Grail
by Anna Dowdall
Lanny stood at the river’s edge, as he had done a thousand times. He was not alone, but stood well apart from the others, who had come to bid farewell to his father. Gwen had been with him during the valediction but, since an awkward threeway conversation on the porch, she had been evasive, distracted. She had slipped away and was somewhere in the crowd now. With that Art, he guessed.
In the middle of the river the funeral raft, ablaze and brilliant orange in the twilight, began to pick up speed. It drifted on the current like a huge molten flower, its column of black smoke tainting and staining the air. In his short life, Lanny had watched several funeral rafts sail away to the Northern Ocean. But it had never been like this.
“Grab a drink, Lanny.” His arm around Gwen, Art had lazily waved his cup. “Inside.”
He was so tired. He had hardly slept in five nights. He stared blindly, defiantly, into the dark heart of the dazzling pyre until he was not sure what he was looking at anymore. Losing his bearings, he began to imagine that it was he who drifted on the river, instead of his father. The burning raft was disappearing around the bend, casually, finally.
There could be nothing worse, Lanny thought suddenly, than to float away like this on the darkening stream – unless you were the one who was left behind.
Thin oily ribbons of smoke, what was left of his father, drifted among the trees.
Panic seized him and he started to run, crashing through the brush at the river’s edge, pursued by what sounded like a child’s anguished cries but were in fact his own. He thought he heard a girl calling his name. But on he ran, driving forward, unable to stop.
He ran for a long time.
He was moving so fast that, when he ran into a great horizontal tree branch, the momentum catapulted him sideways, and he slithered down the muddy embankment into the shallows of the river. The blow to his forehead had left him stunned. He sat in the icy water for a while, thinking about things like water and mud, misery and shame.
Above him the stars were coming out, the twinkling stars of a smoky spring night. A nap seemed like a good idea. Actually, he decided, he would sleep in the woods tonight. No one would miss him anyway.
But first he scrubbed himself in the river, a fierce bath that left him gasping with the cold. He dried himself with his tunic and lay down under a tree. He gazed at the stars through a tracery of branches, that made him think of the delicate rafters of a ruined choir.
Asleep, he dreamed that he and Gwen were gathering morels in the spring woods. But a forest fire swept down from the mountains and, do what he could, he lost her as they ran for their lives.
Anna: I started writing seriously two years ago. An excerpt from an unpublished novel of mine was one of ten finalists in the 2011 Katherine Paterson Prize for YA literature. I make my home in Toronto but have lived in various places in Canada and the United States. I’ve had many occupations: nurse’s aide, graphic artist, journalist, educator, perpetual student, civil servant and, most exotic of all, translator of Harlequin romances. Contact Anna.
