WELL DONE! Fiction
radio reception anyway. Her husband would punch up a playlist on his phone if it were up to him, but he respects her preference. The cruise control has to come off as the road narrows and snakes its way deeper into the forested mountains. This is a snaking road if there ever was one, her husband says. It’s a wonder some bureaucrat hasn’t managed to name it—Snake Road! Do you s’pose there are snakes around here? Yes, she says quietly. There are snakes around here. Theirs is the only car at the trailhead. Her husband is, as their sons had been at five years old, stopping to examine every flower, every fern and every fungus growing sideways out of a tree. The sight of Eddie’s Eddy wrings her. It is as she left it forty years ago, and as it will be forty years from now, and forty years after that and after that again. The water, rushing into infinity in its perfect concentric helix, isn’t the only sound in the forest, but it’s the underlying motif to which the birds, the chipmunks, and the dragonflies sing. They sing to its constancy, and to the sylvan comfort found in that constancy. This is wondrous, says her husband. You’re so lucky. Your father took you to places like this. I never got any farther than the vacant lot in the neighborhood and some
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