Rocky Mountain Gothic

ROCKY MOUNTAIN GOTHIC

by Ev Datsyk

 It is good manners to accept a heart when one is offered to you. They say beggars can’t be choosers, after all. But Dinah’s parents pause. When they face each other, a thousand unspoken fears anchor in the harbour between them:

What if it changes her?

What if she dies without it?

What if she becomes like them?

In a strangled voice, Dinah’s mother asks, “Is there any other way?”

The doctor looks at them sympathetically. She lost a nephew to the forest. She understands their fears as well as anyone could. Still, she says, “If you pass on this, there’s no guarantee another will come in time. Dinah will move to the bottom of the list and won’t have another chance until things are dire. Think about it. It’s a perfectly good bear heart.”

•••

Once upon a time, a dead bear would be a travesty. 

An animal’s death would be a common, uneventful thing in another town like theirs: the forest on all sides, children playing in the river trenches, scaring birds out of the trees with their chatter, while their parents built their livelihoods off the land itself. But it was different here. Everything was different here.

In the four years following the children’s disappearance, the townspeople took on grave assignments. They taught themselves to follow scratch marks on trees and prints in the muck. They learned to look loss in its black eyes.

When an animal was found dead—in a cave, under a blanket of fallen leaves, on the highway, God forbid the highway—the detritus was brushed away by the townspeople, swatting flies off the rot, cursing the maggots away. Tenderly, they laid the body on a canvas and, like pallbearers, mounted the beast’s weight on their shoulders. Struggling not to jostle the body, they moved slowly to town.

When their procession approached, half the parents ran forward, wailing, “Who was it?” Half waited behind closed doors, rocking and worrying, Who was it?

Then they would skin the thing, looking for human flesh.

Today, a dead bear is just a heart on ice, waiting for a girl. 

•••

For four years, the forest sang tainted melodies: a cacophony of mating calls and slow-stalking footfalls and chipper songbirds who choralled, They’re ours, they’re ours. 

From their porches littered with pine needles, the townspeople watched the great green depths for signs of life. They learned how to focus binoculars. They learned what animals ate. They bit their nails to the quick. 

Still the forest mocked them, ravaged them with grief. Left their flesh-and-bone bodies aching and a little mad. This great group of pack-hunting animals, starved and longing.

Ever since the children returned, the forest has been quiet. The silence is not a peaceful one.

•••

The woods summoned the second graders at recess.

Its homecalling started as a stirring. It rustled through the children’s hollows. It whispered to their bellies of fresh fruit. It tickled their fingertips with the need to climb and gather. It thrilled their hearts and quickened their pulses.

By the time the children could wonder, Where am I going? their feet had turned to hooves, or their hands to paws, or their teeth to fangs.

There was a split second where they fought back. Images flitted through them of crabapple trees and fire pits and gingham blankets and Scrabble pieces.

And then, in the next breath, in the dirt on all fours, they lost every memory of what raised them.

•••

In the days that followed, the mountainside shook with parents’ calls. Families took to pine-dusted trails, marking routes home with red ribbons tied to split bark. 

As they searched, the seasons turned around them, burying the forest loam in white. The larches faded from green to gold, under skies first braised with summer smoke and then shimmering with midnight borealis.

There was not a child to be found.

The townsfolk lost their taste for meat. The steakhouse grew dusty. The butcher went out of business. Local hunters would no longer fire their rifles into the forest, unsure whose child they might pull from the brambles, skin, and harvest for parts. Their left-behind human children went to bed hollow with hunger.

The vermin population thrived. No one would lay out traps for fear of ensnaring a child they had once fed apple pie and ice cream. When her 14-year-old tabby left a little white corpse in her shoe as a token of its love, the schoolteacher Miss Simpkins screamed. She went to bed feverish. She disposed of the mouse and the cat before any questions could be asked. He was the first cat to disappear, but not the last. No one would house a creature that might catch a child in its teeth. 

Tourism nosedived. Where once they welcomed outsiders with seasonal hunting licenses and fishing poles, they would no longer entertain such predators. The outdoor store could no longer sell bait, lures, or nets; snares, traps, or hunting knives; or kindling or matches. The only stock that ever moved from its shelves were binoculars. 

The people grew gaunt and weary, poor and tired. They watered gardens with tears and had no appetite for their fruits. They wouldn’t leave when the forest burned. They fought back fire with buckets, and even the provincial government’s pleading could not sway these stubborn people, dark with sorrow and soot. 

So long as the land had their children, they would save the land.

•••

They become a town divided.

Those who

saw the dark overhead holding their child as a star in the sky. 

saw the black night and thought, I am beneath the same moon as my baby.

shooed bugs away and slapped mosquitoes off their arms.

screamed at ones who kept flyswatters and citronella candles.

wore black.

outfitted in gardening gloves and khakis.

hung up photos like an altar. 

continued to call into the hills.

said, It’s been four years. We need to move on. Sell the house. This place has too many memories.

said, I will never leave. I will never abandon them. I will leave my door open so they may crawl back in whatever body is now theirs and know this is home.

•••

When the days were longest, bright flowers mocked their sorrows.

Those who had lost a child dreaded a summer of laughter. It was torture to hear lucky, intact families enjoying the weather, entertaining tradition. 

The fortunate ones did not see it that way; they were ashamed of their easy happiness. Fathers trained their children to feel guilty when recounting their favourite memories. Mothers urged their children to hang their heads when they walked so no one would see them smiling. 

In the last week of classes, the elementary school was full of pinch-faced kids sucking on the twin lemons of joy and privilege. They wrote exams, gave presentations, and forced themselves to dread long days at the lake, honeyed sunsets, and fresh strawberries with cream.

July closed in around them. Harpreet was standing at the front of her third-grade class, holding a diorama about the food chain when Carlin Conners stumbled buck-naked from the trees. 

Harpreet’s diorama crashed. Bent cardboard and squashed plasticine rabbits.

All the schoolkids crushed against the windows, steaming the glass with their breath, to watch as the lost children burst from the brush. They were four years older and dark with filth, overgrown and wild-eyed. They were home.

•••

Because Dinah was too old and her brother was too young, their family stayed whole, and the entire thing felt like a strange dream.

She was a third-grader. Safe by virtue of nothing but her age, and too young to reconcile with the extremities of grief. The lashing out, the anger, the laughter in a sweet moment of forgetting. 

But her class was divided: the segregation of those who had lost and those who had not.

Her friend circle was decided by fortune. They were the lucky ones who could play with plastic ponies and call dibs on first crushes. Across the schoolyard, their peers sat on the grass and shared the same thought, over and over until their tongues had tired from saying it: I miss them. Mom is crying. Dad too.

The school hosted memorial assemblies. Grief glanced off of Dinah. I’m rubber and you’re glue; sad things bounce off me and stick to you. She sat on her hands so she would not wiggle, criss-cross-applesauce on the gymnasium floor. She yearned, desperately, to tell someone her birthday was coming up.

Later, she told her class, “I’m turning nine in nine days.”

One of the girls who had kept everything, but wished to have lost something and be smothered in concern, stared daggers at her across the classroom. “Some people won’t have birthdays ever again.” 

Dinah shrunk against her glare. 

She is four years older now but sometimes feels no wiser. In her mind, she will always be the girl who yearned to grow and was told to stay down.

•••

Dinah stands in the hospital bathroom and stares at the stitched-up line on her chest. The red lines repulse her, the dark threads tied like barbs. The bear heart feels too big for her. 

“How’s it going in there, Di?” her mom calls from the other side of the door.

“Good,” she answers automatically, hastily adjusting her gown before she crawls back into the bed.

While she rearranges Dinah’s sheets, her mom asks, as she has countless times before, “How do you feel?” 

“Same.” Dinah is tired of answering. She feels like a little kid scraped empty and refilled with foreign parts. She feels small and scared and changed. She feels new. But she keeps it simple for her parents: tired, sore, better.

“That’s good,” says her mother, mostly to herself. “Good.”

•••

Those who returned are changed.

Wrong.

The now-sixth graders are back at school. Their curriculum is modified, accommodating for the time they were lost.

It’s customary to say, “It’s so good to see you again,” and hug the returned children despite their squirming. “Are you excited to be going back to school?”

How could they be excited? How, when they were wild?

But this is the only polite conversation, for someone is always wondering, Why you?

Not all of them returned. The only ones left lived as predators and prey larger than dogs.

Caution must be exercised. No one wants to be the one to ask, What did you eat? Who did you eat? For how could they stand the answer?

•••

“Where are you going, Di?” Her dad smiles, but she catches concern wobbling his voice. He’s always seemed nonchalant, splayed on the couch with his face creased with laughter lines, but something’s shifted in him. Tension sits in his shoulders and his smile.

He should be relieved. She is full of heart and red blood. But he’s looking for changes in her, and he’s finding them.

Dinah used to spend hours in her room at a time. She was a peevish preteen. She asked to eat alone. Mitch would suggest they play outside, and she’d shoot him down, too grown for the games they used to play between the trees. She would lie on her floor and text instead. To unwind from doctor’s appointments, she watched YouTube, studying girls close to her age who lived glamorous, beautiful urban lives. 

Now, with a new strong heart pumping blood through her body, she’s restless and peckish when the sun starts to set. She seldom looks at her phone at all. The world behind its glass, which once seemed so critical, falls flat. The videos that enraptured her are odourless, tasteless, and intangible. Too pristine. Too curated. Like an overpruned garden.

“Just outside.”

Worry flickers across his face, but she leaves just the same. 

She kicks off her flip-flops and stands in the backyard grass. This is what her dad can’t understand: she never goes anywhere, not where the sidewalks are paved and hard underfoot. But she’ll stand in her own yard for hours, her toes in the yellow-green lawn, switching her weight from the pads of her foot to her heel.

Her mom’s soft voice floats from the back door, “We’re going to eat soon, Di.”

She hears the door shut again.

Even with the promise of dinner ahead, Dinah listens to her hunger as it comes to her. Crouching in the grass, she gathers chokecherries in her palms and eats mouthfuls at a time. She slaps a hand over a beetle resting on her knee, then picks it for parts, letting its iridescent wings dissolve on her tongue like wafer paper.

•••

On their walk to school, Dinah picks late-summer berries ‘til her fingertips are purple. The air is crisp and gold, a season curling into itself like a dried leaf. She extends the fruit in her open hand towards her little brother.

Mitch is seven, the same age now as the lost children when they were taken. He has overgrown golden curls that his aunties always threaten to cut, and he smells like breakfast: toast and peanut butter. He’s quiet at home but comes alive in third spaces, just a boy and his sister.

“What did it feel like?” he asks eagerly, choosing the ripest, juiciest berry of the bunch. When they are alone, he leads with morbid curiosity. What were the doctors like? Did she lose lots of blood?

“I don’t know,” Dinah answers. She brushes dried grass from the back of his hoodie. “I was asleep.”

“Oh. Makes sense.”

She hates disappointing him, “But now I’ve got the bear in me.” She cuts in front of him and makes claws with her hands, “Grrrrr!!”

He laughs, and she follows. The sound is strange, like it can’t wiggle around her new heart.

•••

Her classroom has a sign that says “Welcome back, Dinah!” Her classmates cheer when she enters. The attention raises the hairs on the back of her neck. So many eyes on her. She’d never minded before. Never felt targeted before. The celebration is for another Dinah: Dinah with a girl heart.

They expect her to put on the bashful airs of one who doesn’t care to be seen but secretly basks in the glow of their attention, soaking in the sunlight of their curiosity. To smile with just one side of her mouth, flushed as she looks at her applauding peers.

But she freezes.

A low noise threads through her. It slips up her insides, climbing her like ivy. The half-forged sound sits at the back of her throat. Horror gathers in her belly. All she can think is, Stop. 

Her oldest friend Heather flags her down, breaks the spell, “Your desk is ready,” and Dinah slips into her seat gratefully, tucking herself back into a girl’s routine.

•••

She misses outdoor recess. Her peers prefer to spend time inside. They’re seventh graders—in junior high now—graduated from the playgrounds and the forest games. They sit with their backs against cool lockers or warm vending machines and watch their crushes. 

While they snack on chocolate or snap minty gum between their teeth, Dinah pokes the vending machine for raisins and nutty trail mixes. When she crunches down on an almond, pain shoots up her jaw. She thinks about the beetle she tasted the other night, how gently its black shell broke beneath her bite. Her hunger disgusts her.

“I’m going out,” she says, and her friends, tossing a ball of chapstick between themselves, barely even look up. Except for Heather, whose eyes linger as Dinah pushes out the school doors.

She’s been back a week, and she’s quieter than she used to be. Everyone notices—including Dinah. 

No longer does she whisper to Heather, seated on her left, about a series they’re both watching, or what they’ll do after the last bell. Of her five senses, she uses her speech the least. 

She hears frequencies she’s never noticed before. Under her peers’ chit-chat, she notes the low thrum of air conditioning, the hallway’s creaking floorboards, a chirruping jay outside the classroom walls. Dinah, are you paying attention? Yes, she is, to everything—she even smells things before others do.

In class, she breathes in the musk of growing bodies, unwashed underarms and sneakers flopping loosely around tapping feet. For the first time, it doesn’t remind her of locker rooms and gym class; it’s interesting to her in the same ways that green grass and late-summer flowers are interesting.

Daytime is warm and hazy. When her desk falls in the great glare of a sunbeam, she dozes off at her desk, cheek flattened on her paper, eyelids powerless against the daylight, daydreaming about the beetle.

She knows people pity her for reasons they can’t articulate. She pities herself too, misses a part of herself that she can’t get back, like she is the lost thing she misplaced. A missing sock from another time. Where did I put me? Where did I go? 

Dinah walks around the building.

The sixth graders stand together, clumped in a herd. When they’re with family or teachers, they speak slowly, articulating themselves carefully with a dictionary of lost words. Amongst themselves, they don’t use words to communicate. They have forged a private language of glances and light touches, of subtle signals and tension. Amongst themselves, their glances say, Don’t eat the grass, that’s too many berries, bark isn’t for your belly. They are a strange and silent cluster in the schoolyard, a soundless island surrounded by babble and chatter. 

When school started, people would do this all the time: stand at the fringes of the schoolyard looking at the freaks, muttering amongst themselves about their behaviour, or what they had seen when the kids were naked. Now, it’s Dinah alone who watches.

She sees their easy intimacy, not an iota of performance between them.

Her heart aches to be with them. But she’s not like them. 

Charlie’s eyes flicker her way, and he freezes with his hands slightly away from his body, his shoulders tense. He is on high alert.

Before, Charlie was remarked on by the town’s many mothers for his Gerber-baby cheeks and healthy imagination. Charlie performed in his backyard with his hands full of magic. He would rummage through the garden shed and use a garden stake for a wand. Whisking the air, sprinkling dirt for fairydust, he summoned, behind the curtain of an upright plastic pool, a rake, a potted plant, a willing assistant (his cousin). He was built for wonder, a child who swore by joy. He slept with his favourite stuffed animals at the corner of his bed and blessed them every night. He told both of his parents individually that they were his favourite of the two. He dreamed of riding dragons.

The forest returned a Charlie who teeters on two legs and worries his lip. When he is hungry, he picks bark from the backyard tree and nibbles it. When he has an itch, he rubs his side against trees and shed walls. When his mother calls him inside, he hesitates. He is afraid to love this woman, since the last female who raised him was smashed into a windshield.

Caught, Dinah flushes. She rips her eyes away from Charlie’s, withdraws back to her friends.

•••

After that, at lunch hour, Dinah walks circles around the school. She goes out of her way to pass the sixth graders eating in the wood chips, shaded by trees. But she never works up the courage to speak. She flits at the edges instead like a midday shadow, always stretched too far for company.

Each day, she turns away feeling defeated. This time, a voice calls her back.

“You’re her, right?” Lillian’s voice is a shade accusatory.

Lillian is an only child, which once she cherished above all. While others her age bickered with their siblings or played with them in the cherry-blossomed parkland, Lillian saw their closeness and baulked. When her parents glanced at one another, or when their hands brushed in the car console on a long drive, she felt like waving her arms and disrupting the calm. She wanted nothing less than to share them, and so she interrupted their every intimacy with a tall tale or an interruption or a sudden hunger for a Tic Tac.

When she was taken, she was raised with four other pups. Together, they learned to walk, stumbling through the underbrush. They tumbled together and played. They yapped at each other for company and tussled in the brambles.

Since returning, she misses them, those lovely, silly creatures without names. When the postman makes his rounds and the neighbourhood dogs bark their greetings, Lillian must do everything in her power not to add her voice to the chorus. It was so lovely to be part of a whole.

When Dinah doesn’t answer right away, she prods, “The girl with the bear heart?” 

Dinah flushes. She’s an urban legend now, just like Lillian and the other sixth graders. “That’s me. I’m Dinah.”

“We see you stalking,” Lillian says sharply. “Sit with us or go away.”

Even though she had made up her mind to leave, Dinah joins them in the wood chips and crawling ants.

“So what? Are you like us now?”

Dinah grabs a clump of grass in her hand, squeezes the green threads till they snap into her palm. “I don’t know. What’s it feel like?”

The sixth graders’ eyes flicker around their circle.

“Weird,” one offers in a voice that has howled at the moon.

“Itchy,” adds a voice gravelly from a diet of worms and thorns.

The group laughs. Their laughter is not children’s laughter; it is ragged and harsh and starts deep in their chests.

Dinah shifts in her seat. “No,” she says, her voice still girl-hearted, “I guess not.” She draws her knees in, tucking her chin into her grass-stained jeans.

“See, the real question, Dinah,” Lillian says, her eyes bright with mischief, “is ‘Do you feel like a freak?’”

•••

Dinah’s friends don’t understand why she’s hanging out with little kids in the elementary yard at lunch.

“Is it the stimulating conversation?” They smirk. “Because they missed so much school, they’re doing, like, idiot math.” When Dinah won’t bite, they repeat hateful rumours they’ve heard before. “They ate garbage. And faeces. And some animals aren’t even a year old when they start mating. They’ve probably all had sex. There’s probably a dozen Mini Lillians running around the forest.”

Only Heather stays quiet and asks to follow her.

Dinah turns her down with no explanation, just a shrug, something like “sorry” in her shoulders. Maybe if they were older, Heather would have the words to ask, Are you OK? Did something change in you? Did something break? 

I miss you.

Instead, she waves and calls a half-hearted goodbye at Dinah’s back. 

And it’s better that way, since Dinah never has to explain, And all that may be true, but still it’s awful, being a person.

•••

After the last bell, Dinah forces herself to linger in the claustrophobic hallways with her peers. Her back teeth hurt from clenching them. She listens to idle chatter as long as she can stand it, but there always comes a moment when she wants to run—and then another moment, shortly after, when she needs to. With her bag slung over one shoulder, she stumbles away. Into the outdoors, away from the day of curious eyes on her, air conditioning, and tummy-rumbling smells. 

Normally, she catches her breath and tries to calm down while she scans the schoolyard for her brother.

Mitch is surrounded by taller boys today. His cheap wireframe glasses sit askew on his nose. She smells his fear over the drying grass.

Girl-heart Dinah would just yell, MITCH! and allow him to scramble away, shame-faced and small. She has done it before, countless times.

This time, she looks at his bullies, at their soft flesh.

She huffs a loud breath through her nose, fights off a primal urge to stomp her feet as she approaches. 

“A girl’s coming to save you, Mitch,” the boys taunt, all bluster.

That boy. He’s angry. So angry. Of course he is. Samuel and Brian were halves of a whole, and now there was only one. 

Brian searched main roads, back alleys, and the best-loved forest trails. He called Sam’s name in every classroom in the school. He asked neighbours if they had seen Sam and tried not to crumble under their pity. He looked for his brother high and low and harder than anyone he knew, only to admit that he was, like all his friends, lost in the trees.

Sam is one of the ones who did not come home. 

“Leave him alone,” Dinah’s voice comes from a place so deep inside it rumbles.

“Listen to your girlfriend, Mitchie,” Brian smirks, pushing Mitch forward so forcefully he stumbles.

She hears Brian’s pain. It’s clear to her like a grasshopper’s melody, scraped by spiny bows down their wings. 

But she smells Mitch’s fear, too.

She means to say, Back off. She means to say, Never again. But, when Dinah opens her mouth, she roars. 

••• 

They don’t talk about it on their way home. Maybe Mitch tries, but Dinah can’t hear him past the ringing in her ears. Her body is wobbly, post-adrenal. Her fingers tremble. Her knees are jelly. She begs out of dinner and stays in her room prodding her throat, trying to understand how a girl could make a sound like thunder.

She shouts goodnight through the door, and it’s only when all the lights in the house are out that she and Mitch speak. It’s a language all of their own, spoken through the wall.

Her head on her pillow, she hears his knock through the plaster.

One heavy thud. Four quick taps. Three slower ones.

I love you.

A tear slips out the corner of her eye and absorbs into her pillowcase. She taps the same message back.

•••

The sixth graders have heard—of course they have—but they don’t discuss it. What is odd to everyone else is perfectly regular for the children who disappeared to the forest.

“Been there,” Lillian flashes Dinah a grin, and that’s the end of that.

As the group packs up their lunches, wiping grass off their pants, there is a pause in their scattered conversations. Pregnant, stormlike, omen-heavy. Charlie whispers something quietly, and the thought ripples through the group, past Dinah’s earshot.

Then a nod, almost imperceptible, between Lillian and Shireen. 

Shireen is the quietest of them all, often sitting slightly apart as she watches the group, both thoughtful and critical, her eyes a hunter’s. 

Before Shireen was taken, her bed was a puffy cloud of a thing under a pink mosquito net. The photo her parents gave the papers: Shireen under her fairytale veil, her plushies spread out around her on a rose-patterned duvet. But at night, she chose to sleep on her parents’ bedroom floor in a sleeping bag. How, her parents asked the news media, would she sleep away from them?

Shireen returned hardened. She had cared for herself for a long time by then. She had left her mother’s den and learned to fend for herself. She sunk her teeth into small creatures and allowed none but the darkness to hold her at night. She slept alone in a thicket and gorged herself on feathers and entrails.

Everything she’s found since coming home feels juvenile. It would be tempting, as some do, to lean into the comfort of a long-lost home, but she does not. She cannot. She has outgrown daughterhood.

Shireen meets Dinah’s eyes, her gaze piercing. She’s such a serious creature. Dinah can imagine her as she was once: feline, golden eyes, fangs like stalactites dripping over her lips. “We don’t want to stay. We’re going to go back.”

Dinah tries not to understand, but she does right away. The new heart in her chest—is it hers? Can she say that now?—skips a beat. “How?”

Shireen shrugs. “We’ll walk,” she says, and she’s so sure of it that Dinah can’t think of anything else to say.

•••

That night, Dinah lies in bed, staring at her ceiling. She used to sleep better, dreaming almost instantly. But she feels closer to nocturnal now. At night, her whole body thrums with awakeness. She can feel the earth moving beneath her, ticklish vibrations lifting from the highway into her bed. She can hear every creak of the house and every sigh of the wind outside. She is so, so aware of Mitch, fast asleep on the other side of the wall. His shallow breaths. His pitter-pattering heartbeat.

How will they survive out there?

It’s a kid question. She knows the answer in her bones. She will strip the bark off of trees and lay in moss to rest. She will let the morning sun burn dew off her shoulders and she will drink rainwater off morning leaves. She will fish, wade in to her ankles and watch for spawn, will touch silver scales with the tips of her fingers and bring pink meat to her mouth, where her teeth are not clenched and sore but long, full, and purposeful.

Dinah understands something the sixth graders know already: the body always remembers.

Speaking from her den to his in a language they created themselves in the dark, she reaches for Mitch: One heavy thud. Four quick taps. Three slower ones.

A groggy pause, and then he answers.

•••

At locker break, Dinah watches them. It’s their recess, and the sixth graders are moving in slow circles around the perimeter of the schoolyard. They move silently as animals do. As animals must. Dinah watches them tiptoeing, and she bites her lip to quell a laugh when she sees Charlie, his spindly body taught and alert, at the edge of the forest with a slightly shocked expression. 

There is Lillian, a pack animal herding her pack into formation. There is Shireen, always on the edges, never speaking, always watching. 

The shift is almost instantaneous. Triggered by Lillian’s nod, a sudden, urgent bob that sets them in motion. They move backwards into the trees, their shoulders knocking on branches, their shirts gathering brambles and dirt. And then they turn, some of them dropping to all fours as they do, their rumps high in the air. 

In the split-second before they turn, Dinah makes out their faces: joy. Relief. Fearlessness.

Wait, she thinks. 

She realises she said it aloud. And then she is running too, away from the bell signalling classes and towards the trunks and the sounds of small footsteps and the scrape of skin on bark and the life her heart yearns for.

EV DATSYK is a queer, second-generation settler living on the land known today as Canada. She primarily writes short stories and is passionate about the Oxford comma and questionable puns. Her work can be found in Haunted Words Press and Divinations Magazine, with a full publishing history available on her social media. You can find her at @evdatsyk on most platforms.