Excerpt: The Gale

Everything was gone. I fell to the floor as the reality crashed down around me. It was as gone as my baby teeth, Ralph Nadar’s hopes of being president, and the woolly mammoths. I knew that the scarf man would not come back. Why would he? He was going to leave us here and we would run out of food and die. I sobbed, my face staining the floor with tears. This was it. Over. All of it. I had worked so hard, had racked up so many services hours for the National Honors Society that I would now never get accepted into. Dead people did not get into academic award societies. And those kind of people most certainly did not make exceptions. I fell to lie on the ground as the images of my kidnapping flashed through my head. If only I had not paused. If only I had jumped out the window as soon as I heard the door click open. Then none of this would have happened. I would have sprinted to a nieghbor’s house, they would have called the police, and then Keith, Clark, and Melanie would never have been interrupted that night. All of this was my fault. I could have prevented everything, yet I was too cowardly to do it. I pulled myself up to the window seat with the biggest accommodations. The sun now shone brightly, and my breath caught in my throat. The tears continued to stream down my cheeks, but I made no sobs. For outside was one of the most beautiful things that I had ever seen.
It was the Grande Ronde Valley, of that I was sure. We were high, very high, on a mountain. Below the house was an array of trees, the leaves of which were on fire and exploding. It seemed to stretch on for as long as eternity, the entire world just a simple sea of crimson and orange and magnificence. Cutting through these trees were the many bends and turns of a rushing river, its clear, crisp water a snarling bull through this sea of vegetation. It was hope. Because that river still ran, and those trees still survived. Their continuity through the years, for the river could very well have been there for centuries, was the ultimate perseverance. Through the years of hail and blizzards and torturous changes in weather, they held strong. Well, here was my blizzard. I could see nothing, I could feel nothing, but this coldness pressing in on me from all sides. There were two choices: continue forward, or try to find my way back. The door was locked. I could only press forward, through the blindness, through the elements that I knew absoluetly nothing of. This was my blizzard. I had to be that river.
I looked down at my watch, and thirty minutes had passed. Looking up and down the row of windows, I saw a padlock on every one of them. Forward. I picked myself up. This was no blizzard of having a boyfriend break up with you, or losing someone, or anything else that I had ever imagined. A blizzard was not even strong enough; it was more of a blizzard of razor blades infected with AIDs, or snowing flakes that were made of flaming steel safes with concrete blocks inside of them. There was no finish line, there was never any gun; this was the race of my life through the blizzard of my life. And what did people do in both of those situations? They kept going. Because stopping during a white out, or the Western States Endurance One Hundred Miles could result in death. Keep moving or die. The end.
I peered outside again. It was not fair. There was this beautiful house, and this breathtaking scenery, and there was no way to enjoy it. It was cruel and twisted, the way that I could not touch that cool water, or step through those snappish leaves. The brusque air could not soothe my skin, and the rolling hills and mountains could not alleviate my soul. Maybe this was the point. Sure, we had food and water and cover. But we were not free. And what was life without freedom? The country of America was founded on this principle. Freedom was essential to a person’s will to live. The sovereignty mocking me from the outside, on the other side of these Plexiglass, impossible to open windows, was one of the worst things possible. Of course, we should be in a shack with no food. But with what we had, the autonomy calling and calling, but being reflected off of the paneling of the house was vindictive. I rested my head against the cool window pane. This was as close as I would get to out there. With so much of my life dictated by my freedom, running through leaves and mud and trees and being so liberated, this was a completely new thing to me.
This was too much. I threw myself off of the cushions and bolted towards the door, unable to give even a last, fleeting look to the impossible splendor beyond my reach.