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" Your Mother Wears Army Boots"

By Terry Echoes

I've got a love-hate relationship with cameras. They love to watch me, and I hate that. I suppose lots of people could say the same, and I'm probably not much different from the next person who thinks their face would break a camera. My eyebrows are too dark, my chin sticks out too far, I've got huge bags under my eyes, and my boobs are invisible. Yessirreebob, I'm all in a day's work for the ugly stick.

Obviously, I'm joshing--Inanimate objects can't love you. Love's an organic process, like the moment you step out of your crummy, tan car and walk of your own volition into the consignment store. Hateful thoughts seed my mind like paranoid agents infiltrating my used-up, burnt-out brain, and they manifest from every glowering glance I imagine from other shoppers going about their business. Oh, that woman's fat. That man's wearing nothing but gray--what a fashion disaster. That other person has thick glasses and thinning hair, so naturally he must be some kind of sexual predator. I don't know any of these people, they in all probability have nothing at all against me, and I have nothing against them other than how their proximity swelters me.

That's not fair. There are plenty of people uglier than me. I don't need the huge rack or the legs or the grotesque Wal-Mart ass to feel beautiful. What I need is a secondhand book from the consignment on Stratford Ave down in the Valley. And maybe to check out the Tama-whatsits they still got in their original packaging. Department stores will just have cheap crap made in China with a boot firmly planted on the face of a Hong Kong national. Gimme the used junk in a Goodwill any day. At least this stuff has meaning.

It's not the people glancing at me that bothers me. It's the burrowing laser vision of the fish-eyed lenses, scouring the world below from behind their less-than-subtle blacked-out domes. I won't go into Wal-Mart anymore because the first thing you're greeted with is the creepy sniper perspective of yourself walking into the store. Yeah, I know I'm entering the store. I walked in here, didn't I? Kids think it's a riot, adults awkwardly ignore it, and then there's me in the middle worrying the whole time. There's a kind of non-sexual perversion about the way the cameras slothfully track after you, zoom in with their little motor vip-vips.

I blame myself for these thoughts. The Valley; I used to be a valley girl. Not in the SoCal sense, but in our own little corner of the eastern seaboard. I was in a clique once. I've been clique-free for 1,564 days. It's easy to forget now, like one forgets the cameras and microphones on your phone, but I spent every moment I wasn't flexing my preppy grades gossiping about other girls' piercings, which jocks were drug dealers, what the hell was up with that one weird kid, and so on and so forth. Important news of the day like that. So now I'm on guard at all times about the weaknesses people have, and the cameras looking down on me, proving to the world I existed and was unremarkable. I realize I've already got enough troubles without having to invent more for myself from the feelings in my head.

As I was saying, I was in the Goodwill when I first saw him. The man all in grey. I was in the clothing aisles, these long, long metallic racks of countless mismatched clothing, with very few crossings to the next aisle over that weren't blocked up by big tubs of plastic garbage better left to the pack-rats. I couldn't see through all the garments, of course, but it was that wide-brimmed hat creeping into my subconscious that I noticed first. It just about peeked over the top of the aisles at the perfect height where I could get a decent view of it and nothing below the brim. Who the heck wore a hat like that if they weren't Amish? I tried to pay them no mind, but as I carefully made my way down the aisle, I noticed them lagging into view on the opposite side. I busied myself with rifling through the clothing rack, surprised by how heavy pushing them aside was. There wasn't even much room to do so; as soon as I drew back my scrawny arm, they all pushed back into place. I found I couldn't reach across to the next aisle's side of the rack, so I wasn't able to sneak a peek at this strange figure in grey.

I made my way to the end of the aisle, determined to step into his, or hers as the case may have been. Just as I reached the end, he sped into my peripheral and departed for the next aisle over on his side. I thought about chasing after him, but I didn't want to get confrontational. I instead moved to the next aisle over in the opposite direction, putting us two aisles apart. There, I accidentally bumped into a heavyset woman, so hefty her breasts and stomach seemed to be one big entity. She was carrying a pile of clothes and dressed like she worked here in a blue shirt with a logo, and an ID dangling on a lanyard around her neck.

"Watch it!" she said.

I mumbled an apology as I stumbled around her, then made my way down the aisle, chewing nervously on the end of my side bangs that stuck out from under my knit cap. I was getting worked up over nothing, I told myself. I was being ridiculous and paranoid. Obviously this gentleman in the all-grey suit was here in desperate need of adding some color to his attire. I rubbed at the bag under my right eye some as I approached the end of this long aisle of clothing. I jerked my head to my left, knowing what I would see. The gray brim was peeking out from above the rack in the very next aisle to me.

I didn't want to panic, but I did. That's how it usually goes, right? "Dude, are you following me?" I shouted, making my voice sound angry. I got several strange looks that I couldn't help but notice. I felt the employee I'd passed boring smoking holes into my neck, and I had the poor judgment to look out into the open area of the store where some guy was scoffing at me, and another woman, dressed with lots of jewelry, was looking at me like a pug that had lifted its leg on hers.

I whirled back around, but there was no sign of the man in grey. Goodie. I was going crazy. My cheeks felt hot as I left for the exit. I stopped in that area with the vending machine, almost afraid to leave, yet expecting somebody, maybe an employee, to rush out and tell me I was making a scene, or to tell me to empty my pockets. Worst of all, there wasn't anything good in the machine. You can't find Orangina anywhere around here.

I felt better by the time I slumped into the seat of the car. It was cold as heck, as it usually was up here, but I didn't mind. I just stared up through the sunroof at the night sky and stalled making my way home. When my mind started to pester itself about having to wake up tomorrow and start the whole uneventful day again, I knew that was when it was time to leave. Before I did, however, I distracted myself for a time with futzing about on my phone. Bored of all the pointless "games" with their micro-transactions and forced real-time waiting periods, I scoured the app store for something new. I'm not very logical, I suppose.

Last night, one app caught my eye. It shouldn't have, really. Its icon was blacked out, and it had one screenshot available that was nothing but a black screen. It was this lack of immediate information that perturbed my attention, I suppose. It was this app that pinged my phone to alert me the download had finished. It wasn't a big install, but I usually keep my phone off. I figured it must've clung onto the parking lot WiFi. I remembered then that I had decided to download the new SeekR app in a brief bout of desperation for human kindness that I was never gonna find.

When I thumbed the app open, I was met with an uncertain sight. The screen displayed a dull shade of melancholy blue which faded into grey toward the bottom. A single clear drop of water dripped from the top of the screen and hit a point within the grey, echoing crisply as the surface rippled. Words slowly faded into view: "What do you want to find?"

About half a dozen semi-sarcastic words popped into my head. Before I felt like committing to a reply, I puzzled over what sort of app this was. It didn't seem like a dating app to me. Where were the cropped pictures of people in sunglasses standing next to all-terrain vehicles while on vacation? Where was the glitz of conspicuous leisure and the glamour of insecure vanity? What did this app think it could provide me? I saw no way of communicating with it, and no method yet of how it would provide for my answer. Maybe that wasn't the point of it. Maybe this was just some dumb meditation app with a bad cash-grab name.

It's funny, isn't it? Here I was, ranting about cameras watching me, and at that moment I was pointing one right at my face. It was this sort of disregard that prompted me to respond aloud:

"Sleep."

I could use sleep right about then, but I was dreading arriving home and having Mom nag me for keeping the car out so late. Not that anyone had anywhere to go until morning.

Frustrated with the app, I pressed my thumb into the still-rippling water. The screen changed. It showed me a map of streets of the immediate area, like you'd see when searching for directions on the Internet, or maybe on your GPS. Now I was intrigued. Or more likely just confused. It took a few moments of staring at the map for me to visualize where this insipid computer program wanted me to go, and also to make sure that other point on the route wasn't moving towards me or something insidious like that.

I checked the clock. It was dark out, and only just turning nine o'clock. I started up the car, threw on my tunes, and rumbled out of that parking lot and down the street. I traveled for a ways, barely able to see past all the headlight glare. I hit a long patch where there weren't any businesses and no traffic, so I flicked on my high beams to keep a watch out for deer. Apparently deer are made out of diamond and can wreck a car designed by a team of graduated engineers. I'm a dirty hippie who hates the wasteful slaughter of living creatures.

I pulled into a plaza with a bunch of lesser-known chain outlets and an obligatory pizza place. I slowed to a crawl, enjoying my sluggish pace, and tried to estimate where my phone's GPS was leading me. I parked under the lights close to an overpriced grocery store and dared to step out into the chill. I greeted the night with a plume of visible breath and walked in the direction of the sidewalk.

It took me a moment to realize I was seeing what SeekR wanted to show me. Laying across a bench was a hobo in several worn layers of clothing, clutching a paper bag to his chest with his folded arms. He looked like he'd dropped out of a cartoon and into a ditch, and from just a couple of yards away, I could smell the stench of what might've been urine. He was an older man, or so I thought, with lumpy facial features and a big, red nose. His eyes were shut tight, and every so often his chest heaved as he let out a scratchy snore.

Sleep.

I wasn't sure whether it was the unpredictable potential behavior of a prospective panhandler or the fact the app had managed to find an example of what I had spoken. I didn't want to run for fear that the man would wake up and give chase. I didn't want to think what some lost soul perverted by a callous society whose cracks through which he had fallen might do to a young woman walking by herself at night. I broke into a run after all and, panicking, let myself back into the car. I burned rubber on my way out of the parking lot, and once I was back on the road proper, I felt more confident that I was in the clear.

As I laid myself back in bed, I worked up the courage to look at my phone and ponder the app. I felt like the most depressing heroine ever to appear in a Goosebumps book. I had decided to delete the app, but I couldn't. I remember realizing there was something I could use it for, but it wasn't long before I'd fallen asleep and forgotten what it was entirely.

Sleep gave me the clarity of the morning: It was ridiculous to think a bit of programmed code could find me a sleeping homeless man from my phone. The government may be in the business of wasteful expenditure, but I highly doubted anyone would be tracking intransigents in my area having a nap in the frigid air.

My mom was clattering around in the kitchen. That's what woke me up, but I laid in bed for a while, reassuring myself, reconciling with my paranoia of the previous evening. If I had felt then the way I was feeling the morning after, I wouldn't've wasted my time driving around in the dark and just gone home to bed. Nah, thinking like that is useless. Better to wonder when Mom would be back from work and I could once again get the car.

Get the car? Why? What for? To emancipate myself from these suburban doldrums?

To go on another little adventure.

That thought was a mischievous spark I hadn't felt in a long time. Wanting to force myself out of bed rather than chase the fleeting remnants of my dreams, I got up and threw open the window curtains. Outside, above the woods, the skies were veiled in grey clouds like the pallour of a bedridden old person, a lampshade to the sunshine.

My mom was downstairs, soldiering on through the kitchen, clearing up her breakfast before her morning commute. Ever since Dad passed, she's been soldiering on, leaving me to my own devices in the process. What's that phrase you sometimes see in old comic strips? "Your mother wears army boots?" I still wasn't sure what in the heck that was supposed to mean; I could hazard a guess but it still felt so bizarre my mind couldn't wrap around it.

"You're up early," Mom said. "Couldn't you sleep?"

I responded with a weak shrug. "I slept. I'm okay."

She offered only a thoughtful hum in reply. I braced myself for the impact of another textbook lecture about finding a job, going to school, acting my age, and other stuff I never learned in public education. But the lecture didn't come. Her only nagging reminder before she departed for the brick workhouse was, "Don't use up all the gas in the car."

My mumbled apology was punctuated with a slice of toast. She wouldn't know how much gas I used until she got in the car, wouldn't she? You can't get away with anything anymore.

I looked at the SeekR app in my phone. I'd forgotten to keep avoiding it. A thrill inside my chest tempted me to make another declaration, to give up another secret thought that the map would reveal to me, but this was stymied by my lack of a vehicle. I also didn't like the idea that the app would summon something within walking distance of my home. It was a growing fear, not yet rivaling my greatest fear of security cameras, but it was easy to mire myself in the thought of it.

I spent the day lost in my own home, smothered in the aggravation of parched motivation. I forced myself to watch streams online, just to have some noise, but my aggravation only grew. I flumped onto the couch, but even with my mom gone for hours, I felt uncomfortable. Exposed. I retreated to the pink lair of my bedroom and wasted the coming afternoon.

Evening fell once more. Mom came home and whipped up an unpalatable dinner of fish sticks, fries, and peas. It all tasted like flat, grainy starch to me. I helped clear the table in a rush, so that at the first opportunity, I could escape into the car and have myself that next adventure.

So what would my next escapade entail? I was looking at my phone, face awash in the glow of its illumination, mouth agape with speechlessness. Every second seemed to spill out of me like grains of sand. "I don't know. You tell me what I want to find."

I pressed my thumb to the rippling pool at the bottom of the screen and waited. I was given a new destination: Holly Green, somewhere in a corner of town I wasn't all too familiar with. I think my mom went down there to pick up Chinese once every other blue moon. There wasn't much I was familiar with out here, and not much to see, though there were some vague businesses I couldn't identify, and at least a couple of gas stations. I was on what, for most of my town, was a main thoroughfare, from the way they would mention the name of the street I was on. It wasn't a main thoroughfare for me, though. We live in a nice, woodsy area, so there were plenty of barren trees to see, cast in chill greys in my headlights. Like last night's sojourn, I wasn't seeing too many other motorists. Just me, the night, and the trees, and the far-off threat of a deer leaping out at me.

The trees opened up to empty darkness for a time, the sight of which almost startled me. The road seemed to border the end of the universe, with pitch black to the right of me. I kept waiting, expecting, as the road curved leftward, to see something terrible blip into existence beside me, but nothing came but the trees again. What did startle me was the automated voice of my GPS telling me to double back. At some point, I'd missed the turn.

Where I was tasked to go was into that inky void.

I managed to find a place to turn around; I wasn't sure what it was, but it had a tall wooden fence surrounding it. I pulled into its driveway for a quick three-point turn, then headed in the opposite direction, more slowly this time. This was how I spotted the entrance, a break in the guard rail, and some wooden posts I hadn't noticed before. There was even an arch that had somehow escaped my notice the first time, bearing a sign reading "Holly Green". So I pulled in.

The road dipped from the street, and at once I recognized where I was. Stones jutted out from the earth. A squarish building, a family crypt, emerged from the darkness. There were a few great trees whose branches reached outwards in all directions. I slowed to a crawl and waited until I found a fork in the road. Turning right, I pulled to the side and parked. There was a moment I sat there in the darkness, contemplating what had been done, what I was doing, and what I was going to do next.

I stepped out of the vehicle and into the graveyard.

A somber sort of courage washed over me. There would be no way something terrible could happen in so mournful a place. That was a strange thought that entered my mind, and I was stuck with it to preserve my own sanity. I tapped on my phone's flashlight function and stuck it into my jacket's chest pocket so the light shone in front of me.

Okay, so I was here. Now what was I looking for? Or was this it? Was the app telling me that what I really wanted was to die? That thought hobbled my knees, and I crouched on the spot to sob silently to myself for a time.

I wiped my eyes and stood back up. I wasn't sure, but I thought I'd heard something that definitely wasn't me. Was it a voice? A sound that sounded like a voice? It was already losing clarity in my memory as it passed.

My tears turned to anger as I spun accusingly into the night, among the mass of headstones and grave markers. I stormed across graves, maybe kicking a couple of plants along the way, flowers someone had left, but vandalism was far from my mind then. I walked through the cemetery aimlessly until the car was just barely visible, about the size of a toy. I had to aim my phone's light in particular to spot it. Again, I heard a sound that I couldn't recognize. Something muffled, something caught in the throat. I stopped where I was, light pointing at some person's grave, as I struggled to listen.

The grass bulged. The earth tore apart with a gasp, snapping and ruffling. Yawning up from the grave was a figure. The figure in grey. The man wearing the strange, grey hat and the long, grey coat. He was emerging from the grave smack dab in front of me, and I balked. My arms and legs went numb with cold. I lurched back, but that was the extent that I could move. The man in grey stood and straightened, the same man in grey that had been chased from the corner of my eyes before, many a time. He wasn't some stalker creeping after me, but a memory that I could no longer grasp.

The man in grey was my father.