Spit & The River

He started by saying that the fastest way to die is to worry about things that have already happened.

The old man spoke through wrinkled lips. I licked the rum off of my own and begged him to continue. He looked at me once and then sighed reluctantly. The story, he said, began small.

-

There was a tribe at the end of an ancient river. The water ran deep and long. The river was florescent, green and unbroken, and it pushed past silver trees, bending into the unknown. The river was surrounded by a forest of petrified mangroves; the past, buried beneath its roots. Endless lightning tore through a sickly sky. Electricity and wires shook in the distance.

One morning, out of loneliness or desperation, a man canoed through the poisoned river. He was searching for the calm, the otherness. Decades before, he lost his world, his known life, his family. All that remained was a shoddily built boat and his wily black lab, Shadow. The man missed belonging and with each paddle, he simply wished for more. He hugged the canoe along the curves of the river and hushed growling Shadow through the fog.

The paddler stroked, directing his canoe through the current and sighs of the ever-moaning river. The petrified trees pierced eerily through clouds of fog, revealing themselves in waves. They passed through a cloud of glowing bugs that hummed with the shrill sound of electricity. The monotonous hours of paddling felt like weeks, as monotonous hours usually do. But, suddenly, the humming stopped, replaced by the calm.

The river carried the paddler and his Shadow through a clearing. The bugs disappeared, the fog parted, and the river, once again, became a clear blue. The paddler held his breath and pushed on. The silence weighed heavily as time crept forward. The paddler gripped his oar. Shadow whimpered. In the distance, the drums roared.

-

Before I knew what was happening, a steam-punk bot refilled my rum. The old man let out a stale breath of cigar and I could tell he wanted me to acknowledge that he wasn’t done. I waited until the rusty bot departed and nodded once. The humid air wrapped around us, the metal bar creaked, mosquitos hummed.

-

The paddler’s name was Spit; he was a vagrant, a gypsy, a zingara, a son. Spit howled at the moon the night he was born. His mother said he sounded so violent, she knew all was lost. It was years after he howled, but he howled nonetheless, and his mother was right: all that once was, was gone.

From the outside, Spit was a shell of a man, but inside, he was strong. Unafraid of life, he survived on his own with only the company of a stray dog. Shadow was a street pup, clever, cunning. Yet, as Shadow sat on the rickety canoe, his fur stood on end. The clouds of electricity loomed overhead.

Spit paddled through the fog, past the petrified trees, through the swarm of bugs and the hallow boom of drums. He paddled until he pulled up to a narrow, shallow beach where other humans sat, guns drawn, waiting.

Spit and Shadow jumped out of the carved wood and onto the sand. Spit bowed his head and dropped to the floor, digging his knees into the Earth below. The quick dog followed suit. Then the drums died down, the moment passed, and the sound of shells clanking above Spit’s head led him to his feet.

Spit stared at the chief. His eyes fixed on her collar, a stringed together cluster of shells, bones, and beads, all tied around a golden, heart-shaped locket. Spit’s eyes carried over the chief’s body; scars, cuts, the burned flesh, the wounded chest. Her wounds had grown green to match the color of the sky, a sickening reminder of the times. Spit tried not to vomit. He held his breath.

The chief looked between Shadow and Spit and paused. Her muscles tensed like a cage fighter caught in a headlock; she wanted a way out but was too stubborn to quit. She twitched, reflexively reaching down to rub the soft spot behind Shadow’s flea-covered ears. Shadow wagged his tail and drooled, grinning past his fear. The chief stood and nodded to Spit, weariness weighing behind her green eyes. He followed as she led him into the green haze of the electrocuted sky.

-

Through a breath of sweet liquor, I asked the old man what happened to Spit and the chief with the necklace of gold. He sighed with the weight of a million suns.

Spit, the old man said over a fire of gasoline and another glass of rum, Spit created the world of now: the world of light and fire and robots and home. Spit founded our tribe under this humid green sky and became the grandfather of all that we know. He left the chief for dead in the corner of a tent and took the city’s resources home.

Before asking why, I blinked twice to see him fondle his own heart necklace of gold.