Rearing Back

Rearing Back 

There should be no question as to why documenting the numbers became her game of choice, as it was the tumbling of the Dow that sparked the move, and the migration they and many of their neighbors took in its wake had created a momentary dip in the town’s population, which Justine had fastidiously tracked in the time since they’d relocated to the Midwest in the summer of 2008. 

It was in the hope that everything would be quite undisturbed when they returned that the Austin’s youngest daughter had made a study of Folds; the town’s population, how many old haunts had shut down and how many new businesses had opened up. She would be found in the computer room after school, typing “Folds number of people” into the search engine, eating powdered donuts bought from the gas station next to her elementary school and invariably getting the powder all over the keyboard. (Her older sister protested this activity until her parents finally relented and gave her a laptop, which she immediately broke by spilling nail polish over the keyboard. She was then given a new laptop, which she dropped a month later, was given another, and then, for unrelated reasons, was kicked out of the house, bringing her laptop with her.) 

What worried Justine was a change similar to the refashioning of signage and branding symbols in restaurants and retail chains - fixing over aged material with varnish and plastic, introducing sleekend logos and waxen reinforcements, the scouring enemy of nostalgia. A declining figure did not concern her – she wasn't afraid of people leaving so much as she was afraid of others coming in and corrupting the scene as she’d left it – but when the number would rise, she would be in agony, her spirit buckling underneath the monstrous weight of change. 

Justine continued monitoring Folds, gambling her peace of mind on its post-recession rise and growth, even when the stacking of the years made it clear that her family was never moving back. This fact remained unspoken, as her parents knew that their youngest daughter would never accept it.

___

What quickly became clear was how inferior her new home was to the town she’d left. She relayed as much to her Aunt, who was driving her back home after a tour of a private middle school that she very much did not want to attend, as sports were mandatory and the school as decidedly not in Folds:

 While the bustle of the city could be heard even from the suburbs, Folds was blanketed in forest and silence, especially as they had lived in those nice neighborhoods far away from the highways. There were too many people in the city, the car rides were too long and the sky had a layer of smog in the horizon and was cut off by the brown, sterile foothills that loomed in the distance – unlike Folds, where the sky went on forever and was a perfect blue all the way up and all the way down. Not only that, but she could hardly bear to call her new house a home, because it was not home and would never be home, for who in the world could make a home in a place like this?

Her aunt, a jaded and angry woman, found the jadedness and anger in her niece accosting, and silenced her with a line or two about ungratefulness. 

Justine said no more, but did not agree that she was ungrateful – she had no doubt her aunt would understand her if she too had lived in Folds and was forced to depart. In fact, Justine felt sorry for her, as surely it was living in this nightmare of a city that caused her aunt to be such a disagreeable person, and to remain in such a place must be due to some sort of Stockholm syndrome. 

––

Her family never visited Folds. 

Justine had learned to play hide-and-seek with her pain rather than indulge it – never loving the city, but neglecting to continuously tally all the ways she resented it. Years passed. 

New neuroses appeared, fortifying themselves unfettered and unchecked, as they were the result of numerous inner movements, and arose into her landscape as mountains upon shifting tectonic plates until they looked exactly like the truth. 

Her excitement upon getting her driver’s license was tempered by intrusive thoughts of car crashes while driving on highways. She was afraid to eat poultry and lettuce due to potential E. coli contamination. She was convinced every new friend she made secretly hated her, so she always pleased them and was never a bother. She was afraid her natural scent was a bad odor, so she showered before school and after school, and sometimes again at night. 

Her parents were relieved when she stopped her spiraling monologues about the town, not realizing that she had brought the subject inside herself and let it continue unheard. 

__

It was her junior year of high school when her mother told her that their old friends Eileen and Jonathan Baumann had invited them to visit their home in Folds; as her mother needed to supervise the bathroom renovation in the condo she purchased with the divorce alimony, Justine was free to go alone. Happily she accepted, even though last time she’d been at the Baumann’s their oldest son kept loudly complaining that Justine was annoying and eating all of their almond cookies. (He’d apparently moved to Cambodia the previous year following his girlfriend, who then left him for another man, her mother said – Justine knew that this was not a karmic development for his previous treatment of her, but decided to pretend it was).

––––

When she was younger and still under the illusion of the inevitable return, she’d bragged to her playground pals that the town was a volcanic wasteland. There’s a hill in the middle of Folds called the Butte, and it’s an extinct lava dome. That means the hill was created around an extinct volcanic vent – no, it won’t explode. It’s extinct. 

Her Uber now passed through the shaded road beneath the butte. As they turned onto Mulberry Street, she felt the same panic she encountered when her plane landed at the airport; a panic that she could not identify as grief, as it was loosely disguised as disdain – towards the white, boxy new apartment buildings, which were surely fashioned with fake wood floors (there ought to be a law, she thought, against putting synthetic materials on such ancient land); towards the food trucks in the parking lot of the strip mall (the harbingers of hipsters and gentrification); towards the Popeyes next to the strip mall (inevitably built upon the ghost of some local business)… 

Though there was a Popeyes in town growing up – but it was on a different road, she was almost certain of that. 

Bothered by and morbidly curious of everything around her, she texted her sister inquiring where the original Popeyes had been, then looked up the available listings on the apartment building they’d passed to mourn over the exuberant rents that had undoubtedly infested the market. Her sister messaged back:

“Where are u? It was on Mulberry I think.”

Oh. It was that Popeyes. 

She swiped the message away and looked again at the listing. It was $900 for a studio. 

Not bad, actually. 

Another message popped up on the screen. 

“Be safe sis, that street is gecko.”

A moment, then:

“Ghetto.”

On the bottom of the listing were the stats for the apartment: in-unit laundry, dishwasher, listed since February (who moves out in February?), and numbers - previously listed for $800 in 2015, previously listed for $725 in 2013, originally listed for $650 in 2007… 

She double checked the number, then scrolled to the bottom. 

Year built: 2006. 

She closed her phone, embarrassed by her indignation. She hadn’t remembered this apartment complex being there, but she supposed her family didn’t have much business being in this part of town much growing up.

__ 

The three of them sat in the backyard, which was perfectly maintained and gave a perfect view of the sunset, which still smeared the sky with vibrant pastels as it used to. 

Justine found an eager listener in the Baumann's daughter Andie, who was newly thirteen and excited to be the confidant of a high-schooler. Justine had been careful not to ask after her older brother, as she was unsure whether that story was meant for ears beyond her mother’s – not that the conversation had strayed from the topic of Justine’s disappointed expectations since her arrival at the Baumann’s residence only a mile uphill from her childhood home, which she had insisted the Uber driver not pass on the way up. 

Her  usual people-pleasing nature had given way to unbridled lamentations. Eileen had been reluctant to wax nostalgic with Justine and now sat silently near the fire pit. Jonathan was attempting to untangle the chains of the new bird feeder to hoist it onto the branches. 

“This town was tiny when we left. Main Street was empty after sundown, you could ride your bike around the roundabouts and it would be perfectly safe–”

“And there’s going to be more people now,” said Andie. “They’re going to build a campus in Folds–”

“Who is?”

“One of the state schools, I can’t remember which one–”

“Oh my god,” Justine sighed. The disdain she’d been cultivating since her arrival now twisted her face into a pinched expression as she imagined college students flooding into the town, bringing with them the necessity for new housing developments – she could hear the tree felling, the turning over of earth and home–

The ringing Eileen’s cell phone shot through the yard. It was their son – he was on his way back from Cambodia and was calling from the airport. Andie, conscious of Justine’s sudden internal displacement after her mention of the new campus, followed her mother into the kitchen to take the call, leaving Jonathan and Justine alone. 

“Change is scary, huh?” Jonathan had been amused by the young woman’s bewilderment and self-serious nature, but was hoping to engage her enough to resolve some of her despondency before dinnertime. 

Justine nodded. “None of it feels the same anymore. I wish it felt the same.”

“You know that quote?” he asked. “You can go visit the past but you’ll be the only one there.”

“But it isn’t just the people – it’s everything.”

Jonathan nodded in the way one does when they are listening rather than agreeing.

“It’s the new buildings, the new streets– it’s the smell,” Justine continued. “It’s like the air was passed through an air filter. It used to smell so warm here, like wood.”

“Those were the forest fires, Justine. We’d spent that whole decade in a drought. Just about every time one of those afternoon thunderstorms came without enough rain we’d get another one.” 

The chain was untangled. He began to fiddle with it, absentmindedly, looping it around his fingers and into loose slipknots. 

“That year your family left was the worst of the decade. It used to be all green up there,” he said, motioning towards the butte. “When you were really young you used to go up with us on the tandem bike and pick the townsendia’s that grew at the summit.”

He’d accidentally slipped the chain through the opening of the loop twice. When he pulled at it the knot did not release. 

“By the time you all had moved away, the fires had completely cleared the Butte.”

The End