Read Online The Park Service: Book One of The Park Service Trilogy by Ryan Winfield - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Ryan Winfield
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close the wind from its cupped feathers tickles my ear, one yellow-piercing eye taking me in without interest. It tips a wing and disappears around the bend, following the river up toward the salmon falls down which I came.
The sight of that majestic bird leaves me feeling small and useless and pathetic as I turn and vomit again.
The morning drags on forever as I drag myself downriver. I forget why I’m even heading down, but I’m consumed with a desperate need to reach the ocean. Maybe to see for myself that it isn’t frozen over, or black with tar, or boiling in an unfiltered sun. Or perhaps it’s the call of some distant past that wants me to plunge into it and cool my fever, one last human returning to where it all began. All I know for sure is that I need salt. I’m dehydrated and sick, but my body is craving salt.
I collect small stones and bits of dried river weed and suck them for their salt as I continue stumbling downriver, catching myself on beached logs, climbing carelessly down banks, hanging onto exposed roots. My hands bleed. My Level 3 shoes prove themselves no match for the real world, one sole flapping lose, the other somewhere miles behind lying limp on the riverbank like a solitary clue to mark my passing.
Morning turns to afternoon, afternoon to evening, and like the hand of a giant planetary clock, the sun arcs in its sky and beats down on me where I walk. I wish I could wish it away—send it barreling down into the depths from which I came. I’m sunburnt. My nose, my ears, my neck, even my scalp beneath my hair, are all radiating a kind of flesh-on-fire pain. And when the sun finally does lower, my skin seems to burn with a heat of its own against the quick and coming cold.
I shiver with fever. The fish are fine, the grizzly, too. It’s not some deadly radiation killing me—it’s my years of isolation down below, my immature immune system. It seems as if the surface is punishing me for daring to climb upon it uninvited, or maybe for all those years of denying its existence.
I think these rambling thoughts as I lurch on into the setting sun, my shadow cast a mile behind me, staggering and nameless, broken and small, mumbling to myself about the lies I’ve been told, I’m angry, my face is lifted, my steps defiant, my hand held before me pushing the giant sun away where it sinks, now enormous and orange, into the shimmering sea.
End of land relief.
Nowhere to walk now.
I drop to my knees and flail my useless arms into the sky, but when I open my mouth for a victory scream, my tongue is cotton dry, my throat swollen, and not even the faintest sound comes out. I fall forward and press my cheek to the cool, salty mud, and with one eye open, I see a vision just beyond the surf.
Twenty meters offshore, he crouches on a coral rock, his toes arched, his butt resting on his heels. His long arms wrap his shoulders, and he stares out to sea as if he were sending the sun to bed with his gaze. His hair is thick and dark and long, falling down around his elbows in curly, sun-kissed waves. His tan skin is smooth and glistening wet, and he looks like the sun himself fallen into the ocean and just now having climbed out.
I’m reminded of Bill watching from his lifeguard tower in Holocene II. Bill, buried somewhere beneath me now, just a faded remembrance of some other life.
I continue watching.
His pose is still and calm, grounded in the sea. So much time passes that I wonder if he’s not just some illusion invented by my delirium; firm and wishful thinking chiseled by my mind from some striking outcropping of rock.
The rising waves lap at his feet. Soon, the rock disappears giving him the look of a bronzed effigy cast after some godly boy who sits on water. And then he rises and dives forward and disappears headfirst into the orange, sun-dappled water with hardly a splash. The ripples move away and diminish, the rock now completely covered by the tide, and no evidence remains of his ever
The sight of that majestic bird leaves me feeling small and useless and pathetic as I turn and vomit again.
The morning drags on forever as I drag myself downriver. I forget why I’m even heading down, but I’m consumed with a desperate need to reach the ocean. Maybe to see for myself that it isn’t frozen over, or black with tar, or boiling in an unfiltered sun. Or perhaps it’s the call of some distant past that wants me to plunge into it and cool my fever, one last human returning to where it all began. All I know for sure is that I need salt. I’m dehydrated and sick, but my body is craving salt.
I collect small stones and bits of dried river weed and suck them for their salt as I continue stumbling downriver, catching myself on beached logs, climbing carelessly down banks, hanging onto exposed roots. My hands bleed. My Level 3 shoes prove themselves no match for the real world, one sole flapping lose, the other somewhere miles behind lying limp on the riverbank like a solitary clue to mark my passing.
Morning turns to afternoon, afternoon to evening, and like the hand of a giant planetary clock, the sun arcs in its sky and beats down on me where I walk. I wish I could wish it away—send it barreling down into the depths from which I came. I’m sunburnt. My nose, my ears, my neck, even my scalp beneath my hair, are all radiating a kind of flesh-on-fire pain. And when the sun finally does lower, my skin seems to burn with a heat of its own against the quick and coming cold.
I shiver with fever. The fish are fine, the grizzly, too. It’s not some deadly radiation killing me—it’s my years of isolation down below, my immature immune system. It seems as if the surface is punishing me for daring to climb upon it uninvited, or maybe for all those years of denying its existence.
I think these rambling thoughts as I lurch on into the setting sun, my shadow cast a mile behind me, staggering and nameless, broken and small, mumbling to myself about the lies I’ve been told, I’m angry, my face is lifted, my steps defiant, my hand held before me pushing the giant sun away where it sinks, now enormous and orange, into the shimmering sea.
End of land relief.
Nowhere to walk now.
I drop to my knees and flail my useless arms into the sky, but when I open my mouth for a victory scream, my tongue is cotton dry, my throat swollen, and not even the faintest sound comes out. I fall forward and press my cheek to the cool, salty mud, and with one eye open, I see a vision just beyond the surf.
Twenty meters offshore, he crouches on a coral rock, his toes arched, his butt resting on his heels. His long arms wrap his shoulders, and he stares out to sea as if he were sending the sun to bed with his gaze. His hair is thick and dark and long, falling down around his elbows in curly, sun-kissed waves. His tan skin is smooth and glistening wet, and he looks like the sun himself fallen into the ocean and just now having climbed out.
I’m reminded of Bill watching from his lifeguard tower in Holocene II. Bill, buried somewhere beneath me now, just a faded remembrance of some other life.
I continue watching.
His pose is still and calm, grounded in the sea. So much time passes that I wonder if he’s not just some illusion invented by my delirium; firm and wishful thinking chiseled by my mind from some striking outcropping of rock.
The rising waves lap at his feet. Soon, the rock disappears giving him the look of a bronzed effigy cast after some godly boy who sits on water. And then he rises and dives forward and disappears headfirst into the orange, sun-dappled water with hardly a splash. The ripples move away and diminish, the rock now completely covered by the tide, and no evidence remains of his ever
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