The Reclamation - Part IV
On day three in the desert, Celeste continues to stick out from the group at the Luminescence retreat; she refuses to participate in The Letting Go and irritates the others. Pat works to distance herself from Celeste. During The Reclamation, Pat remembers dark memories from her childhood, and Brooke asks her to keep an eye on Celeste afterwards.
DAY 4
Celeste was not in her bed when Pat woke. She’d probably gotten an early start and was waiting at the Touchstone Ranch entrance where the van was scheduled to pick up the blindfolded Brookies for their Soul Walk. She showered and amped herself up, wiping the condensation off the bathroom mirror to look at herself. She was tan and svelte: a rugged heroine. Her body was powerful now, elevated to more than just the slab of meat she punished at the gym five days a week. It vibrated with excitement, as if it anticipated the self-actualization that the Soul Walk would bring.
But there was no Celeste at the entrance. That bitch. She was sure Brooke would blame her for letting her bunkmate get away. Don’t think about it. Focus on the exercise. She let Gina tie the silk scarf around her eyes, its cool fabric soothing against her orbital bones. One by one, Gina guided the blindfolded women into the vans for their journeys.
The wind had picked up again, and bits of sand stung her face when Gina helped her out of the van and removed her blindfold. She watched the van drive away. The women began their wandering. Pat’s baseball cap kept blowing off so she tied it to her head with the scarf she’d been blindfolded with and trudged on.
She took shelter from the wind under an outcropping of rock. She sat there for what seemed like hours, listening to it howl around her. Had Celeste hitched a ride? Stolen her cell phone back from Gina and called an Uber? And what did she mean by Brooke choosing her? Surely the woman was jealous of the connection that she, a new Brookie, had made with Brooke.
She wanted to find her way back to the road, even if it meant sitting at the pickup point for a few hours. She looked at her compass and out at the horizon, trying to orient herself. She could do this: growing up she’d often be the one to route her parents back to the trail when they wandered off. Then she heard it—that dreaded percussion. There, staring right at her, was a rattlesnake. Pat backed away from the serpent, dropping the compass in panic, which skittered down a small crack in the rock.
Heart pounding, she froze against the boulder, wishing she could sink into its cool mass. She squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened them, the snake was nowhere to be seen. Though she was still trembling with panic, Pat managed to hoist herself up to the flat top of the rock, hoping to get a better view of her surroundings. But it was as if the road had never existed.
Perhaps all of this—the wind, the snake, the compass mishap—was some sort of test orchestrated by Brooke. Pat was starring in one of Brooke’s Inspo Sessions, that’s what was happening. She stared at the sun, half expecting to see an Eye of Providence inside. She laughed to herself, giddily, as she climbed down from the rock and walked in the direction she was sure the road must be. The group would love this story. She’d find the road soon. She had to.
To be continued…
Lena Valencia’s debut short story collection, Mystery Lights, is forthcoming from Tin House Books in 2024. Her fiction has appeared in Ninth Letter, Epiphany, Electric Literature, the anthology Tiny Nightmares, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2019 Elizabeth George Foundation grant and holds an MFA in fiction from The New School. Originally from Los Angeles, she lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she is the managing editor and director of educational programming at One Story and the co-host of the reading series Ditmas Lit
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