The Golden Boat

The Golden Boat

Paul Hina

Published by Paul Hina at Smashwords

Copyright ©2018 by Paul Hina

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

The Golden Boat

The green, green grass, M hears a voice say. Maybe it's his voice. Maybe not. It felt close, but now seems suddenly far away, in the distance—a sound fading like an echo in his mind.

When he opens his eyes, he's staring out over an enormous field of grass. It's so green that it seems oversaturated and out-of-focus. But it becomes more beautiful as his vision grows more clear, and he can see each blade—kissed by light and swaying ever-so-slightly in the breeze.

The green, green grass, he says, and it seems like the voice he'd heard a moment before was his own.

Sitting up, he looks out at the grassy field around him, and he's stunned by its vastness, its greenness, its apparent newness. It looks like the grass of perfect spring—untouched and pure. Even the weather is perfect—too warm to feel cool and cool enough not to sweat.

He smiles, but she pulls at him. He can feel her beside him, but she's not there. Her hand—warm and soft and clear as clearest memory—was just in his hand.

Whose hand?

M looks at his hand, and it's suddenly strange to him. It's warm as he places it on his cheek, and he smells it as if he might still find a trace of her there. But there's nothing. There's only the earthy smell of the grass and dirt he was just clutching. But he's sure her hand was just there. He felt it.

Whose hand?

He stands up and looks around this vast grassland around him. To the right, in the distance, there's a hill that he can't see beyond. Above it is only lazy blue sky, decorated here and there by a wispy gauze of clouds.

To the left of him, about fifty or sixty yards away, is a dense forest of trees packed so tightly together that the shade beneath the canopy of the trees is quite dark.

And in the front and the back of him is grassland as far as the eye can see, though both ends seem to dissolve behind a distant haze.

Moving forward, he looks around for something—anything familiar. His mind is completely blank. He doesn't know where he is and doesn't have the first idea what he should be looking for. He stops to listen for cars or the buzz of insects—anything at all. He looks for some signage or power lines, but there's nothing in sight.

As he walks further forward, he hears a whisper, something like radio static. He moves toward it, and the noise gets louder. It begins to sound less like static and more like rain. The haze he'd seen in the distance of this side of the grassy field only moments before is growing more pronounced as he gets closer. Once, it was just the slightest haze of distance, the kind you might see in the heat of mid- to late-summer. He just assumed the grass went on like this for miles and miles. Now, though, he sees that it was an illusion. The haze is more like a curtain of white fog or smoke. It doesn't even appear to be three-dimensional, more like a flat curtain or screen in front of him. The world beyond it might as well be a projection. Projected from what? He doesn't know. There doesn't appear to be any transition between the place where the grass ends and the fog begins. There's only a distinct line of fog in the grass, a straight line that stretches all the way to the left and all the way to the right of the field. And when he looks up, the wall doesn't seem to end. It just goes as high and as wide as he can see. It's wholly unnatural.

Then there's a new sound, in addition to the sound of the rain. It's a swinging sound—high pitched and familiar—like a slightly rusty hinge closing and opening. As he leans toward the haze of the wall, he can see a gas station sign slowly developing like a photograph in front of him. The light in the fog fades into twilight as the sign becomes more clear. It's slowly swinging in the rain, and two children are lit from overhead by the light that shines down on the sign.

M puts his hand on the fog in front of his face and pushes. There's no resistance as he steps into the fog.

Now, he's staring at her beautiful, young face. She's probably no more than twelve years old. Neither is he. He watches the water from the rain drip from her wet hair into her face. She looks so happy, but also a little frightened. He can feel it as well—the excitement, the fear. He's full of vibrations of nerves standing there staring at this girl he's about to kiss.

Fear and desire are rising up his throat together in shivering twists as he erases the space from his lips to hers. When he touches her warm flesh with his fingers and presses his mouth onto her mouth, the whole world around them just disappears. All that exists is in the spotlight that shines down on them. But, for him, the world grows even smaller as he tastes the rain on her lips, feels the soft sweetness of her mouth melting over his. Nothing exists outside this kiss.

In reality, the kiss must have lasted no more than a few seconds, and yet it felt like a long space was inserted in between each frame of the film—a string of moments in slippery slow motion. And, even as he eases away from her face, watches those closed eyes of hers slowly open into sweetest blueness and sees her mouth slowly stretch into slightest smile, he can see each individual drop of rain as it falls around her—drop by drop—building a mythology around the memory that, even then, he knew he'd carry with him forever.

And the desire M feels for her is so strong, yet so innocent. They're still at that age where desire is cast in innocence. His sense of sexuality was so new then that his attraction to her was more about nearness than sex. All he wanted was to be close to her, feel her skin on his, to know that kiss again and again, let the world outside of this moment keep spinning and just leave them to their rainy spot of lovely light.

This is maybe the moment that began his lifelong fascination with the rain, with the sound and the rhythm of it, its chaos and its poetry.

Then his body seems to levitate as he's slowly pulled away from the moment and placed softly outside the wall of fog, looking in at them again. He places his hand on the wall and feels a force like two similar poles of a magnet pushing against one another. But he can still see the two figures under the sign, standing in the light. They're completely still, frozen in the moment. The rain can still be heard, and he can see the long lines of it falling around them. But the sound grows quieter and quieter, and the once rusty sound of the gas station sign's swinging ends as the light shining down from above them dims into darkness.

He pushes hard against the wall with both hands, wants to feel that joy and excitement again. But as the scene disappears, and the grassy field on the other side of the wall comes back to life, he sees purples, yellows and whites of wildflowers in the meadow beyond the foggy wall. When he turns to the field behind him, it's speckled with wildflowers, too. They weren't there before. The once solitary greenness had succumbed to an even deeper spring, a more perfect spring—the April of a first kiss in the rain.

He tries thinking of that girl, and though he was staring into her face only a few moments before, he can't remember her. He knows the moment, recognizes it as a moment from his past—his first kiss. But he can't quite remember her face or her name. And suddenly, he realizes he has a past that is lost to him. He can't quite remember anything about himself. He doesn't know his own face, or his own name, but this single memory has added context to the barren landscape of memory that surrounds him. He doesn't know who he is or where he is. He only knows that he was once a boy who kissed a girl, and that now he's a man in a strange grassy landscape, surrounded by a forest, a hill, two very large walls of fog, and a big rock…

A big rock?

He walks over to the rock and sits atop it. It showed up just in time, just as he was thinking he'd like a place to sit—almost as if he willed it.

M's spent a long time staring into the distance trying to will things into being—a chair, a tree, a memory—as he believes he did with the rock he's now sitting on. Nothing has come. But after a time—no telling how long, as time seems lost to him here—he hears a noise near the forest. He turns and spots a woman, her back turned to him, walking across the tree line, maneuvering her way into the mess of trees there.

Hey! he yells.

She doesn't respond.

He gets up and chases after her. She disappears into the darkness of the forest before he can get close enough to get her attention. He stops short of the tree line, looking into the dark shade of the forest for any sign of her. There's nothing inside but a cartoon of leafy shadows.

Are you there? he asks. Don't be afraid. He's not sure if he's trying to reassure her as much as he's trying to reassure himself.

There's a high pitched humming coming from one of the trees. It doesn't sound like a bird, but he's not sure what else it could be. He crosses the tree line and enters the darkness under the thick, thick canopy of foliage above him. The humming that had been a singular thing has now become louder and more omnipresent. The deeper into the forest he goes, it's as if the trees' limbs are bending lower, confining him, stretching their leafy arms around him, almost pushing him forward down the dimly lit path ahead.

The woman he'd seen is nowhere in sight. He can't even hope to hear her footsteps over the near deafening rise of the hum in the forest now. He places his hands near his ears, and he suddenly recognizes the noise. It's the sound of cicadas, and they must be everywhere. He presses his hands hard over his ears and closes his eyes.

When he opens his eyes again, he's walking through a street fair back in Ohio. He's eight-years old, and he's lost. He was just with his mom a moment before, holding her hand, and then he turned his attention to a food cart selling elephant ears, and, when he turned back, she was gone.

This had been an incredibly difficult time for him, anyway. His parents had only recently separated, and he hadn't seen his father in weeks, and being a child with all the uncertainty and irrationality that childhood naturally brings, he couldn't help but wonder if he'd ever see him again.

He had been looking forward to the distraction of this autumnal festival. Anything to take his mind off the turmoil that was happening all around him—the endless worry that his family might be forever broken.

This festival was well known in the area for its liberal throwing of confetti. The dots of white paper were bountiful. You couldn't take a step without walking through the stuff like piles of paper snow on the ground. It was sold all