Mountain Echoes

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I came home to North Carolina just shy of a decade after promising I’d never go back.

Home was a funny word. I’d lived in Qualla Boundary during high school. That was longer than I’d lived anywhere else up until then, but in the intervening decade I’d lived exclusively in Seattle. But North Carolina still twigged as home, maybe because it was where my father had been born.

It was where he’d gone missing from, too, and that was why I was back.

Driving up from Atlanta was a slow immersion into memories. I had the windows of my rented Impala rolled down, and the rich rotting scent of winter collapsing into spring made a hungry place at the hollow of my throat. Of course, everything made me hungry right now—I hadn’t yet recovered from a week’s worth of exhaustive shape-shifting fueled by my body’s resources instead of food. But that slightly sweet smell of death begetting life had always made me hungry, and I’d forgotten that until now.

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