Absolution by VanderMeer Jeff

Author:VanderMeer,Jeff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MCD

DISSOLUTION

016: WATER LIVES HERE

Old Jim stared out from the banks of a sandy, slow river held in deep shadow by ancient trees. Ravens walked on the flat rocks in the middle of the river. The dark of the canopy felt intense, the sun coming through only as a dappling, branches reflected in the water. He was a vessel with a guttering candle, left on the bank, and could not move. He was the water or the air, and neither the air nor the water could be called just that, if you looked close enough. People lived invisible and impossible in the water, or had become the water, or something else lingered there and he could not change his view to be certain. All while there came the pull of a distance he could not discern through the trees, a green light, a cleft between two mountains and he had the sense that if he just traveled further down the river, he would see—

The sounds of distant gunfire—one, two, three, four gunshots or shouts. The ravens, like splotches and ruptures of blackness, became spooked by the noise, rose, and disappeared into the trees or became the trees.

He woke in an unfamiliar bed, a lounge chair opposite with Brigade files on the seat. From the way the cushions had been pushed flat, someone had been sitting there a lot.

His eyes and mouth felt dry. His head seeming to weigh more than his whole body, so he couldn’t think of moving. He thought he’d seen Cass the last time he’d woken up, her hair short and the wrong color, as if in a dream. He struggled to rise, but all that happened was that the sound of water over the rocks came close again, and in no time at all, he was in the water, becoming the deep water, becoming …

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