by Troy James Weaver
If I could corrugate anything, thought Sarah, it would be my body, into cardboard, when the cold months come. She leaned back and smiled. The road beneath her shook up through the tires and into her backbone. “That’s silly,” she said. Then she quieted, and thought, Time will do its work.
Sleet coughed against the bus. The movements of her body twinned the physics of steel traveling too fast through a white-out world. Visibility: the small bag on her lap, the various angles of certain seats in shadow, characters ahead of and behind her, the overhead passenger light like a vague hand, guiding her back inside, beyond the shadows.
The rim of the earth gleamed. A crescent moon had slashed the dusk ocean into a comforting smile.
Sarah cut the lamp off and felt the warmth of sand. The wind whipped the sand against her, vibrating her body. The waves looked like clouds scrimmaging for space in an unfriendly sky. She looked out into that impossible distance, sea-air thick as taffy on her lips. She licked them and swallowed a desert.
If we could find the boat, she thought.
But they trailed. The thoughts blurred into a blinding pain.
Light flooded her vision, though it was a small amount.
A man across the aisle inspected an atlas, the bus quiet then, save the natural groan of it running.
“You remind me of my brother,” she said. “Always trying to find a way.”
The man looked at her and put the light out.
The ocean had receded, displaying a buffet of anemones and starfish and muscles. The quiet depths of the lunar pull. Sarah’s brother, Jack, picked up a starfish after feeling the suck of an anemone. The starfish stuck to his hand. He laughed. The only way to get the thing off was to tear it limb by limb from his flesh.
Later, Sarah waved goodbye as he got onto a fishing boat. She’d always loved the way he smiled.
A horn sounded, the window frozen over, ice crystals like distant dying suns, the driver struggling to harness his will against the sheer force of the storm.
Sarah sensed his fear. She sensed why she was there.
God, she said, and she whispered a prayer, unknown even to her. It came like a vapor from her being.
Then there was a loud sucking sound, the lights went out, and there was Jack, tumbling, being taken away by the waves, and a fire, screaming, way up in the sky, that couldn’t pull him from the tide. Sarah burned her hand reaching into the water, the cardboard-like skin of her body, just enough tinder to keep the fire going and lead them to the boat—which still travels the meridian of her palm.
Nobody understood it. When the bus was found.
about the author
Troy James Weaver is the author of Witchita Stories, Marigold, Visions, and Temporal. He lives in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and dogs.