Cinquefoil

This is just a placeholder for one of my new stories. I will be working on it concurrently with Emigre.

It's about a one-eyed parkour enthusiast and environmental terrorist named Syth Belski, who lives with her sweet slacker of a sister -- Mander -- in the childhood home that their divorced parents are trying to sell, and they're supposed to help spruce it up to make it more attractive to buyers, though they have little interest in leaving it.

A strange man comes to town and offers to help with chores. He insists he's been reincarnated and he certainly acts like he's from another century, but he doesn't seem to remember who he is, or what he's here for, only that he's got the equinox to the next equinox to get a certain task done.

The girls try their best to help him, and it all seems innocent at first, but is it?

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To sigh under a cold, cold moon for a love unrequited, is to put a light upon nature; the natural remedy would be to fall in love with the moon and night, and find our love requited.

Henry Thoreau

Chapter 1: Nine Pound Hammer

Stowe, Massachusetts. One week after the vernal equinox …

I raise the sledge high and bring it down against the corner of the dam. The concrete explodes in a puff of sparks and dust. Bits strike and sting my bare shins. I swing again, the nine pound head just about right for my size. Anything bigger would wear me down too fast and make me lose of control the arc of my swing. But nine pounds, I can guide perfectly and maintain a steady rhythm that sends a ping echoing off the tamaracks and hemlocks about every five seconds.

I figure I’ve got about ten more minutes before I need to run. All I’m aiming to do is to undo the repairs they had done since my last hit and then just do a little more. That’s how progress gets made. That’s how I get rid of this horrible dam.

The dam didn’t exist when my family lived just down the hill in Stowe. Taggart Brook used to flow free in those days, all the way from Marble Hill to the Assabett via Elizabeth Brook.

When I was eight, I used to come just to watch the water striders, who I used to imagine as little alien figure skaters. And below the dimples their hydrophobic feet made in the water I would see shiners and crayfish and even the occasional brook trout. Leopard frogs used to prowl the tall grass where it had flowed through the meadows.

Under rocks I would find salamanders and various monstrous grubs which I found charming in their own way. Midget monsters, though I became more tolerant of their bulbous horror once I learned that they were nothing more than baby beetles. Beetles? I love beetles!

Herons and ducks used to find their way to the pools where the brook gathered its force for the next downhill run. I used to sneak up on them from behind the boulders that the glaciers left behind, sloppy behemoths that they were.

Problem was, now Taggart flows only during springtime and only when heavy rains outdid the capacity of the dam. All that stuff that used to live there is gone from most of the course, or hanging on in the occasional spring or the less hospitable lower reaches where lawn chemicals and septic tanks soiled the water.

I only discovered this last Fall, when I came out on a long walk to rediscover my childhood. Mom says that’s ludicrous, because I never left it. But I’m nineteen now, and believe, there’s not a whole lot of child left inside me, and what there is I save for nature.

I’ve got a record, you see. I spent six months in a detention center near Springfield for breaking and entering and destruction of public property. This was for disabling the spraying equipment of a landscaping company that had this bad habit of spraying native plants on the border of conservation land in Maynard. I tried to warn them as well as the town’s Conservation committee, but nobody would listen so I took matters into my own hands.

Thus, I continue the family tradition begun by Stone, my oldest brother, who is locked away in a deeper, darker place—the Concord State Correctional Facility—for violations only a magnitude or so greater than my own. Stone used explosives when he blew up the Town of Hudson’s sewage treatment plant for not removing enough phosphates from their effluent.