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The Third Twin 17
When I opened my eyes on the morning of the seventh day, faces lingered in the snow shower that greeted me, warping, swirling, dissolving among the driven flakes, among their own echoes. The snow came hard, and on an unfriendly and capricious wind, and the bed was now at least six inches deep. But Ritter wasn’t going to let us off this time. He’d had us get our packs ready and do what body cleaning we were going to—the usual boiled water and alcohol-based wipes—before we went to sleep. He gave us just enough time to shovel down our Pop-tarts and brush our teeth before we were on our way.The going was tedious from the outset, and the blow only intensified as we went. We tried to keep our path as shielded from the brunt of it as possible, but there was only so much navigable ground, and Ritter’s memorized route to keep. The exposed stretch
The Third Twin 18
It was so out of place, character, context as the trees and their denizens fell away behind us, that Dianna and I could only stare in wonderment. The pavilion-like structure, which served as a covered porch to an adjoining cinderblock building, painted a mirage-like tableau. Two sides were open, while the one that stood opposite us abutting the building was a leeward wall fashioned of slim, rough logs lashed and nailed together. The roof, resting on six knotty supports, was just as crude, but the structure was clearly sturdy, withstanding the storm in creaking though staunch motionlessness. Yet it was the shelter’s interior that sang—with its fire pit, the stack of logs in the corner, the picnic table and bench, camping chairs. The scene was surreal, Daliesque, an unapologetic imposition upon rigidity and uniformity, upon the past itself. The shelter was Ritter’s lean-to, disassembled and put back together here, where in its alienness it somehow bel
The Third Twin 19
“Have you ever wondered what it would be like to sit next to God?” Maya said, eyes still moist as they reflected the fire’s whispery flames. “For me, that is not a simple question to answer because I have sat next to one who sits next to God. He dispenses his keys, breaks his genetic codes without regard for bystanders, or even those he dispenses his keys to, those whose codes he breaks. It is entirely possible he has cracked the genetic code to God Himself, but does he consider the possibility of offense? No, because there are no possibilities with him. There is only the thing he intends to achieve and the straightest route to that achievement. For him, God is a bystander. He’ll acknowledge Him if He gets in the way. Otherwise . . . ” She shrugged.Dianna and I sat on the opposite side of the fire. Outside the shelter, the snow came hard
The Third Twin 20
I woke to a world so brilliant, I thought I was still in the clutches of the elaborate nightmare that seemed to have spanned years of mine and others’ lives; and that this must be the culmination of its chaotic conclusion, a blinding photograph to attach to mankind’s record, the moment in time when human evolution pinnacled not in glory, but in irony, for crimes against the very engine that had driven it.When my pupils adjusted to the brightness, I found that I lay beneath a clear blue sky in a world encased in, utterly suppressed by snow. Not a sound or flutter occurred. The story told in the dream had ended, and there was no epilogue. The point-of-view character had landed not in heaven or hell, but in oblivion, and this was what it looked like, a realm of white and blue. And yet there were memories, were there not? In his muscles and
The Third Twin ONE - EGGS AND ELEPHANTS 1
ONEEGGS AND ELEPHANTS1The winter issue of Backtrails magazine appeared in my mailbox in February. Though I’d never heard of the magazine, much less subscribed to it, the following May I was on a plane for Munich answering one of its ads. It wasn’t unusual for me to respond to the call of a distant place or activity. An avid outdoorsman, I’d hiked, biked, climbed, snowboarded, skydived, even canyoned at various locations throughout the States and Eur
The Third Twin 2
Twelve days later we were in Brazil. O Festival da Aranha—the Spider Festival—was an all-weekend affair, so we decided to do it last. Our flight arrived in Rio de Janeiro Friday afternoon, and we spent that evening and most of Saturday enjoying Rio’s offerings. A bus would take us to Tago and the Spider Festival later Saturday afternoon, then back to Rio early Monday morning for the flight home.Rio de Janeiro was splendid, if in shambles. The remnants of its own carnival festival littered the streets, rendering it a city of motley tatters, a sad sort of vision to support a poignant atmosphere of loss. It was back to the misery of life for the residents, while the tourists that had come behind the carnival-goers seemed to linger rather than to explore. Kristin and I paid the mood of the place little heed in the beginning, eagerly
The Third Twin 3
Call me paranoid. Call me what you will. But this place was freakish, and never more clearly than now as I pushed through a crowd gathered around a transparent tank in which an armless and horribly burn-scarred man wearing nothing but a Speedo sat among thousands of hairy spiders that crawled over his body like a shivering coat of fleece. The onlookers squealed as the object of their delight opened his mouth, inviting one of the hairy crawlers inside. When the spider accepted the invitation, their voices grew even shriller. When the man bit into it, they lost all semblance of belonging to a civilized species.A snowboarding buddy once told me that in the Red Light back alleys of Amsterdam he had been dragged into a sex show featuring a woman with one leg ‘doing it’ with a woman with no legs. I asked him why he’d let himself be dra
The Third Twin 4
4The ensuing weeks would prove to be the worst of my fifty-one years of living, to include those surrounding Kathy’s murder. They began with a statement, a strange statement from Felicia’s lips, and ended in death and institutionalization. The period between was a blur of doctors, specialists, and investigators, whose paths, collectively, led essentially nowhere. Some answers were found, but only where there was the raw material to work from. The creature that had glutted himself on the slow brutalization of my family would remain the elephantine shadow upon all of our souls.Felicia’s statement came after a visit with one of the more mainstream of the above mentioned specialists, a psychiatrist who dealt speci
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