Reconnaissance

RECONNAISSANCE

RECONNAISSANCE

The outside world was a mystery encapsulated within a cloud of ambiguity in her mind that even the glimpses through the window in ‘his’ station could not clear. The sickly pallor of the miasma drifting over the ephemera of some wasted expanse gave the desolation in her soul a pallet with which to torment her imagination. She can only see a fraction of the teasing portal, yet still presses her face between the bars with eyes groping for anything more the dismal vantage will betray before her chance is lost.

“Don’t waste your time,” a voice like dry gravel trespasses wearily. “There’s nothin’ to see.”

Startled, she turns sharply to find the new arrival in the next cell just as the heavy rolling panel slams into its niche behind him with a jarring -bang! His gaunt and pallid features echo the ruin she was so eager to scrutinize and obscures his age with equal elusiveness. Regardless, the parched tenor of his voice makes it clear that however long he’s been on this bleak world, the years have been no more kind to him than they’ve been to her.

“Like you know,” she chides turning her face back to the bars only to have it branded with a grimace. “Gods damnit!”

The door to ‘his’ room had been shut during her brief interlude with the immigrant. She slides to the floor with resignation knowing that she may not get another chance for months. The irony of her affected familiarity with ‘him’ comes to bear and usurp with the musing that she doesn’t even know who ‘he’ is. All she knows of him is his dusty onion odor, salty metallic taste, and the size and pressure of his erection when he wakes her in the pitch of night. She imagines him as a mildly handsome roughneck who has somehow rescued himself from starvation by landing a job on this hulking barge. His hands are callused and strong but not grabby or forceful, much like his approach to sexual gratification. He has never spoken, nor has she been able to catch a glimpse of him during the hours of anemic daylight leaving nothing to dispel the comfort of the distracting fantasy.

The immigrant examines his dark cage like a narc, panning the walls and running his fingers across the underside of the cot. “Who was in here before?”

“No one until you,” she retorts, recoiling abruptly as he tests the bars between them.

“Don’t worry about me,” he mutters before stepping back.

“How long have you been in here?”

“Months maybe. Dunno,” she answers in a reluctant meter despite the relief of conversation after so long an isolation. “Hard to keep track when everything’s shut.”

“That explains it.”

“What?”

He nods past her bars to the door to ‘his’ room.

“I just want to see,” she snaps, feeling exposed. Kicking her cot to the far wall, she curls up on the thin mattress defensively with her back to the immigrant.

She is awakened by the three harsh and resonant knocks indicating the evening meal is in the slot pocketed into the cell wall. She rises in a foggy stupor and runs her palms over her face in an effort to wipe away the fatigue. With little to do within the confines of her pen, her day sleeping was not uncommon, but she is surprised the intrigue of the new arrival didn’t stave off the nap. The immigrant is already retrieving his meal and the smell of it wafting through the stale air settles uneasily in her stomach threatening to put her off her own dinner.

“You must be a night owl,” he surmises with a mouth full of hash. “What have you been doing in dark?”

The lascivious tenor of his inference only adds to her disgust, but she is too hungry and too tired to engage with him.

“It’s not bad,” he announces lifting the flimsy plastic paddle provided as a spoon.

He was right about the hash. While she didn’t want to think about what type of meat was the main ingredient, the flavor was on the lesser side of scalded and the potatoes were on the softer side of undercooked. They eat in silence until the immigrant lays his plate on the concrete floor beside his cot.

“You’re going to want to put that back in the wall.”

“Are you always going to be a nag?”

He lays across his bed with a belch as she finishes her meal and is quickly fast asleep. Stung by his name calling, she turns her plate to fit through the bars and then skids it across his cell and under his cot before returning the plastic paddle to the slot in the wall with a sense of vindictive gratification.

The dull reverberation of the barge scrolling lethargically over the unseen terrain at her soles reminds her to retrieve her boots from under the cot. A gift from a dead man, she had to wrestle them off his stiffened feet as others rifled frantically to strip the corps of what they could before the body was dumped by conveyor into the waste disposal chute. A rat-faced woman pushing her way into the fray produced a makeshift knife and, with a furtive pan around the mayhem, cut the genitals from the corpse and smelled them before stuffing them into a pouch and scurrying away. She shudders at the recollection and turns her imagination to the word-of-mouth stories of the outside world to keep the hope of their destination alive in her soul.

As the meager daylight in the transparent bands perforating the top of the cell walls waned, she wonders if he will slip into her cell now that the immigrant is on the other side of the bars. Her anticipation of physical comfort is sudden doused by a dreadful fear that he could bring the filthy immigrant in to join him in using her.

The minutes counted in heartbeats pass in the dark stillness like a series of harassments. The darkness shifts with the faintest illumination as the door to ‘his’ station opens. Her body tenses rigidly as a key penetrates the lock of the barred doors. Careful footfalls approach her cot, and she can perceive his inky form kneeling beside her. The gentle touch of rough hands initiates the session that fills her with relief, comfort, and pleasure. His kisses are as passionate as his rhythmic penetration is fulfilling and she melts into the unabated tides of their bonding. With a deep and greedy thrust, he climaxes with a stifled groan. Entwined and panting, he does not withdraw. His lips move to her ear, whispering.

“Do not speak. We’ve passed the three pillars of the old world and out of the smog. The time is close. You must kill him. You’ll know when.”

Her blood curdles. As he withdraws and disappears, her stunned brain reels in dismay and horror. How could he expect her to do such a thing? Does he think she is somehow capable of killing? With her bare hands? Could he have confused her with some imprisoned ally?

Scratching questions weave dire scenarios that stretch into the night until ushering her into an ugly sleep rife with the macabre insinuations of ‘his’ declaration. The ensanguined corpse of the immigrant lies as if in state on his cot. The bars to her cell lay open to the vivid red door to ‘his’ station. The scarlet door opens, bringing her to the window. It grows to transport her to a barren landscape littered with the corpses of the immigrant in various stages of rot. A voice calls her by name. She turns to find herself impaling the immigrant with hand that has forged itself into a roughly hewn pike. His eyes bulge as if to burst as blood gushes from his mouth. Horrified, she turns away to find herself stabbing the immigrant again. The nightmarish vignette repeats murder after murder while a brawny figure oversees from a hilltop with cold and steely eyes until the phantasms are interrupted by the harsh retching that wakes her.

She rolls over lethargically to see the hind quarters of the immigrant protruding from the toilet alcove as he kneels vomiting. ‘his’ departing words flash through her mind only to be likewise interrupted by a swell of nausea rising to her throat. Swiftly wrapping herself in her blanket, she darts to her own toilet and vomits.

Finding relief in one go, she is curious and annoyed with having to endure wave after wave of retching and cursing from the immigrant. A sterile, hateful impulse skirts through her. Its foulness is shocking and stirs an elusive reminiscence. She shakes it off as a remnant from the nightmares and coaxes her heavy body across her cell, lured by the hot five-minute shower she is allotted each morning.

The steady stream of warm relief is punctuated by the carps and cursing of the immigrant capped by the three resonate knocks just as the five-minute mark is reached. Grabbing the rag to dry herself, she peeks past the partition to spy the immigrant surveying the rash of bloodied bite marks texturing his arms and chest and is unable to suppress a satisfied grin.

“You’re going to want to shower before you eat. Use the blue wash, it’s antiseptic.”

His face contorts into a childish grimace as he mocks her under his breath.

“What the fuck?!” he roars upon discovering the second plate under his cot. Retrieving in a burst of anger, he hurls it towards the bars between them sending shards across the cold floor of both cages.

“The rats don’t like going without,” she goads as she dresses.

“You fuckin’ bitch!” he shouts, stomping to the pocketed slot and pulling out the bowl of mush petulantly.

A turn of nausea supplants her bravado, moving her swiftly to the toilet with deep breaths in an effort to stave off vomiting as her pores open and glaze her skin. The queasiness coupled with the immigrant’s wrath prompt her to stay sequestered but as soon as the nausea begins to recede the need to claim her breakfast before it is rescinded bolsters her fortitude.

“Does this shit always make you puke?” asks the immigrant in a gruff yet reconciliatory tone.

She sits on her cot, bowl in hand, avoiding looking at the immigrant out of disgust for his loud slurping and smacking and gulping. “You try not to think about it.”

Before she can finish her own breakfast, the immigrant is quietly returning his bowl to the niche. Swooning as he turns, he fumbles to his cot with a yawn. The swiftness of his drowse sinks into the pit of her stomach and she stares into her bowl of half-eaten mush with senses scrutinizing her state for any indication of a similar affect.

Nothing.

Returning her bowl to the pocketed slot as a precaution, she pulls the drying rag from the shower knob and uses it to sweep the shards of her ill-fated plate into the corner. Behind her the door to ‘his’ station slides silently open. The shift in the light draws her attention, and she stands to face the invitation with an uncertain thrill. She looks to the immigrant, who appears unmoved in his slumber, and then back to the open door. Reaching to the floor and retrieving one of the larger shards, she walks across her cell clacking the porcelain noisily against the bars dividing the two cages. The immigrant does not stir. She presses her body into the intersecting corner of the bars and pushes her face between the rods to get a glimpse of that window and what lies beyond.

“I wish you could see it all.”

The breaking of silence and her anticipation by the voice, ‘his’ voice, rocks her with a quake on a startled retreat. She casts a checking glance at the immigrant then back to the room beyond the door. ‘His’ room.

“We’ve been following the old byway sunwise since passing the three pillars of the old world. There’s grass. Wild grass, golden-green and tall. Oh! I can see a coyote! Can you believe it?”

She drinks in his deep, soft voice like an oasis spring, moving back to the bars and sinking to her knees.

“Tell me about the sky,” she pleads.

Her imagination bursts with hues of blue and misty slivers and sun-burnished oranges framed like masterpieces on the very canvas of his narrative. A variegated longing like she’s never known wells within her; to experience these wonders with her own senses, to be free, and to know the face whose voice is providing this glorious bounty.

“Clouds,” she echoes in a sigh.

“The old byway will end where trees still grow,” he continues dreamily. “Some may even have fruit you can actually pick and eat.

“Then you’ll see it.”

“What?” she prods eagerly. “See what?”

Her eager yearning is dashed like a slap in the face as the door slides shut abruptly, cleaving her very soul. “No!” she shrieks with little care of waking the vulgar immigrant. Slumping back onto the floor she is unable to quell desperate tears.

There she sits, tear-stained and still, staring absently at her disappointment with no regard for the cold concrete beneath her or the dull passage of time. The monotonous vibration of the barge’s gargantuan tracks clawing at the earth as it carries them all to their end is the only sensation accompanying her imagination’s replaying of ‘his’ narrative until an equally low and monotonous groan from the next cell draws her from her stupor.

“Fuuuck! Now I know why you sleep so much!”

“Shower,” she retorts. “If you don’t the rats will be back -for both of us.”

The immigrant nods wearily and shuffles slowly to his cramped, institutional lavatory.

The drizzle-dapping of his ablutions fade as her mind’s eye is filled with a yawning vista of ‘his’ tall grasses waving in a fresh clean breeze sailing through the three pillars of the old world. She tries to devise what they look like and wonders if she will ever see them or the old byway with her own eyes. She envisions a broad road of cobblestone -that’s what they called it? Yes. Cobblestone- scrolling before her into a golden orange sunset like in the picture books when she was a child. The daydreams carry her out of time and the dreary cell until the stagnant air is knocked loose by the three pounded thuds.

“So what happened when I was asleep?” the gauche immigrant asks with a mouth full of hash.

A stab of fear rockets through her.

“Nothing,” she snaps, avoiding his gaze.

“Hmph,” he scoffs.

She shifts on her cot to draw her knees up to her plate and rests against the concrete wall trying to ignore his scrutiny.

“Tracks of tears on your face. Staring at the door to the custodian’s office for an hour plus. Not noticing me jacking off on my cot,” he baits lasciviously.

“It’s hard to see something so small in this light,” she reviles, certain she would have noticed had he been so disgustingly brash.

“Maybe you caught a glimpse of our custodian. Maybe you even talked to him. Maybe more than talked. Did he break your little heart?”

Rolling her eyes in disdain, she rises stridently to the niche and slides the unlocked panel back to return her plate only to have her breath caught by a jagged shank waiting within. She stares at the rough-hewn blade as the reality of ‘his’ directive is manifest.

“I bet he’s a real lady killer.”

She shoves the plate into the alcove abruptly yet slides the panel shut with pensive uncertainty and returns to her cot with a brain racing so fiercely the immigrant’s taunts fade into the background. He has given her the means, but has she lost her chance by not taking the blade? Why does he need the immigrant dead and why does he expect her to do it?

Moments ago, her imagination was filled with breadth and beauty, now it reels and ruminates on motives for murder, terrible scenarios for the act itself, and the cost to her soul should she paly the part penning her in. Captive to her tangled thoughts, she curls up on the cot with her back to immigrant as lost to time as when she was daydreaming. The afternoon passes without notice rendering even the immigrant silent until those three resonant knocks transport her back to her prison cell.

The shiv lies next to the plate of hash as if not having been moved since the mid-day meal. Again, she leaves it undisturbed during the dinner cycle.

Her inattention to the immigrant makes him even more overbearing but she can hear none of his barbs and innuendos against the nervous dread growing with her. She questions her own judgement in forming any fealty to her jailer, burning her neck and ears with shame upon the recognition of being manipulated. She wonders if he will return in the night and, if so, will his veneer of gentleness have been stripped away by her refusing the implement of proxy murder.

Her heart races with the sound of the clasp clicking as he accesses her cell stealthily. Her chest heaves like ocean waves in a tempest as his inky silhouette kneels over her.

“Shshshsh…” he whispers softly, laying his palm on her chest tenderly.

His caresses are unchanged as he maneuvers his robust frame carefully in the darkness to share her cot. Waves of pleasure crest and curl with abandon and comfort and attachment and she begins to believe that she could actually kill for him. His body goes rigid as he orgasms and then wilts into the afterglow with his lips at her ear.

“We’re nearly out of time. You must kill him.”

Daring to speak and more so to question, she finds her voice and whispers, “Why?”

She can feel his hand caressing her hair as he answers, “Because you have no choice. I’m sorry.”

Upon that declaration, he withdraws into the night and she into another round of uncertainty.

It is the brightness that registers first as her mind rallies to consciousness, spinning a confused curiosity as she wakes. As her eyes focus on the pallor of the concrete wall, her heart jumps with recognition as the hue can only mean ‘his’ door is open. She rolls excitedly to her feet only to have her hope crushed by sudden terror.

“How?!” she hisses, her stricken gaze fixed on the immigrant standing at the threshold of her cell. Both her cell door and that to his room stand open as if to torment to her.

The immigrant raises his hand to showcase the keys dangling from his fingertips. “They were with my breakfast,” he gloats. “You slept right through the morning knock. Lucky me.”

She can’t help but chance a furtive glance to her own niche, praying the shiv is still inside.

The immigrant follows her gaze and lunges, shoving her against the concrete and pinning her with his body.

She can feel the start of his erection on her back as her fingers grapple to reach the panel.

“No, no, no, you little bitch,” he growls, grabbing her wrist and forcing her arm behind her back. “You won’t be having mush for breakfast today.”

Strategically struggling against the pull of her arm, she reaches into her pocket with her free hand and draws the long shard she saved when sweeping up the remains of the plate the foul immigrant had thrown against the bars.

His cry as she stabs him in the leg slaps her ear harshly as he recoils.

Turning swiftly, she knees him in the groin and then kicks him in the chest like a battering ram.

Falling onto his back with a roar, he hits his head on the concrete floor with a loud crack!

He scrambles to his feet quickly as she opens the slot and finds the shank. Her fingers grapple just as he stumbles against her, wrestling her hand from the niche.

The shiv emerges in her grasp.

She lets her legs crumple beneath her, throwing off his momentum and bringing them both to ground.

The immigrant lets out a barking yelp, rolling over to reveal the blade protruding from his side.

“You bitch!”

Without hesitation, she rips the shank from his abdomen and stabs him in the chest again and again and again until she is convinced that he is dead. Shoving his body clear, she stands on quivering legs gazing at her liberation.

“Hello?” she calls. “I -I need help.”

The station beyond her cell is still and unheeding.

Stained and splattered in the blood of the immigrant, she shuffles cautiously forward, hesitating at her open cell door as if disbelieving the invitation.

The window!

She sweeps into the control room, taking little notice of the workstation computer to stand at the yawning porthole that had anchored her sanity for so long. The strength bleeds out from underneath her, and she sinks to her knees.

No grass. No blue horizon. No clouds. A blanched wasteland stretches out as far as the eye can see, marred and marbled by the toxic miasma creeping over the barren terrain under a sickly orange sky.

The crushing reality leaves her as desolated as the world beyond the window and the small station that has provided her only reprieve resounds with her waling sobs until all succumbs to darkness.

“More.”

“Are you certain?” a muffled voice in the enveloping gloom replies.

“I want her to be alert for what comes next.”

A cold surge in her forearm intensifies to burn through her veins as it rockets to her brain. Her eyes flare with sudden sobriety to find herself back in the dingy interrogation room of the barge’s largest precinct. A burly woman with granite features and an equally hard demeanor surveys her with cold, bureaucratic indifference as the administrator of the serum exits unseen behind her.

“Murder this time.”

“He attacked me,” she mutters, forcing the words through the chemical soup swirling in her brain.

“So you’re claiming ‘self-defense’,” the inquisitor surmises with an abject lack of interest.

“He- he was in my cell. I don’t know how. My cell door was open,” she insists, a welling dread suppressing the frustration of impotence.

“Yes, yes. The incident was recorded by the monitoring system.

“Where was your custodian?”

“Shouldn’t you know?” she counters, emboldened by sobering indignance.

The inquisitor remains unmoved, as if an automaton has been placed in a trooper’s uniform, as she scribbles on a sullied notepad.

“You were providing him sexual favors -yes, the monitors- and he compelled you to murder your cell mate.”

“The immigrant was a pig! He was more and more antagonistic, like he knew he was going to get his chance.”

“How did you know he was an immigrant?”

The question confounds her fervor abruptly. She had never considered the source of her assumption. Her mind stammers on the implications.

“Chance for what?”

“What?”

“You said ‘he knew he would get his chance’.”

“To kill me!” she blurts incredulously, watching the inquisitor’s pen jerk and twitch across the yellowed paper.

“Why would he want to do that?”

“Because… because he… knew… something...” The dread that had been usurped by incredulity explodes to overwhelm her addled mind. A knowing, a truth, lies just beyond her grasp as if a greater context were exposed by a pregnant glimpse.

“If you cannot provide further testimony, this court will proceed to sentencing.”

“What have you done to me?!” she hisses on a thrill of violent horror, raging against the restraints binding her to the chair. “I can’t remember! I can’t remember what happened before I was thrown in that cell -to be set up! Like you set me up before!”

“The plaintiff will remain composed or will be sedated!” the inquisitor snaps in a vile chide that betrays her complicity.

A concert of brusque hands fall on her head and shoulders like vice grips, locking her in place to deliver the darkness again on the biting sting of a syringe.

Falling.

The sensation is all-consuming as her consciousness emerges through the portals of phrenic obscurity and dreamscapes and the twilight of waking only to be arrested abruptly upon impact. Her arms and legs flail instinctively within a viscus suspension before her eye burst open to ogle against disorientation and primal panic.

Three figures in gas masks watch from the high wall before callously turning away. It is only then that the searing stench of the enormous septic tank chokes her desperate gasps as scores of chutes pour sewage and garbage and all the rotting detritus expelled from the degenerate society stagnating within the confines of the barge. Panning across the putrid surface on frenzied limbs to the crusted wall lend her neither reprieve nor anchor.

A deep metallic wail so powerful that she can feel it reverberate in her chest heralds a thunderous sucking sound that pulls her desperate hands from the wall as the momentum of the evacuating sewage system sucks her into the fetid bilge. Even through lids and lips clenched tightly the caustic stew stings and burns as the pressure in her lungs begs for a breath.

I am not dead yet!

Taming her flailing limbs, she surrenders to the thick, noxious current and is consumed again by the sensation falling until the enveloping dross evacuates around her. She pulls herself out of the slimy muck, choking on gasps of toxic fumes to watch the waste waters spread into the sickly miasma in all directions. Behind her the colossal barge rumbles into the smoggy veils on a deep, monotonous drone leaving a trail of offal and filth and corpses littering its wake.

A horrifying and exhilarating rush of desolation and liberation battles through her as she stands and surveys her plight. The world is as she has always glimpsed it; a wasted expanse that now mocks the desperate hope fed to her soul by ‘his’ lies. There is no golden green grass growing tall. No hues of blue and misty slivers and sun-burnished oranges. No coyote to greet her. Only the destitution of fate’s grim and slowly grinding death sentence.

Her body crumples beneath her. The fetid muck splatters under the momentum. Her lungs burn with hoarse sobs. Her head is a fever of rage and remorse and shame. Her mind a shattered wasteland haunted by the phantoms of all of which she has been robbed: Hope. Comfort. Her past. And to her disgust, even him. The caustic nature of the sludge, however, leaves her no reprieve, seeping through her clothes to bite and burn.

Climbing to her feet like a cadaver rising from a sodden grave, her weary gaze drifts from one barren vista to the next. Without direction and with little hope of finding water, she staggers out of the toxic mire to the yawning sea of dust and drops to her knees. The dirt is fine and gritty and warm from the high, pallid sun and serves as a functional scrub too easily caught by sudden gusts. She coughs against an infiltration of dust as she works fistfuls of dirt into her hair and scratches it out in muddy clumps until slowly falling still.

She raises her head and cocks an ear away from the breeze coercing the noxious layers.

She stands. Her muscles tightening as if forcing her body rigid will somehow confirm the register. As she closes her eyes, another round of soft and distant clanging confirms the arresting herald.

Relishes the sheer exhilaration of open running, now fueled by a mad and desperate hope, she races toward the growing call of metal against metal.

A tall form pressed against the pale miasma ahead emerges to reveal itself with her swift approach. The enormous cannon of a bombed-out tank grounded against a thicket of tall grass reaches skyward with tethered wind-driven canisters clattering below a tattered and sun-bleached orange flag.

Struggling to catch her breath, she is unsure of what to make of the machination as she assesses the wreckage until her eyes fall on the faded lettering imprinted on the broken hull: Coyote.

Her heart leaps in her chest!

With frantic eyes, she turns and turns to scrutinize the surrounding wasteland with ears piqued.

Her search yields a skeletal spire behind the murky veils, so blanched with age and soot that she could have easily missed it without effort.

Smog burns her lungs as she sprints headlong to the dilapidated wi-fi tower with her brain scouring the haze and shadows for the third pillar of the old world.

Panting beneath the scaffolding, she anchors her hands on her knees to catch her breath when a familiar whisper worms into her attention. On staggered steps she follows the whisper which becomes a murmur and the murmur a cheer of currents.

She can smell the fresh breath of the river before finding its muddy banks, upon which she gazes across the rapids at the knobby, desiccated trunk of a dead conifer. The starkness of the lone giant in the brown and gray haze threatens to dishearten until her attention is caught by a small plank nailed near the base shuddering in the wind.

Suddenly waist-deep in the cold, refreshing water, she plunges into the rushing river. The currents stream through her hair and over her skin as if alive, washing away the residue of septic filth. She rises from the immersion and strides swiftly to the sign fastened to the dead trunk.

It is little more than a roughly hewn arrow. Her eager gaze follows it to a path barely worn into the barren soil that winds into the rising hillside where a silhouette emerges from the bluffs.

A shock of fear opens her pores and her body braces with rigid anticipation.

The figure darts down the trail towards her, becoming more recognizable as a man with his harried approach. The pace and stride of his decent boarder between reckless and wild and she retreats to the tree.

She grabs the heaviest stone she can find and is poised to strike as his robust form slides to a halt at the base of the trail.

“Are you okay?” he bellows on heaving breaths. “Are you hurt?”

She is instantly arrested by both his concern and his voice, cautiously lowering the jagged rock in her fist.

Before she can defend herself, he is upon her. His strong, gentle arms pulling her body into his. “I knew you would make it!”

Her heart swoons with warmth and recognition. She knows his body. ‘His’ body.

The stone falls as she clutches the sole source of comfort during her imprisonment as he kisses her hair.

It is only when he withdraws from the embrace that she truly sees his face. His face.

A blithe and earnest passion burnishes the fiery brown eyes flashing excitedly from his flush and ruddy features.

“You’re almost there,” he pants.

“Where?”

His bright smile faulters. “Home.”

The word strikes her as strange but intriguing and she looks from his eager countenance to the dusty path leading up the hill until it is lost behind bluffs and smog.

She pulls away.

A kaleidoscope account of her ordeal cascades through her brain, corralling her back to the amnestic gray nothing of her unknown self before the dystopia of the barge and unleashing a legion of questions that spin into a storm of confusion.

She falls to her knees.

He shifts swiftly to sweep her up but is stayed abruptly by her outstretched palm.

She lifts her weary gaze from the parched dirt to the toxic veils behind the river and then to the path and finally to the man standing over her. Silencing the want for relief, she pushes past the fatigue of trauma and uncertainty to stand.

“You first,” she orders, ushering him to the trail with a gesture.

With a gleam of informed resignation, he leads her onto the path and up the hill. Ascending like two wraiths through the foul atmosphere their progress is interrupted only when he pauses to let her catch up. Her head pounds from exhaustion and the fetid mist that seems to thicken the higher they go until she realizes that she has lost sight of him altogether.

“Come on,” he calls. “We’re almost past it.”

She drudges on, consumed in battle between tenacity and temptation coaxing her to turn back and build a hovel at the river’s edge. The argument is won suddenly by sunlight and clear, sweet air. Her eyes and senses boggle at the enveloping expanse and unimaginable vistas of forested mountain backs rising out of the blanketing miasma. The fresh air is almost nourishing as it clears the psychic miasma that has darkened her mind for so long and bolsters her strength.

He offers his hand with an enthusiastic smile, and she takes it happily, welcoming the strength of his pull and presence. Hand in hand they make their way into the evergreens of a forested plateau filled with the perfume of pine and lullaby of birdsong. A brightening of the woods ahead betrays a clearing and, slipping from his hand, she runs exhilarated toward the enchanting golden light.

“I remember!”

Fade to Black