Now

The daughter is tired of walking, the muscles in her thighs and calves trembling as they climb, but there’s no chance of the father turning around until he’s seen everything he came to see. The forest in May smells of wet skin and lemon peel and old pennies. In the treetops the waxwings are whistling to one another, and though the day is bright and sunny the trail beneath her feet is damp from spring rain, almost marshy. Mud sucks at the soles of her pink sneakers as she walks.

Beyond a small holler filled with mayapples the cave waits, its mouth a dark, neat slash that looks like someone sliced into the hill with a cake knife. In fact the rock is layered like a cake, tectonic stripes of rainbow sandstone counting down the centuries. Lichen and moss grow over the northern face of the cave, beneath a red plastic sign nailed to a tree that warns Only experienced cavers should proceed beyond this point.

Go on, the father says to the daughter. Don’t be a baby.

The daughter walks into the wind cave, down rough-hewn steps and over a carpet of last autumn’s leaves, of cigarette butts, of bat guano. She knows she is only a few feet from the surface, the greening spring, but down here everything is dim: quiet and cold, very cold. Some of the cave’s passages are narrow and short, forcing her to stoop and scramble, while others lead to rooms gaping wide, stone chapels.

There are glyphs inside, the father says, ancient ones, a little deeper, but the daughter doesn’t see any glyphs, just a bunch of spray-painted dicks and initials: L+J, J+D, D+L, all glittery wet and mineral. One-two, she counts her steps, one-two. A papery sound comes from dark crevices overhead, a fluttering murmur as the man’s flashlight interrupts the bats’ daytime dreaming. The air smells unpleasant, of coffee grounds and Gold Bond powder and the bathroom drain.

The daughter keeps moving, away from the light, away from the father who can no longer fit in the passage. Stop, he says, but she can hear something ahead, something like the ocean or the purr of a cat, and she keeps walking. The walls narrow and bend, close enough that the daughter needs to turn her shoulders sideways to fit. Her legs shake now with each step, from tiredness and from the cold, and she steadies herself on the rock to keep from tripping.

Deep in the cave a door opens that is not a door. In the dark she can feel a breeze on her face, clear and persistent. The daughter tries to speak but cannot make a sound: her mouth is a cave, wet and cold and full of bats. It is too narrow to go back if she wanted to and if the father is trying to speak to her she cannot hear—the rock absorbs everything.

Through the door that is not a door there is light and the air is warm. It takes her eyes a moment to adjust but when they do she sees them all, the daughters, full of daisies and sunshine and gold. The daughter joins them, daughters without fathers who are really just girls, girls who play and yell and carve one another’s initials into the sides of trees. They call back to the whistling waxwings and forget about the door and the cave, and the world on the other side, and if they had remembered it or the fathers they left there they would hope to be forgotten in turn.

__________

Courtney Pasko is a writer and public library worker. She grew up on a hilltop three miles above the wind caves in Lancaster County, PA and currently resides in Baltimore. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Passages North, hex literary, and The Dodge, among others. Read more or say hello at courtneypasko.com.