Willow Farrow's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

Willow finished the first mile in deep green before noon. The stroke followed the concrete barrier like a slow river, and her arm ached in a good way. She capped the can, wiped her hands on her jeans, and looked up the hill. The windmill stood where she had left it yesterday, sails locked, stone base warm in the sun. She needed to see the next bend before she painted it. She climbed. The ladder inside was the same. The hatch was the same. But near the roof, on the inside of the cap wall, someone had painted a crooked jar crowned with sparks and three squirrel tails. The paint was fresh. She knew the mark the way she knew a voice through a door. Jolt had been here. Jolt had claimed this wall. Willow had planned the largest welcome for exactly this spot — a lit window the size of a barn door, visible from every mile below. She stood under the mark and did not move for a long time. She did not reach for a brush. She did not paint over it. She sat on the plank floor with her back against the stone and looked out at the highway. The road bent twice and dipped once and met the sky at the flats. Forty miles of welcome. And above the first two miles, a sign that said something is wrong here, left by a woman who shared her bed and had never mentioned climbing this hill. Willow tried to hold both things at once. A road that promised home. A windmill that warned travelers off. She could not make them fit. She thought about painting her welcome anyway, forty miles below a warning she did not understand. She thought about scraping the mark off and pretending she had not seen it. She did neither. She took a small brush from her back pocket and a can of white from the ledge. Under the jar and the sparks and the three tails, she painted one clean arrow pointing down the hill, toward the road, toward mile marker one. She left the mark whole above it. Then she climbed down, walked to the barrier, and kept painting. The green stroke ran on. But she had decided something on the way down. Before she painted the lit window at mile two, she would find Jolt and ask what the jar meant, and why the wall above her road already carried a warning. The mural could wait one day. The question could not.