I cleared my throat.
“Land.”
And so it was. There was a dark line of greenery and a fine line of brown shore, and way beyond it we could see the dark bridge, or ladder, rising up into the fluffy white clouds. We kicked our legs and tried to work the pontoon in that direction.
We paddled all day, and finally night fell, and we didn’t look any closer to me than when we had first spotted the shore.
We paddled throughout the night, one taking turns straddling the pontoon, sleeping a bit, then swapping out to let another do the same. The mist came back and surrounded us all night, and it was hard to see the land there in the dark, even with the moonlight (and tonight there were two moons), and on we paddled, like angry beavers, and when daybreak broke, we were still some distance away.
The current was carrying us toward the shore rapidly now, and so we merely clung for a long time, resting.
When land seemed truly within our grasp, we began to paddle again, and it was just growing dark when we made the white sandy beach, abandoned the pontoon, and crawled up on shore to rest.
We didn’t make it any farther than that, and I awoke to the water lifting and tugging at me, realized if I didn’t get up and move, that it would take me out to sea.
The mist was floating about again, but I didn’t even look at it. I shook Steve and Grace, and the three of us staggered farther inland, found a spot beneath a tree with limbs hanging so low and thick they almost touched the ground.
We crawled under them and lay near the tree’s thick trunk. It was good and dark under there, and there was plenty of room, and the sand was soft and warm. We couldn’t see the mist. There was only the sound of the sea crashing against the shore, and a smell of healthy greenery.
Almost immediately, we were asleep.
3
Next morning I awoke to light slipping under the thick tree limbs. I pushed my way from beneath them and out into the sunlight, staggered toward the beach and the sea.
The water was blue and the sky was blue, and the blues were dark and rich in color and blended one with the other. In that moment, it gave me the impression of being at the bottom of a china bowl. The sun, in all its warm glory, was like a bright yellow flower painted on the bowl’s insides, and the beach sand beneath me was some fine ingredient, flour perhaps, and here I was standing on it. Probably waiting to be mixed into some kind of cake if my current bad luck continued.
I blinked and turned and looked toward the inner shore.
Trees. Huge and green and beautiful. Beyond it all, rising up into the blue and disappearing into it, as if poking a hole in the sky, was the bridge, or whatever the hell it was. It was the closest we had been to it, and I could see now that it was gold and silver, and there were black lines running along the sides of it, and slowly, it came to me that they were massive cables. I had a sudden hot mental flash that savage lines of electricity were being channeled through those cables, and that the whole thing was plugged into the ground, and if the plug were pulled, the world would be sucked into a vacuum, all that was here: sand and trees, sky and sea, us, we would all go, SsssssssssssssssuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuCK!
And we would be gone. Like spilt paint pulled into a wet vac.
When I turned back toward the sea, I saw a curious thing. The great sky sagged. Like someone above had poked it with a large finger. It sagged low out at sea, almost touched the water.
“Shit,” I said.
I was standing there looking at it, when I heard Grace say, “Well, you don’t see that every day.”
I turned and looked at her. Steve was crawling out from under the tree limbs, starting in our direction.
“No,” I said. “But you do see something every day that you didn’t see the day before. That something is something new, and this is today’s new thing.”
“Perhaps one of many,” she said.
Steve stood next to us, said, “Holy shit. What happened to the sky?”
“We were just contemplating that,” Grace said.
We shopped around for food and found some fruit growing on a strange-looking little tree. Steve tasted it, pronounced it sour as dog urine (I don’t know if this evaluation was from personal experience or not), and we passed on it.
We walked along the beach, looking for other foods, a dead fish maybe, and then I saw her.
Reba.
She lay on the shore on her back.
We ran to her.
She wasn’t looking good.
Her face was puffed out from the water, and her hair was pushed down over her eyes.
“She’s dead,” Steve said.
I knelt down and put my arm behind her head and lifted her to a sitting position.
When I did, she coughed, and water projectile-vomited from her lungs. It went all over her legs. She coughed some more, opened her eyes, and tried to focus.
She almost smiled.
She tried to speak, but when she did, no words came out. Only water.
I picked her up and carried her inland, set her down so her back was against a tree.
“You don’t look much like the Little Mermaid,” I said.
“Don’t feel much like her either,” she said.
“We thought you were gone,” Steve said.
Reba actually smiled this time. “Not yet. This is it? This is all of us?”
“Homer made a pretty good float,” Grace said, “but I think he was dead before the bus reached the surface. He was at the back. The mess came in through the window there, smothered him.”
Reba stared off at the water, said, “My God. What’s happened to the sky?”
We looked at what we had already seen, but now, there was a portion of the sky actually dipping into the water. That piece moved when the water moved.
We sat there for awhile, and while Steve stayed with Reba, Grace and I went down the shoreline looking for something to eat. We finally did find a dead fish or two, chose the one that was in the best condition, and carried it back. It wasn’t a large fish, but it was something. We tore it open with our fingers and shared the cold innards among us. Had I not been starved, it would have been disgusting.
It wasn’t much, however, and Grace and I walked back to the dog-urine fruit, which was shaped somewhat like a large golden pear, and took a few from the limbs.
We brought them back and had dog-urine fruit for dessert. It really wasn’t so bad once you got past the smell. And the taste.
Reba, being in as bad a shape as she was, wasn’t able to go on. We decided to stay a night on the beach, but did manage to help her back to the low-hanging boughs where we had spent the night before.
It was very nice under there. Cozy.
Walking back I saw something I had overlooked before, floating up between some rocks.
My backpack.
I went over and got it. Inside was my journal. A few loose pages had come out of it and had washed up on the shore. I gathered them, and while Reba rested, I spread them out on the beach and let them dry.
We spent the night under the tree boughs, and in spite of everything, or perhaps because of it, we all slept deeply.
