flashquake — David Shapiro's Editor's Pick

RAVEN ROCK
by Don Caudill

I was very moved by this story and impressed by the descriptive finesse and skilled pace of the writing.

Jen is nervous about meeting my parents. We ride most of the trip up in heavy silence, neither of us being able to strike up any conversation capable of generating enough momentum to sustain itself. We arrive late in the evening and what we salvage of the first night goes well, spent mostly around the table after dinner with moderate conversation and wine. I watch my mother and father as they speak and I think how well they have done. They are very warm, warmer than I had thought they would be.

In the morning I wake her and we light out for the rock.

Just outside of thunder, we are walking, whistling once forgotten songs, inspired and somehow incapable of being less than jubilant, though we know for certain we will be caught in the coming storm. Perhaps we are so, because of the coming storm, knowing that the warm rain would come soon from out of that smudge of charcoal sky and we would stand like starving sunflowers, our big faces skyward on our stalks of mosquito bitten legs, for with the rain and the rumble of the thunder the air is electric with the promise of renewal.

I have been here before, many times. I have been here with my father and my mother and my brother. My mother's voice is carved into the bark of every tree on this mountain. I hear her calling for my brother and me to stay with her and father as we repeatedly race ahead, insatiably curious to see what the world looks like from the top. Though we had seen it innumerable times. I can see us and feel us. We race. We are a year apart in age, but unlike the more fortunate siblings in more fortunate families, we will not remain so. My mother has the all too familiar look of apocalyptical agitation on her big doe eyes and her perfect mouth as she commands us once again to slow down. Her face is like the sky here on this mountain that has changed in a blink or in less time than it takes the lightning to suddenly become a memory.

Jen and I are at the bald face now, she is waiting for me and I urge her on in front. The rain has come and we are nearly crawling up the rock, as the angle is not steep, though looking up at the peak from this position, it gives the illusion that it goes on for miles.

"Don't get too far ahead of me, now." I tell her and the electricity arcs across my scalp and down my spine and I can almost hear my mother's voice echo from the top, If I have to tell you two one more time…

I did not tell my mother and father that we were coming up here. Jen does not know this and with a flash of guilt, I assure myself that it is best that she does not. She likes the rain and she likes the mountains and she likes that I have brought her here, home to meet my mother and father. She likes my mother's cooking and my father's stoic humor.

There is no monument up here. There was for a while, a simple wooden cross and the occasional flowers that rigorous, mourning friends and family would bring. For a moment I wrestle with the image of him down below, lying motionless and mangled, crumpled like the past.

We are sweating in the summer rain, we can see the top and she wants to race me. I know that she does. But, she is older than I was then and she knows better. I want her ahead of me so that if she loses her footing and takes a tumble I will break her fall. I tell myself this and it is true. Mostly, it is true. I can't blame myself that I am a man and thoroughly enjoying seeing her in those shorts and in that position just there ahead all the way up the rock.

You think you know what you will do when or if something like that happens and when you don't do what you thought you would, you wonder about it for the rest of your life. I did not run back to them that day. I sat and waited for them to catch up and when they came upon me, I did not have to tell them. They knew.

We are at the top now and I have needed this for almost twenty years. I have craved it and denied it. I have denied it because I knew what I would hear him say. I knew exactly what he would say and what his voice would sound like when his words came to me. I knew his voice would come and I was not ready to hear him say it. I did not want to believe it.

We are there now. There is a green ocean endlessly rolling out before us as the wind transforms the trees on the mountain and in the valley into undulating waves that ebb and flow through the forest. The rain has come harder now as we find a steady perch high atop the rock that sits at what must be the center of the universe.

"It's…" She laughs, blinking rain from her beautiful eyes. "I love you." She says, her wet face smiling and moving in for a kiss.

"And I love you." I follow her lead.

We are embracing there at the peak and softly in my ear, I hear him laugh his tiny and delicate laugh and then tell me, in a little boy's whisper that could easily be lost in the hiss of the rain, "It was not your fault."

Copyright 2003 by Don Caudill

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