River: A Novel Read Free

up in foster care had caused me to
love solitude. Reading a book in a quiet room with a fireplace, even a fake
one, was all I wanted out of life. 
     The first
thing I noticed was one of the worst headaches in memory. While beginning to
wake up, I was irritable because I had to go to the job interview. The fog of
dreams still clung to me, and I tried to embrace the calm, drifting sensation. Wishing
I could go back to sleep, all I fathomed was the pain that consumed my skull. I
braced myself to move and hopefully ingest some kind of pain killer. My body
felt extremely heavy, as if weights had been attached to every muscle. Cursing
myself for the foolishness of once again being Dan’s pharmaceutical guinea pig,
I attempted to crack an eye open. A millimeter into it, my eyelid snapped shut.
Without trying to recover myself, I was unconscious.
     Time was
acting strangely. Feeling as though it should be morning, it was still dark. Not
just nighttime, but midnight-black. How could there not even be a sliver of
starlight? Reminding me of daylight reflecting across the snow, the moon had
been incredibly bright earlier. That was another thing—shouldn’t it be cold? I
had dipped my body into a frozen lake, hadn’t I? I should at least be chilled, if not succumbed to hypothermia. But I could feel
nothing except the slow, throbbing waltz in my aching skull. No frostbitten
fingers, no aching patella full of pins. Nothing.
     I must
be dead .
     For some
reason, I’d always thought I would know it when I died, or at least be aware of
some sort of change. Congrats, you can’t even die right. No angel wings for
you… idiot. It dawned on me that suicides didn’t enter into heaven,
according to what I’d heard, though that had not been my intention. I attempted
to bargain with the universe: I was just following orders, not of my
right mind… druggie, remember?  Suggestive voices were telling me to go
home — that’s all I’d wanted. So, this is what I get for
infinity? Dark matter eating me alive and nothing except my
thoughts to keep me company ? Great. No more escaping my own brain with
pharmaceutical assistance. Getting what I deserved. But it had felt so right, disappearing
into the molten pool of melted ice, warm and numbing comfort. How could I have been
entirely wrong?
     As I contemplated
my non-existence, something peculiar began to occur. Unaware of it at first, I
slowly noticed needles pricking my dead flesh until they demanded attention. Blood
returned to my limbs, painfully in the beginning. The atrophied appendages were
shocked back to life. I visualized a river rushing through a long corridor of
dry, cracked canyons, whose dusty fissures hadn’t seen moisture in eons. As
circulation began to flow in a warm gush, my senses were coming back to me as
well. There was a muffled thump, yet my eyes were still glued shut. I realized
with a jolt that I wasn’t breathing. That I couldn’t breathe. I was
underwater. 
     Suddenly,
my body was moving. I was gliding in a direction I couldn’t pinpoint while
something hooked my arm. Sloshing water and noises echoing in circles were making
me dizzy. I was slowly dragged up and out, then sprawled onto a hard surface. My
right ear was clogged, making sounds weak on that side. Maybe I was suffering
from hypothermia. It didn’t seem cold, though I knew it had to be. I felt my
body being covered up. Exposure was the very least of my problems, because I
still couldn’t breathe. My lungs wouldn’t listen when my brain screamed at them
to be useful. The heaviness in my chest, full of liquid, not air, was all I
could focus on as the realization hit that my limbs had gone dead again. 
    ..................
     
    Cold. It was my first thought in what felt
like a long time. Cold. Weird dream. I had been dreaming endlessly. Then
there was nothing but arctic air. I heard a rustling in my thrumming, frozen
ears, and abruptly knew I was not in my borrowed bed at Danny’s. It felt