Free Girl in Landscape by Jonathan Lethem

had never been alone, never been out in the open this long. Here, or back home, for that matter. Perhaps she hadn’t woken from her waking dream. Maybe she’d failed to break the spell, her dream merely segueing into some more lucid phase.
    But no, she was really here, running. Out on the mangled surfaces. Bruce had just gotten bored, and wandered off, probably. What needed explaining wasn’t outside her, in the world or the situation. It was her state that was the puzzle. Her interior. Her lapse into—what?
    She ran on.
    She came across a gouge in the valley floor. Stones pried out of place, a patch of dust moistened into mud by what had been pulled out of the hole. Potatoes. It was a place where Bruce had been digging, she could tell. Such a sign of normalcy already, that she paused there, hopeful, fond.
    She looked into the hole. Hacked-away vines trailed from the glistening gap, a socket like the space left whena baby tooth falls out. Bruce was probably cashing in the booty at Wa’s shop.
    Calmed somewhat, Pella trudged home.
    Her house was in sight when suddenly she was not alone. A man in a hat stood on a ridge to her left, between her and the sun, so that he was a silhouette against the pink. Standing still, he was almost like another of the broken arches on the horizon, somehow drawn suddenly close.
    She stopped, and they were both standing still. For a moment he just stared, one arm crossed over his middle, the other at his side, and Pella could imagine any expression on his face, and did. Then he started down the ridge toward her. She stood and waited.
    “You headed up to that house there?” he said when he got to her. He pointed first at her and then at her house, in a gesture gentler than his voice.
    She nodded.
    “New family,” he said. He was tall, but not spindly like E. G. Wa. Without his being at all fat, his hips were wider than his shoulders.
    She nodded again.
    “Well, I’m headed there myself. Ben told me, and I thought I’d come say hello. Only Ben must have left out that Marsh was remarried. You’re too young to have had three kids.”
    Pella was bewildered, then astonished, as she worked it out, the meaning of what he’d said. Was hejoking? “I’m
one
of them,” she blurted. “One of the three kids.”
    Pella was already feverish in her panic. Now she felt her face flush with shame.
    But
he
wasn’t embarrassed. “Then this Clement Marsh must be older than I understood. You’re not much of a kid anymore.”
    “I’m thirteen.”
    If he was making fun of her he didn’t give it away. “What’s your name?”
    “Pella.”
    “My name’s Efram.” He smiled, and she permitted herself a look up at his face, but the hat cast a block of shadow across his brow and nose. His smile was bigger on one side than the other, and he held it so that it seemed carved in rock, the way he’d stood still when she first saw him.
    Then he pointed again at her house, and again the gesture was soft, like he was shaping the air with his hand. “I guess we’re going the same way, Pella.”
    “Yes,” she said, and nodded too. Suddenly she wanted to be back at the house, badly. Something was wrong with this meeting. Maybe it was the way they were out in the middle of the valley, without even a porch for context. It seemed mistakes of scale were possible in this alien landscape. Pella could be taken for somebody’s wife. Her father’s, specifically.
    And Efram Nugent could seem too big, out here. She wanted him adjusted, made smaller.
    So they turned and walked together toward herhouse, but that seemed wrong somehow, too, the sudden implicit alliance, the way it was as though she was bringing him home. Efram just sauntered along beside her, unperturbed, so still even as he walked that she felt skittery, like a household deer veering dangerously near a human’s steps.
    They walked like this, in silence, the one solid and unhurried, the other dynamic, bright, unhinged. Their shadows pulsed out in front