hours, you deserve it.”
“Night,” said Zach.
“Night,” said Jules, watching Seth’s little brother descend the staircase.
“You should get some sleep too,” Seth told Jules. “You’re probably tired. You could stay here, if you want, there’s a guest bedroom.”
Technically, it wasn’t a lie, and Seth was more than willing to move all the junk off of the bed in there and sleep in it himself. Jules could have his bed.
She shook her head, curls bouncing around.
“I’m actually not really tired,” she said. “And I’m having a great time going through all this old stuff.”
She pulled something out of a big chest-of-drawers.
“I mean, look at this box. I think it’s covered in fur,” Jules said, holding the box carefully with her fingertips, as though it might come alive and try to bite her at any moment.
Seth looked at the box, and a thrill passed through him, from his scalp to his toes. He reached one hand out and ran one finger along the top. Jules was right: it was some kind of fur, slightly brittle with age. As he touched it, he could feel a low hum start in his bones, and he snatched his hand back.
Jules frowned. “Is there something sharp?” she asked, touching it with the pads of her own fingers.
Seth shook his head, searching for the words to explain it to Jules: it enthralled and repulsed him, all at once. It had something that he shouldn’t want to see but very much did.
Then he took it from Jules, gently, and the hum returned. Jules looked at him strangely, but Seth still couldn’t explain what was happening.
The box was about a foot wide, two feet long, and shallow. He turned it in his hands and then held it up to the attic’s bare lightbulb, trying to figure out what kind of fur it was.
“The fur is from something small,” Jules said, her voice hushed. “Look, you can see where the seams are,” she told him, tracing one finger around a skin.
Seth looked closer.
“You’re right,” he said. “It looks like… mice, or chipmunks, or something.”
“Why’s there a box covered in mouse fur in your attic?” she asked.
Seth just shook his head. “Beats me,” he said.
The real question is, why does it make me feel so weird, like there’s a magnet inside, but I’m the only one drawn to it?
He and Jules looked at each other over the box, then Seth took a deep breath and opened it.
The box was filled with feathers. They were all a deep brown-gold, ranging from tiny to enormous, with a few almost as long as Seth’s forearm.
“Wow,” breathed Jules. Carefully, she reached in and took one of the long feathers, holding it up delicately and twirling it back and forth between her fingers.
The moment she touched it, a thrill ran down Seth’s back.
“This bird must be enormous,” she said. “Look at this thing.”
“I think it’s an eagle feather,” Seth said. “We’ve got golden eagles around here. They nest up in the sides of the mesa. Sometimes you can see them flying in there. It looks like they’re going to just crash into the side of the cliff, but then they hop onto a nest. It’s pretty cool.”
“That’s what Hiram could turn into, right? Allegedly, I mean.”
And my grandfather, and my great-grandfather…
The dream flashed through Seth’s mind again, the feeling of cold air rushing around him.
“Right,” he said.
Then he tilted the box a little, puzzled at the way that its weight shifted.
“There’s something else in here,” he said.
Jules put the feather back, then pushed her hand underneath the layer of feathers and dug around a little, carefully. Then she pulled out an ugly, oblong stone along the length of her hand. It was rough and pebbled, the same brownish-red of the sandstone everywhere. One end was slightly concave and shiny, almost burnt-looking.
It called to Seth with a voice he couldn’t understand, but one that growled at him.
“Is that a crystal or something?” Seth asked. He was starting to get a little shaken by all this weird stuff, but even more shaken by his physical reaction to it.
Am I entering some sort of sleep-deprivation psychosis? he wondered. I didn’t sleep great last night, but it seems early for that.
“It’s fulgurite,” Jules said, turning it over in her hand. “This is what happens when lightning strikes rock. It superheats it really fast and then cools. This stuff in the middle is more or less impure glass.”
She held it up for Seth to look at, still examining it herself. He felt like he was looking down a deep hole, or like he was on a great height, looking down, and he closed his eyes.
“This one looks like sandstone,” she said. “Which makes sense, this part of Utah is all sandstone.”
“It’s from the mesa,” he said suddenly. He didn’t know how, but he was completely positive.
“Probably,” agreed Jules. “I’m sure it gets struck by lightning plenty.”
Seth just nodded, and Jules put it back in the box, then took the box from Seth and put it back in the drawer.
Right away, he felt like the world stopped buzzing, and he exhaled hard, shaking his hands out a little.
“You okay?” Jules asked.
Seth nodded. “I’m fine,” he said. “I just need to take a quick break.”
He found a saddle blanket, spread it on the floor, and sat on it, leaning against a big, heavy wooden trunk.
“C’mon,” he said to Jules, patting the blanket next to him.
She looked over, from his hand to his eyes, and suddenly seemed to stiffen again.
“Are you still worried that I’m trying to seduce you into doing something about the mine?” he asked.
Jules blushed a little in the dim light and looked at the floor.
“I mean, I am in your attic and it’s almost two in the morning,” she said. “If you are, it worked.”
Seth couldn’t argue with that.
Then she sighed, blowing a stray strand of red hair from her face, and walked over to sit next to Seth on the saddle blanket. She picked at it with one hand, looking pensive.
“What is it?” he asked. Seth ached to put his arm around her, but he didn’t.
Jules took a deep breath, then started talking.
“When I was in high school, I had this huge crush on this jock named Taylor Kimball,” she said in a rush. “And one day, he asked me out.”
The whole story spilled out of her: the homework, the studying, the ridiculous love notes. The discovery that he’d just been using her, that he’d told half the school all about how pathetic she was, how she got him good grades while he was banging his real girlfriend. His friends waving her love letters and shouting at her and how she’d run out of the school, crying.
“Holy shit,” Seth said, looking at the floor. “God, teenagers can be cruel.”
Then he looked over at her, at her hazel eyes that seemed far away.
“I swear I just thought you were cute,” he said.
“Thanks,” she said.
They were silent for a moment.
“This thing smells like horses,” she said, wrinkling her nose, scrunching all the freckles together.
“I like horses,” said Seth.
Jules pulled her legs under her, then leaned her head back against the trunk.
“I can’t get the mine stopped,” she said. “Believe me, I tried. In twenty years, it’s going to be in books and documentaries as a famous environmental disaster, but the people in charge of Quarcom don’t care. I think they’d drown a boatful of orphans if they thought they could make money from it.”
She paused and picked at the blanket a little.
“It’s going to fuck things up pretty bad,” she said. “The kind of mining
they’re doing is going to be illegal within four, maybe five years, but this is the first time it’s been tried in the U.S., so there’s no laws against it yet.”
“And we’re the unlucky bastards who lived in the right spot,” Seth said.
Jules leaned her head against his shoulder and nodded, a stray hair tickling his cheek.
Without thinking, he turned and kissed the top of her head, inhaling her earthy, spicy scent, and then she looked up at him, her lips slightly parted in the light of the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. Her green-brown eyes nearly glowed in the low light, and once again he felt weightless, soaring, as he looked into them.
Then he kissed her on the lips. For a moment she didn’t respond, but then she pressed herself against him, and Seth felt something deep down inside him tighten, a deep hunger he’d never felt before. Jules parted her lips against his, and Seth ran his tongue along her lower lip only to feel her tongue seek his out and tangle together with it.
Her hand crept onto the side of his face, made its way into his hair, and before Seth knew it, he had tangled his fingers in her wild mane, pulling her against him, aching to feel her touch. Jules hesitantly put a hand on Seth’s waist, sending sparks through his whole body, and then they broke apart, gasping.
Seth stroked her cheek with one thumb, feeling like he was falling. Any thought of the mine or the mesa or the coming disaster had been completely wiped out of his mind, and Jules filled it, completely.
She bit her lip, like she wasn’t quite sure how to proceed.
“Should we be looking for the deed?” she whispered, her hand tightening on his waist, sending ripples through his whole body.
“Probably,” he said.
Then he kissed her again. This time he couldn’t help himself, and he moved one hand from her hair, down her neck, to her shoulder, and onto her back, feeling her soft, warm body beneath his fingers. He could sense that something dangerous was about to happen, that he was on some precipice that he’d never be able to back away from, but he didn’t care.
