Changes of Heart by Paige Lee Elliston

growth, and the rocks and boulders would tear the undercarriage out of her vehicle before she’d gone a hundred yards.
    Maggie parked well off the road and set out on foot, climbing a weeded rise. The slope wasn’t quite as benign as it had looked through the truck windshield, but the ground was studded with rocks, and the hardy short grass had a firm grip on the soil beneath it, making footing fairly secure. When she stopped to draw a breath about two-thirds of the way to the top, the heat became stifling, saunalike, and the air was as motionless as the inside of a crypt. She wiped the sheet of sweat from her forehead with her palm and shook the moisture from her hand. Then she started upward again, and this time her assault on the rise was an angry one, a fighting mad one, a battle against far more than a hill baking in the sun.
    Maggie scrambled upward, dislodging stones and small rocks as her boots fought the magnetism of gravity. She lunged ahead, fell facedown, her palms and knees grinding against the unforgiving surface. That didn’t matter—thepain, the chest full of dirt and grit she’d inhaled when she went down—all that counted now was beating the hill, because, at the same time, she was beating the turn her life had taken, the heaviness that had become a part of her, the desolation she experienced daily.
    Maggie stumbled over the top and bent forward at the waist, her pulse thudding in her ears, her breath wheezing in her throat as she gasped for air.
    There was a flat rock the size of a sofa just over the crest, and even through the shimmer of tears from her sand-abraded eyes, Maggie could see heat radiating from its surface. Next to it, in the selfish bit of shadow the huge rock yielded, was a much smaller flat stone. She collapsed onto it, the jolt of the impact traveling from her seat up her spine like an electrical shock. She let her head fall between her splayed knees and sucked air with all the strength she had left.
    After a full five minutes, when she’d blinked and rubbed the grit from her eyes and was breathing freely, Maggie leaned back against the larger rock and pulled a sleeve across her forehead. The knee of her right jean leg was ripped, and the edges of the fabric were wet with blood. Her left palm was bleeding from small cuts, and her shoulders were setting up—stiffening—but not really aching yet.
    Dumb. What did that silly explosion prove? Still, a smile crossed her face. At least I did it, though—it’s something I didn’t fail at because it was too difficult. That counts for something .
    A pair of jets scribed arcs to the east, the planes themselves silver specks, their contrails exact, pristine white linesbehind them against the unfathomable blue of the Montana sky. Fighter training, her mind told her from the position of the aircraft; one was slightly ahead, with the other to the instructor’s right and slightly behind. The lead plane cut away from the follower and began a horizontal climb. The shriek of the engine at full power now reached Maggie but was softened by the distance so that the sound was more like a gush of escaping air than the roar she knew it actually was.
    The student plane followed its instructor in the climb. Then, so rapidly that Maggie couldn’t see the change in direction, ascent to descent, the fighters blasted back toward the earth. A dull rumble, like thunder from the next county, reached Maggie as the jets breached the sound barrier.
    The jets pulled up from their dives again in perfect position with one another and scrambled back in the direction from which they’d come. The sky was marked like the blackboard of an artistic young child, the snowy lines still unchanged, sharp, creating patterns that grabbed and held the eye.
    The thought struck Maggie that she’d heard the aircraft from the base daily since Rich died but that this was the first time she’d allowed herself to watch them, to think about them, to let her mind and her eyes follow