of nurture’s wildness - a novella (ch. 2)

by Tom Stuckey

II

Gloria’s car was a modest old Citron estate that looked like the equivalent of a work horse in machinery form. It had a lot of character which came about from many little modifications, either made by her, or from the previous owners. Inside she began moving a few of her gym things out of the way so James could put his small suitcase on the back seat, leaning fully into the back she bumped him with her behind, and then returned with messy hair that she ran her fingers through to neaten. She seemed like the most normal and beautiful woman that he had ever met. It came as a shock as he pondered what he had expected in reality’s place, an undertaker and her vehicle maybe, but the mind was always wrong, no matter how hard it kept trying to be right. “Would you like to listen to some music along the way?” Gloria asked. “Yes that would be nice,” James replied. Gloria had already begun taking the CD out of its wallet and slid it into the slot. It was Bach, air on G string. They pulled out of the car park and begun down the road passing a small service station with little windows, where inside a man talked with a concerned customer about something indistinguishable, maybe the local news or politics. It was the last of it, buildings that is, and ahead of them lay still and sleeping giants. At first it was mostly green and flat, but with ever growing walls of rock as they climbed higher. Gloria opened the window slightly, “You don’t mind?” asking after it was opened, “No it’s nice.” The air was cool and felt refreshing in James's lungs.

“Can I ask what you did before you decided to come here?”

“Sure, before I decided to come here, I guess I was a writer.”

“And what did you write about?”

“I wrote about life, I wasn’t well at it, but sometimes I found it worked for me.”

“I see,”

She looked, for a moment, away from the road and studied his face, which was clean shaven, weathered, maybe slightly older than his age of 40, with heavy patches of grey on his otherwise slick, black hair, and had lines that ran down from his eyes to his chin which looked like scars but were not. He was looking intensely but with little affect out at the road. “I write a little too, not much, mainly poems.” Gloria quickly turning back to the road once she had revealed this, it was the same for all writers. “Oh is that so.” James had past the stage of being able to keep conversations going, and instead allowed the awkward pause to turn into a complete abandon. Looking out of his window, out across the growing expanse of BELOW that had changed everything to model size as they rose further into the heavens. “You may find these few weeks difficult, many of our residents do. If you have anything that comes up then please, you can talk with me about anything, really. I will be your personal attendant, so we will be able to spend as much time together as you like.” James had another flicker of what he thought might be hope, it was a strange and distant cry, he thought why when you planned to die love suddenly became readily available again? Now all of a sudden he had a companion, a beautiful woman who seemed to genuinely care, and was not just about the work. “Thank you.” James closed his eyes, he had long stopped being able to cry, but if he could, at that moment he surly would have.

The next time he opened his eyes they were at the top. There was a thin layer of snow on the ground and it grew thicker as the mountains continued into the distance. The hardy, ancient citron pulled into a court yard that drew up to first, a phallus monument, and then into a fortress-like old hospital, with a bell tower at its top. There was no one to be seen anywhere, just a large black dog that walked up the steps and into the entrance. Half of the building looked new, whilst the other looked as old as time, and almost looked to be a part of the mountains that it was backed onto. Small rows of trees lined its perimeters and then a wide expanse of mountain range and sky. It certainly was the place to come to if you had a choice James remarked, as they collected their belongings and walked up the steps to the entrance, where they met the receptionist who took a handover from Gloria and started the necessary paper work. Most of the documentation had been filled out already but there was always more. “Let me take you to your room, we can go through this later if you would like?” Gloria took the key from the receptionist and led James towards his room. The inside of the building, although modernised at some point, was still traditional in its essence, with a lot of wooden and stone features including the walls. It also had a smell of old that had taken a long time to develop and could never be gotten rid of. The floors, which were also wooden, were smooth with little grooves that had formed over the years, it was the most alive building that James had ever been in, and with the constant view of the mountains made it seem like a nest of a very large ancient bird. James’s room was similar in style to the rest of the building, it was comfortable but still with an edge of mountain wildness mixed in. It had a double bed with white sheets, white curtains and on one of the walls a picture of a mountain town and a horse carrying a cart. James took his bag and put it onto the bed and walked to the window and opened it to let in some fresh air. “OK I’ll leave you to settle in and be back in a couple of hours so we can go through a few things.” Gloria smiled again and left, closing the door behind her, leaving James alone to look out of the window at the vastness of the mountains.

*Read Tom Stuckey’s next installment of Of Nurture’s Wildness on May 22, 2025, at 6PM CST.

Photo of Tom Stuckey

BIO: Tom is a writer from Devon in England.  His work can be found at A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Bristol Noir, Nut House Press, and Pulp Magazine. He is the author of The Canary in the Dream is Dead and The Sun Marches upon Us All. Learn more about Tom Stuckey at www.tomstuckey.com.