“What are we looking at, Christina? Are you looking for your father?” Pamela huffs. “Never mind, you *always* look in this direction, long long before your father went missing on his tractor just day before yesterday.”
“I am a visitor to this place. Over there… those hills. That’s where I’m from,” Christina said dreamily, like she was a ghost instead of a flesh and blood person. Which she wasn’t anyway — mesh, as I indicated before. In contrast, Pamela is “real” in that she has an actual body, actual skin, actual clothes that she can change out of if desired. Actual hair. And those feet! Get back to that soon.
“Christina,” she chastised, but only mildly, knowing the young girl was “troubled” to say the least, “you’ve lived in Amiable all your life. We went to school together starting when you were a wee lassie, pardon my Scotch. You’ve lived here with your father, your brother, all your life. Well,” she amended, “your younger brother *most* of your life, since you were, I believe, 3 when he was born.” She turned and stared at the girl instead of the landscape, very pretty indeed but not worth contemplating for more than 5-10 minutes at a time from this particular angle, she gauged. Yet Christina was up here all day, minus food breaks and various small chores her father dared burden her with. Which reminds Pamela: “Grass is going to need cutting soon,” she said to the younger girl by 2 years while walking away, determined to talk to the almost as robotic acting brother, up at what they call the farmhouse as usual playing or at least attempting to play — *strumming* — his punk songs. Whole albums he is into, not just songs, he proclaimed to her one day in April’s May.
She knew Wally kind of fancied her, as all young boys do, even those as lost in their own world as him. Said so another time. “You’re pretty,” he opined then. “Looong legs. I’d give them a 10, just like the Ramone’s 3rd album. Have you heard ‘Rockaway Beach’?” and he then proceeded to play the whole album the single was from as a kind of serenade, she supposed. Another time he said he liked the way she tended to walk on her toes, and played an entire Sex Pistols album called “Never Mind the Buttocks” as she recalled, perhaps as a tribute to the feet as opposed to parts higher up that she also reckoned he liked although couldn’t say out loud to her.
I’m going to snap him out of this rock trance he’s in, she decided on the spot. By snapping off my feet. “Wally? Wally. Waallly. Wally!” He didn’t stop playing some punk song she didn’t recognize — not her style of music. But at least he was glancing at her now, knowing she was up to something. Those legs, he thought. Those feet!
But then he did a double take when the snapping off was over and the alpha was removed. The music halted mid-strum. “Those *feet*!” he exclaimed. What happened to the beautiful toes??
“This is who I really am, Wally,” she said back. “*Now*… since I’ve awakened you from your music trance, let’s talk about your father. Where he possibly is? How far could he get with that old tractor that breaks down all the time? Let’s *find* your *father*.”
This kind of strategy wouldn’t work with Christina, since she, in her limited mesh way of course, wasn’t looking for shells on the opposite side of the beach. Wally could be persuaded in that fashion. And could be woke up in that fashion.
“My *father,*” he exclaimed, putting the guitar down for the first time in Pamela’s memory of him, “is *missing*.”
So is introduced the story that Bigfoot took his father away into the woods and made a pet out of him, which wasn’t totally false by the way.
(to be continued)
Sunklands 