Hunting Blind
The trees are getting loud again, the knots between my shoulder blades twisting. I fill a small glass jar with water, empty half a pill into it, and screw the lid on tight. It used to be a pepper jar, still smells like it. I shake it, and the pill powder swirls in tiny spirals through the water.
Where I’m going is about two hours out by car. The tank’s half full, good enough. Outside, I throw myself into the car seat, tossing my pack into the passenger side. My breath hovers in the air as I shove the car door closed.
I place the small jar in the cup holder. Rub my hands together to create a little heat. Condensation creeps over the windshield, winding letters in some indecipherable language.
A text from my roommate: Be careful. I peer out toward the apartment, and a curtain flickers over the kitchen window.
The engine kicks. The windshield wiper slashes away the fog, and I lurch out of the city.
*
It’s seasonal, usually. Hours move through me, then days, and the mountains stay at a hum. A quarter of a ring unfolds in the body of a tree. I go to work, “go” insofar as I open my laptop. I train AI bots for ten dollars an hour. Not quite, try again. Different prompts, better wording.I push it down for weeks. Then, the pain begins.
It’s in my knees first. A low ache that builds, radiates. My shoulders join in. Muscles in my back spasm, curl and tighten. My joints don’t know what to do. My joints hate being joints, hate having to hold angry parts together. And the sound gets louder. It’s like those whistle tones that only dogs can hear, except the mountain’s voice is low, lower than anything you’re supposed to hear. A long, tugging tone, and I know what it means.
Folks have accused me of having issues with authority, but that’s not true. I’m just picky when it comes to worship. I don’t like leaving the house. I like dark, quiet rooms that smell fresh. I like shadows that smudge me into approximations. Back home, it was impossible to be anonymous.
I don’t know if you have to like the thing that you worship. I’d say that most people don’t.
But when I get the call, I answer.
*
I park at the trailhead and yank the emergency brake up. My hands twitch as pain shoots up my thumb. I’m at the stage where everything hurts. Each breath, each shift in my seat. A headache presses behind my eyes.
I unscrew the green lid of the pepper jar and inhale the musty scent of the water. I tip it over my lips, and swallow it down.
Two tween girls emerge from the trail and slink into the parking lot. I wipe my lip. They seem impossibly young, raw and red like newborns. Where are their parents?
When I was their age, sixth grade or so, our class pet was a python. She lay curled in a helix beneath a synthetic log, her beady black eyes open. Fingerprints smudged her tank glass. Every Friday morning, Mrs. Smith brought a mouse to school in a thin wire cage. She set the cage on her desk, where it remained until 12:30, our lunch hour.
On these days, our class did not file into the cafeteria with the rest of the sixth graders. We stayed in Mrs. Smith’s classroom, and unpacked our lunches on our desks.
Mrs. Smith brought the mouse cage to the front of the classroom. Bags of chips rustled; droplets of water gleamed on water bottles. She clinked open the little door and reached inside, her silver bracelets jangling. She grasped the mouse by its middle, dragged the creature through the cage door, and held it up to show the class. The mouse seldom looked afraid. Its tiny whiskers twitched. Its paws spread toward us like it was asking for a high-ten. Its fingers were strangely bald, furless as our own.
Mrs. Smith brought the mouse to the python’s cage. She nudged open the lid, and lowered the mouse inside.
We watched this every Friday. The slow waking of the snake’s body, as she realized prey had arrived. The coil and tension releasing into a lunge. The teeth never scared me. It was the strangling that fucked me up. The flexing strength of the snake’s midsection, paralyzing and patient.
The first time, one of my classmates protested. At some point that morning, she’d named the mouse Eddy. She broke into hysterical sobs right as Mrs. Smith opened the python cage, and she begged for Mrs. Smith to stop. She said she’d take Eddy herself and make him her pet.
Holding Eddy in one hand, Mrs. Smith explained the circle of life. She said that if Eddy lived, the python wouldn’t. This was the way of things.
She lowered Eddy into the python tank. Wind threw itself against the classroom windows, everything rattling. We ate our packed lunches. The girl cried the entire time, and the rest of us made fun of her.
Now, the two girls drift through the parking lot, laughing about something. I’m barely twenty-five, but I feel hundreds of years older than them.
The drone of the mountain vibrates in my feet. I’m glad they’re leaving.
*
I start on the trail. Blue plastic triangles are crucified to the trees, leading the way. My knees creak like straining floorboards. But with every step, my vision sharpens. I can already feel the pill powder leaching into my bloodstream.
It’s not much—they call it a microdose for a reason. I can only handle a little bit at a time. Five years ago, I tried a bigger dose with a boy from Tinder. We met by the river, sun melting over the rocks. This was before I moved to the city. I hadn’t encountered many other trans guys yet, and I guess I wanted to impress him. He ran his fingers over my buzzcut. He complimented my arms, the pathetic muscles I’d been begging my body for. Tattoos wound around his wrists. He offered me two tabs, and I took them both.
“Trip” isn’t the right word for what happened. A trip is something that begins and ends. Whatever this was, it began, and then it kept beginning. I went through a door that closed behind me.
I left town the next day. Packed my shit, got in the car, and fled the mountain. Those first few weeks turned me into a connoisseur of parking lots: Walmart, Costco, a few churches.
For years, I stayed away from drugs. I slept with earplugs. The further I went, the louder the mountain became. There could be no running.
*
A woman passes me on the trail, her dog yanking at its leash. She’s wrapped in a puffy blue coat, her cheeks cherry-red. She grins and waves at me. I smile back, tell her to have a good hike. Once she’s passed, I step off the trail and limp into the unmarked woods.
*
The drugs are a shortcut. A way of turning up the volume to what’s already there. I don’t need them, but it speeds things up. Like blazing straight up a hill instead of following the switchbacks.
I think the mountain uses pain the same way. I can dismiss the sound the mountain makes, even when it widens, even when the buzz grows into a roar. Come here, come here. Pain is harder to ignore. It cuts right through the distance of language.
My boots squish into dead leaves, crack over half-eaten acorns. Sunlight seeps between the naked branches. When I’m about ten minutes off the path, I stop and close my eyes. Cold air hisses between my teeth. A spasm rips up my neck.
I wait for directions.
Maybe the mountain feels the same way I do with my AI bots. It gives me prompts, then watches me valiantly flounder. Not quite, try again. Perhaps it tries to determine the best way to phrase its directions, how best to crawl between the gaps of code.
I breathe, but the woods don’t breathe with me. They stay quiet. No birds, no squirrels. They must know there’s a predator about.
An ache splinters up my right foot, and I turn in its direction. I follow the pull, step by step.
*
I stop when the sun hits me.
It slides between the naked trees and lands on my face like a punch. The pain blinks out for half a second.
I sense into the space around me. I’m at least a couple miles off the trail. No humans, no cameras, not even other animals as far as I can see. The knots in my muscles begin to unclench.
A few green ferns stretch through the dead leaves. That’s a sure sign. The ferns curl into spirals under my boots, awake and alive.
I set down my backpack at the foot of an oak tree. I unpack my things, one by one. A purple water bottle. A stack of blue tarot cards. A peanut butter protein bar I shoplifted from Ingles. A composition notebook.
The air wiggles and shimmers, and I let it. Scars murmur across the oak tree’s bark, and I allow this too. I gather all my numbness into the points of my fingers, and dig my hands into the dirt.
I scream, for a while.
*
My roommate and I met on Craigslist. We’ve been living together ever since I left the mountain, and I still have no idea what he does. I’m not even sure what his last name is. We talked once over the phone before I signed the sublease.
He almost never leaves his bedroom. He doesn’t keep food in the fridge. We never talk, except when I leave the house, at which point he always texts me, Be safe. He doesn’t ask where I go, or what I do. I don’t ask him anything either. We tend to our silence like gardeners, waking each morning into the quiet glow.
If I could worship something else, it would be him. It would be the absence that we allow each other.
I delete our text chain every time he messages me. I hope he deletes his, too. Otherwise, the chain would appear as a constant stream of pleas, unanswered: Be safe. Be safe. Be safe.
*
The pain moves like a current. Wind, water, whatever. It pushes down from the crown of my head and up from the soles of my boots, corkscrews in my center then thrashes down my arms, out of my hands, into the dirt. My body becomes a pathway. Everything rings.
It’s like bringing frozen hands to a fire. The flesh thaws, and this is good, but it stings like hell. You ache as you wake.
Of course I scream. This is why I went off the path, why I didn’t just sink to the ground at the front of the trailhead. It’s rude to suffer—it’s rude to worship—where others can see you.
*
I deleted Tinder the same day I left the mountain. Screens made me nauseous. Windows and mirrors too. Everywhere I went, I was followed by these itchy, radiant portals.
I didn’t want to talk to the acid boy. He was hoping we’d hang out again, maybe sleep together after the “trip.” I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
When I was fifteen—emo, underweight, and deep in the closet—my first love got his phone confiscated by his dad. We’d been discussing sex: the things we’d done, the things we wanted to do. Our strategy up to that point had been stringing up a plastic hammock in the woods behind our school. We would touch each other, then later dissect every move via text. I liked when you. Did you like when I.
His dad read everything, of course. Then he got lunch with my dad, and they went over the texts together, to determine what punishment would be appropriate.
If I could never be seen again. If I could dissolve without dying. If I could shatter every screen, every window, every security camera on every street. If I could. If I could. If I could. If I could.
*
When the pain goes, it leaves behind a sound.
It’s different than the drawl of the mountain. I don’t hear it with my ears, but with the insides of my arms and legs. Cold, pounding. I lie facedown in the leaves, in the smell of pine and rot.
The sound builds where the pain used to be. It pulses between my shoulders and whispers up my neck, a chorus of silent singing. My screams melt into melody.
I don’t sing anywhere, except for when I’m worshiping. Even as a child, I preferred to listen. Mom could play the hell out of the banjo, she’d get the whole house dancing, but I never joined in. Even the inside of my car isn’t private enough. Now, my jaw cracks from how wide my mouth is stretching. I sing straight into the dirt, ferns thrumming against my lips. Gibberish, nonsense words, the vowels slipping in and out. It’s ecstasy.
My fingers claw into the earth. The song is every language at once, saying Thank you. Saying, I am here, with you, now.
I grind my face into the ground. I want to dig; I want to burrow. A choked sound leaves my mouth, a message to the mountain. Take whatever you need.
It does.
*
The sun weakens. Goosebumps flutter down my arms. In some distant room of myself, I know that time is waning.
A layer of dead leaves breathes over my face. I am perfect here, covered and alone.
*
It’s cold. I need to get up. I reach through the veil of leaves and detangle ferns from my ankles. Every one of my cells glows with relief as I stand, wobbly as a newborn deer.
Dirt scratches my upper lip. The woods are so silent. My fingers shine bone-white and my teeth won’t stop clattering. I dance, to invite some heat back into my body. My arms flail, knees clicking, and I move my hips river-slick. I burst out laughing, swing my hips a little more. God, I love it here. I love this ridiculous, beautiful body, this ridiculous, beautiful world.
I settle in again by the oak tree and reach for the tarot cards. I flip through them once, colors flashing between my fingers. I’m about to draw one, a parting message, when something flickers in my periphery.
I freeze. A cloud swallows the sun. At first I think I’m hallucinating, that I accidentally took a larger dose than I meant to, because in the distance there’s a man-sized spider, clinging to the side of a tree.
My vision refocuses. It’s not a spider.
It’s a hunter. He sits in a wooden structure nailed halfway up the tree—a hunting blind— wearing camouflage and holding a gun.
We look at each other.
He’s been here the whole time.
Humiliation drags up my throat, sizzles like heartburn. Who is he? What is he doing here? Suddenly and fiercely I wish that I was sober. A terrible rage mounts in me, snarling to full height. My animal body strains to lunge, or flee, but somehow I can’t move.
Neither of us speak. Neither of us move. A dead leaf drifts in the air between us. The hunter watches me, and I watch him. His eyes glint, black like beetles, and it’s only then that I realize we have the same face.
Kelsey Day is a queer Appalachian writing about land and liberation. Their writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Orion Magazine, Freeman’s and more. Their debut novel, The Spiral Key, was published by Penguin Random House in February 2026.
