Young Writers Society

Aaron leaned against the chiseled wood of the telephone pole, waiting. Daffodil sat on the sidewalk. It was studded with bent nails and staples. He wasn’t sure where they were from, or what the telephone pole was for. He asked Daffodil, and she said she wasn’t sure, but she could remember that people sometimes stapled or sf things to telephone poles, and that they held up wires that conducted electricity. Then she’d asked him why everything was so unfamiliar to him, things seemed at least a bit familiar to her. He’d said he wasn’t sure.

He wasn’t sure, but he had suspicions. Ever since he’d that dream, the one with the deer. He’d begun to suspect that waking up half-rotted under leaves wasn’t normal. He’d begun to suspect the slight smell of decay and the parts of him that felt numb weren't normal. He’d begun suspecting something about the child that had fallen from the window and died fifteen years ago.

“How long until they get here?” he asked.

“Soon,” she said.

“Do you know them?”

“No,” she said. “But we’re all confused right now. We need all the help we can. We all just want to know what’s going on.”

He looked up at the telephone wires. Some lengths were deadened and lifeless, and swung in the air like cobwebs. Others crackled with shocks. Birds stuck to them, roosting on them and burning with white sparks. They clotted together on the wires and dropped rotted feathers onto the pavement.

Some people came over.

“You want to use our cable car, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you paying in food or clothes”

“Food. One second.” Daffodil pulled open the mouth of a tote bag and pulled out some granola bars from her house.

“Good. Follow us.”

They took them to some steps to a roof. They were at eye level with the power lines now, the ones didn’t have power in them. A wobbly ferris wheel car swung from it, ripped from a fair ride. There was a wheel that helped it roll across the cable.

“Is this safe?”

The person shrugged. “There's no other way across. Not since the bridge collapsed.”

They climbed in.

creak creak creak creak creak creak creak creak creak

The car began to move down the power line.

creak creak creak creak creak creak creak creak creak

The air whistled past Aaron’s skin. He felt like he was going to fall. Which was strange, because usually he didn’t have a sense for these things. He felt very, very scared.

creak creak creak creak creak creak creak creak creak

Daffodil stepped out of the car first, then Aaron. Their feet hit another roof. Aaron’s eyes were dull. His heart was swimming with fear, his head was swimming with branch-laced sky, and his nostrils were full of the smell of blood and dead leaves.

“Come on.”

He shook his head, trying to dispel the shakiness of his limbs. They climbed down another flight of stairs and stepped onto the pavement. It was very warm here, and the warmth seemed to make things clearer, like a fog had been lifted.

The air was warm and smelled like a campfire. That’s because there were a lot of them here. They crackled and popped out of corners and rifts, knobbled twigs and branches smoldering, clusters of leaves curling and blackening in plumes of smoke. The gray of stone and smoke mingled with the gold of flames that licked at the walls as they added more sprigs from decorative bushes and trees. It was if it was suddenly a hot summer afternoon.

They kept walking.

The campfires thinned. The air cooled. The smoke cleared, their heads clouded. Daffodil put her sweater back on, shivering. There were less people now.

“Hey,” said one of them.

“Hello. What is it?”

“You’re going to somewhere near the subway, right? Near the parking garage?”

“Yes?”

“Well, the lower levels are flooded right now. They’re spilling out onto the street. You might want to take another way around.”

“Okay. We’ll keep an eye out.”

They kept walking. They saw the parking garage. It loomed above them, layers of darkness oozing from between the flashing silver concrete. Clusters of butterfly wings crawled out from the cracks, dripping water. There was a slight gurgling sound.

“Is it really flooded?”

“I’ll check.”

Aaron peered down into the lowest level.

The inky black waters swirled below. Ropes of rushing water surged over each other and tangled like fighting serpents, a boiling, bubbling storm in a pot of pavement, stripping off the layers of white paint and tossing empty soda bottles and plastic storage bins. He could hear the water rushing, slipping against the walls. He could also hear someone screaming.

There was someone there, in one of the plastic bins swimming in the maelstrom, splattered with flecks of foam and hair whipped by the winds.

Aaron looked at Daffodil in alarm. “Someone’s there! What do we do? Could we reach?”

“Maybe. Let me try…”

She reached out her arm, leaning out precariously over the whirlpool below. The bin swirled closer. Her fingers were outstretched, reaching. She could grab it! Her palm gripped the edge and pulled, against the current to shore…

But her hand rippled through as though it was water. She fell in and barely felt the splash.

It was quiet, and dark. Water whistled through her like wind, and light filtered through the surface, the distant surface of the water that swirled distantly over her head. Bubbles swam past her like minnows and her hair brushed her face as it floated in the currents. The cement floor of the parking garage was cold under her feet. She knew water was pressing down on her, and tossing her like a ragdoll. It was supposed to, anyway. Like she was supposed to have been able to touch the rim of the plastic bin. But here she was, standing on the bottom floor of a parking garage with the floods swirling through her as easily as air. She could look up and see the silver-lined tides rippling over her head.

She saw something circulating through the currents. One of the granola bars they’d saved.

Thank you, Aaron.

She grabbed at it and bit down, and she began to feel the water rushing over her, and feel the rushing water pulling her towards the light, as it filled her nostrils and lungs and feeling sizzled into her limbs. She grabbed onto the bin, and her grip held. With a gasping, spluttering heave, she pulled it to the edge and handed it off to Aaron, where he was able to pull it to the edge. She lay face down on the ground, water trickling off of her and pooling into puddles on the pavement.

Finally she sat up. Aaron was staring at her earnestly, and the now-rescued boy was trying to smooth out his hair.

“I was building a mountain,” he said. “My name’s Ferris.”

“A mountain?” she said.

“Yeah.” He nodded. “I was collecting stones, and fitting them all together into a mountain, a beautiful mountain, where I can stand at the top, and I recreate it…”

“It-? What is-a mountain, you said? Where?”

“On the bridge, but it collapsed…”

“Seems everything’s falling apart,” said Daffodil.

But Aaron remembered where they’d been going to and why, his dream, the Oracle, the sticky notes. “Maybe so,” he said, “But everything also seems to be coming together.”