The Valley by Aspen Hickman

The road is narrower than Lou remembered.

The trees are looming over it now, untended and forgotten. The wisteria has reached the edge of the asphalt, creeping over the spreading cracks. The vines are in full bloom, a sea of purple lapping at the fragile tar.

The descent into the Valley was slow, slower than he had remembered. They were biking, so it didn't require much effort given they were going downhill. Which meant that the only thing to do was hear the wind rushing in their ears and gaze at the wisteria, creeping, creeping.

There were cracks in the road, gaping wounds. They had to be avoided carefully, so as not to jolt the nearly-deflated tires of the bikes.

Lou had not been down this road in many years. The Valley was a place he had always sworn he'd never return to, even before it became impossible.

Angelica had never been to the Valley, so she marveled at the wisteria as it languished over the ground, instead of glaring like she should. Lou remembered those long-ago spring nights heavy with the scent of the blooms, before he had learned to hate the vines and the work they brought. He supposed Angelica was still that child, staring out the window and knowing the stars were watching.

As they approached the Valley, the signs of what once was began to show. A large wooden sign, advertising the rhododendron festival, its paint faded and beginning to chip, and a small plastic one, almost entirely overtaken by the wisteria, proclaiming the farmer's market on Saturdays. The words were no longer determinable, but Lou knew what they said. This was a pilgrimage he had made often, before.

The road began to level, and suddenly the sky opened, the sun bursting through the draping branches and looming wisteria. They were in the Valley.

The Valley was an old place, but everything was old these days. Lou had grown up here, in the shadow of the mountains, and the road had never been clear of the webbed cracks.

The road that led into the Valley snaked its way through the length of it, too. Lou and Angelica followed it until they arrived in the town that was just the same as the day Lou had left it.

It had never been a vibrant place. Not a day in Lou's life had there been any color but the deep green of the forest and the high, clear blue of the sky that was always too far to dream of.

The road no longer had any kind of markings on it, not because it was well traveled, but because lanes had never really mattered, here. There was never more than one car on the road at once. Most of the time, there weren't any at all. The machines sat, rotting, within buildings just as decrepit as what they held. Lou loved to sneak away to see them, to dream about driving them, out of the Valley and into the world beyond.

A river ran along the road, and without the small amount of upkeep it had once been afforded, it was beginning to meander again, as was its way. It had eroded the land under the road. Lou and Angelica avoided that section carefully, though it was probably not any more unstable than the rest of the road.

Lou had once known the name of the river, but he'd forgotten, because what use was there in knowing? It would always be a river, there was nothing a name would do to change it.

It was Angelica who asked to take this trip, and it was Angelica who really cared. They stopped to lean their bicycles against the side of the old gas pumps, to cross the road and skip rocks on the river.

Or, rather, Angelica skipped rocks while Lou sat, staring down at the water that flowed and flowed, eternal. The river—It was more of a creek, really, it was not large enough to warrant that title—babbled and bubbled gently, sometimes loud and sometimes soft, like the child Angelica wished for the two of them to have.

There were fish in the creek, but Lou had never tried to catch them, though he knew many who did. He'd never wanted to. All he had ever wanted, for all the years of his youth, was to leave this place.

Angelica had taken off her shoes, rolled up her pants, and was wading in the creek. Here, near town, the creek was wide and shallow, never deeper than the knee. Lou knew of places where it was deep enough for swimming. The thought came, unbidden, that he should take Angelica to one of them.

Lou lifted his gaze from the flow of the water and to Angelica as she reached down into the water.

"Look!" Angelica cried, holding high her prize from the creek bed. A crayfish, waving its legs and claws frantically, desperate to return to the flowing water below.

Lou rose, taking off his own shoes to meet Angelica in the water. "It's a crayfish. Be careful, hold it here instead. They can get you with their pincers if you hold them wrong."

Angelica gasped. She had such wonder for the world, such joy. Every plant was magical, every animal a new and inexplicable miracle. She had grown up in the city, and that was where Lou met her, before.

Envy, sometimes, was the word for how Lou felt about Angelica. Envy, that she had grown up in a place where the world was clear and bright, laid out before her like a buffet, delicious and colorful and brilliant in every way. But more often, the word was love.

Love was a strange thing for Lou to feel in the Valley. It had never been a place of love. It had not been a place of pain, exactly, but it was a place of long and torturous summers, full of only the sound of the cicadas, unceasing. Lou had loitered often by the road on those endless days, feeling the heat of the world, for there was little else to feel.

It was a place of gray winters, of little snow and far too much cold. They were sunny winters, so even shadow could not hide the bones of the trees and the vines that strangled them.

The Valley was a place of nothing. Nothing but a thousand days of lingering, of staring at the mountains that stood like walls, unmovable and unchanging. Boredom was the rule of Lou's life here, before.

It would not be anymore, it seemed. Angelica would make sure of that.