Fall To Grace - Patrick Sean Lee (the reading strategies book .txt) 📗

Fall To Grace


He hit the ground, and it surprised him. It hurt very much, yes, but he had not died, he sensed immediately. The impact was jarring, and the pain was momentarily intense, yet his brain continued to fire commands, jangled though they were. Oh, the shock of that--of not seeing angels fluttering around him preparing to whisk his soul off into eternity as well. After several seconds Laz opened his eyes. The first thing he saw when the spinning stopped and his vision cleared was the perfect outline of a torso in the walls of the earth above him. Legs splayed, arms outstretched, like a gingerbread cookie man. He had slammed three feet into the ground on his back. Trickles of dirt tumbled down onto his chest and legs with a dull clattering sound in the aftershock. He noted next a blue sky with a small tufted cloud suspended directly above him, its underside shaded in splotches of gray, but not ominous like the gray nothing he had just left. He smelled saltwater. He tried to move his arms, and then his legs, but he was stuck like a plug in concrete.
He lay contemplating what had happened for a long while, trying in vain to move any part of himself, when suddenly a faint shadow finally crept over the pit enveloping him, and then a face followed.
“Hello down there. Are you hurt?”
Laz’s brain was rattled, but the question hit him as ludicrous.
“Am I hurt? Jesus Christ, what kind of question is that? Of course I’m hurt!”
But he was not. Not really. He peered up at a face that struck him as capable of raising the dead. A youngish woman with auburn hair that cascaded down, framing the sides of an angelic face. He could not see her eyes clearly because of his age and failing vision, but he knew they were deep-set and dark. Perhaps rich chocolate. An instant before she spoke again her lips curled up slightly, and he completely forgot himself—his mouth dropped opened. He felt his lungs gasp for air.
“Let me help you out of there,” she said, and thrust a hand toward him. “How on earth did you get yourself so far into the ground?”
Laz tried to free one arm, and then the other, but they were shackled tight to the earthen walls. The woman shifted along the edge above him, lay down on her stomach, and then reached again for his hand. She found it and took hold.
Her skin was soft, like silk against the wrinkled leather of his own, and he imagined how her fingers might feel caressing his cheek. His situation suddenly didn’t seem so bad.
“You ask how I got here? I fell, I guess. I think. Wait. Is this Montreal?”
The lovely woman looked up at a clear blue sky.
“Oh, I don’t think so. This is Bristol…or close by, anyway. Fell from where? There are no trees nearby, and there are no cliffs save Dover’s, and they’re far away. A balloon?”
“No. No. There were birds...ugly birds. Big ones. They…I don’t remember. I just jumped! Yes, that's

what happened.”
“My goodness. Well, I suppose it doesn’t really matter. Let’s just get you out.”
“Okay.”
“When I say three, pull down…or up. Whatever,” she said. “Ready?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. One. Two. THREE!”
Wendy’s muscles tightened, and so did Laz’s. His embedded position in the ground was the immovable object that overcame the irresistible force. She tumbled over the edge, landing on him in the most strikingly wonderful way. An X atop an X, with a delightfully confined space between the upper vees for two heads.
“Uh-oh,” she muttered into his mouth.
The Canadian felt the feather-light weight of her, the softness of her breasts against his chest, and the flatness of her stomach against his own. She smelled of evening stock, lily-sweet. Roses and gardenias. Spring rain. He had been wrong. He realized he had not fallen to the earth, but had somehow soared to the bottom of heaven.
“I can’t move,” she said into his smiling lips.
“ ‘S okay.”
Well, no it was not. He smelled. A skeleton with steel mesh for skin, and piss for cologne. He was sixty-three…or sixty-five; he’d lost count. Until this moment it hadn’t mattered. She raised her head, and then pushed her chest up with great effort. Her stomach left his, and her small arms worked themselves free.
“Wait!” Laz said. “I don’t think you should…I mean, just lay back down here for a minute and let’s think about this.”
“You’re disgusting.”
Her fingers found the top of the pit. She wriggled upright, which series of movements excited Laz, and then another shower of dirt fell onto him as the Brit pulled herself out of the hole.
“I should have left you to wither up and die…you down there.
“What’s your name, anyway?”
Laz spit dirt out of his mouth. “Lazarus. Lazarus Sixty-Seven. It’s French. What’s yours—and you’re not going to leave me like this, are you?”
“You are a dirty old man. Why shouldn’t I?”
He thought quickly. His life depended on it. And he wanted, at least, to feel her hand again. At least her hand.
“I am. I’m filthy, but it’ll all wash off. If you’ll help me out of here. Please.”
“That isn’t what I meant.” She turned and began walking away. "Wendy. Wendy Reakes,” she shouted back. “Like in…umm…Peaks. There.”
He lay quietly for a while looking up at the lone cloud as it drifted away, wondering if she would come back. If it rained, Laz thought despairingly after a few moments, he would drown, either in water, or suffocating black waterfalls of mud. Still, it wasn’t as bad as all that. He would go out smiling. Fate had thrown an angel on top of him, and for an instant her lips had brushed his. He let his tongue flick his lips in search of the infinitesimal residue of hers, rolling her name over and over inside his mouth.
Wen-dy Wendy Reakes, like in Peaks…

Wendy returned much later. She stopped at the edge of the pit and kicked a shoe-full of dirt down onto him.
“Hey you down there. Wake up.”
Laz looked up at her and smiled. She was beautiful. Fuzzy, mirage-like, a Raphaelish image floating in a bowl of soup. “I was dreaming of you,” he said to her without thinking.
“Dreaming of me what?” She held a long, stout branch, waiting for his reply, waiting he thought, to jab him with it if he blew the explanation.
“Dreaming…of walking along a beach below the Cliffs of Dover…that I nearly stepped on you. You were a pretty little pearl, and your voice was so small, and pleading, and as gorgeous as…as…a thousand banjos.”
That was his best. He rehashed it, edited, and quickly added an addendum, “Violins! As a thousand violins! I knelt and lifted you up…and I kissed you,” he finished in a half-whisper.
Wendy laughed, then shoved the end of the branch into the hole near his free hand.
“That was nice, Mr. Sixty-Seven. Here, grab hold. I’ll try to pull you up, but don’t get any ideas. I’d rather kiss a frog.”
And so he locked his fingers around the end of the branch. A moment later, with her legs straddling the pit, Wendy managed his release. Once he had gotten to his feet and checked to see if all the bones were still where they should be—or where he thought they should be—he dusted himself off. She stood three feet away, and he glanced over at her.
“Can I…” he began.
“No.”
“I was just going to say thank you?”
Wendy’s demeanor softened. He had spoken these words with visible ingenuousness. She let the branch fall from her hands onto the ground at her feet.
“I’m sorry. You’re welcome.” She turned abruptly and began walking away. “Come. You can help me look for my friends from Bookrix.”
Mr. Sixty-Seven rushed after her, tripping over the stick she had dropped. He landed face first, his thin arms thrust outward helplessly, and he tasted the grittiness of sand mixed in among the fine blades of grass. He shook his head and looked up. The sky had turned darker blue, bleeding into deep cobalt toward the horizon, and it was blanketed with a hundred million blinking stars, although it could not yet be evening. To his left, the green grass gave way to the beginnings of a forest. He could see the line of trees fade where they met a narrow strand of beach. To his right, a tall dune of sparkling sand snaking