September 11, 2017 | Occasus | Issue 7 | Fiction
Hawk Point
We moved to Wildercliff in the last days of a muggy August and piled our belongings into a house with blue siding and a crab apple tree in the yard. I felt the grooves in the floorboards with my toes while my mother put mugs into cabinets and sweaters into drawers, and my father fiddled with the electrical panel. Wildercliff was a small, dusty town, with gravel roads that seemed unplanned and telephone poles that teetered in strong winds. We didn’t know anyone who lived there, but my parents promised that I would make friends and settle in soon. In the daytime, it was too hot to go outside, so I sat on the porch in the evening and counted the mayflies teeming in the late summer air. No cars passed and no dogs barked in the distance. On my first day of school, I walked down to the big tree stump at the end of my street where the bus was supposed to pick me up. I looked around at the other houses; most were vacant, some had peeling paint and unhinged shutters. Wildercliff felt like a place that had been forgotten by all who had passed through, and left to wither away over time.
There was only a handful of other kids on the bus, scattered in different seats. I sat near the back and looked at the scratches on the back of the grimy red vinyl in front of me. I focused on them until I almost forgot where I was. Then, I felt the fake leather beside me dip down. “Hi!” said the boy who was suddenly beside me. His short curls hadn’t been brushed, and his white button-up looked to be a few sizes too small. “I’m Moby. I saw you standing at the bus stop. That’s my bus stop too, but I was late. I ran here.” “Oh, hi,” I said. “I’m Hazel.” “Do you live in the blue house? I think I saw you sitting on the porch, but I wasn’t sure if it was a ghost or if a new person had moved in. I live in the white house across the street.” “Oh, yes, I do. It wasn’t a ghost.” I laughed uncomfortably, wondering how long he’d watched me. Moby and I sat together at lunch that day. I was glad to have a new friend, although it seemed strange to me that I was the only person Moby talked to at school. It was as if all of the other grade seven kids lived in one world, and Moby lived in another. He talked to me about his foreign currency collection, the bird he used to have, and his older brother Ben, speaking of each thing as if it was more amazing than the last. “Ben and I are going to make picture books together when we’re older,” said Moby one day. “He can write and I can draw. Just wait and see how good our books will be.” Every morning I sat with Moby on the bus, and he’d talk so much that I hardly noticed time passing. After school, we’d walk back down our dingy street together. At night, I’d see an upstairs light on in his house that never turned off. The rest of the street seemed like a ghost town, but there was always that light that I could see out my bedroom window. I wondered if Moby was afraid of the dark. He seemed like someone who could be. I imagined him sitting on his bed until 4:00am, sorting foreign pennies into little piles. One morning, Moby opened up his sketchbook on the bus. His hair was slightly greasy as always. His blue t-shirt had a little brown stain. “I need to show you something,” he said, and flipped to a page with a detailed outdoor scene drawn in pencil. There were valleys and hills and even small rivers, winding through thick foliage and lush meadows. “It’s Hawk Point.” Hawk Point was a cliff that Moby had heard about from Ben. If you wanted to reach it, you had to trek through a nearby forest. Hawk Point was more beautiful than anything else in Wildercliff. At least, that’s what Ben told Moby. “Is it really like that?” I asked. “You can see all the way outside of Wildercliff, and all the way through the next town, and all the way into the ocean.” said Moby, with enchantment in his voice. “Ben saw it for himself.” September started to turn the skies greyer and the ground harder. Moby and I sat together one morning as the bus rolled through cold rain. Hawk Point came up again; it was becoming a frequent topic. Nothing else seemed to spark his interest anymore. His thoughts were consumed by the idea of finding Hawk Point and seeing all of its glory. “Ben says first we have to practice jumping.” Moby told me. I raised my eyebrows. “Off of couches, tree stumps, tall piles of books. If we don’t practice the jump, we won’t get it right, and the hawk won’t come,” Moby explained. “The hawk?” I repeated. “The hawk will catch us. We’ll never even hit the ground, Hazel. Trust me. Ben did it and lived to tell the tale. We can too.” Moby’s voice was determined and his eyes were wide. Once you got to Hawk Point, you had to go to the very edge of the cliff and jump off; it was the only way to experience the magic of the place. We spent our recess that day standing on a wooden bench and jumping off again and again. Moby critiqued each jump until he was certain we were doing it right. Other kids played basketball or stood in circles, talking privately. I never saw Moby on the weekends. I wondered if he left his house to go anywhere other than school. I sat by my window one Sunday night and looked across the street at Moby’s house. His yard had a crab apple tree just like mine, except its branches were skinnier and shorter. The light that stayed on all night was on. I’d asked Moby about it; he said it was Ben’s room. I thought about Ben and how he jumped off of Hawk Point, only to be saved by a magical bird. Was it true? Did he know Moby was planning to jump too? The bite of a cold autumn draft slipped into my room and around my shoulders. I went to sleep that night and had vivid dreams of being swooped up by an incredible, glowing hawk, Moby flying next to me, both of us smiling uncontrollably. It had been a few weeks since Moby first brought up Hawk Point when he decided it was time to go there. The inside wall of his locker was now plastered with drawings of the view from the cliff. There were puffy bags under his eyes as if he’d been up at night thinking about it. I heard his round, distinctive voice in the hallway at school, and he pulled me aside. “Tonight, Hazel. I can feel it. We have to go to Hawk Point tonight,” he said eagerly. “Why tonight?” I asked. “Come to the tree stump when it’s dark and we’ll go together.” Moby paused and sighed blissfully. “We’ll see the view. We’ll fly through the air.” “Moby, listen.” I looked around and quieted my voice. “What if the hawk doesn’t come?” Moby squinted at me, as if trying to see something in my eyes that could help him understand the words I was saying. “What?” “It’s a nice idea. It’s nice to dream about Hawk Point.” I looked at the ground, then back up at him. “But I don’t know if Ben’s telling you the truth.” Moby started shaking his head, slowly at first, then faster. “Ben wouldn’t lie to me, ” he said fiercely. “I’m going to go tonight. And the hawk will catch me. And you won’t be there. Just wait and see.” We didn’t say a word to each other on the bus ride back home that day. Without Moby talking, I started to notice other kids in our grade. I wondered if it was too late to make another friend. Moby and I got off at our bus stop, and parted ways. I watched him disappear into his little white house. The next day, Moby didn’t come to school. I walked through frigid morning sleet to the tree stump, then rode the bus alone for the first time. I ate my chicken salad by myself in the cafeteria. When I knocked on Moby’s door after school, I realized I’d never actually been inside his house. I wondered why he’d never invited me over. Moby’s father, a thin man with untidy hair and lines surrounding his features, opened the door. “Hello,” I said. “Is Moby here? I’m Hazel, his friend from school.” Moby’s father shook his head anxiously. “No, I’m sorry, he’s not here right now. He’s – do you know where he is?” I felt my throat tighten. “No. I mean – maybe.” “You do?” he said. “Hawk Point. It’s… this place. I’ve never been there, but Ben knows about it,” I explained. “Ben?” Moby’s father asked, puzzled. “Yes,” I said, as Moby’s father looked at me, waiting for more information. “Moby’s brother.” Immediately, the man’s eyes shot to the floor, and his head shook slowly. “I’m sorry. Uh, I thought he was done with that. I only have one son.” “What do you mean?” I asked. As I stared into the narrow front hallway of Moby’s house, I realized that I’d never seen Ben, or a even picture of him. “You see,” Moby’s father sighed. “Moby’s just a bit different.” With that, I wrote down everything I knew about Hawk Point on a piece of paper and gave it to Moby’s father, then walked briskly across the street and into my house, where everything made sense and everyone was home. I sat in a kitchen chair and ran my toe over the grooves of the floorboards in my kitchen. It had been a month since Moby went alone to Hawk Point seeking the unmatched euphoria of standing on its edge. I looked out my window at his house, now just an empty white box with dull windows and a neglected garden. The first snow of the year was piling up on his walkway and I watched small animals start to make homes in the crevices of the foundation. The light that was always on upstairs had finally flickered off. I wondered why he believed that something would catch him. I wondered if he still believed it when he felt his shoes slip off the last centimeter of rock and plummet through open air. I got up and put on my boots and walked to the forest, trying to remember the directions that Moby had once told me. The air was sharp and cold but I kept walking, up winding paths that criss-crossed through webs of thick trees, until I found Hawk Point. I stood on the edge and looked down at the steep rocky cliff that seemed to go on forever before it met the hard Earth. It was nowhere near as magnificent as Moby’s sketches. There were no glistening streams down below, just rugged earth and brush. I pictured Moby standing where I was. I pictured him grinning because he’d finally made it, and then jumping off and waiting, waiting, waiting for the hawk to swoop down and pull him out of his free fall, the hawk that Ben said would come, the hawk that never came.
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CASSIA PELTON is a first year student in the Social Science faculty. Although she is not studying writing, it's a passion of hers.