Written by Sunny Carlstrom
Content Warning: Sexual assault, brief mention of Abortion and Miscarriage
The hills are heavier here, she tells me, her head resting against the window. Look at how they
slope out of the valley to meet the mountains. They’re all filled up with memories, like meteorites
burnt into the soil, reclaimed by tiny, winding roots and loamy earth.
I ask how she knows how much a hill can weigh.
She says it was easy, once you knew what to look for. First, you had to know how far away the
hill was from civilization.
Not here, she says, Here the valley has scooped up all the human lives that thrive where the
water runs and the hills protect them. Here, the hills are full of remembrances. Mine and yours,
she says. Everyone’s.
Next, you have to look for the swelling, the way a hill expands out against the body of the earth,
rises up like a pimple, angry and red, but too early to pop. You have to watch it spread out,
heavy, heavy, heavy, like a breast hungry for the relief of a baby’s mouth, or the suckle of a
pump, chhhchhhchhh. Grass in the wind. The rustle of song birds (or dead ones crawling with
silphidae or nicrophorus, their insectid mouths making the sound the dead birds cannot).
The hills are all heavy here, she tells me.
Only, look there, at the one they call Bald Man’s Crown she says to me, finger tracing the near
distant sweep of a hill blurred against the descending twilight. The nightjars are out, those
notorious goatsuckers, here to milk the hill whose teats are sore with waiting. They dip in and
out, snatching at the new-emerging stars. See how the hill begins to sink into the earth, a
weighted black outline that determines where the valley ends, where it begins, the borders that
define your agency. Always the promise that following its shape to its pinnacle will reveal
something. Not just itself, replicated beyond the horizon.
The hills are heavy here, she tells me, because nothing makes it out. They’re venus fly trap hills,
luring fly-people into the valley of its mouth. Close. Digest. Repeat. Lure them in with promises
of water, life in liquid form. Watch them crumble, suffocate, dissolve slowly into nutrients. God
created the hills, but people weigh them down. The heaviness follows you, even beyond the hills.
As if the hills are pulling you back through the earth. Home they whisper, Home. You only ever
have one and the hills know it.
Her pause is a gasp of breath, a consideration of whether she is revealing too much, but she
continues, Even if you forget, the hills remember. Each time you make the drive back into the
valley it is their shape that first emerges along the horizon, beckoning or threatening or
promising that you have returned Home. And the hills are eager. Eager to share everything they
know about you, even the things you’d rather have left forgotten.
Sometimes, she tells me, in the early morning, you can see the fog roll up along the tops of the
hills, carrying the ghosts of everything that came before.
They know me, she says.
And I know what she means, because some of this she has told me all before. The hills watched
as she was raped at fourteen underneath a single flickering street light in a church parking lot, the
sickening heat of summer greasy on their skin. The boy was eighteen, tall, heavy-set. He was a
ravenous boy, whose hands forced their way against her thighs, even when she pushed away,
even when her tears mingled with the sweat on her cheeks. She didn’t know that’s what it was
then, rape. But the hills did. She thought she was lucky that this boy would touch her, kiss her,
hold her close and whisper she was beautiful. She thought her fear was necessary to keep him
close. He’s a bishop now, in that same church building with the single street light that finally
burnt out last year. And now the parking lot is always dark, but she knows that the hills can still
see whatever it is he does there.
And when her belly began to swell, she used to lie down and pretend she was a hill too. Heavy
with labels like sinner, whore, un-righteous, slut. Her bishop told her these were the
consequences. And when she asked what consequences the boy would face, his face was solemn.
He told her that the boy had already learned his lesson through her defilement, and didn’t she
remember how short her skirt was? When she asked for someone to scoop out the life growing
inside her they said it was a sin to discard someone else’s body. And the hills remind her now,
through the smoky evening haze, that when she lost that baby she was told it was a tragedy, but
she praised it like a miracle. She passed off her tears as despair, but they were tears of hope.
And when she returned to church, everyone thought she’d been visiting her father in West
Virginia, but the hills knew that this was a lie. She hadn’t seen her father since she was three
years old. And she never knew why he left. But the hills did, because he grew up in this same
valley and they’d claimed him from his first breaths until the day he packed up his blue Camry
and disappeared.
Yes, the hills are heavier here.
They call it Happy Valley, she says, her voice edged with sarcasm. Most people think that’s a
joke. But if you ask me, they’re secretly hoping it’s true. The hills and me know better, because
low crime rates don’t mean less drug use, especially when the drugs are prescribed. Just
because you can’t see the wounds doesn’t mean they aren’t festering. But the appearance of
happiness is important here. Nuclear families with tidy homes where everyone follows the same
template like paper dolls: Church. Marriage. Children.
I think she might stop, but her eyes are fixed somewhere past the headlights as if I am no longer
here.
She starts again, quieter, but just as earnest, There was real happiness too. The kind that sneaks
up on you. Two best friends driving down a moon soaked road with the windows rolled down to
howl and giggle at the freedom of dark blue summer nights. Peeking during an over long prayer
in church to stick our tongues out at each other and mouth “conference prayer” with lips that
didn’t understand yet what it meant to swear. Sneaking out late at night to meet each other on
the edge of the horse pasture where we could kiss before scuttling back to our beds when we
imagined something creeping up on us in the dark. Days spent digging a swimming pool in an
empty lot and ruining our clothes in the mud. Water balloon fights at the park, learning to do the
monkey bars, trying to clear the creek with one running jump. Happiness all compiled into a
broken childhood. A childhood that makes you feel cheated once you’ve left it behind, but
somehow you still wish you were living it.
And according to her, when you’re all grown up you come back to the hills and beg them to
make things different.
Here, on the top of Bald Man’s Crown where we’ve stopped to look out over the valley, you can
watch the lights begin to flicker on, one by one, down below. They pollute the stars that have
been shining for centuries, their artificial luminescence shrouding the valley. When you look up
from the city all you can only see are the most stubborn stars piercing through the veil of
inversion, but here everything is sharper, colder, less forgiving. As night falls, teenagers crawl
out like hungry beetles to search the hills for quiet places, to kiss, to fuck, to smoke, to let their
lives soak into the soil of the hills. Some will leave the valley, but most will stay. And even the
ones that leave will be drawn back by ailing mothers or family Christmases.
She tells me that the hills will draw them back like moths to a flame and they will know what it
means to be claimed by a place.
She paused then, drawing her knees up to her chest. There were tears pooling in her eyes. I asked
her if she missed the hills or loathed them.
She whispered: both.
.
Sunny Carlstrom is a writer from Salt Lake City, Utah. She received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Utah and writes uncanny and atmospheric fiction that attempts to blur boundaries. Currently, she is on the hunt for a truly supernatural thrill, though if all else fails, a fox sighting will do the trick.