Free We Are Not Eaten by Yaks by C. Alexander London

spinning. They had to hold on tightly to the raft and to their father, and their arms were tiring. Oliver couldn’t handle it anymore. He lifted himself off the parachute, letting it fly out from under him. It snapped and twisted in the air. Two or three of the plastic bags broke away and twirled off into the sky. Oliver feared the whole chute would tear to pieces. The knots connecting it to the raft strained, but held. The canvas ponchos stayed tied and the chute filled with air.
    â€œWell, those were worth more than twenty-three ninety-five,” Oliver said.
    Celia’s stomach churned as their fall slowed. They felt themselves jerked upward and then, suddenly, they were drifting. The parachute was working. They weren’t falling anymore, at least not deathly fast. They were floating slowly toward the clouds below them.
    â€œI can’t believe that worked!” Celia shouted.
    â€œMe neither,” yelled Oliver. They both still held tightly to the raft, though they could now let go of their father, who was still out cold.
    As they drifted through the sky, the view was amazing. Mountain peaks jutted like teeth through the clouds. Mount Everest rose in the distance, towering above the others. Wind whipped snow off the mountaintops.
    When they dropped through the clouds, they saw birds swimming gracefully through the air over rocky plains where herds of yak grazed on grassy patches. Sunlight shimmered off the golden roofs of Buddhist shrines scattered like crumbs over the scenery. A canyon snaked through the mountains, like the earth’s deep veins. Neither of the twins would admit it, but it was a beautiful sight.
    â€œThis is just like the second season of Million Dollar Mountain Challenge ,ʺ Celia said.
    â€œThey had to eat bugs,” Oliver added.
    Celia groaned. “We better not have to eat bugs.”
    â€œLike the Thanksgiving before Mom left.” Oliver remembered that night. They had a turkey, like a normal family, but his mother made her favorite recipe from Thailand: roasted centipede and cornbread stuffing with a spicy peanut curry sauce. His stomach, already weary from the airplane food and the fall out of the airplane, felt like it did a backflip. He thought he might yak himself.
    That Thanksgiving had been a lot of fun. They had played a geography quiz game, naming all the most extreme points on earth (Mount Everest, in front of them, was the highest mountain, and the Tsangpo Gorge, right below them, was the steepest canyon). After the game, they curled up on the couch and watched a movie. They had to watch it on an old film projector. Their mother loved those old projectors. She loved the sounds they made and the antiqueness of it all. She loved how real they were. She refused to have their home movies transferred to DVD. She even refused to own a DVD player.
    She always said that one day the film reels and the old projectors would be civilization’s artifacts for future explorers to discover. They would think it was a kind of ancient magic, how people put little images on film and moved them in front of a light to make them tell stories.
    â€œThey are like our shamans,” she would say. “They are our mystic storytellers, conjuring visions and images from light and air. How is a projector anything other than magic?” Their mother made watching a movie seem like an important thing to do.
    Oliver couldn’t remember what the movie was that they watched that night, but his mother laughed the whole way through it, while she snuggled with his father, and they popped fried beetles into each other’s mouths (instead of popcorn). Professor Rasmali-Greenberg had come by with some old nautical charts to review, forgetting that it was an American holiday. He ended up watching the movie with the family, and laughing at jokes none of the Navels thought were funny. It was a great night. Too bad his mother had to ruin it all by running off on her adventure just