As Easy as Falling Off the Face of the Earth Read Free

stick and tryingto spear one of the fish. He could picture sharpening the stick, but in his mind’s eye every time he took a stab, he either missed or just knocked the fish off course. How long would it take you, what was the learning curve on fish stabbing? Maybe he should give it a try while he still had strength. Then there would be the whole starting-afire-with-a-stick thing. Unless he ate the fish raw.
    “I think you can go for pretty long without eating,” he said aloud. “As long as you have water to drink.”
    He sat on the bank, putting his boots back on, and a white shape in the weeds caught his eye. He picked it up. It was the skull of a small animal. He laughed softly as a thought struck him. The thought was that he had expected to spend his summer hiking and looking for bones. He had wanted to do it because it seemed like it would be doing something real. And here he was, hiking, and here was a skull. And it all felt pretty real, right?
    The difference was that instead of hiking with a small group of people and a guide who knew where to go, he was utterly alone and not one person in the entire world knew exactly where he was, including himself. And he hadn’t expected his hike to be along a railroad track.
    But although the track didn’t make for the most interesting hike, it was not interestingness he neededmost. He just needed to get somewhere.
    Ry turned the skull over and looked at it from various angles. What was it? Looking into its vacant eye sockets he said, “You were probably a large rodent. I’m guessing not that long ago.”
    He held it in one hand as he got to his feet, then slipped it into a side pocket of his shorts. He would find out later what it was. It might be cool to put it on his dresser at home. The truth was that it made him feel a little less alone.
    He took inventory of what else was in his pockets. It was a short list: pocketknife, next-to-useless cell phone, wallet. The list of what he didn’t have at the moment was longer.
    “But at least I have my health,” he said. It was a joke.
    The wallet had eighty-three dollars in it, a hundred bucks less the cost of some Amtrak food. He looked around for a place to spend it. “Where’s the 7-eleven?” he asked. This was a joke, too.
    He said his lame jokes aloud, to keep his spirits up. He didn’t know if he should panic or not. Well—he knew he shouldn’t panic. But he didn’t know how dire his situation was. It was the moment when the elevator drops and you don’t know whether to laugh or get started on the screening of your whole life passing before your eyes. Only a lot longer than that moment. It was that moment stretched into hours.
    Periodically, he felt the urge to text someone.
    Nowhere , he imagined typing.
    Still nowhere.
    Each time, without thinking, he pulled out his phone, looked at its blank face, remembered, and shoved it back down in his pocket.
    “It’s not like I’m the only living thing, though,” he said. “Look. Cows.” Black ones grazed on a hilltop in the distance.
    It was probably a great place to be a cow. Or a pheasant. One of which fluttered up from the grasses at his approach.
    He walked past a field where cylindrical bales of hay were sprinkled like giant corks spilled on a tabletop. A dilapidated long-ago schoolhouse. A conglomeration of rusted buildings. A cluster of newer silvery ones. Ry stared for a long time at a small house painted bright orange with about twenty cars parked behind it, in varying states of decay, along with discarded bathroom fixtures and a windowless bus that seemed to have melted into the ground, faded to an almost greenish yellow, vegetation thriving around it and up through it. He decided to keep walking toward the little town.
    Down here in the bottomlands, Ry couldn’t see it. It had to be just beyond those next hills, though. Should he use his energy to climb up high again? What if nightfell before he got there? No. It couldn’t be that far. How often did