White Tiger on Snow Mountain by David Gordon

Author:David Gordon [Gordon, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Short Stories
ISBN: 9780544343740
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: New Harvest
Published: 2014-10-28T04:00:00+00:00

We summit on our hands and knees. At the peak sits a boulder the size of a two-car garage—coarse, black, porous—thrown from a volcano on the moon. I read the alien inscriptions through my fingertips: A star is about to be born. The black rock breaks, like a giant egg, and blows light into my hair. My mind splits like a rotten peach spitting out its pit.

Philip screams. As I watch, a halo of white fire explodes around his skull, burning his hair like nerve endings. His voice is dust. His face is wind. The hill is heaving, throwing trees sideways and cleaving rocks. He sticks his finger down his throat, trying to puke up the poison.

Just then, lightning shoots from my hands, blasting trees into flame. Struggling for control, I wrestle them into my pockets. Clouds rush into the sun and are burned away. I realize that my brain is now linked, as if by wired roots, to the world. I can’t tell the difference between thought and action, between the voices outside or inside my head. Anything I think will happen, so I must not think the wrong thing, the evil thing. I must hold still. I freeze my face, trying not to breathe, and follow Philip with my eyes as he crawls over.

“Evil,” he hisses, crouching like an elf in the shadow of the rock. His ears and nose grow points. “This place is fucking evil,” he whispers in my ear. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

He takes off, stumbling back down the mountain we just climbed. I rush after him. Shadows swoop and dive around me. Trees grab at my legs. We plunge into a swamp, and I stop short as Philip howls. He has sunk into the mud up to his knees. He thrashes around, grunting and baying, like a brontosaurus stuck in tar.

“Wait, don’t fight it,” I say. “The quicksand will pull you under.”

But he ignores my advice and plows through, leaving one sneaker in the sucking wounds. In their depths, eyes open for just a moment and then forever close.

Trying to circle the sinkhole, I quickly lose my bearings and tumble into a campsite. I crash blindly through a bush, yowling as switches lash my face, and there they are, squatting over a fire, a bald dad and his young son, limp wieners on the tips of their sticks. They stare at me, aghast, as if I were a Sasquatch: long hair full of leaves and twigs, body covered in cuts. The mud I’ve layered on my face for sun protection is flaking off. But then again, who are they to judge? Look at their fucking faces—swelling horribly with pustules and throbbing rainbow colors. The little boy is actually aging, wrinkling right in front of me, while the dad morphs backward into a pudgy hairless baby. Somebody screams. It’s me. I turn tail and flee back into the forest, trying to outrun the screaming, which follows me like an echo. I’m dodging

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