Free Jack Be Nimble: Gargoyle by Ben English

stood shivering before him, bouncing on the deck, their arms firmly clapped around their tanned middles.
    Mercedes kicked the water with greater ferocity, groaning softly as she forced herself to work. Lines of white fire now drew themselves across her legs, winding from her buttocks down around to her inner calves. Thirty seconds more. She managed to lift herself out of the water nearly midway up the slopes of her breasts before she gave out, her arms collapsing into the water and immediately working to support her. A rivulet of perspiration ran into her eye, and she leaned back, dipping her face backwards into the cool, cool water before lifting her legs up as well. Gradually, Mercedes arched into a back float.
    She began to breathe deeply, letting her body know to begin its cooldown. Years of this type of exercise had thoroughly programmed her metabolism, had managed to educate the mysterious workings of a body that had so often and so thoroughly turned traitor to her. When it came to exercise, at least, her body now seemed to know precisely when to flex itself into something taut and hard and when to relax.
    Mercedes felt like she was weightless, floating almost without effort, and she could imagine the pool bottom more than twenty feet behind her and below, herself buoyed above.
    This was the best part, she thought. She wondered if her doctor had known he would turn her into an endorphin junkie by prescribing such a rigorous exercise schedule. A gentle warmth was spreading through her entire body. It filled up the hollow, aching chambers in her legs and lower abdomen. Overflowed the bounds of her body. Wrapped her in a tender heat.
    And there, floating, almost levitating blissfully on a wave of buoyant emotion, Mercedes found her thoughts once more spiraling in reverse, down through the history of Forge; not that dry commentary friendly to any museum chronicle, but the story of her own first coming to Forge. That miserable, torturous, deliriously happy summer when she was seventeen.
     

Forge

    When she was seventeen

    Mercedes leaned back into the leather upholstery and closed her eyes, trying to listen to her grandfather whistle through his teeth in syncopation with the jazz piano gliding from his CD player. She could feel him glance her way occasionally as he drove the white LeBaron through blades of sunlight and shadow cast by the pine trees lining the sides of the road. The top was down, and the tires themselves were singing on the blacktop, a monotone background note to the music from her grandfather’s CD player. 
    She could smell Grampa Max’s cologne. Her whole life, the scent of Brut aftershave had been one of the fine constants she marked time by. To her it was the essence of her grampa, of summer afternoons hiking with him in the hills, of her first memory of being pushed gently on a toddler swing and then turning to recognize the raw, handsome Swedish masculinity of her grandfather. To her, he’d never changed. She recalled the sheer delight she’d felt as a young, young girl when she realized for the first time that her eyes were exactly the same shade of green as those of Grampa Max.
    Eyes closed now, she imagined her surroundings: the wide, green Clearwater River slipping by on the left, headed in the opposite direction. Beyond it, the steepening, boulder-studded cliffs that reached up to the sky. On her right, greener hills with miniature valleys of their own; wooded and rolling hills that eventually led (she’d seen from the airplane) to a bright yellow prairie, and then more mountains. It would be nice to capture the view somehow.
    So far, Idaho wasn’t that different from the hills and parks north of Oakland, where her grandfather had taught her how to fish when she had been a little girl and before he and Grandma Brit retired.
    He was looking at her again, stealing glances away from the unwinding black ribbon of highway. “Merce, you’re being awfully quiet on me. Hardly said a word since