fragments (one day in the woods) part I

Part I
I can rename it into “LOST”… it would give away too much. Ops, I just did, although there is much more to find….

It was the fifth day of the hunting season, and it was the fifth day for George to go in the woods, away from the house and his morning coffee that was the preferable routine, cup of a black, hot and strong coffee, the way to start the day, anytime his life would permit it. It was his blissful fifth day away from the kitchen soaked by the scent of a cinnamon mixed with bleach, although, the bleach was more of his imagination. The sterile cleanliness of the place, one could hardly call a kitchen, it could only be compared to the operating room just before the surgery. That spotless cleanliness nauseated him by evoking in his mind the smell of antiseptics and bleach. And every morning in his kitchen would bring the memories of nightmarish scents of the hospital room equipped with shiny, unfamiliar and familiar objects; one may think of tools that you can use to cut small branches. With this in mind, George felt a slight pulling sensation, not a painful but not a pleasant one either, in his chest, over his breast bone that was cut open about a year ago on real short notice, before the anesthetics had a chance to circulate up to that part of his body, by the surgeon, skillful, young woman, who repaired his heart, that was not wounded by a fat diet, smoking or any other pleasurable lazy activities that the lucky bastards indulge for decades, but shrapnel: hot, heavy and deadly. He keeps it as a souvenir. No, he likes to think of it as a trophy, a small fingernail from the bony hand that was squeezing the last drops of life out of him, but the lady-doctor won the battle.
Those days, excursions in the woods, were filled with a sense of purpose and routine, qualities, he learned for years and years in the military, even so the purpose and routine of his post army life felt artificial and fake. This winter he hit his Golden Age and was retired. The time, he had dreamed of so often, turned to be far from his expectations, filled with his friends and relatives and mostly with his wife Marta, the woman of his dreams, whom he was deeply in love with. They had the three children together. Today she remained the same, as years ago: sweet, innocent and naïve, the qualities he used to like. But those years changed him many times over and over, and she was the same, a stranger now, more, she was an annoying stranger. The thought he hated to have in his mind, but, at the same time, he was not able to get rid of.
And if he would say that he finally was happy to be home and have a peaceful night of sleep, without being awakened by shooting or explosions or being ready to wake up every minute due to some other crisis, he would be lying, because he was miserable. The idle peacefulness of those nights did not give him a chance to fall asleep. The memories of past events would run in circles in his exhausted mind, holding each other hands, dragging him inside of that circle, blindfolding, spinning, dragging him into the endless dance of insanity, until his consciousness would give up and drop him into a vale of darkness, like a rock from the cliff, and as soon as he hit the bottom, he would be awakened again and again, countless times over the course of night. Every night, in the middle, he would stop awaking Martha, he would go to the library and finish there, what most of the people call night, and he called it wrestling with the night.
They have a name for this condition, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder; they have all kinds of therapies, medications and groups for it. But George, being a loner at heart, had a different means to deal with his emotional and social wounds and problems. He had to be alone. In those times, he saw himself as a wounded animal who needed to find sanctuary somewhere in a cave, hide there from the world and lick his wounds, until they healed.
Today he left the house quietly and early, way before daybreak, not to wake up Martha. Any time he would leave the house, she would give him a look that would ruin his day with feeling of guilt and frustration.
The darkness of the night was broken by the light of the still invisible sun that was hiding below the horizon, somewhere in the deep waters of the ocean or in the dark valleys of the mountains.
The street light, outside of the house, usually, when George would take his dog for the last stroll of the day, around midnight, would cast long dark shadows. Today, the shadow was grayish in color and insignificantly small, maybe up to his knee if he would have measured it, a baby shadow, but nevertheless, it was tightly attached to George’s boots and followed him all the way down to the car and in the moment he closed the car door behind, the shadow split free and crawled under the car, or maybe lurked for a ride in the comfort of a dark trunk.
He liked this time of the day. The road was almost deserted. He was driving to the East and the sun met him half way through. At first it was just a red stripe slightly above the horizon and growing in size the stripe was swelling into roundness until it finally rolled over: perfect circle, bloody-red and apocalyptically majestic. As soon as it broke with the land, it had turned into a yellow giant that was quickly decreasing in size and increasing in intensity, blinding George’s eyes. He put his sunglasses on, blocking the brightness of a new day.
The sun was sailing through the deep, blue sky when he parked his car on the side of the road by the hill, they call it mountain… he silently smiled at this thought. The last two years of his military career, he spent in northern Afghanistan. He chuckled again, muttering softly and rolling his eyes up… ”mountain”.
He pulled his back pack from the passenger seat of his car, double checked its contents, put his hands through the straps, felt its heaviness comfortably on his back. Then he bent over, tied his boots on double knot. He noticed an army of ants’ crossing over the trail, marching in harmony, one after another and disappearing under the rotten bark of an old three on the other side. He sighed, straightened his back, opened the trunk of the car, reached for his binoculars, hung them over his neck and lastly, he reached for his riffle, picked it up carefully and gently, slung it over his right shoulder and started walking.
The fresh morning air, saturated with early fall and the forest, flown into his lungs, circulated through his blood stream, sipped into every cell of his body, bounced there from wall to wall, made him light. George felt that gravity had lost its deadly grip on him; it made him childishly happy: the heaviness of his past and uncertainty of his future had disappeared.
The sound of a broken branch high up to his right, made him to turn his head and he saw a squirrel dropping down from the top of the pine tree, bouncing from branch to branch like a brown balloon, filled with water. She broke her fall by grabbing on the lower branch and was sitting there …. She looked in George’s direction, intruder that startled her and broke the balance of the forest. As much as he welcomed this morning and those woods he sensed that he was not welcome here.
In a mile or so he broke of the trail and was walking in the direction that was pleasing his sight and his feet, changing the angle frequently to avoid thick shrub or other usual obstacles of the forest. He was trailing, feeling the incline of the hill, and it was all he wanted to do, just go up, following a general direction.
He walked slowly and quietly; he looked attentively under his feet avoiding breaking the natural silence of the woods by stepping on dry branch. And every time he did, the woods become still for a second, listening to the noise as of determining what had made that noise and how dangerous that “what” was.
In a few hours of hiking George felt thirsty and tired; he decided to take a little break. He opened his back pack, drank some water, put the back pack on the ground and leaned against it, looking at a pale blue sky of the afternoon with occasional curly clouds slowly rolling toward the North. He felt relaxed and tired and decided to let it go and doze off.
A faint sound, unnatural, alien to the forest, woke him up. He was listening without opening his eyes or made the slightest movement. Someone was crying and that someone was female or a child, he determined it by the pitch of the voice. The sound was fainting away, stopped, the silence was restored for a few moments and then, the sob started again as if the person forced that cry out. George opened his eyes, carefully packed his back pack and silently walked into the direction of the sound. It took him a few steps to reach the clearing of the meadow, he stood there hiding behind the tree and looked. As he lifted the binoculars to his eyes the young woman appeared within reach of his hand.
She was sitting on a large stone, with her knees up and embraced by her arms, fingers both of her hands were enmeshed and tightly held her in that position. Her head rested on her knees, tilted to her left and her hair long and tangled, color of gray sand were reaching her toes while the wind blew it in all directions, like tall grass with roots up in the air. She was alone. George did not detect any other items, except her shoes, that were placed neatly on the ground. Those shoes told him that she did not leave her house for a hike in the woods, perhaps for a stroll in the city. He was stroked by indecision. He could not just walk away, what if she is lost, injured, thirsty or hungry. But on the other hand, her presence had disturbed the flow of his day; her presence was unwelcome in his life, unaccounted for. He just stood there waiting for a sign or miracle to happen to save his day.
And, sometimes, when you ask for a miracle it will be given, and as many would say, be careful what you wish for. But George skipped the second part of that thought, when he saw a man walking from the woods in her direction. He was ready to walk away with relief but then not knowing why, he paused, waited for a moment, still holding the binoculars to his eyes.