Chapel Orahamm

There’s magic in those hills. When they dust up in glowing gold. The cliff faces shimmer at sunrise, brilliant cinnabar and salmon stripes. Ice hangs right behind my lungs, producing the only cloud in an empty, oceanic blue sky for miles. Pine needles and thin aspen leaves crunch under foot.

Its threatening snow and I can’t find any reason to turn back yet. Tucking the sheerling liner of my coat collar up around my ears, I gulp in an early morning moon like a drunk finding the bottom of the bottle. The wolves howled all night. Lavender shadows woke me to a frost lined window sill. All I ever want is up into the treeline to watch the eagles hang above the valley. I found my heart in those high desert mountains, and I can’t find the will to tear it up, roots and all, to move along to somewhere more fortunate.

The village is dying. More money in plywood for the empty window panes than goes around for the diner that also serves as the one gas station and trading post. And the backroom that acts like a church on Sundays. It’s all there, right next to the post office that has twenty boxes and a dusty birthday card carousel. It’s all gravel paths and one stop sign that’s rusted through with buckshot and a twist from a runaway tractor trailer from that one February when Old Man Blackbird had that stroke that landed him in the hundred person graveyard out behind the dunes not two months later.

Maybe we’ll all be buried under those wind swept sands one of these days. Sooner or later. For now though, it’ll have to wait. I want to catch a chance with my paints while the ground is still breathing. That one moment in a desert mountain dawn when a cold smoke rises in pockets to swirl rainbows around the loblollies.

I trudged up past the cross and faded silk flowers that marks a spot where two kids found out what happens when you go for a joy ride after too much at a midnight bonfire. Those markers litter the tiny lanes that should have been left as the animal trails and the wagon ruts they were before the folk out in Sante Fe decided that the trapper hills looked like a good spot to ski in.

This country is like shaking hands with the grim reaper and offering him a shot of tequila. Maybe it’s morbid to some, but here, hospitality comes a bit spicy. It could be the ristras the birds haven’t pecked apart yet. I think this country just makes you keenly aware of how finite life is. Sometimes how long lived it is. The elk antlers festooning Abuela Epifania’s adobe reminded me of this every time I hiked past. Tiny and hunched in her blue ribbon skirts, she could have been anywhere between eighty and one hundred and twenty. Her rocker was made by her abuelo from back in Mexico before he came up with his son who married into the Pueblo. This heirloom, like the rest of the forest, blended into the raw compulsion of these hills. He couldn’t find his way out. Because here, it’s home and it gets it’s canines tangled in the heartstrings worse than a chipmunk in a snare.

Mom had asked again last night if I was going to bring home a girl. Every time I come home from NMU, she asks. Three years of this. I’m running my brain into the ground fighting with electrical engineering homework every night and all I want is to smudge paint and pastel across my papers. But fine arts doesn’t make money. Not unless there’s a gallery wall and a nice shop owner willing to feature you in the Alley. Then there’s money. Money from the New York CEOs and the Texas ranch owners. The folks wearing pawned squash blossoms who taste desert mountains from inside their suped up hummers and get $100 steaks at cowboy themed restaurants that import all their beef from Kobe.

I didn’t know what to say to her. Again. What was there to say? Nothing really. Not here, not now, not ever. Maybe making myself busy was a way to walk away from chasing an unrealistic reality. I know where my home is. It’s not the cracked cinder walls, or the moth eaten Chimayo rugs that acted like doors to the bedrooms. The originals were rotting in the apple orchard, having waited well past their usefulness to be fixed. It wasn’t the Sagrado Corazon above the kiva or the saddle soap lingering in the utility sink on the back porch. Home was one twisted ankle away from a magnificent view of the rio. And I would live out my days alone painting these hills if that was all this world would ever let me have.

I scrambled across sharp chipped granite that cracked beneath my boots. It drew me back to the five mile path I was ascending. The baggies of cracked corn and sunflower sat warm under my palms in my welder’s coat. I was already three miles in from the dirt pull-off I left my rusted C20 two-tone at. I could have walked from my mom’s house. But I wanted to drop down to Espanola for flautas at El Paragua, and if I wanted to have tamales for Christmas, I wasn’t about to tell mom that I wanted flautas at a restaurant instead of hers.

It was just her and me now. Anastasia was off in Connecticut for university. Wouldn’t let me live it down that she made her escape and promised she would never be back. She never could get my obsession with the mountains. All she ever wanted was to leave. To make it big. And she did. She made valedictorian, got the scholarships, and made it to an Ivy. She told us we could come visit her. She wants us to see more than just the desert and the mountains. Every phone call and letter that comes back raves about city life, city food, city people, a city boyfriend, and dreams of working in Manhatten one day. She had plans of being in New York for Thanksgiving this year and mom and I were realizing that we had never really known this girl. I don’t think either of us had ever realized how badly she hated it here. But mom still sends a care package every month and has been for the last year with homemade salsa, cowboy candy, and polvorones.

For me, no care package. I could just drive home, as mom would remind me often enough when I would complain. And then she would get mad at me for disappearing into paradise for hours on end. It would be days, if I could, but my tent had disintegrated over the years and buying a replacement was going to cost more than the new carburetor I knew I needed to put into the old C20.

My hope was to get a few canvases finished over Thanksgiving and winter break that I could drop at Total Arts. Maybe it could cover the cost of a tent if we got snow birds up to ski who wanted a couple paintings of the Rockies to take home. I had done this in high school and now in college. There was a nook off in the back of the gallery where I was allowed to shove my pieces. They would sell eventually and I was able to cover the blown tire from that time I got ambitious in an arroyo in senior year. It let me pay for my text books and some of my groceries. For the most part though, I didn’t paint the Rockies when I was in Albuquerque. I had found a bit of spare change showing up for life-drawing classes. Not that I was ever going to tell my mom that. She would have fainted. All she knew was that I was tutoring. She would inevitably fill in the rest thinking I was tutoring other kids in math. Instead I was sitting butt naked in a classroom watching charcoal smudged students begin to panic because shadows are evil.

I passed an outcrop that was just starting to pink with the sunrise. I stalled, debating on if I wanted to stop and catch the colors or hurry on for the end of the animal trail where a different view I could count on waited. This was how paradise made me pay my due. I couldn’t have this moment and the one at the other end. I had to choose and hope that giving this one up would get me the other one I wanted.

Sucking in a breath, I dropped my canvas duffel on the leaf litter and unhooked my sling that I had my camp stool and easel hitched up in. I could come back tomorrow for that sunrise across the rio. The color on the rock was too much to give up and it was just hinting at what it was going to do. Enough time to pull out my palette and thin out some of the colors I already had splashed across it. I had prepped my canvas yesterday with thinned quinacridone gesso in anticipation of a sunrise. I had seen a couple of fine art kids on campus use powdered gold mica in their gesso and couldn’t get the idea out of my head how badly I wanted to buy some. Maybe that was something I could do in Espanola. If the shop had any. I didn’t want to wait until I was back in Albuquerque to pick some up. Maybe just a taco at Paragua instead of the flautas. Then I could afford it with the couple of bills in my pocket.

I had the twisted juniper hatched out in raw sienna when the sunlight across the outcrop disappeared with a chill breeze. I turned to see the blow up I had been waiting for. Storm clouds were lingering out across the edge of the plateaus along the horizon. I had driven out there in the dog days to paint the Rockies from the other side. It had been worth the trip, but now the way the light was hitting, I was glad to be on this side. I set the outcrop canvas against the rock and dragged out a smaller canvas board from my pack. These ones weren’t something I usually sold. Canvas boards tended to warp over time, and the paint would crack and fleck when the board did that. This was just for me.

I hatched out the valley floor and clouds in maroon. The cardinals and jays were fighting in the trees around me, knocking about juniper berries and pinecones. The solitude in the mountain air burned the back of my throat as I swatched greens and browns into the canvas, slowly building up the bulkheads that promised to bath the valley in white. If I could just get the base colors down, I could work the rest out in the sunroom back home.

A twig snapped, dragging me from my brush strokes. I looked up. A crow perched precariously on my outcrop painting, it’s talons puncturing holes in the canvas. I should have been angry. Canvas was expensive and it wasn’t going to be easy hiding the damage. Maybe I’m a bit superstitious, like my mom, though. She was no more Mexican than I was one of the People. Both of us were as white as her last name Fagerberg, but growing up with Blessingway boys and Dias de los Muertos chicas in the public school had taught me to be just a little respectful of when crow wanted to tell me something, and not to whistle for the dogs after dark.

Slowly, I extracted one of my handwarmers out of my coat pocket. The bird cocked it’s head, ruffling its feathers in a threat to take off. Crows were a white whale to paint for me. Their glossy black feathers presented a challenge and if it would hang out for a bit, I could study it and figure out how to mix up my colors so that the iridescence would come through. With care, I scattered seed and corn into the leaf litter near the creature. It hopped down off my canvas to a dead stick and eyed the bits of food. There was no way I was going to be able to drag out a board and new paints and get it all down fast enough before the crow would fly away. I flipped over the brush I’d been chiseling out the clouds with and used the tip to sgraffito an image of the crow past the paint.

“Are you sick?” I kept my voice soft. “You’re not eating. That’s fresh out of mom’s garden. We just dried it this summer.”

It continued to watch me, flicking it’s head this way and that. It sank on its haunches after ruffling itself once more. I had never seen a crow do that before. “Well, that’s cute,” I muttered at it. Even if it wasn’t going to eat mom’s sunflower seeds. Something else would be along shortly to snatch them up.

I scribbled on my board, hoping my movements wouldn’t startle the black ball into flight. It’s eyes eased almost shut, the pale charcoal of it’s lids rising up contentedly as it shifted back and forth. I sighed in sympathy. Animals didn’t do this naturally. It was probably dying. Or dead.

Probably dead. Now that I had to think about it. I flicked a glance at my canvas, though. Puncture marks showed where the bird had grabbed on. Ghosts didn’t leave behind marks.

“You probably should move on by now, little crow. It’s getting too cold for you to be napping on your way to wherever it is that crows go when they die,” I murmured to it. It’s eyes snapped open at the comment, the pupil focusing on my face. I held my breath, startled. It was staring directly at me. Like it knew what I was saying. It yawned and stood up. And kept standing, growing taller and more robust.

Black combat boots sank into leaf litter where there had been talons before. The feathery scrawny legs shifted to a pair of black Dickies with a patched knee. The wings and tail feathers eased up into a black leather, padded, biker’s jacket thrown over a black turtle neck. Pale skin, more so than mine, rose from that turtle neck to a stark, high cheekboned face, cupid bow lips, and piercing brown almost black eyes that looked like they wanted to dissect me. Dark brown hair whisped away from his face in a Kurt Cobain kind of grunge look alike. He had a black ear cuff and a dangling black feather on one ear. The other had a bar piercing and several small diamonds crawling up it. I’d only ever seen two people with a lip piercing, and he was the second.

I swallowed back my terror. “Alrighty, Crow. Lay it on me,” my voice cracked. I’d be having an extensive talk with someone from the Native American studies department when I finally got off the mountain and back to NMU. Crow wasn’t supposed to have a human form. That wasn’t in any damn story I’d ever heard at the festivals.

“Who are you to tell me to get lost and die, Ghost? You should have crossed over a long time ago.” The man’s voice held a touch of an accent that didn’t sound like anything coming off the rez. It also wasn’t a tone that brokered peace or sympathy.

“I’m not dead. Don’t think I’m dead. I mean, is it common for Crow to come collect spirits? Did I fall off a cliff and my spirit kept coming up here to paint?” I mulled that one over. It wasn’t exactly impossible. I felt for my pulse in my wrist. It was there, beating away, a bit fast, but still there. “No, I’m alive. Got a pulse and all that.”

A thick eyebrow shot up on the man’s face like he didn’t believe me. “You think I’m going to believe that, kid?”

“Kid? You can’t be any older than me.” I shot back at the man who looked to be maybe a touch older than me, if I was being generous. My generosity was flying out the window pretty quickly with his attitude.

“What year is it?” He towered over me. I had been sitting on my short camp chair to sketch and was only now realizing that I probably should have had the where withal to stand when the crow had turned into a person. I decided against that instinct. Nothing good ever came of challenging gods or ghosts.

“1992. It’s November 25 at,” I glanced at my watch, “7:15 in the morning. Bush is on the way out and Clinton’ll take over after New Years. So, unless I literally just died from you scaring me to death, I’m not dead yet.”

The man’s brows drew together in confusion. He cocked his head and squatted down to look me in the face, a little too close for comfort. The cedar, beeswax, and amber note of his cologne brought me up quick. I pushed back off my camp chair, sending paints, brushes, and canvases flying as I landed on my back. “What are you?” I demanded, deciding that for some perturbing reason he couldn’t be the big house’s Crow, but something entirely different. I couldn’t imagine a god with patched Dickie jeans wearing Bois Oriental from the mall. I scrambled to put distance between me and him while he just stared at me like I’d grown a second head.

“I don’t think you’re malevolent. You’re not a poltergeist either.” The man flicked the edge of his coat away from his hip where a black leather sheath perched on his belt. I swallowed, going light headed. He palmed the hilt of a double edge stone blade and brought it out to point at me casually. “You can tell time and are aware of current events. So, not a time pattern. You haven’t tried for curses, yet. Probably not a chained demon.” The tip of the blade rose and fell as he counted off different types of spirits.

I chuckled nervously. I couldn’t call him the crazy one here. He had been a crow not more than five minutes before. If anything, I had to wonder if maybe I was starting to hallucinate. Maybe hypothermia? My hands were red and chapped from the dry cold. My gloves were somewhere. Nowhere. I’d left them on the passenger seat of the C20.

Okay, just a hallucination, I told myself. I sat up straighter to look this imaginary creature of my mind over. Objectively he was handsome enough, in that rigid Northern-European-needs-to-see-sun kind of model agency way. The bad boy type with the shag hair and the leather jacket. Was my subconscious kicking in from my conversation with mom?

The blade sinking into my heart while I watched this imaginary creature, though, told me of a certain kind of electrically shocking reality where my lungs seized and all the hair on my body stood on end . A blue and white glow rose off the blade handle in my chest as I stared at it numbly. How much longer would I stay conscious with that in my heart? Seconds. Barely.

He muttered and the blue glow flashed an unholy shade of florescent white and an entire coating of something under my skin throbbed out of me then slammed back into place and I gasped like a fish out of water. The man tried it again, with repeated results. “The hell kinda ghost are you, Ghost boy?” He yanked the handle, drawing the obsidian out of my chest.

I crumpled to the ground in the fetal position and waited for the stars in my eyes to dim. I couldn’t quite pull in air. Every fiber of my being, every nerve and tendon throbbed with an echoing pain that reminded me of trying to sit on the toilet after leg day. Nothing wanted to move properly. It all jittered and twitched. “You-you stabbed me?”

The man wrinkled his nose at the blood free dagger. “It’s supposed to unlock your last remaining wish and let you move on. Why didn’t it work?”

“Be-be-because I’m alive? You j-just sta-stabbed me in the heart. Why-why-why am I alive?” I gasped in the stench of dust and pine, willing any one of my joints to stop trying to move left of their natural home. My mind reeled. Mom would never find my body. It would take searchers years to, if they even tried. I was on the edge of the mountain with a psyopathic murderer. I’d probably be picked apart by coyotes and hawks and my bones buried into caches by the foxes. I got a deep breath in to the bottom of my lungs, past the sharp pain radiating out of my heart.

He grabbed my face and brought his too close once again, this time studying my eyes while I couldn’t push him off. “Those aren’t multiple pupils. You have some weird two colored shit going on. I thought you had that multi-eye thing that happens with some high tier ghosts.”

“You s-stabbed me be-because of my eyes? They’re freck-freckles,” I wheezed. I’d been bullied all my life for them. Now I was getting stabbed because of it.

“Those ghosts are scary AF, Ghost boy,” he continued studying my face too close for comfort. “You’re warm. Some ghosts can be. You smell like you’ve brushed your teeth recently.”

Heat swamped my face at that, but I was too exhausted to do much more than lay there limply. Was this that freeze instinct some animals had when they were being hunted? I had hoped I’d be the type that fought, but always suspected I’d be more of a flight person. But to find out when confronted with someone trying to kill me, I would freeze? That was demoralizing. Shock. It had to be shock.

He turned my face and laid a pair of fingers on the pulse in my neck. I watched his lips twitch as they counted beats silently. Finally he let go and sank back on his haunches to regard me warily. “Okay. You’re alive. But you’re also dead. Your aether wouldn’t have come out like it did if you weren’t sort of dead. What happen, you get brought back after a bad accident? Die on a stretcher for a minute and they used the paddles? I’ve seen my fair share of old people and they don’t even do what ever that was you just did.”

“You-you-you were a crow,” I croaked. I had just as many questions as him, but I couldn’t muster the energy.

“Yeah, but that’s normal. You aren’t.”

“Normal? Hu-humans don’t shift.” I went to ease onto my back. The static pain made me curl up even further.

“Oh, no. Human’s don’t shift. Grim reapers do. That’s normal.” He finally put his blade back into his sheath and rested an elbow on his knee to play with one of the diamonds in his ear.

“Reaper?” The nauseating silence in my head told me I was probably going to pass out, or vomit, or both, and sooner rather than later.

“Yep.”

I closed my eyes, hoping maybe the next time I opened them he would be gone. I blinked. He was still there. “’k. You gon-gonna kill me yet? I hurt.”

“I don’t kill living people. I just help ghosts move over. Nothing good comes from lingering. But you. You’re weird.”

“Says th-th-the crow.”

“Reaper. Reaper I’m a grim repear.”

“You-you-you-you were a-”

“A raven. Not a crow. What, do all black birds look the same to you?”

I genuinely in that instant wanted to close my eyes and not wake up. The pain was beyond me and all of my energy had left me. I couldn’t even shiver as the cold started creeping up my digits. Something about that look must have finally registered into that bird brain of his. His face was rather expressive in his confusion and silent questions, what with his eyebrows going up and down and together.

A slight blue glow began to encompass me. The most I could do was watch it with a level of distant interest. He touched my neck again. His lips pressed together and he uttered a curse. The world turned black.

• Copyright Chapel Orahamm LLC. Do not reproduce this writing in any form.
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