Seventeen year old Misty Cellars lives in a double-wide trailer where she bargains with a local drug gang to keep her mother out of prison. After losing her father to heroin, she is invited to a weekend church gathering, or so it appears. Instead, M...
Postcard season. The time of year that's featured on all the tourist websites and brochures. When she gazes up, Misty can see the sun twinkling through the ever-photogenic leaves. Around her, there may be broken down cars and Dave's broken bottles, but looking up, she takes solace in this: Despite all that, she's still got the same sun and sky as everybody else.
Misty hears her footsteps echo in the aquatic acoustics of the damp, dark tunnel.
She shines her phone flashlight to markings of graffiti that fill the rusted tunnel walls. Two lines of prose catch her eye:
If this world was for us,
There would be nothing left to imagine.
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Someone had written this aside spray-painted gang signs and clumsily drawn occult symbols. At least, that's what they looked like to Misty.
Misty stopped, the echo of her shuffle pausing as a slow, eerie drip reverberated behind her. She looked back, temporarily blinded by the sun that had so recently provided her with desperately needed illumination. Spots flashed before her eyes, and she tried to readjust and make her way through the end of the tunnel. She swore someone was behind her. No, she knew. But what could she do? With her leg, she knew she couldn't beat them. And, she figured, no reason to add fuel to their fire by letting them know she could recognize their face.
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On the other side of the old, rusted tunnel, Misty sighed, shading her brow with a tanned hand. Had she figured out how she was going to make it to the retreat this weekend? No. But was the cat out of the bag? No. She still had time. But that time was slowly becoming short.
Misty could feel the bad idea rumbling up inside her before she could fully bring it to fruition in her mind. What other choice was there? She headed to the old bridge, trying not to scuff the ends of her already-torn jeans on the densely thorny bushes that framed the unofficial path down to the stream.
She could see the bikes all knocked together by the three boulders that lay before the bridge next to the Hermit's house, and she knew she had come at the right time. Or, the wrong time, depending upon how you liked to look at things. "Hey!" she shouted, as to surprise them before they could accuse her of sneaking up on them. Without examining the bikes, she already knew who was there.
