by C J Paget
till we slip away
and become a part of this land.”
“Ok, that’s my last one for the evening. Thank you, Maui, and goodnight.”
The snapping fingers and hoots from drunk college guys on vacation may say differently, but Marietta is still of the opinion that Yoshiko’s poetry sucks. Then again, maybe Yoshiko has finally found her home, because everything that came before her was just as bad, even worse. Marietta looks around at the audience of this shack bar open mic night. She watches some balding retiree climb the stage, take the mic, and announce a poem entitled, “A Breeze In Palm Tree Scene.” Marietta realizes things aren’t going to get any better.
Yoshiko comes bounding to Marietta’s table and rushes into an embrace. “I’m so glad you’re here! I’ve been without my most honest critic way too long.” Yoshiko breaks the hug to take a long swig of her rum and coke and asks Marietta, “How did you like them?”
That voice. Marietta was still getting used to hearing it again. She could never understand it. Whenever Yoshiko takes the spotlight for a reading her voice becomes clumsy, awkward, grating; yet the instant she steps down from the stage and has a casual, face-to-face exchange, her voice becomes honey, menthol, silk, sex; absolutely bursting with poetic tone. The sound of it “kicking up the dredges of some dormant desire, on her way out she builds my funeral pyre,” or so the words of the retiree poet say on a completely separate matter, yet seem embarrassingly relevant and shamefully fitting for Marietta’s emotions.
“Marietta?”
“Oh. They were fine.”
Yoshiko looks at Marietta in apprehension, waiting for her to say something else.
“Fine?”
“Yeah, lovely poems, Yoshi, really. I think the change of scene has done you a lot of good as a writer.”
“That’s exactly what Nathan’s been telling me!”
Nathan… How would he have any right to make such a claim? He hasn’t been around to see you grow. Not like I have.
“Ah, Nathan. Shame he couldn’t be here in the flesh.”
“I know, but he tries to come out to as many readings as he can! He’s really supportive of me, you’ll like him. Too bad you’ll probably still be asleep when he gets off work. Knowing the way both of you sleep, you might not get to meet him until it’s time for you to say goodbye!”
Marietta would prefer things to happen that way, but knows meeting Nathan is inevitable. Not now though. Tonight she has Yoshiko all to herself.
* * * * *
It is a thirty minute bike ride before Marietta and Yoshiko are back at Nathan’s bungalow, a relatively isolated home beside a section of the Twin Falls River directly outside of Haiku. Once inside, there is a quick meal of home-brewed lager and rice before Yoshiko goes to bed. There is a cot laid out for Marietta in the main room.
Despite jet-lagged weariness, she forgoes lying down and instead takes her laptop to a wooden rocking chair outside to better enjoy the warm Hawaiian night air. She writes a quick blog post, detailing her delayed arrival at the Kahului airport and promising her readers she will investigate the river tomorrow and report back to them soon. She would hate to let them down, considering the traffic her site receives is what paid for this trip.
Her blog details geographical oddities, making the river of particular interest to her readers. As of late the river has experienced abnormal, unexplainable fluctuations in size and location. Although Yoshiko was convinced it was a collective fabrication of superstitious minds, Marietta read one eyewitness account by a respectable scientist that went so far as to compare this phenomenon to “the movements of a worm, writhing around after a rain.” She had been following the buzz the situation was garnering for some time, but it was when the Twin Falls were closed to the public that Marietta knew she had to go. Besides, she had been longing to see Yoshiko again after parting on bad terms five months prior, and now had a legitimate excuse to do so; a pursuit of both her loves, without abandoning either.
* * * * *
Marietta is still outside when she wakes up the next morning, having no recollection of falling asleep at all. Her laptop rests on the table beside her. Her feet have been propped up, and Yoshiko must’ve provided her with a pillow while she was asleep. The aroma of a fresh, local coffee fills her waking nostrils. She walks into the bungalow’s kitchen where about a cup of the miraculous stuff awaits her in a pot. She pours this into a thermos and, after a quick breakfast of papaya and cinnamon toast, walks back outside. From her laptop case she grabs a pen and journal to take notes and walks down to the river.
The walk to the water seems impossibly shorter than Marietta had perceived it to be at a glance the night before. Her coffee has barely cooled to a sipping temperature when her bare feet stumble upon the river rocks. She is about to yell out some expletive response to the pain when something she sees forces her to keep silent and take cover behind some shrubby vegetation. From there, she confirms what she has just witnessed; though she can no longer see them, she can still hear the sound of Yoshiko fucking a man Marietta presumes to be Nathan.
Fueled by some desire to interrupt, Marietta rises from hiding and wades into the river. She shouts Yoshiko’s name nonchalantly, hoping that such a carefree attitude will alarm the couple and ruin their act. Instead, the couple breaks free and calmly waves for Marietta to come over. Unsure of how to take this, she hesitantly approaches them. The couple basks naked upon a rock, making no effort to conceal themselves, their toned bellies pumping air. The man stands up, extends his hand to Marietta, and says, “Hey. I’m Nathan.”
“Hi,” Marietta replies, not bothering to offer her hand in return, or even look at him. Instead her gaze is focused on Yoshiko, trying to detect any trace of discomfort in the situation. Yoshiko glances back at her with a vacant ease.
Unnerved by this, Marietta looks away and decides to ignore Yoshiko and Nathan for the rest of the morning. She wanders off to the other end of the rock where she pretends to scribble notes of assessment so they will not question her actions. She decides it would be for the best if she could lose herself in work for a little while. Yet, try as she may to focus, she is too distraught to begin any of the work she had promised her readers the night before. The blank pages are soon dampened with tears. There is only one situation that can cause Marietta to cry outside of physical pain, when she is saddened by how sudden, drastic changes can occur, and old ways lost forever. Marietta reflects on her earliest memory with Yoshiko in her life.
It had been the January of a fourth grade winter, back in Washington, one of those days where the temperature dropped below freezing, and recess was held in the cafeteria. A classmate of Marietta’s kept making fun of Yoshiko’s ethnicity and saying she looked like a boy. Marietta wasn’t really the type of girl to stand up to bullies at the time, and she had never interacted with Yoshiko before, but something about the situation caused Marietta to approach this boy, tap him on the shoulder, and punch him in the face. When the boy started crying, and Mrs. Sebelist became aware of the occurrence, Yoshiko took a dazed Marietta by the hand and led her out the double doors of the cafeteria. Running through the playground in the snow, the two girls took shelter in the hull of a wooden boat named Persimmon, a mighty vessel anchored in the sand that had weathered generations of schoolchildren. Shivering in Persimmon’s belly, Marietta and Yoshiko cuddled up to one another and made a teeth-chattering promise on the spot to “be the best of friends, always love one another, look after one another, and never let a boy treat us that way again.”
‘Never again.’ she’d said. But, those days are long past Marietta catches herself thinking. The Yoshiko I know is gone.
She’s always hated it when someone claims a person ‘isn’t who I thought them to be,’ but this is the first time she’s truly understood the sentiment. Ok, so if the Yoshiko you love has vanished for good, what is on this rock with you in her place? For some reason the words ‘island’ and ‘slut’ strung together are the only ones that come to Ma
rietta’s mind.
Marietta shakes off the aching nostalgia of it all and tries to bring herself back to reality. The sun is in the middle of the sky now, and everything looks different. The river seems to bend in a slightly different way. The shore she came from seems farther away. She begins to feel the first impressions of a sunburn on her cheeks, and sees that Nathan and Yoshiko have fallen asleep.
“Wake up, something’s wrong.”
Though Nathan’s deep sleep isn’t interrupted in the slightest by the urgency in Marietta’s statement, Yoshiko jolts up from her nap and looks around, immediately registering that the entire landscape has gone off kilter.
“What the shit? Feels like a storm’s coming, water must’ve risen with the rain.” Yoshiko places a hand on Nathan’s listless face. “Wake up, Nathan, honey. There’s a storm.”
Nathan, still half asleep, rolls over to his other side and says, “Turn the generator on.”
“Babe, we aren’t at home right now. We’re at the river.”
“Oh. Let’s go home then, I’ll cook lunch.” Nathan sits up, rubs his eyes. He looks upstream, the opposite direction from which Marietta and Yoshiko are facing. He shouts something, and Marietta and Yoshiko don’t even have a chance to turn around before the surging water knocks them off their feet and sends them down the current.
The water they are carried off in seems to float above the river, as if it were a separate entity entirely. They are suspended above the rolling surge, tossed about but never dragged under. Yoshiko and Nathan try to grab onto tree branches, but every time one comes into reach, the water shifts directions, dragging the couple along with it. Marietta is several yards farther from the shore than Yoshiko and Nathan are. She tries to swim to them, only to find herself slipping from the flow and being launched into the air. She lands face first into a rock formation right off the banks of the river. There is a cracking sound upon impact. She feels an intense jolt of pain, then blacks out. The water continues to carry her unconscious form until the surge begins to dissipate. Then the water stops entirely, dropping its three passengers off onto a patch of soft, white sand.
The sound of Yoshiko’s voice is the first thing Marietta notices as she comes to. Though her eyes are swollen half-shut she observes Nathan and Yoshiko standing beside a neon vacancy sign several yards away, their backs turned. She tries to listen to their conversation but finds it difficult to focus. Blood stains the sand all around her. She is missing several teeth and her nose has been broken. She tries to call out to Yoshiko, but finds her voice too weak to be heard. She gathers her strength. After a few false starts, she manages to stand up. Her head spinning, she begins to hear parts of the couple’s conversation.
“Oh, Nathan. It really is beautiful.”
“I know babe, I know, and I agree. Let’s just go get our stuff packed and then we can come back.”
“No! I don’t want to risk it, what if we can’t find our way back here? Look around you, why go get our old things? We have everything we need here! This is it, this is where I want to stay. I want to grow old with you here, Nathan. We can be happy here.”
“That’s all I needed to hear. Let’s go have a look around then.”
Marietta watches Yoshiko and Nathan walk around the corner of a building and disappear from sight. It is then that she first takes in her surroundings, beyond the sand and blood. She is standing on the outskirts of some town, composed of a variety of ramshackle structures. Marietta notices a large wooden sign she had overlooked before. The words, barely illuminated by the red glow of the vacancy sign situated beside it, read:
Welcome to Lagan, A River’s End Community.
Population: Whatever the currents bring in.
The words of the sign seem to accurately summarize the scenario of the township. Every structure in sight looks as if it were built from salvaged materials, some pieces quite evidently rotting away from water damage. As Marietta wanders down a narrow, muddy path, which has been designated ‘Main St.’ by a slimy signpost, she observes these architectural oddities. Some of the creations are structural abominations, beyond condemnable, while other buildings look quite resilient and inventively built. Most of the structures fall somewhere between the two conditions. There are homes built out of driftwood and river stones. There is an inn built from the hull of a cargo boat. The fire department is built entirely from various clear, plastic containers stacked on top of one another, each filled with river water. An empty phone booth sits in a yard, missing its glass panels, and seems to serve no purpose whatsoever.
As Marietta plods down Main St. in a daze, a realization begins to dawn on her; there is no way that all this stuff could’ve been washed down the Twin Falls River, and the climate doesn’t even feel or look like Hawaii anymore. Deciduous trees grow in yards, and sporadically parked along Main St. are rusted automobiles with an assortment of license plates from other places. When she nears a structure carved into the face of a two-story chunk of a demolished dam, her suspicions are confirmed; the building is donned in a massive banner, which reads:
Town Hall of Lagan, Where All Rivers End.
With such a revelatory truth exposed, Marietta realizes she must leave this place and return to Hawaii, to her computer, to her blog. She has to tell the world about this. Even if no one believes her. Even if it ruins her reputation. She is turning to leave for the river, when she remembers Nathan and Yoshiko, who ran ahead of her into the town. She turns in pursuit, shouting their names. She hears Yoshiko giggle somewhere in the distance as she runs deeper and deeper into the town.
Marietta takes a right at the intersection of Commerce and Main St. and sees Yoshiko and Nathan skipping along, hand in hand, three twisting blocks ahead of her. She then catches the first glimpse of the ones she had been on the lookout for since arriving, the denizens of the town, lurking in the shadows of the buildings all around her, standing in doorways of soggy driftwood. Every eye is watching her pass. They are human eyes for sure, yet the bodies attached to them seemed bloated, sagging, waterlogged, like shipwrecked corpses discovered weeks in the aftermath. Marietta presses on down Commerce. A cut in her face has reopened and blood streams behind her as she goes. Just when she thinks she will surely break down from the incessant stares of the Lagan townsfolk, the buildings come to an end, and there is a large clearing of grass, filled with headstones as far as she can see.
The Lagan Graveyard stretches across many acres. The graves are marked with river stone monuments in perfect little rows, like cornfields. Yoshiko and Nathan press into the horizon ahead, running farther into the heart of the fields of the dead. Marietta tries to keep up with them, passing piles of dead camels, cattle, humans, puppies, birds, all waiting to be buried in a final resting place, here at the end of all rivers. Lagging behind in the pursuit, Marietta’s wobbly legs give way beneath her, and she falls against a mound of freshly packed dirt. She thinks, Surely I am dying, and I couldn’t have picked an easier place to do so.
She looks back to the town and sees a small mob of Laganers entering the graveyard, carrying pitchforks, oars, or anything else handy. She turns back to where Yoshiko and Nathan had been before. They are gone now, yet something else looms beyond all those graves, approaching her, crushing mausoleums and grave markers in its path. When it gets closer, she is certain of what she is seeing, and her heart leaps in joy; gliding across the graveyard, washed here all the way from her Washington state childhood, is the good ship Persimmon.
A smile comes across Marietta’s face with a thought. Yoshiko must be behind this. She’s come back for me. Marietta clears her throat and lets out a cracked shout. “I’m here! Yoshi, Yoshi, save me, I want to go back. Please. Let’s be little girls again, let’s go back to when we lived only for each other.”
The mob creeps down the rows of headstones, closing in, much closer now than Persimmon.
“I miss you, I forgive you. Come to me, Yoshiko, come to me, and let’s sail away from here!”
But Persimmon never reac
hes her. It shifts directions and drifts off to Marietta’s right. She realizes that the ship’s helm is unmanned and that Yoshiko has not come back for her. The mob is standing above her now, looking down. They speak to her in a frothy garble she can’t decipher. Her eyes shut, and the world goes black.
* * * * *
When Marietta wakes up she is back in Hawaii, sprawled across a stretch of shore on the Twin Falls River. She stands up, feeling no pain. She touches her face to find her nose is no longer broken, and every tooth in her mouth remains intact. She starts to believe the whole thing to be just a daydream, the product of a nap at the river, when she hears the screams of Nathan and Yoshiko somewhere downstream. She runs along the river bank, shouting for them. She hears the festive sound of some sleepy river town come alive for an occasion. Suddenly, the river seems to disappear, and she finds herself running through a clearing of trees, no water in sight. She runs about in circles, shouting Yoshiko’s name, listening for any sound at all. There is no response from Yoshiko or Nathan, and the sounds of the town have ceased altogether. All she can hear is the sound of running water in the direction she came from. She runs for the sound, continuing to call out for Yoshiko, though the screams have long since stopped.
When Marietta reaches the river again, she follows it more carefully, prepared for it to shift direction on her and try to trick her away. She is determined to reach the river’s end. She continues to follow the river, and hours seem to pass without the signs of any other human activity ahead.
The sun has begun to set when she reaches the river’s end. She falls to her knees along the bank of the river, staring ahead in disbelief. The river does not end in white sands and the town of Lagan is nowhere to be found. Instead, Marietta kneels at the edge of a waterfall. The entire world seems to end in some newly formed abyss, and water from the river dumps into the chasmal emptiness below. Marietta sits at the edge of a rock, hangs her head, and cries in disbelief. She sits there for some time, letting her tears fall until nightfall. She rips a page from her pocket notebook, remarkably dry and undamaged, and, as best she can in the total darkness, scribbles Yoshi; Love you, miss you. Always. Marietta. She empties the coffee thermos strapped to her belt and slips the note inside. After securing the lid, she tosses the thermos into the river and watches it drop off into the void.