"-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> Frigg | Fall/Winter 2024/25 | The Stream | Kevin Spaide
artwork for Kevin Spaide's short story The Stream

The Stream
Kevin Spaide

I was on the back porch reading when I heard the motorcycle. First I heard it up on the road, whining under the birdsong, then I heard it slowing down, its whine dropping to a mutter. Now it was coming down the lane through the trees. I set down my book. Cara had been gone for three days. After three days I wanted more days. If I had another, though, I knew I’d want another two. If I had another two, I’d want four more. Eventually I’d get to the point where I’d never want to see another human being again. Being alone was sweet and dangerous, but now I was being forced back into my other self. The creature I was when I wasn’t alone. But I couldn’t go on thinking that way so I didn’t.

It was a bright spring morning, wildflowers barging in everywhere. I ventured around the front of the house, the dark side of the house, just as the motorcycle shot out of the trees. It was towing a small trailer Cara used on her trips to town. She had a pair of bicycles strapped down on the trailer. At first I didn’t know what they were. Foreign objects. Something out of an old story. Fantastical tools for problems I didn’t yet know we had. I’d forgotten people rode bikes. You couldn’t see the road from the house and I almost never went up there. Some days I hardly even dared go around the front of the house. The backyard was my territory—an amphitheater of river, trees, hills, birds. I didn’t mind birds. It never ceased to amaze me that birds could actually fly. I didn’t think I would ever get used to that. I’d sit there on the back porch watching them fly brainlessly from tree to tree. They were so horribly casual about it. Anyway, no one would ever arrive from that direction on wheels.

When I realized what I was looking at, I said, “Who’d you steal them from?”

“No one you’d know.”

Cara leaned one of the bikes against the house. It did not move. The green paint on the crossbar gleamed in the sun. Its wheels looked sturdy and capable, and its elegant handlebars might have been endowed with free will. I’d known men whose faces were blanker. Cara lifted the other bike off the trailer and hopped on it and set off across the yard, down the hill toward the river, turning just as she was about to plunge headlong into it, which would have been so like her.

The bike leaning against the house waited there for me. Patient, deep in its own solid universe. I knew how to ride a bike but hadn’t thought it would ever come to that. When I touched the handlebar I could feel its pulse. Or maybe it was just my own pulse coming back to me. I must have had one. The bike didn’t shy away. I adjusted the seat. Whoever had last ridden it had had long legs. I did not have long legs. Nor were my legs short. They were a normal set of legs, easily bruised but stronger than I would have guessed from the looks of me. I swung one leg over the crossbar. It felt strange to do a thing like that. Like I was a person who did things like that. It was like performing a senseless miracle.

As we pedaled up to the road, the trees on either side of us did not bother disguising their wonder. They leaned out over the path, their branches interlocking above like a song. I followed Cara. Where we were going I did not know. It felt so good to be riding a bike I didn’t care where I was going as long as we weren’t heading toward town. The road was crumbling away in places and rocks had slid down from the cliffs, and I steered carefully around these traps. In one place an avalanche of rubble had tumbled down the hill and taken a giant bite out of the road. It was already overgrown with brambles and tiny saplings. Whoever came along this way would have to swerve around this rude intrusion on a bumpy, rutted track that looped among the trees. We halted and then walked the bikes along the track. When the rain came it would be impossible to get through. Cara said nothing about any of it and I said nothing.

I could not remember the last time I had come this way. Years ago. But it was so different now I’d never been here. Back when I stole Cara’s motorcycle I rode up into the hills so I could look down at the lake. It was important to see the lake now and again, the vast swath of it stretching off into the haze. I always went the same way and never saw anyone. This road was more likely to have some traffic on it. Today, however, we saw no one. Cara pedaled out ahead of me and I followed. Already my lungs were bursting. The trees were dense and dark, their dark green leaves conspiring against the sky, and the road was littered with twigs and small branches. Where whole trees had fallen across the road, someone had come along with a chainsaw and cleared them away. I wondered if it was Cara herself. Someday the forest would swallow this road.

Cara stopped and leaned her bike against a tree. A stream gushed down from the hills, running through a culvert under the road and on into the lake. I couldn’t see the lake through the trees but I knew it was there. All that water had a gravity to it, a pull. When the storms blew the leaves off the trees in fall you would see it from here. Wasn’t far. I leaned my bike against hers, and we left them behind and started up the gully.

At first we were able to walk beside the stream on the dead leaves from last year, the gully walls rising steeply on either side. But then it narrowed and we walked in the cold water with our shoes on. Huge boulders, bigger than small houses, had swollen up in the stream. Cara said they were set down there by glaciers, the same ones that had carved out the lakes 10,000 years ago. I had heard this tale many times but found it hard to accept. I couldn’t stop wondering what had been here before the hills and the lakes. Had there been trees full of birds and insects and worms dangling on strings? Had there been women with long hair and scarred faces? Women with short hair and tattoos? What was here before the glaciers scraped it clean and pooped out these giant boulders?

My feet went numb. I hated being cold, of course, and just the thought of being cold could actually terrify me but I knew it wouldn’t last for months. It was a clean kind of cold. My feet burned with it. The bed of the stream was jagged with rocks and debris and sometimes we held hands to keep our balance, a big four-legged, two-headed monster creeping up the gully. Cara’s hand was rough and strong and I knew she could have ripped my arm off. And then we came to a waterfall. It was taller than both of us put together and we had to climb up a narrow dry ledge at the side of it. The loose shale gave way and crumbled under our feet but it was an easy climb. If it hadn’t been easy I wouldn’t have done it. I did many difficult things, like mending shoes or chopping the heads off chickens I knew well, and writing poems, but I did not do difficult things for nothing.

Cara reached down from the top of the waterfall and hoisted me up, complaining that I weighed no more than a starveling child.

It was a hot afternoon but we were wet now in the deep, cool shade under the trees. The stream ran flat above the waterfall and the bed was smooth and slippery. Smooth as an old plate. Cara cupped her hands and took a drink. Tall trees hovered over us, watching with infinite curiosity.

We followed the stream around a sloping bend, the water sluicing down one side of it, the other side dry and white in the sun. I sat on the flat rock in the sun and soaked the heat into my bones. The heat of the sun. Energy from outer space keeping me alive. I lay right down and Cara laughed. She said, “Get up, we’re almost there.”

“Let me lie here a minute.”

“Get up, man.”

“Five more minutes.”

I stared up into the trees, and for a few seconds it was hard to believe anything else existed. No burnt-out houses dotted the land, no children stalked the forest. Our town full of hollering lunatics had been swept away, and the rapists had been put in their boxes. I lay on my back with the palms of my hands and the soles of my feet pressed flat against the warm rock. I closed my eyes and did not move.

“I’m right here,” I said. “I’m nowhere else.”

Cara laughed again and lay down beside me. We stayed there a long while, breathing.



Kevin Spaide’s Comments

Except for the line about “wildflowers barging in everywhere,” which is pretty weird, I don’t really remember writing this story. Cara and her friend, the narrator, are apparently taking a little time off from their usual perilous lives. They go on a bike ride and do some exploring in the woods. They don’t meet anyone. In their other stories they often encounter someone who Cara then feels the need to intimidate. Sometimes there is violence, occasionally bloodshed. In one story, the narrator herself bites a man in her kitchen. But nothing like that happens here. The two women go for a walk up a gully. They climb a waterfall. Where are they going? They don’t talk about it.

I was surprised when the trees are described as being curious about them. At one point the trees are “watching” them. This made me remember being alone in the woods when I was a kid, experiencing that feeling of being watched. The trees leaning over me then felt old and not very friendly. The weight of their attention could make me run away. The trees in this forest, though, are not so terrible. They wonder about the two women. What are they doing? Who are they? The story ends abruptly, in a rare moment of peacefulness. No burnt-out houses dot the land, the rapists have been put in their boxes.

I wish I could write more stories about these two, Cara and her bitter-minded observer, but I think they might have left me behind. It’s not the first time they’ve given me the slip, though. I’ve made previous comments about my hard drive crashing on the first day of a global pandemic and sucking 42 of these stories into an inaccessible abyss—so maybe I’ll find them again someday.

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Frigg: A Magazine of Fiction and Poetry | Issue 63 | Fall/Winter 2024/25