Amanda had an enlightenment and it came through the presence of a nineteen year-old boy. He was waiting for Godot with a school textbook and skinny legs. She was somehow still jeune et farouche and at the end of two short but mutually exclusive lines they met, or rather he forced a meeting on her by calling out “hey girl” across the apartment parking lot. It was on that same summer day when he tried (but did not succeed in) kissing her on the lips. They were just perusing the stack of novels in her apartment bedroom. Something about her walking home from the community pool with wet stringy brown hair and a towel wrapped around her had made him frisky. Her flippant, careless, somehow delicate flipping of the pages of Dostoyevsky’s The Raw Youth drove him over the edge.

Gerick – the boy – had a strong sense of “America,” which was brought on instantaneously the day he found out he was being deployed to Iraq in the Bush war. He was surprised that, as it turned out, that actually happened to people. And so only a week after their initial meeting, the boy didn’t hesitate to ask the girl to join him on a journey. It was only an hour by car and he promised the pay-off would be eternal amazement. If she still had been only twenty, Amanda would have refused. But as now she was twenty-one, she agreed, and she wasn’t even going to ask her mother.

Halfway in the car ride she knew he was taking her to the Driftless Area, but she still asked “where are you taking me?” and demanded, “I have no idea where we are—tell me. I’m serious!” He, of course, drunk it all in and pretended like he didn’t notice every time she pulled out her cell phone to check her text messages. Gerick also noticed that there were very few cars on the road this very cool summer Friday, that his car had stopped making that whiney sound, and that they would be arriving to his surprise location at any moment.

When he parked he jumped out of the car and pulled a blanket and a basket from the trunk, handing her the second to carry and throwing the first over his shoulder. He paused for a moment and she looked at him with a look that said, “You do realize I just met you one week ago, and now I’m following you into a secluded forest.” He looked back at her with a smile that said, “That is rather amusing but I’m glad that you’re doing it because you can trust me.” He began to walk very quickly past the trees, touching most of them or circling around them so he could see that she still followed behind. Some of the trees, he could see they were dying, he would stop and give a giant heave and they would collapse on their sides. Or he would kick them with all of his might while making a “haa!” sound. He looked back at Amanda and she sort of giggled.

“What’re you doing?” she asked lazily. “Stop that! You have a body count already and you’re only nineteen. Three sad little oaks and one maple.”

He just smiled and said, “We’re almost there,” and then looked up and corrected himself: “we are here.” He took the blanket off of his shoulder and fluffed it up into the air. It drifted softly to the ground, right in between two rock formations. He sat upon it, and patted the spot next to him which she obligingly occupied. The sky was slightly overcast and the woods around them seemed to lean into where they were sitting, and when everything had been going quickly and even entire days too, all suddenly stopped still and nothing from anywhere told them what next they should do. He looked at her and smiled. He had a secret surprise to show her, and was waiting for precisely the right time.

Meanwhile, she opened the cover to the wicker basket and found a camera, a pencil and paper, two poorly wrapped egg-salad sandwiches, and a bottle of wine with the $5 price sticker still attached.

“This is your mother’s basket, isn’t it?” She asked.

“What, you think a respectable man can’t own a picnic basket?”

“It depends on what you mean by ‘respectable,’ I suppose,” and this time she laughed.

“I happen to have purchased that finely-weaved artifact from Salvation Army, and just for this purpose.”

The wind began to blow swiftly in spurts, and she pulled out the wine and handed it to him.

“Wait—” he said, “that’s for later. After something else.”

“Alright then.” She put it back and pulled out the camera, squinting her eyes at him before snapping his picture. He took it from her and snapped a picture of her. He laughed and looked up at the sky. It was still overcast and he wondered if rain would ruin the occasion. At any rate, he decided he had better not delay.

“Look over here.” He got up and walked to the back of one of the rocks. She followed and saw that half way up and all the way to the bottom of this particular rock were markings. They said, “meet me at Romance General,” “meet me at 6:30pm,” “you are my one true love,” “Gerick, I love you always.”

“Gerick? Are these yours?” she asked.

“No. I just found them, completely at random. I don’t know who these people were, but I’ve read the whole rock and I know their whole story.”

“Will you tell me it?”

“It’s a story of forbidden love,” he started, “and I can’t be very sure of the exact date, but it had to be the 1940s, because they mention The Battle of the Bulge. This Gerick lost his brother in that battle. See—here.” He points to a spot that says, “In Loving Memory of Robert Thornton, Beloved brother to Gerick Thornton, lost January 1945 to the snow and ice of the Ardennes Forest.”

“Tell me from the beginning.”

They walked back to the blanket and sat down. “The first notes are all expressions of love. ‘Nancy and Gerick.’ They were very young, sixteen maybe, but that’s just what I think.” He paused for a moment. “I also like to think they met here while on a family trip. They wandered off from their perspective mothers and fathers and happened upon each other. He startled her, but she didn’t run away. They realized that they lived in nearby neighborhoods and so started meeting there. But she was of a low class and he was from a rich family. Neither of their parents thought it was right. Gerick wrote, ‘We can run away’ and Nancy wrote, ‘I hate them.’ The war just made it worse. Gerick’s brother had to leave, and he was the family favorite. Nancy’s mother, whose husband had died, hardly had the money to feed her daughter and herself, and she constantly said she was going to send Nancy away to stay with her grandparents in Minnesota. For Nancy, this was worse than starving. Gerick was the only one she felt respected her, loved her, and would protect her. She tried to earn money as a seamstress, and would work for whatever anyone would pay her. He worked too, and stole from his parents whatever he could. Together they saved up several hundred dollars, enough to escape comfortably from this place they felt tortured and mistreated in. The last four notes on the rock say, ‘Meet me here at 6,’ ‘Meet me at 6 Wednesday,’ ‘If you still love me, meet me at 5 Thursday,’ ‘Gerick, I love you always.’” He stops and looks up at her.

“And then the story just ends?”

“I think so.”

“Well, do you think they ran away? Did they make it?”

He shrugged his shoulders and laid down on the blanket.

The fact that it was over made her a little sad and she felt an empty space she didn’t like. So she asked, “Don’t you have a story of your own to tell?”

He paused for a moment and shook his head: “Nah—the stories all come from other places these days. But maybe when I come back from—”

“…From where?”

“Oh. Nowhere. It’s not important,” he said, and then he laughed.

“From where?” she asked again, and he shook his head. She laid down beside him. “I don’t have a story of my own either. What is required, for one to have a story?”

“I think you have to not have been born in Wisconsin in the late twentieth century,” he replied and she laughed. “I guess really—I don’t know. I guess your life has to be not so easy. And then you learn interesting things from it, right?”

She shrugged her shoulders and breathed out, “Je ne sais pas.” She faced away from him, her hair falling off her shoulder and exposing her neck, and her red lips now hidden from him but still present in his mind’s eye. He couldn’t help but notice that the trees and everything in them were quiet and still too.

He could hear her whispering something to herself and he asked, “Do you think we’ll never experience the same passion and possession and fear, Nancy?”

She decided she liked the mistake and so didn’t correct him. “No, I don’t think we ever will.” She hummed a couple of notes from a song she knew and then added: “But then Gerick and Nancy never had the pleasure of getting to buy coordinating throw and pillows for $4.99 at Wal-Mart.”

He smiled but he didn’t laugh. He inched closer to her body. He noticed that she added a floral smell to the scent of dirt and trees. She sighed heavily and started fingering the leaves of a large fallen branch beside her and she started to pick it up. As he leaned in to kiss her neck, Amanda started shrieking, yelling, kicking and backed up over Gerick and against the rock formation behind her. She covered her eyes and was afraid to make any noise and Gerick rushed to her, glancing to where she came from. There, sprawled underneath the branch, the entire time they had been there was hidden the body of a dead and bloody cat, with its mouth open and tongue hanging out. It looked as if it had just died, a domestic pet that had wandered too far from its owners and had been torn to pieces by some feral creature. Amanda held her breath for fear of throwing up and Gerick held her too tight. He stared at the unfortunate being whose name had probably been fluffy or mittens and he shook his head because it didn’t make any sense. Amanda still hid her face in Gerick’s chest and he started crying now, wondering why now of all times this confrontation had to take place. His mouth felt dirty and he spit a couple times into the grass beside him. He was trying to picture what that body would look like if it were human and even though he couldn’t quite do it, he still felt guilty for trying.

“Take me home, Gerick,” she pleaded, and he packed up the picnic site in a hurry and led her back down the path to his car. They quietly walked side-by-side out of the forest, which seemed more living than it had before.

“I didn’t get to show you the water,” Gerick said.

“It’s ok. I’ve been here before.”

Gerick hesitated before starting the engine. He placed his head in his hands for just a moment and then tapped slowly on the steering wheel as he pulled out of the Driftless Area, still feeling unsecured.