Free Beyond the Horizon by Ryan Ireland Page B

he felt the eyes on him.
    His father had watched him defecate on the island. The boy kicked sand over the feces as a sanitary measure.
    â€˜Whats that?’ his father asked. He pointed to the clumps of turd now dusted over with sand.
    â€˜Took a shit,’ the boy said. ‘Do every morning… Thought you werent up.’
    His father kept staring at the spot in the sand. His lips curled up in disgust. ‘What bout the blood?’ he asked.
    The boy shook his head, picked at his fingernails.
    â€˜What about the blood in your shit?’ his father asked again.
    â€˜Been like that since the first mate shoved his piece up there,’ the boy said. He stammered and felt hot when he admitted it. But he did not cry.
    His father’s throat lurched like he might vomit. If he did vomit, he swallowed it back down.
    â€˜It’s better than it was,’ the boy offered.
    His father refocused his gaze on the boy. ‘Whats that?’
    â€˜Aint as much blood—gets less every day.’
    His father grabbed the boy by the shoulder and forced him to the ground, pulled him by the hair to the pile of sand and feces. The father used his own hand to scoop the turds out of the sand and hold them up to the boy’s face. ‘This aint natural,’ he said. ‘You dont bleed when you shit!’ He wiped the feces on the boy’s face and it left streaks of brown and red, flecks of earth. ‘It’s not human!’
    The boy rolled over once his father loosed his grip. He cried now, writhing in the sand. His father staggered away then emptied the contents of his stomach by a palm tree. From the tree line the native chief and the half naked woman watched as silent witnesses.
    The stranger turned along the creekside trail, the path eventually parting ways from the water and lifting around the skirt of the mountain. As he walked the trail flattened, growing wider. He smelled the smoke of sulfur, manganese, bauxite. Again the trail inclined, becoming steeper. Pine tree roots irrigated and dammed the soil, creating a natural staircase up the slope. Where the pine boughs parted and looked out across the valley, the stranger stopped. A slight haze of grey hung like gauze in the air beyond the next mountain.
    The stranger focused his sights in closer on the foreground, at the adjacent mountain slope. A tailing of loosely packed till spilled out from the mountainside as an unnatural ruination of the landscape. He strained his eyes looking through the yonder pines, trying to see what he knew lay in the depths.
    In the future, steel pylons would support a span of concrete and asphalt over this gulf of space. In the valley below cigarette butts and foil wrappers would blow around like confetti. The adjacent mountain, not yet tapped for minerals, would be discovered to house a fortune in copper. Men would die by the dozens extracting the stuff of electrical transmissions and striking effigies of Honest Abe. Within a hundred and twenty years nothing would be left of the mountain. In fact a void, a pit, would be left in its place. The pit would eventually be filled with garbage added in layers and bulldozed over with dirt until a mound like those of the Miami Indian burial grounds took its place.
    It was the evolution of the world—mountains and pits and garbage. The stranger thought how odd it was that someday after the great fallout, the next generation of species would unearth the landfill thinking it to be a place of significance. They would dig through each layer finding the things not yet decomposed to be worth something—something at least of numismatic value, if not historical significance. History is only made by burrowing into the earth, by digging out what will become the annal crypts of our past. Just as the early archeologists extrapolated the skeletons of entire dinosaurs from a single tooth, the stranger saw that these future dwellers would use these clues to reconstruct the myth of a