Marta Mitchell's Arc

Chapter 1 of 7

Marta Mitchell stood in the doorway of the only home she had ever known and counted four days since the old man walked out of it. His soup bowl was still on the table where he had set hers down beside it. His watch sat next to the bowl, the leather strap worn pale from his wrist. He had not taken it off in fourteen years. He had not taken it off when he left. She was fourteen. He had raised her in this stretch of desert since she was a baby, in a house no stranger ever found. He never told her where he came from. She never asked. The last thing he did was make her soup, kiss the top of her head, and say he was going for a walk. Then nothing. No note. His coat still on the hook. His boots, the spare pair, still by the door. People who plan to leave take their watch. She had spent three days walking circles around the house, reading the ground the way he taught her. On the first morning she found his bootprints heading north, past the carved stone marker at the edge of their yard, the one with the bones lashed to it that pointed at the open desert. She had followed the prints for two miles before the wind started eating them. By the third day, she stood over a brown smear of disturbed dirt where the trail simply stopped. Beyond it, the sand was clean. The wind had taken the rest. She knelt at the smear and waited, as if the ground would tell her something more. It did not. To the north there was only flat country and heat shimmer. To the east, a low ridge. To the west, the dry pan. He could be any of those directions, or none. By tomorrow even this last smudge would be gone. She understood then that the desert was not going to give him back. She would have to ask someone who knew it better than she did. She walked home before the light failed. She packed his watch into her front pocket, two canteens, a knife, and the rolled map he kept under the floorboard. On the map, three days' walk south, he had once circled a dot in pencil and told her never to go there alone. She had asked why. He had said because the people there remember everything, and remembering is dangerous. She set the circled dot under her thumb and held it there. In the morning she locked the door behind her, stepped past the bone-marked stone, and turned south.