by R Magnusholm
And still the waters rose.
“When does this end?” Liz moaned. She drew up her feet and stood, hugging the willow trunk as if it were a dear friend.
“Well, nothing lasts forever, including the tide,” he replied. “The highest pondweeds are below us. It won’t rise any higher.”
Two hours later, he stood knee-deep in the water while Liz was slightly better off. She was in only shin-deep. He wished they could climb higher, but there were no suitable branches, only thin twigs. His feet were as cold and numb as blocks of ice. His thigh muscles trembled and his back throbbed. He clung grimly to his branch, but little strength remained in his cramping arms, and the water seemed to lisp that letting go and just floating away was a perfectly reasonable and rather peaceful option.
“Up yours,” he mumbled, addressing the muddy water. He hooked his left arm over the bough and stuffed his right hand in his pocket, flexing his fingers vigorously to warm them up.
The reflection of his face, a pale oval, rippled among the eddies, torn apart then rebuilt over and over. An oak leaf, golden-brown and shriveled, sailed through his protean visage—just another bit of debris, except it was heading downstream. Downstream! The river flowed east again. Into the sea.
“Liz, the tide’s turned,” he croaked.
She smiled with blue lips but said nothing.
As he grinned back, their willow tree shuddered. Rumbling hollowly, it began tilting to one side. Liz screamed.
Thank God, the crown of their tree caught in the neighboring willow. But now it leaned downstream like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The squirrels chattered in indignation, skittered off along the branches, and fled into the nearby trees.
“Like rats from a sinking ship,” he said. “Liz, if the tree falls, whatever you do, hold on. Praise the Lord, it’s not winter. We won’t freeze to death.” Not instantly, anyway.
“What in hell happened?” she cried. “Our willow must’ve stood here for decades.”
The extra weight of the mighty squirrels. He suppressed a bout of hysterical laughter. Never ends with only the one wrong turn, does it now, honorable gentlemen?
Chapter 6
Not Any Damn Nudist
At the back of his mind, the braying voice chanted again: Lizzy and John sitting in a tree, F-R-E-E-Z-I-N-G. John and Liz sitting in a tree, F-A-L-L-I-N-G. He wondered if he might be going insane. Exceptionally bad timing. But wouldn’t it be swell to yell, YEEHAW! and leap down?
A line from a kids’ book he sometimes read to Emily and Ben popped into his head: He jumped into the water to make a big splash. The cover had a picture of a smiley frog with green sides and a yellow belly. The creature sat on a lily pad, one webbed hand lifted in an insanely cheerful greeting.
John composed himself. “I’m starting to believe the story of Noah’s Ark is real.” He studied the water below. It definitely flowed east. And didn’t the surface level recede a tiny bit, just a fraction of an inch? Sure it did.
Their tree shuddered. With a groan, it slid sideways amid a series of wet snaps—like bones breaking—as it wrenched its branches off the neighboring willow. It stabilized at a crazy angle.
She exhaled in relief. “Phew, that was close.”
He smiled woodenly. Perhaps the tree would hold. With the water receding, they only needed to cling on for a couple more hours. His mind flashed back to that damned smiling frog on the book cover, and he bit off a burst of laughter. Just a shock reaction, he assured himself.
He imagined addressing a boardroom meeting. He’d lift an index finger sagely and declare: Leaving reality is no reason to go insane.
Insane. Insane, the words echoed in his mind.
A crack as loud as a bomb blast shattered the silence, and their tree tilted and crashed into the water in a shower of spray, as if it were a humpback whale. Before the waves closed above his head, John had time to scream, “Geronimo!” The willow trunk slipped out of his numb hands. He held his breath, bubbles escaping from his nose, as the current dragged him deeper into the suffocating dark.
His butt bounced on something. He floundered his hands, grabbed a handful of drowned reeds—the bottom of the river. His frozen feet were nearly useless, but he kept kicking anyway. Up. Please let this be up. His head breached the surface. He tried to gasp but almost choked on muddy water. Spluttering, he spun around. No tree, no Liz.
Had there ever been Liz? Or the Leaning Willow of London? Had he simply had a fatal heart attack on his way from the office, and instead of his life flashing in front of him, he saw all this?
A hand seized him by the collar. He turned, and there was Liz, straddling a tree trunk. He grabbed onto the branches and hauled himself halfway out of the water.
Cold wet clothes clung to his back. So heavy. He turned away and spat out the muddy water that trickled from his nose into his mouth. It tasted slightly salty. He must have ingested more than enough to pick up some intestinal disease. What would be more glamorous—dying like a man of dehydration or expiring of dysentery, like some shit-kicking shittant?
Now that’s the question, Monsieur Shakespeare, and take that to the bank.
The current carried them swiftly downstream. The wind slackened, and the sun shone brightly. Endless reed beds and then a steep bank overgrown by alders and willows slid by on the left. It might have been a small, narrow island. John felt incredibly tired and struggled to keep his eyes open. Warm sun on his cheek. Wavelets lapping. So nice and peaceful.
Liz shook his shoulder. “Don’t sleep.”
“Just resting my eyes,” he replied through clattering teeth. “How are you?”
“I’m rather chilly.”
John smiled weakly. “Still think we’re in hell?”
She shrugged.
“I keep thinking all this can’t possibly be real,” he said.
“Real or not, talk to me and stay awake. Slim people die of hypothermia fast.”
And so they made small talk and cracked inane jokes as their tree spun lazily, drifting downstream. Half an hour later, it fetched against a flooded grove of gray-trunked aspens whose leaves trembled overhead. His legs were numb, almost lifeless, and his arms weren’t much better. Incredibly, his spear floated alongside him, still snagged in the willow’s branches. As he stared at it stupidly, his feet bumped against solid ground.
Over his shoulder, the shore lay a stone’s throw away. The sight of dry land galvanized his failing body like a shot of adrenaline. He slipped into the river and stood chest-deep. Grinning with bloodless lips, he closed his hands over his weapon, his fingers pale and water-wrinkled—the hands of a drowned man.
Liz caught his glance and slid into the water beside him. Together, they waded across the shallows, struggled through a reed-bed, and climbed ashore. Water cascaded out of his backpack and dripped from the lapels of his suit. He imagined he looked surreal—a savage with a spear in a wet pinstriped suit. His formal office shoes squelched with every step.
Shivering violently, they slogged up a gentle incline, cool and shady with aspens and willows, and into a pine grove, redolent of resinous sap. Birds sang all around, and more camouflage-green squirrels watched them from bronzed trunks. It felt good to move, and despite pins and needles assaulting his numb feet, he sensed life returning to his limbs.
The pines thinned out and gave way to a sunlit meadow dotted with aspens and willows.
“Let’s rest a bit,” Liz said. She took another step, and her plump legs folded underneath her.
He grabbed her elbow but had no strength left in him, so they both collapsed in the grass, panting. With the sun warming his face, John was content to lie here for all eternity. A strange apathy stole over him, and he wondered if he might sleep.
“John, do you hear that?”
“What?”
Instantly alert, he clutched his spear and strained his ears. A gust of wind trembled the aspen leaves and susurrated in the willows. Blackbirds twittered, and small animals rustled. Crows cawed in the distance. No
signs of danger. And then he heard the burbling of a distant waterfall.
“Fresh water,” Liz cried.
They struggled to their feet, took a moment to judge the direction of sound, and began walking. Not long passed before the rushing of water became louder. After forcing their way through an alder thicket, they came upon a forest stream gurgling over a jumble of fallen logs.
A pool had formed behind the dam. Fish darted in the dappled sunlight. Fallen leaves floated on the surface. Further upstream, the water flowed crystal clear, sparkling in the sun.
He fell into the pool with a splash, like that cover art frog, to let the clean water wash away the tidal muck of the big river. Then he staggered upstream and drank and drank. Liz fell in the water beside him, and they drank some more.
John rose to his feet. “Let’s name the stream the Fleet. For old times’ sake.”
Liz gave him an uncertain look, then nodded. “Well, it does flow rather fleetly.”
Later in the meadow, shivering despite the warm rays of the sun, Liz said. “Let’s get out of these wet clothes.”
He smiled crookedly. “I’m no damn nudist.”
“I won’t look if you don’t.”
A stand of hazel trees caught his eye, and he wandered over. The leaves were broad, and still mostly green. He presented them to Liz, wearing what he hoped was a mock-solemn face. “These be our fig leaves, eh?”
She broke into a peal of laughter, pulled off her office jacket, then wrung out the water and draped it over a branch. John followed suit.
Soon, their drying clothes fluttered from branches.
Avoiding looking at each other’s nakedness, they sat in the grass and shared the last sandwich of the Old World—a cheese and pickle variety that his wife had made on day zero. Despite prolonged immersion in water, it had stayed fresh in its cling-film packaging. The east wind was as brisk as before, and he hoped their clothes might dry by the evening. After the cold river, the air felt balmy on his naked skin.
John sawed the tomato in half with the cutlery knife.
“Save the seeds,” Liz said suddenly.
“Huh?”
“If we’re still here next year, we could grow tomatoes.”
“Oh, why not?” He scraped the tiny pips onto his dismissal letter and spread it on the grass for drying. “I knew this damn letter would come in useful. Ha-ha!” His laughter ended in a cough.
“Your lips are awfully blue, John.”
He gazed into her face. The crow’s feet and dark rings around her eyes had deepened and spread. Bedraggled, she looked like an extra from a disaster movie about a shipwreck. Her eyes though were an interesting shade of blue-gray, like a stormy sea—not unlike his wife’s. Strange how he’d never noticed that before.
“We better get a move on,” he said wearily. “Jog to keep warm or something.” He rolled on his stomach and tried to do a push-up. His arm muscles quivered, and he collapsed.
They settled for ambling around the meadow, eating blackberries, and picking hazelnuts. A fallen log provided a convenient place to crack the nuts with a rock. As the sun sank lower and lower in the west, the temperature plummeted.
After putting on their still damp clothes, they gathered armfuls of last year’s reeds and tussock grass. It took them several trips to drag the material into the bramble thickets, but eventually they had enough for a small haystack. Working on this task kept them warm. By the time they finished, their clothing was mostly dry.
He said, “Tomorrow, we’ll build a better shelter. A lean-to out of branches—or something.”
“That would be nice.” She smiled wanly. “I’m so cold.”
He hesitated, then put his arms around her. If at that moment they were miraculously teleported to the normal world, and Liz sued him for sexual harassment, it would be a small price to pay for warmth.
They sat on their pile of dry reeds, gazing into the darkening woods. He spotted his dismissal letter in the grass and picked it up. The paper had dried with the tomato seeds stuck to it as if glued. He folded it in four and put it into the inner pocket of his jacket.
John blocked the narrow path through the brambles with deadfall branches—sharp ends outward. With his spear, he flicked a few barbed strands over the top of the makeshift barricade.
Exhausted and shivering, they burrowed into the scratchy warmth and slept without dreams, only to be awakened by the crashing of thunder and a torrential downpour in the early hours.
***
Back in Pimlico woods, a great stripy cat, his belly distended from a freshly devoured boar, crawled into its lair. The detestable scent of the intruders, bitter and smoky, still lingered. He sniffed the strange square object the pair had left behind to defile his home and growled. The object didn’t growl back, so he swiped it into the corner, yawned and laid his heavy head on his paws.
As he did so, the gash in his nose smarted. How dare the repulsive two-legged deer sneak into his den and gore him! He half-rose with a bellicose roar, silencing the furtive rustling of wood mice who shared his thicket home. Earlier in the day, he’d tracked the trespassers down to the river and saw them blundering through rising tide on their hind legs. If not for all that churning water, he would have eaten them.
He rolled the odor of the pair around in his nose, seeking out detail. Odd. The female deer seemed the usual herbivore. But the buck was a meat-eater.
He pondered that oddity as he sank into sleep. Whose flesh would be more delicious—his or hers?
Outside, the first raindrops fell.
Chapter 7
Make Shelter or Die Trying
Morning, Fleet Woods
With the rain pounding hard and their haystack soaked through, John and Liz huddled under a spreading yew tree.
1 The gray sky—what could be seen of it between the branches—seemed to be descending to envelop the land in a sodden shroud.
Despite the protection of the dense fronds, water trickled through in several places. Their damp clothes clung to their skin as if they had recently climbed out of the river.
His belly grumbled miserably, and his teeth chattered. It was only their second morning in this strange land, and already he felt hungrier than he’d ever been.
“Hungry?” Liz asked.
“I wouldn’t mind wolfing down a full English breakfast.”
She laughed a little and then coughed.
John pulled her closer and waited for the rain to stop. With every passing minute, whatever warmth remained in their bodies seeped out of them into the murky, damp air. He had to do something. And soon.
“We gotta move,” he said.
“Huh?”
“If we stay still, we’ll die of hypothermia.”
“John, if we leave the shelter, we’ll get even wetter.”
“Then we exercise right here,” he said. With a groan, he lay down on his belly and did ten pushups. That sent his blood flowing faster through his veins. His empty stomach rumbled again.
Liz rolled face-down on the sodden carpet of moldy yew needles and tried to lift herself up by pushing against the ground. He grabbed her under her arms and helped. She managed two pushups and flopped like a fish on her stomach.
“Sorry, I’ve grown too flabby from the good life,” Liz wheezed. “But, oh wonder, I do feel warmer.” She stood and began plucking red berries from the overhead branch.
“What are you doing? Yew is poisonous.”
She popped a berry in her mouth. “The flesh isn’t dangerous. Just the pip. My father taught me that.” She turned her head aside to delicately spit out a pip. “Leaves and bark are toxic, too.”
John gingerly squeezed a berry between his tongue and palate. With a consistency partway between gluey porridge and jelly, it tasted refreshing. “Hey, not bad. I can’t place the flavor. Not quite strawberry.”
“It tastes like yew. Obviously.”
He grinned. “Sure, like me.” No matter how bad things were in this new world, at least here people could
joke without fear of being sued for a bit of banter. A new trickle of water started directly above him, cold drops falling behind his upturned collar. He moved aside.
In the next two hours, they stripped the branches within reach of berries. John’s tongue hurt from spitting seeds, but the edge was gone from his hunger. The rain slackened to a heavy drizzle. Wisps of mist rose above the soggy ground and snaked through the dark avenues of the forest. Once or twice, branches creaked and snapped as something heavy moved in the dripping woods, and he wondered how safe they were out of the bramble patch where they’d spent the previous night.
***
John pushed a sturdy deadwood pole between the forking boughs of a young pine and lashed it in place with a length of ivy. He fit the other end of the pole to a birch tree and likewise tied it down. His shoulder muscles ached from wrenching long thin branches from a wind-toppled willow they had found on the riverbank, and he had skinned his knuckles on both hands.
“Voila, the ridgeline.” He stepped back to admire his handiwork. It wasn’t much. Just a twelve-foot beam fixed horizontally above his head height. “Now, all we have to do is build the sides.”
Next, he leaned two tree limbs against one end of the ridgeline to make an A-frame. He pushed the bottom ends of the limbs into the ground for extra stability and with Liz’s help tied their tops to the ridge beam. They repeated the procedure at the other end of the structure and in two places in the middle. This produced a skeletal frame of a gabled roof, sans walls.
“Hey, this doesn’t look bad,” he said.
“It’s great.”
For an hour or so, they worked in silence, threading branches into the sides, tying some of them with ivy. Eventually, the store of sticks they’d dragged into the narrow clearing in the bramble patch dwindled to nothing.
John’s fingers were raw from handling rough bark, and his head swam with fatigue, but he was grinning. Liz sat down on the pile of reeds and wiped her forehead.