Keep Calm and Kill Your Wife by Lucky Stevens

into her consciousness in a dilatory fashion, the facts organizing themselves mechanically, as brains do.
    Within moments, she became aware that Hart was not with her after all. She wondered where he was and if he was okay. She wondered if she’d ever see him again.
    As she stood up, she zoned in on what her body had been through. The bumps, the bruises, the soreness. They were readily apparent but miraculously seemed to be minor and she was grateful that everything seemed to be in working order. She had survived, the trees acting, in a sense, like nets that had lowered her to the ground. Roughly, but safely.
    The next thing she realized was that she was a long way down from where she had been previously standing. As a matter a fact, as best as she could surmise, she wasn’t even straight down from where she started. Her path had seemed to veer diagonally, due to the cut of the land, and it became clear that at some point she must have been rolling from one tier down to the next, deeper and deeper into the valley.
    “Hello!” she yelled at the top of her lungs. “Hart!”
    After calling out several times without so much as an echo in return, she figured she’d better save her energy. She was on her own and it would be getting dark soon— or at least eventually. The thought terrified her and from that point on, the idea of spending the night out here was expelled from her mind. There was no doubt. She would reach her grandmother’s cabin by tonight, period.
    If there was any silver lining to the situation, it was that the diagonal course that she had tumbled in was at least in the direction of her grandmother’s cabin.
    She walked along whichever of the valley’s tiers she was on, using the sun as her compass, hoping at some point there would be a natural path that would gradually lead upward and out of the heart of the valley.
    As she advanced, she tried to be aware of everything around her, her mind at times battling between getting lost in theoretical strategies and speculations, and a real safety-driven need to remain hyper-alert.
    One of her biggest problems was the pace with which she would settle upon traveling. Not knowing exactly how far away she was from the cabin and how long it would take, she didn’t want to blow all of her energy early on, sapping herself of needed strength later. On the other hand, if she moved too slowly, she might not beat the sun as it lowered itself into the mountainous horizon.
    And then she stopped. Even though there was a glaring absence of Snake X-ing signs, there it was. Slithering across her path. And taking its sweet time about it, too. Summer put her hand to her mouth and gasped, suppressing the desire to scream her lungs out. She had no idea what kind of snake it was, and didn’t care.
    “ Go. Go,” she whispered, waving her arms and dancing in place.
    After what felt like half an hour, but was probably only thirty seconds, the snake complied, settling the matter as to how fast Summer would be walking. Double time it was.
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    After a few hours Summer couldn’t help but feel as though she had made great strides—assuming, of course, she was heading in the right direction. She had a slight sense of doubt about this, but all in all, a surprising feeling of confidence had seemed to eclipse fear as her new motivating factor. She would make it back to the cabin and she somehow knew this.
    She remembered being lost once at Dodger Stadium when she was about eight years old and how scared she’d been. Would she ever see her parents again? Who knew?—at the time. It’s all so hazy and unstable when you don’t know the end of the story. But looking back, knowing the ending, makes it a lesson; a bit of strength for the spirit that each of us can carry in our arsenal if we choose to see it that way.
    And so it was, with this mindset, that she trucked forward. Grateful that she had survived the fall, her will intact. Thirsty and hungry, she knew that when she would