The Wild

-4- Trespassers

Copyright © 2014. All Rights Reserved.

BANG!

The door bounced off the wall when I came bursting into my house. It took a few tries fumbling with the keys, but I did it. The only thing that could be heard was my heavy breathing and the thumping of my boots against the ground. I shut the door and locked it before sliding the chain into place. After kicking off my boots, I moved to the back door and locked that was well, along with all the windows and shut the blinds.

No one would be able to find where I'd run off to, especially with the beginning of the path all overgrown. And the chance that they'd keep going up the path? Yeah right. I recall the first time Amaya saw my house and she thought I was bringing her out to the middle of the mountains to murder her.

I paced the kitchen for a while, trying to bring myself down from this hectic craze of paranoia. The thought of being followed terrified me more than I cared to admit, but as soon as I realized no one was coming for me, an overwhelming feeling of satisfaction rolled over me. It made me want to go to the bathroom.

I meandered over to the door between the kitchen and bedroom that curved into the basement where the bathroom was. Upon remodeling the cabin, the bathroom had been originally outside in an outhouse, so I'd had a bathroom installed in the only place there was room for it while the outhouse was expanded on and made into a shed.

After relieving myself and having a hunch that suffering from a full bladder was probably one of the reasons for my unnecessary worrying, I returned upstairs and set a record on to fill the unbearable silence that plagued the cabin.

Out of pure spontaneity, I called up Bennet on his cell phone though the chances of him actually having a signal were low. I propped myself up on my bed, one foot curled underneath the other as I stared out the window. It was oddly peaceful out there, despite the looming clouds over the horizon that darkened the forest to the west. The phone rang a few more times before leading me to voicemail. I ended the call there.

It took a while for me to find something to do until I recalled what I'd told Bennet when he brought up leaving to go north with his father. I leapt off the bed with newfound energy to retrieve my sketchbook and paints, all stashed in a slick travel bag I'd picked up on a trip down south to Santa Fe with a past friend from a past town in some place I'd long forgotten. That was one thing about me; it was easy for me to pick out a person, make a quick but not long lasting friendship, and journey across the country with them. It made life exciting, unless that person ended up being a serial killer. Then of course that wouldn't be too much fun.

Without wasting much more time, I unlocked the back door and stepped out onto the deck with a scarf wrapped around my neck to keep the wind from freezing my nose and ears. I shouldered the black leather bag, water bottle stuffed into the front pocket of my sweatshirt, and sized up the lodgepole pine that was one of the few that grew too close to the cabin. Its branches were thicker near the bottom, and came with more sap than needles, but that didn't stop me from climbing over the railing that marked the end of the deck where the windows stopped. I crossed over to the nearest branch and started my climb upwards.

At the top of the cabin, I made a hasty jump for the roof and staggered a bit backwards down the slope. I caught myself before I could fall much further, heart beating rapidly, but I quickly steadied it so I could get a good seat to view the landscape where the clouds were rolling in over the vast mountain range of ragged peaks.

They were pale against the sky, which caused them to stand out more than usual. I set up my paint pallet and got to work mixing the colors haphazardly with a frayed brush tip.