Cold River Resurrection Read Free

into her forehead, blood springing out, and she fell below the tree, alone and bleeding.
    She lay like that as the sun slipped behind the mountain, the glacier glowing pink, and then red.
     
    It was full dark when Jennifer opened her eyes. She had never confided in her closest friend the one thing she feared the most was to be alone in the woods in the dark with unknown wild animals. She told her doll, Nanna, that she would rather be stranded in Central Park at midnight. At least I could jog out of there, she told her doll.
    She began shaking. What am I going to do?  I . . . can’t think . . . I don’t know, I’m afraid. Someone help me.
    Wild animals were here for sure, especially the ones chewing on Mr. Ferragamo Oxford back there. I’m alone and lost in the rugged wilderness with wild animals.
    And dead things.
    As Jennifer faded into unconsciousness, she knew not all the things to be afraid of at night in the wilderness were alive.
    She soon learned that while animals could be territorial and make you part of their food chain, man was still the craziest, deadliest of all to inhabit the planet.
    And walk the wilderness.
    Her last thought was, I want my Nanna.
     
    When Jennifer was two, her grandmother gave her a homemade doll, a canvas-covered human form without the eyes, nose, or mouth.   The doll looked more like a dough figure, without much form, but Jenny loved it just the same.  From her earliest memory, she was clutching the doll.  She named it Nanna.
    Nanna went with Jennifer to college (her friend Jill was the only adult person who knew this, and was sworn to secrecy .)  Nanna had been re-covered more times than Jennifer could remember, but she was still Nanna.  When Jennifer was troubled, she would find her Nanna and hold the old cloth doll, her comforter in a world not so nice. She would absently rub the cloth through her fingers like a tailor checking the fabric of a suit, or a latter-day Captain Queeg. When she caught herself rubbing her doll she would laugh, thinking that whether one used metal balls or cloth, is wasn’t about the material.
    She had left Nanna home for the trip to find Bigfoot.  She didn’t want to risk her doll in such a harsh environment.
     
    Alone on the mountain, Jennifer moaned in her sleep and thrashed her legs. She turned over into a ball and twisted the tail of her shirt and pulled it up to her face. She opened her eyes to full dark.  It was never completely dark in her apartment. Streetlights brightened the corners of her window in the middle of the night.  She moved and pain lanced through her head, making her cry out.  Where am I?  
    And then she remembered. The wilderness.  And the dead things.  She had never wanted to be in the city, any city so bad in her life. The places she had thought of as scary in New York City she would have willingly traded for the wilderness. She would gladly be in Central Park at midnight, to be able to jog a few blocks away from trouble and to civilization. The NYPD patrolled there, didn’t they? Won’t be any cops up here. She pushed up to sit. Her arms shook and the pain bounced in her head.  As she sat up she saw that it was not completely dark. A half moon and starlight made the clearing behind her a place of shifting shadows. 
    I want Nanna.
    The thought came to her without warning, that she really did want Nanna.  Jennifer Kruger, a twenty-eight year old adventurer, sometime Deadhead who used to follow Jerry Garcia, owner of two cats, copy editor for a small romance novel publisher in Portland, and woman who sometimes thought she could handle just about anything - now just wanted her Nanna, her doll. She didn’t want Carl, just Nanna. And she didn’t care who knew.  She would tell the world.
    If I live.
    For the first time, she began to have the notion that she would not make it out of the woods alive. You don’t want to end up like Mr. Ferragamo Oxford back there, for things to snack on, do you? Something crashed