You wake up, waist deep in soot and rubble. But not really awake, just halfway, or possibly even less than that. Maybe a quarter. Once upon a time, there was a number you remembered that was less than ¼, but that time has passed you by. For now, even reminiscence of the past milliseconds seem like a feat for the gods. Don’t be too hard on yourself, though. You have too many other variables to thicken the equation. Ridding yourself of fractions and brain functions, you fitfully shuffle around and discover with a heave of relief that everything is still intact. At least on the outside, that is. If finding a number less than a quarter is a mission, the idea of understanding the thoughts running like acid through your mind—burning, scorning, acid that carves away any sort of pleasantries—is a couple hundred miles away from attainable. You tentatively probe the air with your free nostril. It’s crisp and tainted with pine leaves and nipping cold freshwater. Another treat. If you were in the midst of a raging fire or trapped under a collapsed skyscraper, you definitely wouldn’t feel so nice. The news alone is cause for an excavation through the loose rocks until your entire face is free to catch the sunlight. Folding like paper mache from a baby-powder blue lake is an elaborate frame of snow-capped peaks. Proud trees with jutted chins rise from the rocky shoreline, but you can’t help but notice a couple others lay, lifeless on the ground. The intensity of the silence, the dead, still air—you know that either a storm is rolling in or a storm has just passed. Neither sounds great for you, but it’s all you can do to hope for the latter. But second by second, your confidence is subconsciously pasting itself back together into some excuse for a fortification. You don’t know exactly what there is to protect, though, and that alone is unnerving enough to make you more awake and alert to the silence all around. There should be pikas squealing, bighorns ramming their heads into one another, the unsteady wavering of a hawk suspended in the clouds. Blood. The word is piercing, and even it’s one single syllable peels a strangled shout from your lips. As if in protest for breaking the silence, a warning thunderclap ripples across the chiseled blue sky. There are no clouds, but there is a thunderclap. There are no wounds, but there is blood on the rocks. It’s not your blood, you know that. But it’s something else’s, something else that is nearby. You bend yourself painfully over to the side, feeling like elastic when flexed and yanked to breaking, and you gratefully dunk your head into the freezing water. A feeling that you think is pain rockets through your pores, but it’s a good pain. It’s the ¼ kind of pain, because only ¾ of it actually hurts and that small fraction is all that really matters. Now you can open your eyes and scan the sooty bottom of the lake. It is a lifeless lake. There’s nothing darting around in it’s depths, although you can’t remember right now what exactly would be. Nothing can live in water. No living creature can find air underwater, right? No air. The head will become heavy, and the world will swirl all around, and eyes will droop closed and the world will fall away.

By the time your eyes startle open and you’ve gasped into the fetal position, you feel as if the entire lake has been tainted red. Not blood red, no. Just red. You tentatively bend your neck, pleased to find that it doesn’t scream in protest, to find no blood painting the rocks. Maybe, possibly, in your drunken state, you imagined it all. There’s no blood, there’s no thunder, there is life all around. Then the lake shifts. Water is resistantly torn away from water, like the seams of a dress unweaving themselves. A long, narrow kayak is drifting with ease towards you. You smile. Of course! Somebody has come to save you. All this time, lying stretched out like a bear rug on the rocks—it’s a one to none chance that you went unnoticed. You can’t help but call out, even as the kayak drifts close. The woman steering sits secure inside, bundled in a ploom of a life jacket, smiling with perfectly square teeth, chapped lips. She nods towards you, she nods at her boat. And your own smile drops into nothing. It’s a one seater, and she has no intention of inviting you to go for a ride.