START
I
Over the range and halfway down the mountain was a timber house called Brown River. It was a big place. Eight thousand square feet of timber lined brick and stone built by the Mitchell family in the seventies. This was where they used to ski, from this very stark and empty mansion carved into a mountain. They didn’t keep it long. They got older and after the ’74 fires, they donated it to the forestry service. Forestry posted a marshal there every year, a sort after position, but in the winter they leased Brown River out to corporate groups and dynasty families and to the writers’ retreat currently in-progress.
Today’s exercise was to describe a memory.
The writing instructor paced the carpet rug by the whiteboard. ‘I want you to travel back, and not just record what you see, but also use all of your senses. What can you hear and smell and taste in the memory? What else is back there? How did you feel about that whole month, that whole year?’ The instructor wore short light blue shorts, despite the winter cold, and drank coffee from a steel decanter.
Ethan could tell he didn’t like running these things.
‘I want rich description godamnit,’ said the instructor. ‘Don’t bring me back a story. Bring me back a moment, a tiny slice of your life. Make it anatomical.’
Afterwards, Margaret walked back through the hallways with Ethan.
‘This’ll be interesting,’ she said.
‘You think? I’m not too big on the past.’
‘But we must have an anatomical slice, Ethan. Those fucking shorts of his are anatomical. That’s a slice of my memory now. That’s my anatomical slice, Ethan.’
II
Ethan stood at the window with his face pushed into the palm of his hand. All the rooms faced out onto the same snow field, this white blanket of nothing, described in the brochure as inspiring and calming.
It was like staring at a wall.
Where was the river?
In the same place as everything else, probably: under that blanket.
Ethan envied the river. The top of the river may have been covered and frozen shut, but a part of it still trickled away, silently escaping. Each day a few teaspoons made their way to the valley floor and to the stream.
From the stream to the river.
From the river to another, to the city pipe or estuary, and eventually out to the ocean.
He used to love the ocean.
Every summer his family went to the same cottages by the beach. He knew what they cost now, but at the time they felt rough and primitive, the peeling linoleum under foot. That’s where he met Jamie. Every day Jamie took him down to swim. She was a foot taller, leaner, red hair that smelled like lavender. They were two years apart, from different schools. He remembered one soft morning, under the surface. It was a game. They dove to the sea floor and listened to the breakers overhead; such a muted version of something so close. She came in one day. Her hair floating around them. He was ten years old, and the moment was so quick and so confusing that the kiss disappeared almost as it happened.
END
— IAIN
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