How to be Wild

[WretchRoad]

@Knightofsloth707

Ash’s phone wasn’t connected to any network. She carried it for situations like this and when she could pick up free wifi. She had it to her ear where half a dozen piercings clicked against the glass screen.

“What’s that? You can pick me up just off the…” They passed a sign for an exit, “The sixteen? Yeah. Okay.”

The driver’s grin straightened out into a thin line.

“Your friends are picking you up now? Out here?” Sprawling oaks and moss-draped cypress whipped by, faster now as he pressed the gas. “At least let me get you to the next gas station.”

She didn’t want to spend another second in that car. His smile had all the wrong angles when he picked her up, desperate to get the hell out of the rain and the hell out of Baton Rouge, where, apparently, one needed a permit to busk. Even permits wouldn’t allow her to do it in a cemetery. So, she crossed The Raq off a mental list that kept getting longer and decided to try her luck with the creepy smile who’d said he was aiming for Lafayette.

Her ride wasn’t heading west. He’d taken a few too many turns, he promised shortcuts, and talked about construction in the city. Said this was faster.

About twenty minutes in he got real concerned about where she was going to sleep, like he was about to offer something up. They’d carved onto narrower and smaller roads since then.

“Nope, actually, right here!” Ash exclaimed, pointing at a billboard. “They said ‘by the big sign saying ‘REPENT.’’”

“You sure?”

“I want to get out of the car now. I’m fine, really,” she locked eyes with him, using her sternest voice.

The rain had diminished to a warm, October trickle by the time she slammed the door shut. She watched his tail lights disappear before she started walking away from the sign advertising some baptist church a few miles up the road. She walked in the opposite direction.

Two miles and no cars later, it was nearing midnight. Ash lit up her phone again, scrolling through a gallery of saved maps to figure out where she was and where she could go dry off for the night. It looked like there was a rest stop on the other side of the tall darkness between her and the next road over. Was it a rest stop? She checked again. Blank screen reflecting her sun-kissed cheeks and box-dyed purple hair, edges lit by the streetlight above like a halo.

She shoved the phone into her patched-up backpack, aimed where she thought was north and stepped across the ditch into the woods.

 

[Knightofsloth707]

Daniel swept the late afternoon rain from atop the pale stone of his mother's burial vault. Etched in dark grey were the words:

Katherine Mackay
January 2, 1957 - October 16, 1988

Hints of green moss had begun to infiltrate the lettering. He lightly set the banquet of gardenias atop the vault. They had been his mother's favorite flower.

Beautiful and notoriously fickle - a fitting flower for her, Daniel thought to himself.

He'd acquired the seeds during one of his infrequent trips into the city, and afterwards spent months trying to grow them in the old greenhouse. Batch after batch had failed. The soil was too acidic, the soil wasn't acidic enough, too much sunlight, not enough sunlight, and on and on.

Daniel was a patient man, however, and determined. Recording the fate of each generation of flowers in a small journal, he adjusted and tried again. The flowers sitting before him were the results of batch 11, the first he'd deemed worthy of display.

The vault next to hers read:
Samantha Mackay,
September 23, 1981 - October 16, 1988

His sister had been the spitting image of his mother, blonde haired and spritely. He laid a single flower on her vault.

Daniel had inherited his mother's piercing blue eyes, but otherwise when he looked in the mirror he only saw his father. The sunken cheekbones and strong jaw, flecked with dark stubble that Daniel dutifully shaved each morning. The same shock of black hair, swept back, now with a tinge of grey creeping in at the temples. It was hard to remember that he was older now than his father had been when he died.

Around him were arrayed generations upon generations of MacKays, interred variously in their vaults or the mausoleum. The dates ran backwards at least two centuries until, reaching the oldest plots, the worn lettering became unreadable.

Had he been so inclined, Daniel could have pierced the veil of Kudzu vines in the corner of the family plot to find the tomb of his father. Daniel hadn't wanted his father buried there at all. Put him in a swamp and let the gators eat him, he'd said. But at the time he was 8 years old, and unheeded.

As he left, Daniel reflected on the fact that once he was gone there would he none left to keep the creeping vegetation from swallowing the Mackay family cemetery entirely.

He walked the short distance back towards the main house, it's yellow paint faded and peeling from the walls. Vines crept up the columns flanking the front door - once a vivid red, but now weathered to a pink grey.

Daniel liked to sit in the main room. The acoustics were best here. He set a record on the player, and fetched the open bottle of whiskey he had started last night. Soon the room was filled with the melancholy twang of Robert Johnson. He sat and drank, watching the dark clouds swirling above outside.

 

[WretchRoad]

Ash almost wished she'd stayed in the car, almost. She certainly wished she hadn't wandered into the woods based on a half-remembered map she couldn't even pull up on a dead phone.

Mud clung to her threadbare runners so thick it felt like wearing boots, with each step getting heavier and wetter. Hair strayed loose from a functional bun and stuck to her face, plastered with rain or sweat or dirt or a combination of all three. At least she was warm, for now, but she knew the night would cool off fast and so would her body as soon as she stopped moving.

"This is how I die," she gritted as she clambered into a clearing, finding a brief reprieve from the tangle of branches and sodden earth. Doubled over, hands on her knees, she heaved a few long breaths. There were at least a dozen times she'd said the same thing. The first time, she was twelve. The next: fourteen. The rest were dispersed across the country in the years since then.

She thought back to the sign on the side of the road. REPENT. But she wouldn't, not now or ever.

As she caught her breath, the waxing moon peeked out from the clouds to briefly shine on a winding sliver of a path, one she had no choice but to follow. Ash didn't know where north was anymore.

Pushing through dead branches and ripping across vines, her fingertips met the rough, weathered concrete of a small building right before she stepped into the open, into the cluster of a small cemetery.

"Yep, this is where I die. Mysterious graveyard in the woods..." She huffed. Then she noticed the fresh flowers carefully laid overtop. Quickly, she determined it was either a cursed woods spirit who would most definitely devour her for infiltrating it's sacred burial site, or, someone nearby with impeccable taste in flowers.

Ash spun around, peering through the gray drizzle until she spotted what looked like lights in the distance. Lights that were warm and close and meant civilization — which she missed so dearly on her short but treacherous hike.

Dragging her feet along the overgrown grass, she tried to scrape as much mud from her shoes as she could before climbing the steps to a house that had seen better decades. But as she approached she picked up the somber blues playing beyond the curtains. If the house was haunted, she already liked the ghost.

She rapped her knuckles against the door.

 

[Knightofsloth707]

Daniel's days followed a consistent schedule. His days were planned all the way up until the moment each night when he added another X to his calendar. Rows of identical X's, inexorably leading towards the one date each month circled menacingly in red. Nowhere in his schedule was any provision made for the chance that a purple-haired woman would come knocking on his door in the small hours of the night.

Daniel had slipped into an uneasy sleep in his armchair, his half-finished glass perched precariously in the loose grip of his hand. Despite the whiskey singing through his blood, his senses remained sharp, and the distant tromping of footsteps was enough to recall him to a state resembling consciousness.

With an effort he wrenched open his lids. The lights from the chandelier stung his bleary eyes. The record had finished and now the player only emitted the gentle popping of the needle as it rotated aimlessly along the runout groove. Above that came the whistling of the wind, the branches as they tapped gently on the windows, and there it was, beneath it all, the unexpected sound of footfalls.

The footsteps grew nearer, clearly coming up the steps now. An unwelcome dose of adrenaline dumped into his bloodstream, propelling him awake. He stood, forgetting the glass in his hand. It tumbled and shattered noisily on the wooden floor.

The crash precipitated a second dose of adrenaline and Daniel stepped to the door just as the stranger's footsteps reached it on the other side. He reached his jittery hand to the door and flung it open.

Instead of the undefined threat his imagination had conjured, he found a young woman at the threshold of his door, wet hair plastering her face and her lower half doused in mud. Daniel blinked his eyes in rapid succession - as if she might disappear if only he could clear his vision.

His head still swimming with whiskey, he looked down at his own attire, as if he had shown up inappropriately dressed to some forgotten event. His self-review showed the expected wrinkled linen shirt tucked into dark pants and black shoes. He had rolled up his sleeves and unbuttoned the top buttons of his shirt during the hottest part of the day. Despite that, faint rings of sweat darkened the material around his neck and armpits.

He looked back up at the girl, meeting her gaze. The protocols for hospitality, drilled into him from a young age, cleaved through the haze of the alcohol and took command.

"You poor thing," he said. "Please, come inside."

Locals, or those with an ear towards dialects, would detect in Daniel's speech a slower, more musical drawl than the rapid-fire cadence of the region - a legacy of his mother's Georgian accent imprinted onto his own.

He stepped aside and swept his right arm towards the main room, inviting her in.

"Oh, do mind the broken glass on the floor."

 

[WretchRoad]

Her hand still held aloft, wide, brown eyes took in the surreal display before her. She hasn't expected to be greeted so quickly or so warmly at that hour, if at all.

There was a look of disdain reserved only for the indigent and the rougher edges of society, labels that fit her well, but she saw none of it on his features. Features cleanly cut and well aged, unlike the manor itself. From the inside she saw a vaster expanse than was hidden by vines and darkness outside. But it felt just as cold and lonely at the cemetery.

Regardless, she had a decision to make, the careful weighing of vibes and circumstance so she could decide whether to trust this person or not. Her life depended on her ability to make those choices. Something about his accent put her at ease, a dialect she'd come to associate with buttery pies and music and rolling green fields she'd traced with a finger to the window of a passenger side door.

Ash stepped inside with a quiet "thank you," standing squarely on the mat at the entrance, turning to face him. She trusted him that far and no further, not enough to show him her back. And, she didn't want to drag any more swamp into his home. But out of curiosity she peered around, through the entryway to the main room.

The warm sounds of the spent record to the shattered glass on the floor to the bottle of half-drunk whiskey on the sideboard all painted a picture of a quiet evening alone. She guessed he was the only soul in that house.

Her gaze traveled back to meet his.

"Oh!" she said, remembering why she was there, pulled her backpack free and set it on the mat between her feet. Digging through, she produced her phone and a cord. "I just need to charge this. Is that okay? Then I'll get out of your hair." Her accent was a practiced midwestern neutral, though if one listened close enough, they might pick up the hint of a North Carolina twang she never fully departed from.

 

[Knightofsloth707]

"Of course, " Daniel said absently, his eyes showing no recognition of the USB cable she held. He looked at her damp clothes and mud-caked shoes.

He felt pulled in different directions, his mind swirling with the tasks that entertaining a guest would require - none of which he was prepared for. He grabbed a towel from the foyer and placed it into her hands.

"To dry yourself," he said before shuffling off to retrieve a broom. He quickly worked to sweep up the broken glass in the main room, glancing up at her frequently.

"There is a rack there, for your shoes," he called back to her in the foyer.

How many years has it been since a woman, any woman, had stepped foot into this house? The last he could remember had been when his au pair had left, 30 years ago. He could distinctly remember the tears in her eyes and the palpable eagerness in her body to turn and leave this place forever.

The two most urgent tasks (in his mind) completed, he returned to the young woman, and seeing the cord in her hand remembered her original ask.

"Ah, your phone," he said, motioning at her to follow him, and turning to lead her to an outlet. After one step he stopped and turned back. "I'm afraid, however, that we don't get much in the way of reception out this far..." He paused, realizing how ominous this might sound. "...or wifi."

He rubbed the back of his neck with his hand. "As you can see, we're a bit behind the times." He gestured vaguely to the old fashioned decor of the room.

His eyes met hers. Softened with concern though they were, his eyes were still, in the end, those of a hunter, and the young woman's habits did not escape his attention. They way she kept him in her sight. The distance she maintained between them. The way she kept at least a hand free, in case she needed it. If he was determined not to be a predator, she was equally determined not to be prey.

"If it's alright with you, I think you ought to stay here tonight. I might not have wifi, but I do have a shower that gets plenty hot, and a bed you can sleep in. Tomorrow, we can take my truck into town and I'll drop you where you please," he said.

 

[WretchRoad]

Ash kicked off her shoes and set them on the rack, but held the towel like she'd forgotten what to do with one until he came back from his hurried tasks. Instead, she watched him with mild amusement as he stalked around. He seemed more worried about embodying a good host than who his guest happened to be. After nearly a decade on the road she'd never seen anything quite like it.

Finally she remembered to dry her face, one cheek at a time, always keeping at least an eye on him. She tugged the elastic out of her hair, letting it fall in damp waves so she could dry it properly. The rest of her, however, still carried the rain.

Her brow furrowed in a look of mild disappointment that he didn't have internet, but she wouldn't think of saying anything about it. The lack of reception didn't bother her except that it was odd. No satellite? No starlink? she wondered. Maybe he was isolated by choice.

There had to be something fucked up about him.

Kind, beautiful men didn't hide alone on sprawling estates without some caveat to balance the picture.

And yet, she felt enticed by his offer. Her last warm shower was at a YMCA and the last time she slept was in the back of a pick-up truck riding in from Mississippi. For all that, she smelled like road and earth and the bundle of lavender she'd plucked from a public garden, tied to the handle of her bag.

"We?" she began, looking around as though she expected to find someone else. "Or do you mean, like, the royal 'we?'" She wasn't sure if she would feel safer or not, knowing there were more people in the house.

"Not that I'm making fun," she added, quickly. "You just offered me a bed and a shower and I only showed up on your doorstep two minutes ago..." she gestured back toward the door. "I don't even know your name."

 

[Knightofsloth707]

Daniel chuckled. "I suppose introductions are in order. Let me see if I can get my friend to join us."

He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. After a moment the unmistakable clinking of claws on wood could be heard above their heads. Daniel stood patiently, watching her reaction.

The sound grew louder and then changed to the soft patter of paws on carpet. At the top of the stairs appeared a venerable black Labrador. The dog sat, resting his milky eyes on the young woman and sniffing through his greyed snout.

"That's Roland, the other half of the 'we' around here," Daniel said, smiling for the first time. "He won't come downstairs unless bribed with a treat."

"And I'm Daniel Mackay," he said, extending his right hand. "Nice to meet you Miss..."

 

[WretchRoad]

"A dog!" She exclaimed with some relief. "Of course."

People who live alone in crumbling estates are strange. People who live alone with dogs are worldly authors, retired financiers and brooding divorcées.

The lab looked about as old as the house, explaining why he wasn’t there to enthusiastically greet her like any other member of his breed.

She almost didn’t see her host’s hand, too busy patting her knees and coaxing “Come on down Roland, come on good boy.” Two moments too late, she caught his greeting, and collected herself, sliding her hand into his for a firm one-pump shake. “I’m Ash. Just Ash.”

Letting go, she turned back to sweet talking the dog, imploring “Daniel will give you a treat, won’t you?”

 

[Knightofsloth707]

Roland danced along the top of the stairs, wanting to greet the newcomer, but determined to hold out for the customary treat that was his reward for the punishing trip down the stairs.

Daniel sighed. "I'll save your knees, old man," he told Roland. He ascended the stairs and lifted Roland bodily. Roland went still, his legs sticking straight out beneath him. As Daniel carried him down the stairs, Roland assumed a look of (what might have been) quiet embarrassment. This was beneath his dignity.

Daniel set the dog down gently onto the wooden floor. On unsteady knees, Roland made its way over to Ash, his tail wagging vigorously. Daniel watched and smiled. It had been a long time since Roland had gotten to make a new friend.

The old boy could use the attention, he thought to himself.

You talking about him, or yourself? Some other part of his brain replied.

"I'll go upstairs to get the room ready. Roland here will keep you company." Roland heard his name and looked at Daniel briefly over his shoulder, then returned his attention to the far more interesting newcomer.

Daniel headed upstairs, looking down over the banister at the two of them. Briefly, a memory flashed in his mind - his sister skipping to the back door, blonde hair flying behind her, their childhood puppy nipping at her heels. He shook his head and continued upward.

He passed through a hallway adorned with generations of framed photos and portraits of the Mackay clan, only a handful of which Daniel could identify. As he approached the bedrooms, he realized that of course his room was the only room that was even remotely set up to sleep in. He popped his head inside to make sure nothing embarrassing had been left in sight.

His room, as ever, was meticulous. The bed (ridiculously ornate for his purposes) was a large wooden four poster frame - the sheets crisply made. The clothes were folded and put into the large oak dresser. His pens and notebooks were neatly organized on his desk. Only his nightstand, piled with an array of softback books, defied the strict order in which the rest of his room was held. Daniel checked the bathroom next, ensuring there were clean towels.

"Miss-" he caught himself.

"Ash," he called down. "If you'll come upstairs I'll show you where you can sleep tonight.”

 

[WretchRoad]

His gentle care for the dog made her smile.

“Roland will be great company,” she replied as she dropped to her knees, arms open wide to greet the head of fur and bones wobbling toward her. Her enthusiasm was genuine, but part of it was knowing how to endear herself to would-be kind strangers. Her charm was inspired by a need to survive, and showing some love to a man’s dog was often the fastest route toward friendship, however fleeting it might be for her. She made good friends with Roland while Daniel’s footsteps creaked up the stairs.

The look he gave her when she stopped could have broken her heart, so she quietly promised more attention later as she bounded up the steps. “You’re too kind, really. This is incredible of you. If there’s anything I can do..”

She stopped to note the volume of Mackays adorning the walls, briefly recalling the shelves of albums kept in her old family home before dispelling the thought violently and entirely. Inwardly, she chastised herself for even thinking of that place again. She was here, now.

Here happened to be at the threshold of Daniel’s room, where she peered into a space that was worth more than she’d ever made. The bed itself looked like it belonged in some roadside heritage museum or an upscale bed and breakfast, a place not meant for her.

“This is your guest room?”

 

[Knightofsloth707]

Daniel watched her eyes dart around the room, a look of disbelief on her face.

"No -ahem- this is my room," Daniel said, slightly embarrassed now at the ostentatiousness of it. He put up a hand to forestall any protestations about taking his room for the night.

"It's the most comfortable room in the house. I insist." He motioned to an open door in the hallway. "The shower is in here if you feel like washing up."

In the confines of the hallway they stood closer than they had yet. She smelled of rain and churned earth, along with the distinct scent of feminine sweat - a sweet and musky odor that Daniel hadn't encountered in years.

Not since Justine in that hotel room in New Orleans. The memory played behind his eyes.

Her legs straddling him. The ceiling fan circling languidly above them. Beads of sweat on her forehead as she braced herself against his chest with her hands and rocked her hips against him.

He snapped back to the here and now, his heart racing a little faster than it had before.