The Great Alone

First and always was her hair. Long and untamed and red. And there was the milky skin that was standard issue with the hair, and freckles like red-pepper flakes across her nose.

“And you,” Large Marge said. “What’s your story, missy?” “I don’t have a story.” “Everyone has a story. Maybe yours just starts up here.” “Maybe.”

Mama flung open the dirty curtains and sunlight poured in, thick with dust motes.

But five out of every one thousand Alaskans go missing every year. Just disappear. And most of the dreamers . . . well, they don’t make it past the first winter.

Today she had glimpsed a world that lay beneath the surface of her own.

edict,

She clicked another picture, but no ink and paper could capture the grandeur of that mountain range.

The chasm between the girl Mama had been raised to be and the woman she had become seemed impossible to cross.