“I want to hear about the giant slug.”
Apparently, there was no slug big enough to impress Oregon children. The hand-sized yellow and black banana slugs impressed Kia, but the children all declared that they’d seen bigger. They were still riveted as Sullivan rattled off facts about the moist, slow-moving creature covered in a slimy mucus. Kia was too. Sullivan found one of the poisonous newts ambling across the path, the same color as the dirt, with a bright orange belly. She scooped it up.
“See how chill he is?” The newt ambled over her thumb andonto her other hand. “He knows I’m not going to eat him. And look at his little smile.” She knelt down and held the newt up for the smallest child to admire. “Who wants to touch him? We don’t want to scare him, so just let him walk off your hand and onto the next person’s.”
“But it’s poisonous,” one of the tweens pointed out, echoing Kia’s reservations.
“If you lick your hands. Who’s going to lick their hand after handling a newt?”
The children laughed. Sullivan shook a finger at each of them.
“Are you going to lick a newt? How about you?”
A hush fell around them as the children reverently let the creature walk from hand to hand. When it reached Kia, the boy with the newt held it out.
“You don’t have to,” Sullivan said.
But this might be the only chance she ever got to touch a poisonous newt in a forest with a pack of strange children and a woman who was her wife, and whom she’d been kind of in love with since she was twenty and was… really, really falling for now.
She held out her hand, waiting for the burn of poison. The newt felt cool, light but solid. It didn’t burn. It wasn’t slimy. It looked up at her with tiny gold eyes.
Sullivan went on to describe the network of fungus biologists believed passed messages between trees. She encouraged the kids to press their thumbprints into sap oozing from a pine tree. Everything smelled like freshness and pine. When they returned to the campsite, the tents were up. Grills were lit. Camp chairs were out. Phones were put away. A few people sat around a firepit stacked and ready to go when it got dark.
“Wash your hands!” Sullivan said by way of farewell.
“I didn’t tell them half of it,” she said to Kia as they walkedtoward the bathroom and the soap that would save them from the fate of the legendary newt sandwich. “When the banana slugs mate—they’re hermaphrodites—they both have a penis that comes out of the side of their heads, and sometimes if the penis gets stuck on the other one, one of them will chew it off.”
“Ewww.” Kia sounded a lot like the tweens.
“And the newts, when they mate, they create these flotillas, like newt sex rafts. All twirled up together, so you can’t even pull them apart. Or you shouldn’t.”
“I have no desire to pull apart newt sex rafts.”
They washed their hands and wandered toward the creek. Sunlight dappled the mossy ground, and the water glittered. Kia could almost imagine splashing into it without giving a thought to what might brush past her legs or the disturbing fact that snakes could, indeed, swim.
“You’re good with them,” Kia said when they were sitting, side by side on a large boulder overlooking the creek.
Sullivan had retrieved the binoculars Kia had picked up for their trip in case they got lost at the top of a mountain and had to look for help. Sullivan said there was a blue heron on the other side of the creek, and she wanted to get a better look.
“I’m good at talking about stuff I’m interested in,” Sullivan said, raising the binoculars to her eyes.
“They were totally hooked,” Kia said. “You could have told them about dirt.”
“I think I did tell them about dirt.”
“And they loved it. You’d be a good mom.”
Sullivan handed the binoculars to Kia. She put the strap over her head.
“It’s over there.” She pointed. “I wouldn’t be abadmom. Butwhat kind of legacy can I leave them?”
Kia looked for the bird but saw only wet children with their dripping child-hipster mullets.
“You mean what if they didn’t keep the house?”
“I mean what if there’s no planet to leave them. No fresh air. No… snow?” Sullivan stared at the stone beneath them.
Kia let the binoculars hang heavy around her neck. She thought Sullivan might have teared up, but her expression was calm and still.