Seekers at Deer Creek

July 29, 2026

1998

They are running again. Far into the heart of Wisconsin woods, slipping through the gaps between spruce and pine. Along the sunlit curve of the creek. They surge past the baying of dogs, the hiss of meat sizzling on grill grates, leaving behind rattling prescription bottles, toppled furniture, napkins crumpled like fallen doves among glass pillars, a yeasty whoosh of fury in the air. The yellow farmhouse recedes to a mere thumbprint in the distance. And still, they push on deeper.

Vivi, ten years old and the elder, grips Calla’s damp hand so tightly that the eight-year-old, annoyed, protests. Vivi notices Calla’s fingertips stained with pastel crayon, marmalade smeared beneath the curve of her mouth. Her chest tight with adrenaline, she still manages to relax her muscles.

“Here, Button,” she says, passing Calla a stick. “Draw me a dragon.” When life bends toward its inevitable shapes, the sisters vanish into the woods.

In the dirt, they conjure worlds far more radiant and sensible than their own. Dragons cast out from castles; mermaids guiding sailors away from shipwrecks. Their mother, May, was the source of all those myths about justice. She hadn’t wanted to live within their reality, so she taught them to lay stepping-stones made of stories. She revealed to them the craft of waking dreams. Then she left to climb alone.

Calla stares at the stick, then discards it. “No. I won’t.” Vivi sees a bright, new hard edge appear in her sister’s eyes. The gauze of childhood peeled back to reveal a wound. She remembers how, just moments earlier, in the kitchen their mother once loved, their father had slapped Calla across the cheek. Don’t sass me, girl. It was a half-hearted slap, uncertain in its claim, but it also marked the first time Tuấn had turned against his youngest and most cherished child.

Calla had stood in the mottled light, a hand against her cheek, breathing quickly. Vivi saw the churn of wills; their father, on his fourth beer of the evening, remorseful yet clinging to his last thread of authority, and Calla, proud and betrayed, ready to provoke. Vivi knew enough to pull Calla away before a portent could become disaster.

The Deer Creek woods would always lure Calla, her dark siren. Wind hissed through her parted lips, the grind of her teeth as she ran. She loves to run. And perhaps she’d drift away because, somewhere in her young heart, she understands how power works. Even in fairy tales, heroes must be cunning. They must wait for the monsters to sleep.

Now dusk settles. Tuấn’s handprint on Calla’s skin glows pink as the horizon vanishes. Vivi imagines mixing that color for herself. She’d start with titanium white, warmed with Holland yellow. Then a dash of carmine, deepened with a hint of her favorite shade, phthalo blue. Yes, nearly there. The gentle pink of consequence.

Calla meets her gaze. “What are you looking at?” “I have a plan. Let’s play hide-and-seek. Trốn tìm.” “His game.” Calla sounds with dismay.

Months earlier, during a winter blackout, with nothing to do but poke at the fire, Tuấn told them about how he used to play with his younger brother Kiê`u in Long Xuyên. Kiê`u was rarely spoken of, but that night the memories poured out. Tuấn spoke of how he and his brother folded themselves into impossible masses of skin and bone to vanish from one another’s notice. The hiding had served them well during the war, another forbidden subject. Tuấn buried the memories of singing bullets and refugee boats capsizing with bodies, along with those of their mother, who’d vanished without a trace when Vivi was seven and Calla was five. Disappearances and violence, curses that kept returning.

Before the sisters could ask where Kiê`u had gone, the lights flickered back on in the farmhouse. Tuấn would not speak about his brother again, but Vivi sometimes imagines her uncle, a patient man with her father’s blue-black eyes, still hiding behind the trees, waiting to be found. But he’s dead now. Most of their family are.

“Trốn tìm will be ours,” says Vivi. “Better than regular hide-and-seek.”

“A bigger adventure.”

Doubt hops across Calla’s face, then sinks beneath her skin. In its place grows a hope so delicate and fragile that Vivi could almost reach out to cradle it.

“How do we play?”

They set the rules together. The seeker counts to fifty while the hider scurries to a chosen spot. They can hide anywhere in the woods, but once a place is chosen, movement stops. No matter how long it takes, the hider must remain unseen, enduring the ultimate penalty of sibling humiliation if she reveals herself.

Vivi slides behind a rock shaped like a curled-up jungle cat, not far from where Calla shuts her eyes and begins counting. Calla skips a few numbers, but Vivi lets it pass. She sinks her nails into the dirt and waits in silence.

Then Calla begins the hunt, footsteps drawing near and then drifting away, tracing arcs around the trees. By the tick of her wristwatch, Vivi tracks five minutes, then ten. Leaves rustle, Calla’s soft growl of annoyance rises.

Finally, Calla’s head pops from behind the rock. Exactly eleven minutes. “Found you. My turn.”

As Vivi counts with her eyes shut, she trains her other senses. She’d once read about sightless animals navigating by vibrations, an alternate sense expanding to fill the gap left by sight. She recalls how her art teacher spoke of Claude Monet’s fading vision, how perception can both cloud and sharpen at once. Art, the teacher said, can spring from loss.

Twenty-seven, twenty-eight. Her fist tightens and loosens with the count, a pulsing rhythm.

In another current of thought, Vivi imagines her father’s right hand, crushed in a mill accident a year before their mother left. Vivi was six then. She’d just begun sleeping through the night, but her father’s hand pulled the nightmares back. She sees the hand when he’s sleeping, resting on his chest like a heap of bone and skin.

Now he does everything with his left hand. Reaching for his belt, slamming doors, gripping the telephone as he makes calls about food stamps that never arrive on time. He drives like a maniac along the yawning country roads. He smacks Vivi for some infraction she would never recall afterward.

“Fifty,” she finishes.

Calla is not behind the crouching-cat rock. She is not among the ghost trunks of trembling aspen or the snowberry shrubs heavy with their seed clusters. Vivi wanders deeper into the woods, her sneakers slipping in mud, a damp sickness creeping up her neck. Fifteen minutes pass, and Calla remains unseen. A warbler sings from a branch, a squirrel scrambles over mulch. Dread carves a hollow in Vivi’s stomach.

She hears her mother’s last words, spoken the night she left them. Keep close to your sister. She’s all you have. A hair-tuck, a soft closing of the door. Vivi had nodded off, not understanding the promise she’d made or how that vow would anchor itself in her life. Oaths work that way. They bind.

Ink gathers in the clouds, shading the day’s end. Vivi fidgets with the silver antler ring in her pocket, one of May’s keepsakes. She hasn’t told Calla about the ring, but secrets always find a way to grow between them.

“Calla?” she calls. “You can come out now. This game is silly.” She imagines Calla slipping into the creek, fingernails pressing beneath the surface. A quiet farewell. Vivi darts toward that narrow thread of woods. Her feet rustle the leaves and the shy night creatures. Yet the creek’s surface is glass, reflecting a swarm of midges and the black cathedral of trees.

Vivi wants her mother now more than ever, even as her anger flares in unexpected bursts and then dissolves just as quickly. What would May do in this moment? Vivi cannot tell. With every year that passes, May’s memory frays into another woodland tale, suspended from branches like moss. How does one hate something that no longer exists?

Vivi makes up her mind. She will return to the farmhouse and confront Tuấn. She will draw him into their hidden world, permit him to tear it open with his impotent rage and unrelenting blame. She has no choice. She is the guardian, and she has failed.

But then a muffled giggle reaches her. She looks up to find Calla perched on a low branch, legs swinging in hand-me-down sneakers. She has drawn a string of hearts on the sole and filled them in with a red Sharpie. Each heart is as precise as a stamp.

Vivi blinks into this alternate reality, a world where Calla is not in danger, where they can be children playing in a safe pocket of nature. How close the two realities were, how easily their borders blurred.

“Why didn’t you come out when I called?”

“That’s not how Seekers works.” Calla drops down gracefully, flicking a clump of dark hair from her lips.

“When did you learn to climb?”

Calla offers a secretive smile. “Let’s play again.”

In time, Vivi would realize, like a sudden storm that descends on a body, that she had taught Calla to run. Even before their minds and imaginations formed, they learned together every way to hide from the world, and from each other.

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Isabela Reyes

I write about books as quiet places where memory, imagination, and culture meet. At PLAI, I explore literature through reviews, author stories, reading reflections, and the small details that make a story stay with us long after the final page.