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A bitter wind swept southward over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and tattered the remaining snow clouds into a moonlit web. A lone figure stumbled north along Paseo del Pueblo Sur. Blood from a gash in the woman’s scalp clotted her long hair. She fingered the stickiness and hurried on, oblivious to the adobe and concrete buildings standing watch over Taos’ streets.
At Paseo del Canon, she stopped and plunged her flannel shirt back into her jeans, pulled the collar of her denim jacket tight about her neck. One hand resumed its clench on a small hemp travel bag, its strap slung like a bandolier across her chest. She once again lunged northward.
Her lungs began to ache from the air’s astringency. Seeking sure footing, she drifted away from the town’s walkways and into the center of the street, where wind had swept the pavement bare. Her legs pumped, canvas hiking boots slapping at the cracked pavement as she ran. She passed the courthouse. As she crossed the dry swale of Rio Fernando, she slipped. Trying to brace her fall, she rasped the palm of her free hand on a patch of sandpaper-rough ice. She moaned, vaguely aware of more pain, more blood. She rose slowly, unsteadily. The sounds she uttered were now guttural, inhuman. Her hair seemed black icicles against her face. She pushed the bloody strands back over her ears and plodded north.
Now, her beleaguered senses told her, she was no longer stumbling. She seemed to be skimming the frozen ground. Her labored breathing calmed, and for a while the pain and cold left her.
Then a pair of fragmented thoughts: To the mountains. Daddy.
She stumbled and fell again. The moon’s reflected light cast a myriad of shadows about her. For a moment she studied them, but they made no sense. She rose, awkward as a fawn. She ran on.
Her thoughts began to blur: Old man okayokayokay he is he knows I’ll be safe.
The wind’s fingers had penetrated her thin clothing and were grabbling through lean flesh toward her bones.
If she were to have unscrambled the bits and pieces of her thoughts now and forced lucidity on them, she would have realized she didn’t know where she was, or how she got there. Instead, she began to wail. Nothing coherent would surface now, not even her own name.
Rememberallrightoldmanrememberwho? Tallisn’t he? Nowhereremember!
Another wail as pain once again thumped. Her memories, her past, the reason she’d come to this place: all this had dissolved in wind and cold and pain. The fear that had set her running, and the fear of being abandoned by memory and name – these knifed through her. She wailed, loudly, agonizingly this time.
She bent low into the wind and ran on, now sliding on the underlying ice, now faltering as she stumbled through potholes and over rocks and refuse beneath patches of soft, glowing white. She slowed often, stopping to hug signposts, anything that might afford a moment’s rest and keep her upright.
Soon Kit Carson's homestead emerged to her right. On the other side of the Paseo, the town plaza lay squat and dark. She ran past art centers, Kit Carson Park, past the police station, a post office.
The street changes to Paseo del Pueblo Norte north of the town plaza. It turns sharply west from there, toward the airport, but the woman continued without hesitation to the north. Buildings and lights fell away; she ran on a moonlit trail. Even the jumble of thoughts left her, fading to simple instinct. Numbness replaced the throbbing in her head. She ran on.
Soon, a cluster of shadowed buildings. Not the squat, square buildings of the town; these appeared to be stacked like a child's building blocks. She trotted through a gate in a high wall. To her left lay the blunt fingers of a cemetery’s monuments. Ahead, she gained a full, moon-illuminated view of the pueblo. Its crudely fashioned adobe surfaces were broken only by the projections of their viga beams, by their shuttered window openings, and by the narrow wooden slots that served as portals to the building’s interior.
A smile crept across her face. "Home," she whispered.

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