The hum of the highway was a constant in her life. A comfortable sound, really, as it hovered at the threshold of hearing like a mother's heartbeat to a fetus. Sometimes during winter, in the space between the leaf-bare trees, beyond the shoulder of the mountain, she could see the flash as another traveler shunted from one there to another. Could they see her valley? Or did they pass by too quickly?

    She walked along the trail, noting the logarithmic growth of mushrooms in one fen dell and the fern-fiddles further on. Then the path split, one branch going higher and the other looping toward the creek. She followed the upward track. A rabbit darted from a pillar of sunshine into the murky-safe shadows beneath a thicket of berry bushes. Soon, a few days maybe, they would be ripe. Suddenly longing for the sweet-tart flavor, she turned her mind from the possibilities of a next week.

    The May-apples grew further up on the ridge near the notch. The gray tower, which supported the power lines or the highway or both or neither, had its solid feet planted close by. The old folks told tales of when the DOT had negotiated for the rights to use the land. The promised payments had dwindled and disappeared but nobody much cared as long as the talkers had stayed clear as well. The city people brought distrust, fast words and spotless, crisp paper covered with dirty-sounding phrases. The clear cut had filled with briars and brambles, with pine seedlings and oak scrub, and with wildy-weeds drawn to the sunshine and the radiation of high-energy wires.

    The silver-pink tube of highway glittered with a passenger. She half-listened for the whoosh of the transit. From here, on the mountain, each could be heard distinctly above the drone of power. Someone had told her that this highway carried people to the next ocean. Hard to believe someone would seal themselves in a casket, willingly expose their flesh to eemeffs, and be rifled through a bubble-frail straw simply to visit a distant sea when there was one nearer. A week long hike or less, if one's thumb and ankles trimmed the miles by the happenstance of an interested passerby. Her mother had never walked further than the first cargo route before being offered a ride, wherever she'd wanted to go. One transport might go by, with the awful cyclone of its passage lifting lush thick hair like a royal banner, but never two.

    She could remember the taste and feel of brine, and the brutality of sun-baked sand on the feet of her childhood. The endlessly restless but hypnotic sound of waves and the gentle rise and fall of the spaces between the curls. The poppity-pop of the wet sand as sea-dwelling shelled-things scurried to rebury their ghost-pale bodies.

    Her mother had lived there in summer, using her loveliness as net, and sailing back to her snug hidey as autumn stripped the beaches of young men with firm bodies and older men with firm wallets. Brown skinned, gold hair. Brown wallets, gold coins. Exchanged as if in equal value.

    Remembering her small pale hands covered with sand as she intruded where forbidden, and was ignored as if forgotten. Hearing throaty whimpers in candle-lit rooms, shadows twined on the slanted drapes surrounding her bed space. Building symmetrically pleasing stacks of coins, like storing grain, and rubber bands, stretched tight around rolls of bills, snapping from the strain of holding back the winter, holding back the hungry times. Remembering the reordering of her life as they returned to the valley beneath the highway.

    Remembering her mother, with a puzzled frown, at last realizing that fashion changed and her wildy-flower beauty was no longer fresh. The young men no longer worshipped or begged for her smiles and the older ones kept their once-generous wallets tightly closed, and used them like fists. Her mother's youth wilted in the space between one season and the next. The bountiful summers of years past mocked the empty purse of that one. Comfort, like ice cream, melted into sticky memories. They returned in regret to an uncomfortably autumn-colored valley. Hunger and cold moved into the hidey like some opportunistic next of kin, unwelcome but needing no invitation to stay o'er long.

    Her mother's failure found form in the sunken eyes and unremitting cough of her grandmother. The old woman's passing, duly noted in the bible alongside the tally of births, marriages and other deaths, added another mark against them and hastened her mother's change from woman to crone, and began her own from child to maiden.

    Her mother, in desperation, discovered a talent for seeing the subtleness of a person's soul. Welcoming the trickle, then stream, then ocean, of anxious faces seeking arcane answers. Remembering the peace in their eyes as her mother gave them good tidings and her daughter's mood-resting teas. Milky skin, silver-chased hair. Milky fears, silver-crossed palms. Exchanged as if in equal value.

    Again, holding back the winters, this time with the summer people's wealth of fears. They, who measured riches by the weight of a purse, had no inkling of these spaces between, where prosperity was measured in cups of cornmeal and grams of sugar. They, who traveled the highway from city to city and named place to named place, had no thought of how the low anonymous spaces between were crossed. But they found her valley, led by one raggedy between-boy or other.

    Her mother did magic with her words and potent potions for the strangers while the daughter wove sandcastle tales for the boys who, like her, could imagine a thing or two and for whom mere stories were as good as being there. Boys sprung from families who knew the desperation of winter and, thus, blessed the coming of spring. Boys who, when whelped in years past, fell into her grandmother's hands and were given a nod of continued existence for beauty, for straight limbs, for having the right number of the appendages that midwives counted, and for being lucky - born before there were too many mouths in the family to feed. Boys of the between, who would grow into husbands - drunks, wife-beaters, scratch farmers, hunters and guides, wood-workers, artists, and craftsmen - or who would disappear into the wide beyond and, unlike her mother, never return more than once.

    She smiled wordless promises, claiming a place in their hearts. Boys, who grew up and, as young bucks, came sniffing for a lissome doe. Her mother drove them off with threats of curses, and season after season of youthful rut passed her by. The daughter, always possessed of few words, lost the will to argue over time. The grown-to-men boys found their wives and lives in other valleys or on ridges beyond this one.

    Her teas and sachets, tied in painted folds of brown paper, and her mother's readings kept the winter at arm's length. She wore flowers in her hair and read Shakespeare aloud for the amusement of the visitors and her own entertainment, living a life neither hers nor her mother's nor that of any of the people in the space between the cities. She tended the graves of her grandmothers and dug a fresh one when the time came. The people of the between, who would have been a comfort to one of their own, knew her not and had no words of commiseration for the familiar and always silent stranger in their midst.

    She was not her mother, nor her grandmother. Neither the seductress nor the wise woman had gifted their talent to her hands or heart. She knew nothing of usefulness. She'd lived in the shadow of a sunbeam, never casting one of her own.

    She knew paths and trails and the twisting of each. She thought about highways and cargo-ways and wondered if they led true or if they changed as paths did in the space between the years. The road of her mother's life had looped from summer to winter, beach to valley, ever-changing.

    The memory of her mother, now a siren song, had lured her to follow the same road. She, with velvet night hair and feline delicacy, could claim that ageless space, not as a sunbeam made flesh but, instead, a priestess of moonlight. She could have harvested the fruit of summer passion into her gathering basket and held back the ferocious winter.

    The endpoint of that path was too well known for any comfort, so she collected weeds and roots, flowers and leaves, the powerful autumn ingredients for one more tea. In that blend, there would come an answer, if not in the mixing then in the drinking. A bitter full cup in which to end a bitter empty life.

    Whoo-kerchink, crackle, rattle, pop . She looked up. A coffin-shaped carriage emerged from the highway like a discarded watermelon seed from a child's lips. Lines tangled around the pod, slowing its fall. Still, she thought, whoever was within would be badly battered. Breaking free of the wires, it dropped a double score of meters to be buffeted anew by the branches of the forest. It landed on a bank, bounced, and tumbled into the clear-cut, flattening the smaller scrub with the sound of a cargo-carrier.

    Finally, with sunshine flashing from the polished surface, the case slid to a halt and rocked like a cradle brushing the uber-bright flowers. They nodded assurance to her and each other - the spectacle had ended.

    Quiet again. She heard only the crackle of trees easing and rearranging their buffeted limbs and the snap as another blighted sapling was defeated by the weight of the casket. The whistles and chirps of birds, interrupted momentarily by the racket of the ejected traveler, resumed.

    The pod lay like a pearly pill in the palm of the notch. She stood transfixed as if it were she who had fallen from the sky into an unknown world. Another flash in the periphery of her sight, and she cringed, fearing another bullet from the highway. But the smooth accustomed whoosh confirmed what she already knew. Whatever the combinations of power and path, circumstance and timing, the event was a singularity. Nothing more would fall today.

    The dangling cords spat fitfully, the embers dying before kindling. A final sputter showered, and then died completely. Above, at the juncture, a single beacon pulsed. New. A warning? A signal? The DOT would come again.

    She hated the scratchy mutated leaves of the clearing. She shrank from the drooping oddly shaped branches of the irradiated swamp-oak. She wanted nothing more than to turn her face back toward the cool lush natural green valley and her hidey. Each step felt like a scream, drilling into her head and leaving a trail of pain as real as the one her legs bruised through the grotesque tumor bloated grasses.

    The pod, however, smelled unsoiled like the air after a lightning storm. She wondered at the clasps, and then recognized them as complicated versions of the ones on her grandmother's banjo case. Her hands refused her intentions. Unclean. Fearing the welts and terror of the burns of those who ventured too close.

    'No,' she said, startling herself in the spoken word. Turn away. The DOT would deal with the aftermath. Part of the bargain this traveler had made with the highway included this consequence. No business of hers. No cause for her to risk her own life…

    She laughed - a movement not a sound. Having come to the mountain to find a way to end her life, why was she now quibbling at the offer fate had presented?

    The clasps clicked with a sound as final as watch-beetle's warning. The lid, heavy with padding and solid metal, counter-sprung at her touch and lifted as grandly as a tiger lily's striped face rises toward morning. The scent of sleep within escaped with a dreamer's sigh, dizzying her as it wafted, carried away by a mountain rift cross breeze.

    The traveler within his casket was as still as her mother had been in hers. This one: sleek, pink-iridescent, and city-made. That one: rough, sap-stained, and between-hewn. This occupant: dark, dazzling, strangely-clothed in bright colors. Her mother: pale, faded, somberly dressed in her best dress.

    A man, she thought, identifying his physique through the too-snug fit of his pants. No man of the between would wear flutterby colors nor would any advertise the shape and size of his manhood for the casual observer. Most would be content letting that be a matter of conjecture, not a topic of certitude. Some things were better kept as rumor.

    Lifting the passenger was more difficult than raising the lid. The slippery fabric covering the slender arms ran through her grasp like glycerin. Finally desperation drove her to hook her fingers inside the neck hole, touching the too-clean skin intimately, and tug with a fierce, frightened vigor. Her other hand found a similar hold at the waistband. He tumbled to the ground, crushing more of the fell-grown plants. A mumble of objection bubbled forth; the spit-covered syllables popping like snapdragon seedpods.

    She gathered the material of his shirt in both hands, baring his midriff. Dragging him backwards through the clearing, she tried to protect his face and winced at each cruel lash of the vindictive brush. The over-sized thorns caught at his hands, tangled her skirts, seeming to rustle with whispered laughter each time she stumbled or dropped her burden.

    Spatters dripped to his face. Sweat, she thought, not realizing her tears flowed in her frustration. The clear cut, always an evil place, usually avoided, always respected, would not let her go with the windfall in her grasp. It would trip her and cut at her, bind and brutalize, until she gave up or gave in. In every last twisted stem, the niche knew her measure. Never had she persevered in any difficult task. The wily weeds mocked her and spoke in whiskery voices to let it be. 'Go in peace. Brew your teas.' She almost listened. 'Spread your thighs or sell your lies. Leave the outsider to us.'

    Outsider? She, blinking away fiery tears, saw her shadow wavering. When had she stopped? She grabbed his shirt anew, gripped the reins of her own fear even more tightly. Who could be more outside than she? One more step. Free her skirt. One more step. Suck a thorn and spit it out. One more step. One more.

    The cool shade of a pin oak, the shape of the leaves flickering in regular patterns, fell over his face, shoulders and her white-knuckled hands. Abruptly, she realized how far they had come. The boles of normal trees protected them from the brilliance of the sunshine at the foot of the highway pylon, only a rare shimmer penetrated the dusky woods like a wayward and harmless arrow that would spend short of its mark.

    She collapsed, knees trembling, into a pile of last year's leaves. The dust of the ordinary progression of foliage to soil rose in a musty cloud and settled. She felt the individual grains landing, a camouflage, melding her body outline with the forest terrain. She could lie here, she thought, until the appearance became the reality and her bones sank into the loam. How restful.

    Her burden sneezed. The weight in her legs, which she had taken as a lack of willpower to move again, was his torso stretched over them, just as he had landed when she had dropped him. She inched her feet from under him, wondering why she'd been compelled to bring him even this far. The DOT could come and claim him from here.

    With the help of a fallen tree, she regained her balance. Pins and needles stabbed her calves and fingertips as circulation was restored. In each palm, her nails had etched bloody half-moons and on the traveler's shoulders, staining the bright fabric, splotches of red dried to brown. Was it hers, or his? Even in the gloom she saw the rents through his clothing and blood oozing from the hidden scrapes and puncture wounds.

    Up on the peak, a catamount screamed. In the deepening shadows, snuffling and growling, smaller carnivores waited for the moon to draw them forth. The thorns and spines of the clearing would yet have a sacrifice this night. Her effort brought to nothing by the maleficent energy there. She rested her forehead on the deadfall, defeated.

    The bark crumbled and its old-wood smell reminded her of walking these paths as a very young child. Being carried, and then she held a rough hand to climb up a similar log with the bark shifting beneath her toes. Remembered giving names to the trees, as she hid in their branches. She remembered listening to the whispered wisdom and learning patience as her roots entangled in theirs.

    Like spring sap rising, determination crept into her limbs.

    The embrace of tree shadows supported her in the remainder of her journey. Her rekindled resolve lasted until she fell down beside him on a braided rag-rug covering much of the hard plank floor.

    So tired, but her mind wheeled and turned with the space between awake and asleep. The individual strands of the rug felt like welts rising on her cheeks but her finger's truth restrained the rising panic. The last rays of the autumn sun slanted through the still-open door. Quivering, she crawled to her feet and lurched across the room. Latch it, she reminded herself. The night wind would blow it open and welcome the creatures that prowled in that realm. She followed that thought, leaping in the sweet cool of darkness like one of them.

    The traveler laid where he was dropped; where he would stay, she realized, her strength spent getting him off the mountain. Pulling a fresh comforter from the footboard, she draped the supine form. Standing blankly, wondering what she should do next, her mattress, fragrant with petals and crushed pods, beckoned and she stumbled to accept the call. She dragged a quilt from the basket beside the bedstead, buried within and fell headlong into the gaping black maw of her exhaustion.

    She awoke to the sound of retching. The silver gray mist that rose each morning from the creek and, using tree trunks as ladder rungs, crept up the mountainside to seek freedom at the summit, glimmered through the open door. A huddled figure trembled on the porch edge. Wrapping the quilt around her shoulders, she ladled a dipperful of water into a ceramic cup.

    A startled gasp answered her light touch on the stranger's shoulder. Dark brown eyes settled on the cup and he reached out with unsteady hands. Flashing splatters of water escaped the brim. She covered his hand with hers and guided the cup to his chapped lips. He gulped a mouthful, choked as if swallowing were an unlearned skill, and then retched again.

    He curled into a ball in the gray shadow of the morning. She covered him with a fresh coverlet, his other a soiled testimony of his wretchedness. He shivered on the rough planks, hissing like a trapped weasel.

    Three scoops of water went into her iron kettle and then over the coals, which she breathed into rebirth. A mesh ball, filled with herbs, chinked into the ancient porcelain pot. Waiting for the water, she settled into the bentwood rocker.

    The cane seat had stretched to fit the rump of another. The curving contours reminded her that she was neither the gifted healer her grandmother was, nor the soothing seer her mother had been. Still, the steady creak filled the air with a comforting rhythm. Gradually, the traveler stop quivering and his disquiet, finding unison with hers, rocked with the same tempo.

    The sun sent a golden sliver under the eaves to split the gray. It molded around the stranger, falling into the creases and folds of the quilt and licking the hunched shoulders. Without looking, she felt a stray strand light upon her foot. The tiny mote traced a path across the uneven boards, diving into the crevasses, climbing free, and winding around the wood grain, until reaching the fingers, which was all of him that was visible. His hand twitched and she felt the beam tighten around her ankle.

    Fairy string bound. She said the magic rhyme and felt the thread loosen and fall away. When the water boiled she made tea. She tidied the hidey while the brew steeped, curlicues of steam rising from the spout. She breathed the warmth while pouring two cups full. Her spent energy grew with the sweet fragrance. A sip restored more.

    She put the other cup down, next to his hand, which was now bathed in full light. He emerged, like a turtle from its shell, from the covering. An arm followed a hand. His foot to the knee, and then, reluctantly it seemed to her, his spiky-haired head, with a crinkle of his nose, sought fresh air. His eyes avoided her, but found the source of the scent that drew him forth. In a single motion, from compacted to sprawling to sitting upright, he moved. He leaned against one a balustrade and inhaled as if tasting the day.

    He reached for the cup, creating a trembling staccato on the saucer. Over the edge of the cup, in the space between his brow and the rim, he finally looked at her.

    Examining her as she did him. Young, maybe. The age of the city people wasn't worn on their faces. The length and weight of him had fooled her but his movements, jerky and inadvertent, had the mark of injudicious youth in their puppyish ease. His shiny apparel had hooked, soiled and puckered but had held up to the briars and dragging.

    What did he see? She could feel the scratches and grime of her struggle in the clearing. Her body smelled of that same struggle, and her clothing was torn and stained.

    His speech was as abrupt as his recovery. He chattered as if every idea he ever had must be given voice and, in the frenetic gesturing of his hands, given form. He spoke incessantly, asking rhetorical questions and answering them for himself. She learned little in his monologue as he followed through her routine, stumbling over blades of grass and jerking at each unexpected sound. Feeding the chickens and rabbits, bringing in firewood, mixing cornmeal for bread led to a barrage of questions. Even when she curled up to read with the coming of evening, the stranger narrated her activity and paced from the door to the back wall, from the fireplace to the bedstead.

    His quiet, when it came, surprised her, startling her into attentiveness as his noise had not. She had to search for him in the shadows cast by the candle lamp.

    He had slumped against the door. His eyes, dark and crystal-bright, sparkled in the flickering light. He looked at her curiously.

    "Can you speak?"

    "Can you not?" she said, instantly. His direct question, after a day of meaningless queries had caught her off guard and, atypically, words slipped by her tongue-tying reticence.

    Laughing with the same intensity that he'd shown the rest of the day in his babbling, he staggered his legs outward until crouched. He wrapped his arms around his knees and rested his head, still chuckling. Finally, he dropped into a ball and, slowly, collapsed onto his side. "Sometimes," he said. It took a moment for her to recognize an answer in the simple word.

    "Sometimes, me too." she said. He gave another, quieter, snort of amusement.

    She gathered a blanket and pad. As she tucked him in, he smiled.

    "I'll be better tomorrow," he mumbled. Only then did she realize that his behavior was as foreign to him as it was to her. She blew out the candle, and sat in the darkness. She heard tiny moans from the traveler and, as her sight adjusted to the light cast by the red coals in the fireplace, saw tears glittering in his eyes.

    "Are you alone here?" he asked, after a time. He caught the nod of her head, had learned to judge the shape of her silence, or didn't really need an answer for he continued as if she had spoken. "I'm a… I don't like being alone. It's too quiet here."

    He had been about to say afraid, she thought, but had changed his words. Was he as afraid as she of admitting to fear? For some the act of identification eased the emotions but, to her, giving her worry a name meant imbuing a power to fear over her.

    Sometime later, after pushing and pummeling her own concerns into a manageable burden, she spoke into the darkness. "Hear now 'The Tale of the Wayward Wave'," she began. It had been years since she had spun her tales for anyone else's ears but the words pooled in the front of her mind then, like little waterfalls, tumbled from her lips in pleasing cascades of prism-bright phrases.

    The rain began during the night. Autumn rain, serious and solemn. Not the gentle misty showers of spring that made the soil loamy, floating worms up from beneath the ground to where the birds waited with gaping hunger. She remembered dancing in the spray in her short shift, letting the damp folds cling, and then finding fairy circles of mushrooms and making wishes at their centers. As a child she bloomed with the spring, her soul transforming into billowing lightness that banished the dark crawlies that had burrowed there with the uncertainty of winter.

    Not the cacophonic schizophrenic thunderstorms driven out of the sky by the heat of summer, which broke on the mountains like waves, crashing again and again, no one clap identical to any other. She had observed the fury and the glory, as the heavens were rent, from the shelter of her mother's arm across her cheek and chest, curled together in the rocker on the porch. A close strike would glue her nostrils shut, and the hair on her entire body would strive to creep free from its roots. The afterimages flashed and flared in the recesses of her eyes; she could lie in her bed and watch them dance on the eaves.

    The autumn rain fell in sheets, lifted from time to time by the fitful wind, as if the year had squandered its force and was now content to drop the wet burden without fanfare or spectacle. Rivulets cascaded in the gullied paths, and flooded the flatter areas before her hidey. From the door, or the porch, they watched the inundation.

    He followed her with worry in his eyes but, true to his prediction, he spoke more reasonably. The tremor receded from his body, but plagued his hands when he awoke or when he was tired. The sleep gas, he'd explained, had a specific antidote.

    She bathed in the rain barrel, feeling his covert glances across her bare shoulders and back. Her shift, though of good linen, embraced her slight curves as she stood near the fire to dry her hair. His blush, when she looked at him, and the snug pants revealed his thoughts and, embarrassed, the traveler went out to the porch. She heard a splash and a gasp. The water was cold.

    Her mother's ivory handled brush burnished her hair, a hundred strokes to dry it and then a hundred more to tame the tight curls into waves. She wondered if the traveler had drowned, but the right explanation came to her. He had nothing to put on if he had washed his clothes.

    A creaky plank betrayed his presence, and she slipped a comforter through the opening. She took the dripping laundry from his blue-with-cold hands and hung it over the back of the chair. He stood before the fire shivering and gulped the hot tea that she'd made in anticipation of the chill. He wrinkled his nose at the bean soup, but ate all his and part of hers.

    Later, clean, dry and warm, he smiled at her. His look of expectation was an eloquent request. She cleared her throat and said, "Hear now 'The Story of the Third Mouse'." He laughed at the yarn, though she hadn't intended it to be funny. The space between her experiences and his formed a gulf of differences. The parable of both stories had escaped him without his giving chase. No youth of the between would have misunderstood the meaning. No child of the between would have laughed.

    The creek and the yard became one on the second day of rain. She raised the rabbit hutch above the water level with stone and pole. The stranger helped in his awkward manner, more in her way than anything else, until she realized his greater strength and let him wield the lever while she knelt in the mire and fitted the fieldstones more securely. They carried ungrateful chickens to the larger trees and set them in the branches to roost.

    Between them, the pile of exposed firewood was transferred to the relative dryness beside the wall on the leeside of the porch. Even so, the wood was wet through and smoked when added to hearth. The shakes dripped only slightly, but the traveler looked horror-stricken by the invasion of weather into the hidey.

    She heated water and let him worry. It seemed to be an activity he did well. She sliced cornbread and fried the last eggs. She wondered if he'd ever gone hungry, but didn't ask. Tomorrow would introduce him to want, if the rain continued.

    During the night, thunder rumbled through the notch and down her hollow. Cups quaked on their hooks, rattling together. The tin bucket and ladle shivered on the hook. She could see the stranger had crawled closer to her and away from his place near the fire, now huddled beside the bed, watching the roof as the shakes trembled.

    She knew every sound the winds could make in the spaces between the planks, or hissing through the slats, or whistling over the chimney, or shrieking in the tall weeds outside. She had heard the owls' eerie cry, and the catamounts' scream, and the whitetails' grunt, and the squeak of chipmunks and mice under the floor.

    What were the sounds of his world that these startled him so? He felt her regard and turned to look at her. "Should we go out?" he asked, hoarsely. "Will it fall?"

    She shook her head. He gazed awhile longer at the roof, and at the door as it shuddered with the next rumble of thunder.

    "How do you know?"

    "I know." For generations the hidey had sheltered her forbearers; this little show of nature's temper held no danger.

    Her answer seemed to settle him. He laid his head on the mattress against her drawn up knees and curled his arm in the cove formed by the curve of her. The thunder rumbled now and then, the storm's reminder of continued existence.

    "It's going away," he whispered. She shrugged, knowing the unpredictable patterns would fool anyone's guessing.

    She'd expected it sooner, but evaded his kiss. "No."

    "Why not?"

    "Too many reasons."

    "Give me one."

    "You are a stranger."

    They whispered back and forth with long pauses between. He didn't pursue, and she retreated no further.

    "And I'm too stupid, and from the city, and will leave here sooner or later."

    "Yes."

    He sat up and turned his back on her. "And I talk too much," he said, but smiling.

    "Sometimes."

    He laughed and looked at the fire. She listened to the night. The rain had slowed for the moment. Above the patter she heard a mechanical sound. He would leave sooner.

    She said nothing about the hurlywhirl city machine. It couldn't land anywhere but the clearing and not in this weather. Morning, then, if the storm abated.

    "What is your name?" he asked, suddenly. He had asked before but she hadn't answered, and had rushed to give his in that abrupt and trusting city way. They didn't realize the power of naming, only a word, but defining and capturing a picture of a person. The trouble was the inaccuracy of the snared essence in that moment of name-giving. To her, 'Kale' would forever be the frenetic fool of his first few hours with her but she had learned so much more of him. Could the new knowledge reconcile with that mistaken first impression? Or would 'Kale' need a fresh name.

    If she named herself at this moment, would he think of her as the woman who rejected him, the woman who saved him, or the woman who bathed naked before him? Or would she be the storyteller or a tea-brewing silent specter? Which picture of her was in his imagination at the moment?

    How could she know? Into the firelight, she whispered, "Here now, 'The Tale of the…" He jerked as if burned at the sound of her voice.

    "I don't want one of your stupid stories," he said but, immediately contrite, apologized. "They're not stupid. I like them. But…"

    The traveler clambered to his feet and wandered toward the fire. He watched the logs crumble into coals and added another. Mentally she subtracted the bit of wood from the tally. No matter, she reasoned. Winter would come regardless of the size of her woodpile. She'd already known it was too small.

    "Tell me about you. What is living here like? Tell me your name." He walked back to the bed and sat on the edge. "Tell me…"

    "Hear now, 'The Tale of the Sunbeam's Burden'," she said again. This time he let her speak. His face changed as the story rose and fell, his expressions appropriate to the meaning not just the words. This time she could tell he listened with his heart as well as his ears.

    When she finished, he sat silent. Finally, in stunned awe, he said, "They are all about you." He paused, "Your stories are you."

    She nodded. This time he'd understood.

    He leaned toward her after awhile. This time she welcomed his kiss.

    The birds betrayed the beautiful morning. Their songs and joyful calls lilted through the freshly washed air. She opened her ears without opening her eyes and lay there both regretting and rejoicing the storm's passing.

    "The birds are telling us the rain has stopped." The breath of his statement tickled her ear. She moved a shoulder, almost a shrug. The weight of his arm, and the coziness of his embrace made her loath to move further.

    "They'll come today," he murmured into her hair. He wasn't stupid, either. "Tell me one last story." Her caressed her curves through her shift, and kissed the bare skin above the bodice.

    She gathered her courage to speak. Would his insight of the night before be lost to the morning? Would his partially sated pleasure be as anxious to understand her parable as his completely frustrated desire had been? She waited as the words and phrases conjugated and found a cadence. "Hear now," she whispered, "Listen now, 'The Tale of the Winter That Wasn't'."

    When she finished, he looked puzzled. She slipped from his warmth, dressed in the confused silence, and reheated the tea. Everywhere she turned, he was there with a hug or a touch but no comprehension. The space between their realities was a chasm that he couldn't see across and she couldn't overcome. In her chest, her heart beat. In her brain, her thoughts whirled. In her soul, her resolve hardened.

    She would do this one last thing and see him to the clearing, but then she would find her own path and her story's ending.

    The forest trail, slick with mud and pitted with gullies carved by the rain, required close attention. The traveler cursed the uneven ground. As if it cared for his opinion, she thought. The bright sun of the clearing came as an eye-blinding shock after the shadows beneath the trees.

    He strode out, ignoring her gesture of warning. 'Traveler,' she mused. That would be his name to her. Always moving, always in motion, the word defined him well.

    Traveler stood in the sun, enjoying the heat and the breeze. Gradually, he began to shift from foot to foot, and then he looked up at the tower and highway. He glanced at the uber-flowers and wildy-weeds with a frown.

    He retreated from the clearing and stood beside her. "Poison." His hands brushed his clothing as if that small effort would remove the residue from his skin.

    She nodded and leaned against the tree. Like a June bug trapped in her hair, the buzz of an approaching hurleywhirl distracted her. His head turned toward the notch as the aircraft glittered in the afternoon sky.

    The machine set down like a mutant dragonfly among the transfigured plants. White suited figures dropped from the hatch into the slick grass. One shouted orders, took a post on a high point, and watched while the others used hand tools to measure and examine. A levitation device raised one worker to the highway beacon where a series of adjustments extinguished the pulse. Eventually, the supervisor removed his hood and one by one the other DOTs followed the example. A lone shape, slow in the disembarking process, detached from the group and headed straight for the pink pod.

    Traveler, who had hidden with her in the shadows, gasped and, with his feet struggling to keep up with his head, dashed toward the empty casket.

    She smiled as Traveler almost tripped into the older man's arms. Snatches of conversation carried into the trees but none as words. The DOT supervisor strode down the hill and the three men turned to where she stood in the shadows.

    As they walked toward her, she nearly ran. The space between grew smaller and smaller but, as it did, her sense of the differences grew. They didn't avoid any obstacle, instead tromping weeds, thorny bushes, and saplings down in their passage. Traveler regaled the others with his adventures in her valley. He had explained how the rabbit hutch had been lifted and said something about the stupidity of chickens when they stopped before her.

    "Is this your land?" the official demanded. He released some small device from his belt, and waved it around her. "Radiation is dangerous. Why weren't we informed?" His voice droned on with a list of symptoms that he wanted her to confirm or deny. She did neither, simply bowing her head and let the noise wash over her like the crash of waves. She awaited a quiet space in his soliloquy, an eventual pause or thought.

    Finally, he turned to Traveler and asked, "Can she speak?"

    Traveler grinned. "Sometimes." Her hair hid a smile.

    "I have a question for you. When was the last time Trans-Con did line checking up here?" the older man spoke. Traveler's father, she judged, by his appearance and affectionate demeanor.

    Traveler added, "When was the last time your company paid usage fees on this land? She has a complaint. No compensation and unattended radiation leaks."

    She listened to his clever words as Traveler, and his father, wove a web of ever-tighter ties around the supervisor. Finally, Traveler spoke of the hardships of winter and the empty shelves of her pantry. He described the inadequacy of her wood stock and the trials of the between. He bemoaned the potentially preventable deaths of her mother and grandmother. She listened to his story of her life in wonderment.

    The supervisor interrupted and returned to the hurleywhirl to fetch a form. Traveler's father followed, arguing and cajoling.

    With eyes closed and the tree supporting her, she felt life flow into her numbed limbs. She hadn't realized how far she had retreated from her feelings until one breath stuck in her throat, thistle-shaped, and would not be swallowed.

    Traveler whispered into her ear, "You will not have a winter that wasn't. I won't let that tale be true."

    Even a shrug would have cost her too much pain - to vocalize sensibly from the swirls and whirls within her could not be done. He'd never needed her questions before, however, and didn't need them now.

    "I've seen you shredded and dirty, muddy and tired, fresh and shy, caring and distant. I've seen you by firelight, candlelight, moonlight, and sunshine. I've seen you fearful, and disgusted, and laughing. I can imagine the child you were, the girl you should have been, and I have glimpsed the woman of my fiercest desires just beyond my reach."

    He kissed her lower lip. "You cannot live in my world and I won't live in yours. The space between our lives is too great." A tear poised on her cheekbone, waiting for its twin. He kissed them away and put the salt on her lips. "But could we build a bridge, and cross it occasionally?"

    The aircraft engine revved and an order whipped to them in the draft of the blades. Traveler glanced up the hill then buried his face in her tangles with a sighing groan. "I've got to go. I'll be back. Promise me you'll still be here."

    He interpreted her stillness as assent, which it became. As he ran up the hill, reckless and ungraceful, she explored the odd ripples his message had left in its wake. Her softly wondering voice lifted to reach him over the steady whirr of the rotor. Traveler turned and searched for her in the shadows.

    "Daphne," she called. The space between them suddenly seemed telescoped, leaving her dizzy, and his blown kiss alighted on her mouth like the caress of a flutterby's wing. The city-built machine lifted him away and she retraced the journey to the hidey in her valley.

    She drank her tea slowly, enjoying the fragile beauty of an autumn evening. The berries rolled in the bowl as she rocked. The low creak mimicked the calm of her pulse.

    Day by day, the woodpile grew. She filled the chinks in the dabbing and sealed the cracks in the floors with river clay.

    The bee-trees gave up their golden treasure for sweet and wax for candles. She would trade her teas for cornmeal, beans, and chicken feed. She cut sheaves of wild grain to winnow and bag. Strings of mushrooms, onions and carrots festooned the rafters and the rabbit meat, jerked and jarred, stood on the shelf like personal trophies.

    Not enough. She'd started too late with too little. Not nearly enough to halt the winter at the door but she didn't think too hard about it.

    She had no idea if Traveler's promises would be a barrier strong enough to hold back winter. She didn't bother herself about DOT resuming payments or decontaminating the clearing. She had discovered a tantalizing truth that her mother had never taught her; possibly because it was something she had never known. She'd found something to offset her despair, doubly valuable in the messenger and the moment. She would embrace it desperately in her heart with every bit of her strength.

    In every person rests a precious seed, buried deep and dormant but needing only a little light to blossom.

    Like a flower within each soul, nestled unexpected in the space between despair and desperation, lives hope.