The Reddening Path by Amanda Hale

Author:Amanda Hale
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC044000, FIC019000
Publisher: Thistledown Press
Published: 2013-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

Paméla sat above the trees looking down into the jungle. She had climbed the breathless stone steps to a changed perspective, and a young man from Québec had snapped her with his digital camera in the arms of this monstrous pyramid; a traveller, well met in the Heavens, touching briefly. She could not see where she sat exactly — atop one of the four giant pyramids of Tikal facing onto the plaza of a once-thriving community where Cortés had stopped briefly on his journey into Honduras — but only that she was surrounded by a dense jungle stretching into swampy scrubland. She felt as though she could fly, diving off the pyramid, covering the world with her wingspan.

The nights were hot and slow. She heard the jungle breathing like a sleeping animal as she lay half asleep, naked under her thin sheet, her consciousness spread out, barely held, touching everything. In the morning she drank coffee with Denís, the Québecois. Their paths had crossed and now she was leaving, heading south on a crowded bus, bumping over the damage they call roads in Guatemala. In between stretches of rubble there were sections washed out by monsoon flash floods, smooth and dangerous, rich with mud. She looked out through smudged glass at a soaring landscape as the bus curved so close to the edge that she couldn’t see the road under them. The corners were blind, the horn incessant, the bus filled with bodies pressing, the people’s faces passive and inscrutable as they stared at the patterned land, sweeping and plunging in a patchwork of green, yellow, reddish brown. The fields were planted with corn and coffee, their delicate leaves breaking through the earth and rising through a thin mist blanketing the hills. She wondered what Guadalupe was doing. They had arranged to meet at Iximché when Guadalupe was finished her work in the village. Paméla was on her way, moving slowly, trying to contain the exultation that leapt in her like a fish in sunlight. Since she’d given away her watch a new sense of time had grown in her, a line curling in on itself, past and future clasping the moment.

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