ARRIVAL
Title:“El Dorado: Frozen Dreams”
Author:Dhruv Makhija
As the first snowflake settled, it whispered secrets of a winter tale waiting to unfold. No coverage, not even one bar; the battery was dead anyway. It was still daytime, but there was an overcast and the sky had a perfectly even dullness, so there was no way to tell what time of day it was, much less which direction was north or south or anything else for that matter. A two-lane blacktop road snaked up into the distance and disappeared into some trees, or a forest if you wanted to get technical about it. It also snaked down toward some snow-clad hills and disappeared there as well. What sounded like a two-stroke chainsaw could be heard in the distance, but it was impossible to tell whether it was up in the forest or down in the lumpy hills. This had been happening more often lately. Two different ways to go, with a dead battery and no bars, and nobody left to blame.
With the fortitude of resilience I had borne out the pain of the vile agony of my distempering nightmares, I woke up from another one. “How long has it been?” I asked him. Perseus had been a constant in my journey since I got struck with this rather arcane illness. The permanent pain in my arms was always overwhelming. His was a face you had never seen before, and yet, when it came to your life, you could trust him blindly. The scars on his face, the veins on his wrinkled hands all spoke of experience, and camaraderie.
“A quadrant. It has been the fifth in a row.” His hoarse voice relaxed my ear drums as I looked into my convulsing arms, my vision blurred by the vastitude of suppressants I had taken to prevent the nightmare from happening again. It was but in vain, all in vain.
I couldn’t quite draw a definitive conclusion from the conflicting expressions on his face, whether he was repenting for dragging me into this hellhole or whether he was bemused by my unending suffering. my mind, however, was more concerned in navigating the clouds that were surrounding this…thing..for I was becoming convinced that my dreams were closer to reality than normal dreams are supposed to be. Cold was freezing my body and I had the thought of giving up and letting it take me.
