Some Crabby Talk about Hermits
Short fiction in isolation.
On the night that I later learned would be our last together, I suggested we go for a drive and she said, let’s go to the mountains.
The mountains would be swell, I said. We don’t go there often enough.
So we drove and as our car began to scale the mountain I rolled down the window and breathed what I guess qualified as mountain air, until we reached an area where we had to slow down. I smelled hot asphalt. A work crew was patching up some potholes on the other side of the road.
I rolled up the window, but the asphalt aroma lingered inside the car.
The delay didn’t dampen our spirits, though. We parked at an observation area and trekked a bit into the woods and reached a clearing where we could see other mountains and we no longer heard the traffic or the work crew and it no longer smelled like hot asphalt.
She took one of those deep breaths you take before you make a grand statement, and declared she always thought we’d be together in the mountains at some point. She beamed as if she just reduced the length of her bucket list.
“Yeah,” I said. “Here we are in the mountains.”
She said no, she meant she had this juvenile fantasy where the two of us would live in the mountains.
I asked her to explain how that would work.
“We’d live in a cave like hermits. We’d live off the land and just have each other.”
“If we were hermits,” I said, “we couldn’t live together. We couldn’t live near each other. A hermit lives alone.”
“Can’t we be a pair of hermits?”
“A pair of hermits? That’s like a ‘pair of singles.’”
“Like a group. A group of hermits.”
“A group? We’re inviting other people?”
“You just said we couldn’t be hermits, and I suggested we call ourselves a group. You and me. A group.”
“Two people in a group? That’s more like a duo.”
“A group can be just two people. Like a musical group.”
I asked her whether she called Sonny & Cher a group. Or Captain & Tennille. She asked why I had to argue about this.
“I’m not trying to argue. You just mentioned something and I wanted to clarify so you wouldn’t be embarrassed later.”
“What later?”
“When we move to the mountains and you tell people we’re living together as hermits, and someone says, ‘How can you be hermits when you’re living together?’ Though I suppose just having that third person to talk to would invalidate the whole hermit thing, as well.”
She sighed. “I don’t literally want to move to the mountains with you.”
“Oh.”
“Oh. Yeah. I was trying to be romantic and you have to fucking ruin it with this bullshit about hermits.”
I apologized. I get very literal sometimes.
At that moment, the leaves rustled and a figure emerged from the bushes. He was slim and sinewy and his hair was matted to his head and he had a beard that I wanted to shove my hand into but worried my hand would be stuck in there forever. He wore overalls and a T-shirt and scuffed black boots.
“What are you two going on about?” he said, more lucidly than his appearance would suggest.
“My girlfriend” — she glared at me — “and I were just having an argument. In fact, we were arguing about what qualifies as being a hermit. And as a hermit yourself, I suppose you could back me up on this.”
“Hermit?” he said. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Aren’t you a hermit? You look like you live up here all alone.”
“Where? In a cave? What the hell kind of existence is that?”
“My girlfriend said it would be romantic for just two people to live up here in the mountains.”
“Are you nuts? Is a stork gonna bring you food every day? You’d die in three days from the weather, thirst, or an animal attack.”
“If you’re not a hermit, what are you doing up here?”
“I’m in the road crew fixing the potholes. I came up here to take a shit. What makes you think I live up here?”
“Uh…no reason. Maybe we should be stranded on a deserted island.”
“Yeah, maybe you’ll last five days there,” he said. “Excuse me.” He turned his back to us and unclasped the straps of his overalls and stepped out of the overalls and started to take a shit.
My girlfriend and I returned to the car and descended the mountain in silence. She never called me again, and I ruined the car’s alignment because I drove too fast down a choppy mountain road full of potholes.
