Smoke-Mouth is a dystopian supernatural novella, serialized in ten projected parts. This is Episode One.
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In this episode, a stranger arrives and asks Jenny-Dog for help.
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THANK YOU to everyone for your kindness and patience as I pivot to a new serial this summer! It’s an odd little story, especially compared to my previous offering, but I do hope you enjoy it.
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The unfamiliar scent of the stranger lingered on the prairie like fog, like the spirit of God hovering over the fescue, and Jenny-Dog did her best to stay upwind of it.
She had five paths, like her five fingers on her right hand. She had five paths to travel, and never the same one two days in a row. Jenny-Dog kept the scent of the stranger on her left shoulder as she walked the thumb-path to the abandoned yellow house with the overgrown garden.
She was careful. She waited at the edge of the trees for any movement, for any sign of the stranger’s scent made flesh. But when nothing appeared, she waded through the tall grass to the tangled wilderness of a garden.
Jenny-Dog reached carefully, hand over hand, picking raspberries into the worn-out basket hanging from an old belt strap against her waist. She was quick, practiced-quick, her nimble fingers stained red with the berries’ juice. The raspberry patch had grown beyond the backyard of the abandoned yellow house, and the scattered boards of the old fence lay in confused ruins around the unruly canes.
High summer. Beyond the shade of this small stand of woods the sun-drenched prairie stretched July-brown, grasses and hardy wildflowers nodding in the light breeze. The click and hum of cicadas and grasshoppers filled the empty space that the sounds of daily traffic had left behind when they ceased almost eight years prior. Somewhere, a bird trilled a liquid psalm into the blue.
And over it all, the scent of the stranger.
Jenny-Dog didn’t linger. She knew better. In and out; she was quick.
She kept the breath off the prairie in her nose as she circled the raspberries, filled her basket halfway, and then slipped around the side of the abandoned yellow house and away along the thumb-path.
Never the same path two days in a row. Sometimes not even in the same day. Jenny-Dog was careful.
The path skirted the open prairie, keeping just inside the treeline, and Jenny-Dog was a shadow. A tall shadow, but sly. Eight years of practice, and she knew where to put her feet, and she never relaxed a muscle. Never let her guard down.
The fragrance of the raspberries lifted to her nose as she walked, but she did not give in to her hunger. Not yet.
The prairie surrendered to a another loose patch of woods, larger still. The sound of the creek rose to her ears and she quickened her pace. She followed it like an invisible tether until she reached the big old farm. The creek ran through the pastures like a knife before it tumbled—somewhere in the distance—into the river.
The place she sought was a deep-water spot in the creek, man-made once upon a time for the sake of the dwindling salmon who choked the rivers and streams now with nothing to impede them. She found the place where the rope was tied securely to a tree and began to pull, hand over hand, until the cooler rose to the surface. It was heavy, but Jenny-Dog was strong. She pulled it onto the grass, peeked quickly over both shoulders, then unlocked and opened it.
Within lay her supplies. A half-eaten can of cold soup, foil wrapped carefully over the top. A jar of pickles someone had put up years ago and abandoned, the date written on the lid in fading Sharpie. Three small, shining trout in a zip-top bag. A bundle of wild greens and lettuce leaves from another abandoned garden. A sealed quart jar of clean drinking water, foggy with condensation.
Jenny-Dog took an empty plastic bag out of the box and dumped the raspberries in, sealing it. Only now did she indulge, eating a handful of berries that had tumbled onto the grass in the transfer from basket to bag. Sun-sweet like a drug.
She tucked the raspberries into the cooler, sealed it tightly, locked it, and then slid it back into the water, lowering it carefully to the muddy bottom of the creek. She tucked the basket into the grass nearby, upside-down. Then she crouched there by the deep water for a moment, curve-back like an animal, watching the eddies swirl on the water’s surface from the currents below. Her head twitched.
Jenny-Dog has a knack for finding things.
She’s got a hound’s sense, right?
She finds things in the soil, she finds things in the woods, she finds things in the lake and the river and the old houses where no one lives…
Jenny’s head twitched again and the echoes bounced back and forth between her ears, rolling like pebbles. It was not an unpleasant sensation.
A ghoul. What a ghoul you are.
Jenny-Dog looked down at her fingers, her nails that she bit short, all raspberry stains and dirty cuticles. Her long dark hair had escaped the overstretched hair tie she had used to put it up and fell around her shoulders in a tangled mess. All habits, all routines, all solitude. It was better this way.
“A ghoul,” she murmured, and regretted it. She didn’t speak often, these days. No one to talk to. And she didn’t like the way it stretched her throat, stretched and snapped like a muscle.
To fix the feeling, she stood and danced—a wild thing, a whirl—until she was a panting mess.
Better, better, better…
One of her five paths shrieked, behind her, calling for her attention. It was the ring-path.
Jenny-Dog left the creek to follow the sound.
*******
There was a vehicle on the road.
The roar of it was like thunder in the quiet, the rising and falling of its engine song. Jenny-Dog watched it, wary, from the safety of the sparse woods. She had been seeing more of them these days, but never knew where they thought they were going. Too many roads were still cracked and crumbled, overgrown by the prairie. It had taken no time at all, after the quakes. No time at all for the prairie to rise like a golden tide and take back what once had belonged to it.
The car—a heavy thing, a military thing, covered in dust—was heading north and out of what was left of town. Jenny-Dog knew that a handful of people still lived in Yelm, but she had steered clear of them. Most of the people around here had left a long time ago—out of the state entirely if they were smart, or up to the cities in search of a safety that was not guaranteed. But the ones who stayed lived within the greening copper-topped stone walls of the compound where the old cult used to live. Church people mostly, growing like invasive weeds in the ruins the cult had left behind. She could hear their songs rising on the wind sometimes as they worked their gardens and raised their children. Rising like an engine in the quiet. It reminded her too much of other singers, other voices, best left buried in the past.
Cult people, church people.
Too much religion about, these days. Too many angels with sharp talons and dozens of eyes, lurking in the hidden places. It all made Jenny nervous.
In the east, the snowy citadel of Tahoma—queen of the mountains—rose cold and impassive over the lowlands. The vehicle disappeared from sight around a corner, and that’s when Jenny saw the stranger for the first time. Just a shape on the horizon, walking south through the field with purposeful strides.
Jenny couldn’t make out much at this distance, but she saw the shape of a wide-brimmed hat on the stranger’s head.
She turned her back on the road and the mountain and disappeared into the trees.
*******
Jenny-Dog took the ring-path around to the gray house with the big dogwood tree out front. She had been fortunate indeed to find this place; it was where the jar of pickles had come from. It had taken her a whole weekend of afternoons—moving in stages, not content to linger too long—to shift the jars from the big pantry in the kitchen where anyone could find them into a cool, hidden space under the floorboards.
She entered now and went straight to the bedroom, still draped in its cornflower wallpaper, dust gathering on the bedspread. She pulled up the floorboards, then covered her eyes and reached into the hidden place without looking at the jars within. Like a game. Like a guessing game.
She thought, Bet it’s dilly beans.
Then she looked, and no! Pickled beets.
Not bad, not bad.
She replaced the boards carefully and left the gray house with her treasure tucked in the crook of her wiry arm.
The ring-path seemed to tremble with a frisson of portent as Jenny-Dog walked it back toward the old farm and her deep water cold box. She felt it under her feet and instinctively left the path to walk along the treeline, instead.
What’s wrong? What’s wrong?
But she knew it, once the path spilled out into the field.
Sitting beside the creek’s deep place, whistling a soft tune and dangling a bare foot in the water, was the stranger. The scent of her filled the air.
Jenny froze. She had no time to make a decision before the figure turned to look at her.
It was a girl in a wide-brimmed felt hat and a coat made from an old faded quilt, like an impossible map. Her long dark hair fell down her shoulders in worried waves and her dark eyes were wide open and soft like the hearts of sunflowers. She was maybe eighteen, maybe twenty. Jenny didn’t know. Jenny didn’t care.
Golly-gawd, Jenny, but she looks a lot like you!
Jenny-Dog tilted her head and let that thought slide to the other ear like a marble. The stranger did look a little like herself, when she was young. Tall slip of a willowy thing with dark eyes and dark hair down her back. Jenny didn’t know whether she looked like that, anymore. It had been a long time. It had been twenty long years since eighteen.
“Lula,” said the girl.
Jenny blinked. Didn’t respond.
“Name’s Lula.”
Jenny blinked past the girl. The girl, in turn, removed her hat.
“This your pond, here?”
Jenny nodded. Sure is, sure is, get your damn fool foot out of it.
“Didn’t mean to intrude,” the girl said. “I just needed to rest a minute. I’ve been walking a while.”
Don’t care one bit.
“South is where I’m going,” the girl continued, as if she hadn’t noticed that Jenny wasn’t saying a word. “To Smoke-Mouth. Lawetlat’la. You know it?”
Jenny’s head twitched. The crippled mountain—the one with the big old bite out of its side—was a long way from here, and people didn’t go there. People don’t go to mountains. They used to, probably. But not anymore. They went to the cities, or out of the state if they were smart.
This girl isn’t smart.
Jenny’s curiosity got the better of her voice, at last.
“What’s there?” she croaked out.
The girl didn’t seem to care that Jenny’s voice sounded like the scrape of stone on stone. She lifted her foot out of the pond and let it rest on the grassy bank, dripping. “I dunno yet,” she said. “But I’ve been dreaming about it, and that’s something. So I mean to get there. Walking, riding if I can…anyhow I can get there, I’m gonna.”
What a fool, what a fool.
“You know anyplace where I can get a bite to eat and some safe sleep tonight?”
“Not here,” Jenny said before her brain could catch up with her panic. “Not here.”
Lula shook her head. “Not here. But anyplace?”
The church people. The copper-topped compound. Jenny wouldn’t be caught dead in those gates, but this fool girl probably wouldn’t mind it.
“There’s a place,” Jenny said. “There’s church people.”
Lula nodded, smiled. “I get on well with those, most of the time. When they’re friendly. These friendly?”
Jenny shrugged her shoulders.
“Will you take me there?” Lula asked.
Jenny nodded like a yes, but her mouth said, “I won’t stay there.”
“Not expecting you to,” Lula replied. “But if you could show me where it is, I would be grateful. Will you show me?”
Jenny still had the jar of pickled beets under her arm. She had forgotten about it. She wasn’t about to pull up her cold box with that fool girl sitting there, so she held it under her arm and gestured with the other.
“This way,” she said.
*******
It was a mercy that the girl didn’t chatter Jenny’s ear off as they took the pointer-path into town. Jenny needed all of her attention. Needed to listen for vehicles, for the sound of unexpected voices, for the snap and shiver of movement in the dry woods.
But soon enough it didn’t matter. The sound of the church folk singing their songs drowned out everything else, shivering on the prairie grass and wildflowers. In the east, Tahoma glowered down over it all, closer today. Too close.
Maybe mountains move.
Maybe if this fool girl stands still long enough, Smoke-Mouth will come to her.
Jenny-Dog laughed at this thought, and Lula looked up—big dark eyes full of questions under her wide-brimmed hat—but didn’t ask.
The closer they got to the compound just on the edge of town, the more leaden Jenny’s feet got on the hot pavement. She hated town. She hated the corners, the alleys, the broken roads, the yawning faces of the abandoned stores and houses. These houses didn’t have pantries for Jenny to raid; these were townsfolk, too comfortable before the quakes. They died, or they left.
Out of this place, if they were smart.
As they drew up to the copper-topped gates, the stone walls stretching for blocks in either direction, Jenny paused at a distance.
“There,” she said. “That’s it.”
Lula looked up at the entrance. The gates were open. Back when the cult lived here they were always closed, locked against the world, but the church folk kept them open now for any wanderers who happened by.
Jenny sometimes pictured the church people shoving the old god of this place out through these gates, like chasing a mouse out of the kitchen with a broom. She often wondered if the ancient warrior—the cult’s enlightened one—was out and about in the woods and fields, looking for new disciples to gather to himself.
Maybe he, too, left the state.
“Thank you for your help,” Lula said. “You sure you don’t want to come along? To Smoke-Mouth?”
She asked as if she had already asked. Jenny shook her head no like a violent tremble, the thoughts rattling back and forth from ear to ear.
Lula smiled. Stuck out her hand, like to shake, and Jenny ignored the gesture. So the girl raised the hand to her hat and tipped it, and then turned and entered the open gates where the church people’s songs enveloped her.
Jenny stood for a moment longer, jar of pickled beets under her arm, terrified into watchful stillness by the movement of people inside the compound as they flitted to and fro like ghosts.
She blinked to break the spell. The girl was gone from sight.
There. It’s done. That’s done.
So slink-shouldered under the solemn gaze of Tahoma—too close, too close!—Jenny-Dog took the pointer-path back home.
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Oh my lands... I am *loving* the tone of this. Reading between the lines to what may have happened, and who was there before -- and I know those mountain names. I'm 100% hooked on this, for SURE.
Amazing story. Ring path, thumb path, as many paths as fingers.
Jenny-dog is an interesting person.