Swell Zine: Drift

Sheri rubbed her lips as if she were tasting some exotic flavor she couldn't quite identify. Head bent, she stepped back, the sharp green she originally thought was slithering under the leaves now still in that way that no living thing can be, even when it's dead.

"Dan?" She looked up, scanning the gentle slope of the hillside, blinded briefly as the low slung sun beamed through the gently sweeping branches of the trees along the edge of the pasture. She took another step, catching her breath as she heard a snapping sound underfoot.

This time she twisted around, her gaze soaking in the leafy cover underfoot. Fall had come early this year, and leaves from the surrounding trees banked here like drifted snow. Only this drift was not the freshness of cold white rebirth but rather the seeping brown stain of decay.

She gently toed the leaves with the tip of her shoe, pushing off the dry brittle top to expose first the damp rotting layer beneath and then the unmistakable yellow streaks of grass too long without the sun. She let out the breath she hadn't realized she was holding, stepping more firmly now, ready to be the flake of snow or fallen leaf that gets blown past the temporary drift upon which it has snagged. SNAP. SNAP-SNAP. Glints of white popped through the leafy cover with each sharp crunch. This time she screamed.

From the creek, Sheri looked farther away than she really was, a vertical line in glaring contrast to the series of horizontal ridges cutting across the hillside. Dan tired to imagine these worn remnants of terraces covered in strawberries, perhaps as many years ago as he and Sheri were old. The realtor had said that the farm had once been a haven for berries and trees and wildlife after local farmers and lumberers began stripping the land to prepare more room for crops.

In some ways, the farm was a local anomaly, a hundred and fifty acres of forest interrupted only by wide pastures and a snake of a dirt road that lead to the old brick farmhouse now falling into ruin. Only hours before, Dan and Sheri had signed the final papers that made this farm their own. Their haven. Unlike their new neighbors, they would gladly welcome the gnarled underbrush of blackberries and raspberries, sharp thorns keeping all out as if the farm were actually torn from the page of a fairytale. Far better than their previous world of wrought iron fences and chirping car alarms and the incessant sparks and fizzes of the el train passing close.

Though they had examined the farmhouse before closing, how does one find an inspector for land? So they had bought, largely sight unseen, the rolling hills of bent trees. For hours they had celebrated their purchase by carrying a packed lunch currently strapped on Dan's back, a bottle of champagne slowly giving up its chill by wet osmosis to the surrounding backpack.

Each time, hunger had been stayed by Sheri's "just over the next rise" as they wandered the woods. Lunchtime had nearly become dinnertime, and they had ended up here, a strange clearing that appeared nowhere on the survey map nor in the property's description, an eerie silence interrupted only by Sheri's cry.

To Dan, Sheri seemed to be jumping around, raising her feet, taking long strides as though to straddle some great beast, doing some sort of dance with no partner. He climbed the hill towards her with barely audible grunts; earlier he would have sprinted up the hill, but now he was exhausted and hungry and beginning to wonder how long it would take to get back to their car.

How much easier and much more fun these slight rises would be if one were riding down them on a sled or, Dan thought, the hood of a car - wasn't that what country folk did for sleds? Barely winded but aching everywhere, Dan paused as Sheri put up her hands to keep him from coming closer.

After calling him all the way up there, she had made him stop about twenty feet away. He let out his breath a little louder than he had meant, and Sheri shot him one of her infamous glances.

"Be careful. I think they're bones." She was calmer now, no longer afraid of some great slithering mass under the leaves but recognizing the remains of something much more real than her nightmares. Dan walked gently towards her, testing the ground with a stick.

Like archaeologists in Egypt, they swept away the leaves in little strokes as if clearing away wet and heavy sand that has stuck to everything. Eventually they bared the bleached bones of some great four-legged beast, a strip of bright green neon haltered around its skull.

Dan let his knees rest on the ground, the musty moisture bleeding into his jeans while he studied the skull. It unnerved him, but he refused to let Sheri see his discomfort. She crouched across the flattened skeleton from him, a great three-dimensional living fetus carried in its dead two-dimensional womb. He imagined the absent skin and hide stretched over her, her size and weight a constant back-breaking pain for the animal, falling here after giving up all hope of expelling her.

"Horse." His voice sounded as wet and dark as the leaves piled to the side. Like a force of nature, the two of them had created their own drifts.

"Wouldn't someone have known? It has a halter, for god's sake. Wouldn't someone have buried it?" Instead the horse had been left to decay, exposed to the sun and wind and rain, not even in the shallowest of graves, until finally the fall had brought some cover, blown across and caught in the bones as if they were a drift fence.

She was fretting now, he could see it. How quickly their celebration had turned into something to fear, their haven no longer an escape but another mystery for her to torment not just herself but him over. His visions of finding peace in the country burned away in the evening sun like the fog would in the late morning.

He stood up, looking down at her form crouched next to the skeleton. The champagne bottle felt heavy in his pack. He needed to lighten the load.

Raised in rural Appalachia, Josef Steiff is an independent filmmaker and writer currently living in Chicago. He most recently published The Complete Idiot's Guide to Independent Filmmaking and performed live in the critically acclaimed solo show, Golden Corral. His latest film, "Wiped Clean," will screen in late October at Chicago Filmmakers as part of the Split Pillow collaborative feature film project, Soulmaid.