All Alone at the End of McNiven Rd

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Faerie Road

A peculiar path wound through the fields behind Beaugenveu Estate. It was a long path that no one ever walked for fear of never walking back. Despite never being used, the grass on the path was always cut while the grass surrounding it grew vigorously. As was the way of Faerie roads.

The youngest Beaugenveu daughter, Alice, had grown up hearing horror stories about the Faerie road. She used to watch the path from her bedroom window night after night and wonder if what her nanny said was true. This sort of thinking was what drove Alice to walk the path one sunny, Sunday afternoon, and her cousin was either stupid enough or courageous enough to go with her.

"This is it?" Lena sighed. "I thought it would be more impressive."

"This is it," Alice confirmed. Lena gave it another disapproving look. Doubt crept up Alice's spine the longer Lena stared. "Come on. Staring doesn't do anything," she said, stepping onto the path. Lena was quick to follow.

High tendrils of grass swayed around the path like a green ocean. Like gleaming golden rays of sunlight, dandelions stood out against the green. The air of unease that had surrounded them slipped away with each step as the house grew smaller and smaller, leaving them smiling and laughing. Everyone was wrong; there was nothing scary about the path. Nothing at all.

The path stopped where the old family cemetery began. Both stared at the ancient iron gate for many moments before Alice spoke. "Let's have a look around," she breathed. Lena shrugged.

The cemetery was small with crumbling graves. "No one's been buried here since the path appeared," Alice whispered. "Said it was too dangerous."

They danced around gaping holes and fallen stones before coming to the center of the cemetery. A large brush cropped out of the ground and loomed over their heads. They stopped and stared at it for several moments.

"It looks like you can go inside," breathed Lena. A small fissure, more open in some places than others, ran between the two bushes. Beyond was darkness.

Alice nudged Lena in the back. "Go on then," she said. Lena stared at the gap, hesitant. "What are you waiting for? An invitation?" Alice laughed. Her cousin's mocking was not something Lena would put up with, so she brushed away the thoughts of danger beginning to cloud her mind and stepped into the bush.

Alice followed close behind and the two girls spread out in the small area. "How very mysterious," Alice laughed, looking around. Lena glanced around as well but her eyes stopped as they landed on a gentleman kneeling before a gravestone. "Do you think faerie-"

"Alice," Lena hissed. Alice quieted and turned to see what had disturbed her cousin. Her eyes quickly found the gentleman. He was watching them with eyes the color of silver and hair a glowing gold.

"Miladies," he greeted, slowly standing, brushing dirt off his opulent clothing. The unease Lena had felt before stepping in the bush washed over her again. There was something dangerous and also delightful about him. Lena wasn't sure which scared her most.

"I'm sorry, we'll leave." Lena grabbed Alice's wrist but her cousin wouldn't move. She was staring at the man as if he was the only thing in the world.

"You needn't." A shiver of terror raced down Lena's spine, and she tugged on Alice.

"We have to go." Alice didn't budge.

"In fact," continued the man. "I was just looking for a partner. I was on my way to a ball at my brother's kingdom." He smiled at Alice. "Do you like to dance?" A smile broke across Alice's face.

"Yes," she breathed, stepping towards him.

"Then come with me." He offered a hand and Lena pulled back on Alice, terror fully consuming her now. Alice kept walking, reaching for the man's hand. Lena felt her fingers slip from her cousin's arm, and she fought for grip. As Alice's fingers wrapped around his, she disappeared. Lena stared at where her cousin had just been standing with wide eyes.

"Would you like to come to the ball too?" the man asked Lena. His charm did not fight through her fear, and she whirled, tripping out of the bush.

Lena raced back to the path. Her pounding feet matched the frantic beating of her heart. Alice was gone, captured by a faerie. The path was just as dangerous as the stories said.

Clouds gathered with alarming speed and lightning shattered the sky. Rain began to fall in torrents and the world blurred until Lena didn't know up from down. She pushed forward, unsure of where she was, or where the path was, but determined to keep going.

Suddenly the rain dropped away as a canopy of leaves sheltered her. The forest unveiled itself around her, dark and foreboding. Lena jogged slowly down a random path, her waterlogged skirts weighing her down. She needed to get back to the estate, to tell Uncle Pete that Alice had disappeared, to send people out to find her. Could anyone be rescued from a faerie, though?

The forest was unfamiliar territory and somewhere in her heart, Lena knew she was hopelessly lost. She wouldn't let that seep into her mind, though. There was hope somewhere. There had to be.

A stick snapped behind her, and she whirled. She couldn't see anything through the murky light of the forest. Lena started on when a growl rumbled behind her. Again, nothing revealed itself to her. Lena remembered the hunt's master talking about wolves that lived in the forest. The thought continued to fuel her fear.

As if on cue, a giant wolf lunged from the shadows. Lena reeled back, screaming. Two other wolves followed the first. They slowly began to circle her. Ragged sobs began to rip from Lena's throat. She was going to die, in the middle of a forest, no one knowing where she was. She closed her eyes and waited for their attack.

Silence filled the forest clearing and Lean slowly gathered the courage to open her eyes. The wolves were gone. Lena felt her legs give out, and she hit the ground. Hopelessness filled her and she sobbed.

As she sat there, a hand patted her on the shoulder. "The ball would be much more fun than this." She looked up, finding the faerie man behind her. Lena nodded despite herself. "Come with me."

Written by: Cameron Mitchell

Photograph by: Kyle Hemmings

Life is a Winding Road

On a backcountry road, the hills make my stomach go up and down, and realize that's how my life’s been for the past seventeen years. My life has always been a colorful catastrophe. I can hear my parent’s voices in my head, always trying to tell me what to do with my life. My mom’s voice--Turn your life around. Make something of yourself! You know what you are? You’re my biggest regret. I sit at a stop light, and in that flash second of the light turning from red to green, I realize I have the biggest decision to make. I can turn around right now and go home without anyone noticing I am gone, or I can go straight, down the path I choose for myself.

I am trying to decide, when I hear someone honk and say, “Come on lady! Move your car!”

I yell back, “Give me a minute! I haven't decided!”

“I don't care, just drive,” he says. Do I drive or let him go around me? Is this a sign that I should just go? I step on the gas.

It’s been three hours. I wonder if my parents will notice that I am gone, or even care. The voice in my head replays the argument my mother and I had before I left.

“Are you ever going to become an adult?”

“Are you ever going to become an adult role model I can look up to?”

What would it be like if there were auditions for adulthood? You could either have a call back or not make the cut, which would mean you would have to wait for another production of “life.” I probably won’t make the cut, because my mom didn’t rehearse the lines with me. If I tried to explain my relationship with my mom, it would sound like a cliché lifetime movie. My mother and I have a love/hate relationship: she tries to love me more and I try to hate her less.

Sure, my mom and I have had three or four mother-daughter moments.There was one time we went on a really fast roller coaster to the point where I thought we were going to be sick. In the end, we did get sick, but it was worth it. Another time on a family vacation, we went swimming in the ocean, and came out with seaweed all of over us. But all of that was before she found out that I was going to be the biggest disappointment in her life.

My dad and I don’t really talk. I think I make him uncomfortable. I don’t think he knows what to say to me or how to deal with me when I get myself into what they like to call an "anxiety headache situation." Whereas I like to call it "enjoying my youth," they interpret my every move as proof I don't give a damn about what I do with my life. But they don’t know the real me. I am very organized and responsible when it comes to school--all my binders are on point. When it comes to my boyfriend, Jess, I make sure I make time for him, but not so much that I get behind and stray from my academic studies. I make sure all my college apps are in on time, and I still manage to make time to relax without stressing too much about my grades. But they don’t think I am responsible in my studies, because I am not bringing home the grades they want to see, and I don’t compare to their expectations. So she makes subtle comments that make me feel like shit.

My mom has always told me she would be proud of me in anything I do ... as long as I come home on the honors list and get into an Ivy League school. They always wanted me to be the perfect child who they could brag about to all their friends. Some people might think my parents just want more for me than they had in their own lives, but they had everything. They graduated from Cornell and became well-known lawyers. The day I come home with an acceptance letter from Dartmouth, they will be proud to call me their daughter, but until then, it’s like they’ve disowned me.

When I was growing up, I would see my friend's parents tell them they loved them or hug them goodbye on their first day of school. I’ve never heard my mother or father say "I love you," not to each other or to me. On my first day of school, they wouldn’t even walk me inside. They told me they had to get to work and I would have to go in alone and, "have a good day, see you at 2:30." I was like, "Okay great, I'm only in kindergarten, but I guess I will try to figure out when 2:30 is."

I get so jealous of my friends and their families, talking about stuff they did in school and actually being interested in each other's lives. When my friends come over for dinner, my parents interrogate them about their futures and then make disappointed comments..

Once my friend Julie was over, and my dad says, “Julie, have you started thinking about where you want to go to college, or what you want to do when you graduate?”

Julie says, “I haven’t given it much thought...maybe doing some courses online and then traveling the world a little bit.”

My mom chimes in, “That’s what you want to do with your life?”

Julie’s face turns bright red and she says, “Well, yeah. My parents think it’s okay.”

Under my breath I say, “Wish I knew what that felt like.”

My parents roll their eyes and say, “Stop being so dramatic.”

I stop and grab some gas before I keep driving. I turn around to grab my wallet and see my small carry-on bag on the back seat, with not many clothes in it and not many toiletries. I had to pack lightly, because I needed to leave quickly this morning. Even though I ran away and don’t know what I am going to do, all I know is that there is no way in hell I am ever returning to that place I used to call my home. The day I packed my things, grabbed the car keys, and drove was the best day in my entire life.


Written by: Jen Meltzer
Photograph by: Fabrice Poussin

Border Road

The end of the world is near.

We are driving southbound on I-80 toward Bisbee, Arizona. My husband Matt drives while my parents and I stare silently out the windows. Matt and I moved to Tucson nine months ago from Portland, Oregon, and my Seattle-ite parents are our first visitors from the homeland. They watch the miles of desert flit past with wonder, asking me the same questions I used to ask them about the mountains and trees as a child. What kind of cactus is that? Why do they only grow on hillsides? How much rain falls? Are we close to Mexico yet?

“In Bisbee, we’ll be twenty minutes from the border,” Matt tells us. He points to the hills in the distance, hunched lower than the Pacific Northwest crags that wallpaper my memories of all life before now. These are rounder, sparser, taking the hottest and coldest temperatures the earth is capable of churning in stride. “I know I’ve gotten calls from the truck out here before.”

This is the reason we’re here. Matt’s company creates mobile surveillance units for the government, used to watch the drug-runners skittering through the nothingness. The invisible line in the Sonoran sand separating America from Mexico, comes into focus when you are close enough to touch it. The hills, the dust, the agave, the sunsets flamboyant enough to put neon to shame, they don’t end where we drew the line.

We pass the gaping Lavender Pit mine across from old Bisbee, which folds like steps to the bottom of the earth. The day before our Bisbee trip we walked through the Tucson Desert Museum’s Ancient Arizona exhibit, with a wall of alien minerals glowing in the almost-dark. Blocky chunks of malachite, like coral from an otherworldly sea; wulfenite, an amber cluster that looked like butterscotch shards; and alcoves of azurite that were like gazing into an alien cave. I imagine each piece carried up the steps, wonders one by one stripped from their home, leaving nothing but dusty ledges and a pit no one felt inclined to fill. A blue road sign tags the crater’s mouth as a “Roadside Viewpoint.”

Around the corner, the GPS throws up her hands. “Due to insufficient data, navigation has been lost,” she tells us.

Fortunately the town is miniature, and our destination appears through the road’s next bend. A smattering of tent canopies in a block-sized park making up the local farmer’s market. Unlike the superstar farmer’s markets I left behind in Portland, the ones crammed with Food Network featurette food trucks and famous chef demonstrations and corporate “artisan” bread overlords, most of these booths didn’t even have signs. The fancier professionals broke out some poster board and Sharpies to announce their Gluten Free-ness to the passers-by, but most let their tabletop wares seduce alone. Olives cured in local oil, sourdough breads studded with jalapenos and goat cheese, tortillas so warm and puffy they seem to hover. While I am mesmerized by steaming bundles of fresh tamales, my dad wanders over to a man and a woman I assume to be his elderly mother. They sit next to a grill crammed with golden bundles.

“Chile rellenos,” Dad says, and I know he has won the Find of the Day game. He offers me a bite, and the kerchiefed woman’s eyes light up as mine roll back in my head.

“This is the best thing I can remember eating,” I tell her, and she grins twenty years off her face. I want to follow her away, to learn how to make just, exactly, this. I’m dying to discover whatever magic exists to make the batter so light and yet crunchy, the chile pepper snap, the cheese to ooze without gushing. But the world for me ends twenty minutes away.

“I could get a passport,” I’ve told Matt a half-dozen times. With each mention he gives me a look I can read with eight-years-together couple telepathy. We’re not going to Mexico; it’s not South America Disneyland. He thinks I expect to be serenaded by mariachi down curls of brick street unfurling into piazzas full of piñatas and flamenco dancers. I want to refute the image, to tell him that I know that Mexico isn’t a cartoon playland with chile peppers. But in his mind, my desire to visit is proof enough that I don’t understand what’s at the end of the Arizona highway at all. This is the view of a man who watches criminals smuggling into hills, who has heard every horror story the border patrol agents are at liberty to share. It is the Mexico of news snippets and grainy indie films, of machete executions and white slavery.

And then there are my co-workers and new neighbors, the ones who talk about having to head down to Chihuahua or Sonora on the weekend for a niece’s quinceañera or a grandmother’s 94th birthday party, the concept of driving south as breezy as heading a couple hours north to Phoenix. They are not kidnapped and beheaded upon arrival. They aren’t thrown in jail as bribes are wired back home.

“That’s because they’re Mexican,” Matt reminds me. “And you’re not.”

Then suddenly, my insurmountable boundary makes sense. After all, the U.S. doesn’t open its gates for curiosity. People aren’t welcomed over here to sample local cuisine, take selfies next to road signs, poke around at the art. I have a place; I need to know what it is. I need to stay on my side. The road isn’t pavement. It is contradiction and friction and complication and politic and personal, and I am incapable of understanding.

I drop the subject, but then when I’m alone with my no-judgment laptop, I set Google Earth on our house in Tucson. I grab the screen with the little cursor hand, and drag the map down, down, through whole blank screens of desert, until I reach the United States-Mexico thick gray line. I reach down, where the streets turn into calles. There is a grocery store. A fire station. Tons of dentist offices. Gourmet coffee café. Cities, people, lives further down the stretch, across the line in the sand.

Written by: Tabitha Blankenbiller
Photograph by: Emily Blincoe