The Joker to the Thief

Iowa Hill: Episode Twenty-One

Static cracked like dry branches snapping in a free fall boonie crash. Selah twisted the rusting dial of the HAM set, fingers smeared with wood ash and dried pine resin. The antenna cable, a spliced mess of copper hair and fishing wire, quivered in the breeze like it too was trying to listen. High in the Sugar Pine on Giant Gap Ridge, she caught the voice.

"...you got me, girl? Over."

Kailani’s voice slithered through the hiss, soaked in exhaustion but arriving like lavender bath bubbles to Selah’s ears.

“I got you like a tick on a coyote,” Selah said. “How’s the belly?”

“Still growing a goddamn revolution in there,” Kailani replied. “Feels like it’s knitting its own uterus blanket from my nerves. You ever feel haunted by something not even born yet?”

“Oh, honey,” Selah said, pulling thistledown out of her hair. “I live in a haunted town. I’m raising haunted kids. I shit haunted dreams.”

They both chuckled, and the wind rumbled like a grumpy ancestor.

“I had a dream,” Kailani said after a pause, “about Potrero Hill. The old library at the corner of 20th and De Haro. The Seed bank. Unmodified. Legacy stock. Pre-Flux. Might be our last shot at clean genome lines.”

Selah sat up straight. “You saying we’re gonna go full Return to the Real?”

“I’m saying,” Kailani whispered, “it’s time we stop playing defense.”

A silence passed over them, long and full. The kind of silence you get just before lightning breaks the sky or a thought changes your life.