Alice Close Your Eyes. Averil Dean

      “Watch yourself,” Jack says.

      “Watch your own self,” I tell him, picking my way across a cluster of damp rocks. “You keep watching me, you’re gonna wipe out.”

      It was Jack’s idea to go hiking today, up the Chulapai Trail where the flat, loamy footpath wanders through an undergrowth of ferns, and gradually upward between slabs of mossy granite, rising like the ruins of a long-dead city in the forest. He is sure-footed as a mountain lion, graceful and swift, with an inaudible loping gait that makes it difficult to tell where he is when he follows behind me.