Echofaction - Chapter 1

[Echofaction]

For years on end ideas roll through creative minds like ours in the hope that one day we can put our ideas to paper in a way that could make the world understand something new and amazing.  Sadly, I may never finish what I start because "I am an artist, therefore I suck", but maybe some prodding will help me get down as much as I can before my self loathing takes hold.  Thusly I present..  Chapter 1.

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The early morning light was a washout watercolor framed by a lingering mist that steamed up from the shallow ocean water.  Hues of grey that suggested a towering tree line of Hemlock with a twisted fringe of shedding Arbutus lined the peripheral vision of the man laying washed up uncomfortably on the rocky beach.  The large rolling waves of the Pacific ocean crashed into him as if still punishing him for his violent intrusion, washing up across his shoulders and splashing his face.  Over the last few minutes he had noticed that the waves were blocking his breathing more often than when he had first reluctantly dragged himself from the thrashing water.  The tide was inexorably on it’s way in to shore, and soon he would either have to move or cease breathing.  All things considered, he felt every breath stolen between surges of water to be a curious oversight by life.  He should have died when he had hit the water, and had been quite surprised when it had only left him with two broken ribs and a dislocated shoulder, the pain of which had been muted by the water which was of a temperature so extreme that his body could not decide whether it was freezing, burning, or being repeatedly skinned.  This was nothing, however, compared to the pain overwhelming his mind.

Mere minutes earlier, 30,000 feet above, the aircraft carrying himself and hundreds of others had broken apart over the coastal city of Vancouver.  He had watched his family and friends plummet away from him, towards the concrete maze of buildings and streets. For a moment he had considered How Galileo would have felt, having known the name and course for all of the many stars, if they had one vivid night simply expired.  Another wave sloshed across his mouth and nose, his breathing interrupted for enough time to jolt his train of thought back to what he should do about his current situation.  More specifically, which way to end his life would be the most efficient.  He could have easily fixed his broken bones and walked off of that beach, but everyone he knew was dead, and he had no idea how to survive in the world alone.  He closed his eyes and waited for slow asphyxiating death, having decided that inaction was better than attempting to do anything elaborate which might give him a chance to fail at death as well as he had in life.  It was ironic he thought, as a wave engulfed his entire face for the first time, that he would choose to die from the one thing that could have saved him.  As his oxygen ran low, a darkness settled upon him that was deeper than unrecalled sleep. 

Amanda awoke with a start, breathing heavily.  She looked around herself in a moment of confusion, before realizing she was already sitting upright in her tent.  Whatever she had been dreaming of must have been frightening, but nothing came back to her as she stared wide eyed beyond the thin nylon walls, trying to bring up some image from her sleep.  She was not prone to having nightmares, and the previous night was still clear in her mind despite having enjoyed enough alcohol to excuse any lapses in her memory.  Everything had been great, and there was no reason for her mind to be as stressed as she felt.  But the feeling was leaving her as her breathing slowed, and without anything to go on, Amanda shook off the dream as an inconvenient oddity.  The blankets moved as Rob rolled onto his side, unconsciously repositioning himself so that he would continue to be warm by capturing all of the covers.  His gentle snoring confirmed that he was still completely asleep.  She envied him, as she yawned mightily and pulled her long, dark hair back from her face, reestablishing a messy ponytail that would suffice until Rob was awake so that she could retrieve her toiletries. There was no chance of her falling back asleep anyways, or getting back any of the blankets from the strong sleeping man next to her, she mused to herself, so she might as well get up for the day.  Listening through the walls of her tent she heard no other signs of life from the other campers, but plenty from the beach below.  Seagulls cried to each other as they searched for clams in the early morning light, and waves slowly crashed themselves onto the shore.  It would be inconsiderate to wake everybody else who were certainly still sleeping off a long night of frivolity, so her options were slim.  Breakfast could wait, but maybe she could get some nice photos of the beautiful cove in the morning light.  She and Rob had both slept in their clothes to keep warm through the night, so she slipped on her old running shoes, found her camera and some chewing gum to tide her over until food and her toothbrush could be produced, and slipped out of the tent.

Kaz could not see the lights, for he had no sight, but they were there all the same.  His body was dead somewhere, he knew, but he had not expected that there would be anything beyond that finality.  Now he remained still, yet untethered in the world that he could no longer sense by any mortal sense.  He simply existed, as did the light.  He knew that the beach was still there, in some sense, but the small cove was now as large and as empty as eternity.  He did not worry, or enjoy the sensation, as these were mental calculations which he was no longer capable of performing.  The lights became brighter, reaching out to him, and as he felt it turn towards him, a similar light swelled up from his core.  The energy connected like water droplets, instantly flowing into a single source.  Suddenly Kaz was aware, truly aware, of everything.

The salty ocean air was already energizing Amanda as she walked quietly along the shoreline, idly watching for skipping stones, or unusual pieces of driftwood.  A distant thundering told of helicopters in the distance, a common sound not so far from the international airport that saw plenty of traffic.  She looked along the horizon to see if she could find the source of the sound and as usual found nothing.  So often the sound was heard long after the aircraft could be seen, unless it was one of the large passenger jets making it’s slow turning climb into the air over Richmond.  Often, when she was a little girl, Amanda had pointed to those enormous low flying planes and yelled at her mother that they were falling out of the sky.  It had seemed so impossible that something that size, soaring at such an awkward angle, could stay in the air at all.  She began chuckling to herself as she turned her attention to the waves rolling across the sand.  Down the beach, something was being slowly washed up onto the shore, most likely another large piece of driftwood or seaweed.  Waves crashed into the obstruction, throwing water up into the air, and driving the lump against the shore.  Rocks crunched happily under her old shoes as she wandered towards it, still checking under her feet for any bits of interest.  As she came closer, she thought she saw a flash of what looked to be clothing.  It wouldn’t be the first discarded article she had found washed up on a beach, but the shape of that bump on the beach began to register in her mind as...   It couldn’t be a person, she chided herself as she began to walk quicker, despite her reasoning.  Another wave crashed, pulling back to reveal a black hooded sweater and a mop of red hair.  Amanda began to run.

Walk into a forest full of ancient trees, full of birds that have nested in the branches for generations, and lit by a glowing sun, and you might be lucky enough to feel a vibration of energy that tingles at your skin and makes your heart beat just a little bit faster.  Life exudes an energy that radiates like ripples in a pond, reacting to other energies, creating a symphony of mashed up thought and emotion.  Somewhere numb beyond Kaz’s body, the whole of his expired existence could be compared to a single note by a lone violin compared to the cacophonous symphony of energetic harmonics.  Life itself seemed a single vessel, with the branches of a single great tree being every living thing.    But then it seemed more like a slowly gushing fountain, constantly moving upwards, and falling back to the core of the earth to replenish the flow.  His essence lingered near the root of the upward flow.  There was no consciousness here as in sight or sound, just the pulling, crawling, caressing feel of life, like a raging fire consuming his being as surely as a forest aflame in the dark of night: slow, beautiful, and deadly.

Amanda ran a tally in her mind as she desperately heaved the incredibly heavy body from the rising surf.  Dead weight was one thing, she complained internally, but dead weight covered in heavy wet clothes, stuck on a beach covered with rocks small and worn enough to be the traction equivalent of oversized playground pea gravel, was proving to be impossible.  As if to prove her logic, she promptly fell backwards sharply, slipping and sinking in the loose stones. 
“Far enough.” she muttered angrily, scrabbling on her hands and knees to assess the pale, red headed figure.  Her mind drew a painfully long blank for half of a second before she screamed up the beach, not sure that anybody would be close enough to hear her call for help.  Panic pumped quicksilver adrenaline through her, making her fingers hard to control as she fumbled with a pasty cold wrist, looking for a pulse.  Was there really no pulse or had she forgotten all of her first aid training?  The neck, she thought, that’ll be easier of course.  Two fingers, below the jaw...  her own pulse swooshed in her ears loudly, and she began to wonder if he had had a pulse, would her fingers even feel it past the rush of her own racing blood.  What did it matter though, she chided herself angrily, he wasn’t even breathing.  Amanda had never performed CPR, and for a brief moment she wondered if he had been dead for hours and this would be a the type of experience where she would be receiving plenty of therapy afterwards.  But he didn’t look dead.  Her body remembered what her brain didn’t have time for, leaning forward and bringing her mouth towards his blueish lips.


Pain.
It came upon him like a needle in the back of the eye, one that was full of light.  As the infinite tree of life gushed from the cradle of the earth, he suddenly felt less a part of the essence and more an observer.
Pain. 
He could feel a heaviness settle over him that was awkward and demanding of his attention.  An awareness of his old body pulled him out of his mindless contemplation.  He turned away from the eternal flow of energy to examine what had him tethered in Limbo.
Pain.
And the most radiant beacon of life crouched over his body.  Despite being apart from himself, he could feel the force of her hands pushing into his chest.  She leaned towards his face, bringing her lips to his.
Pain...
...as his waterlogged lungs expanded with breath.  They convulsed, forcing the salty fluid up his throat so that he could choke on it again when he reached for air. Broken ribs and bruised muscles protested with fierce stabbing pain as he heaved ungraciously, thankfully realizing that he had been rolled from his back onto his dislocated left arm, pinning it with his condensed, wet weight.  It would figure, his body seemed to say, as it combined every complaint into a single wail of torment that could be temporarily muted by the urge to breathe.  In the primal fear for self preservation, all other trauma forgotten, he felt a hand grab his, gripping him tightly like an anchor as he pulled with his lungs for his life, wheezing and coughing.  His chest ached as oxygen began to make its way through his syrup thick blood.  He became aware of more voices on the beach, calling urgently to each other as they moved closer.  People were coming.  Despair hit him like a bullet. 

[Lady Serpent]

"I am an artist, therefore I suck"

Moreso -- "therefore I find my mind in a million directions at once, so that I have to really work at sticking with something until it's finished."    I would say that you're far from the level of suck; you seem to be at least cognisent enough to speak your thoughts clearly and to socialize with the likes of us, so you've not got a bad start at all.

Mild grammatical critiques: 

The tide was inexorably on it’s way in to shore,

-- Needs the apostrophe out of 'it's'.  (It's one of my pet peeves, too, actually; I think it was poorly thought-out that a posessive rule (John's, Mike's, the dog's) and a separate contractive rule (hasn't, don't) should come together in a word like 'its' and find itself inexorably confused.  Can't 'it' have things belong to it, too?  Although, I suppose they.. no, sorry, I ramble on when I should be carrying on with your story.  We'll discuss the foolish nuances of the english later at some later time.)

He should have died when he had hit the water,

  I would remove 'had'.  There's a lot of small words at once that can confuse the reading senses and jumble an otherwise smoothy-flowing sentence.

How Galileo would have felt

  Accidental capitalization of 'How'.

More specifically, which way to end his life would be the most efficient.

  It feels like this sentence is missing the subject.  I would throw in something like 'he thought about' after the first comma, personally.  It also slows the idea down, and I think this is a sentence that should be presented with some impact as the idea behind it is quite strong.

It was ironic he thought, as a wave engulfed his entire face for the first time, that he would choose to die from the one thing that could have saved him.

  I would throw a comma in after 'ironic' to further split the sentence.  Great thought!  Makes us want to read more.

The whole paragraph that starts with 'Amanda' is well-written and a very nice transition!  The sharp contrast with the last paragraph really starts to make this story interesting.

Be careful to watch that extra apostrophe in the posessive 'its' in future paragraphs.

Fantastic writing!  The whole end section begs to be read further; I hope you continue with this so we can keep moving on the story.

The one thing I would suggest is to modify the end somehow.  The way it ends, with despair hitting him like a bullet, doesn't feel like 'enough' to bring the reader out of the thought.  It feels somewhat like it should continue on.  Something like 'Despair hit him like a bullet.  He was not meant to be here.'  Or even, without saying the part about dispair at all, something that finalizes the paragraph without begging immediately for more.  You want them to beg for more chapters, which the writing itself does quite well, but you don't want to leave the chapter on something that feels a bit like an unfinished paragraph.  The way it came across to me, as a reader, was that the final sentence didn't really finish off the thought by giving it a bit of explanation, it mostly just created a new thought that seemed like it should go on a bit more before really concluding that chapter.

You, of course, have much more potential to find the 'right; words to make it work well than I could come up with, because it's your thought and your story, and you're likely very much in the mindset of knowing where you want the feeling to go.

Lovely writing all around; I look forward to hearing more.  Feel free to let me know if you'd like the critique toned down a little; I tend to correct minor mistakes as I go, as well as offer suggestions to writing bits that that I feel are good ideas overall, but that could potentially be improved upon by finding the right changes from your own thoughts.  I do know, though, that sometimes such feedback might seem to be too much on occasion, so know that I have no trouble backing off a little if you feel that the suggestions aren't personally helping YOU in your headspace.  We've got to feel good about where we're going with our own work, after all.

All the best, and I hope you continue writing this!  It's very intriguing and I'd personally love to see where you go with it.

-Sephren