Body Surfing

know if you can come to my I want to get fucked up nasty and I was only a month pregnant so I He was in the flower of youth If you see Brittany wish her Hey at least this one looks It’s all about the hair I transformed my It’s the truth
    He had to go home.
     
    The words pressed down on Jasper, choking him.
    Give it up man, the fish keep eating your worms right off the hook. I told you, you gotta thread it through the body . Through the body. THROUGH—
    Summoning all his strength, Jasper blew the strange words away. Blew them out like candles, plunging him into a silence that was also a darkness. He felt as though he’d been poured into some peculiarly shaped vessel, all nooks and crannies, bulbous projections and strange indentations, that his liquid form couldn’t resist fitting itself to. But at least the voices were gone, save for one faint echo.
    “Eye seh , wuh tie you wahna go hoe?”
    Jasper blinked. No, that wasn’t quite it. He made himself blink. He felt the muscles in each of his eyelids squeeze shut. They stayed that way until, with a second effort, he opened them. It took an even greater concentration to focus, but when he did the dark world snapped into view as if he’d donned some kind of night-vision goggles/binoculars/microscope. Each tree leaf seemed sharp-edged among its thousands of neighbors. The whitecaps of rolling blackwater crested in discrete drops, each and every drop briefly, perfectly distinct before his eyes. He could see fish swimming a few feet below the surface of the river, bats wheeling through the blue-black sky and snapping at insects on the wing—mosquitoes and mayflies mostly, aphids, weevils, moths. But the more clear it became, the less sense any of it made.
    “Yarheh? Yarheh? Err to Yarheh!”
    That one voice. It wouldn’t go away. But Jasper couldn’t quite make out what it said. It was like plugs had been stuffed into his ears. He concentrated. Felt his ears move, pivot, like a dog’s. Seemed almost to feel the minuscule bones reorient themselves within his inner ear. What were they called? Hammer, anvil, stirrup? Actually, the problem was in the cochlea, but the names didn’t matter. What mattered was fixing their relationship to each other, aligning them properly so that—
    A claxon sliced through his thoughts: “Earth to Jarhead! I said, what time do you want to go home !?”
    Jasper turned his head. It felt thick, heavy, as if coated in wet plaster or Play-Doh. He took in the grass, the darkness of the river beyond. The white face somewhere between the two. Danny. Danny?
    “Jesus Christ, Jarhead. I know you ain’t that drunk. I’ve seen you knock back twice as many in half the time.”
    How in the hell had Danny gotten here? And why was she calling him Jarhead? And…and what the fuck was he doing here? What had happened to the car? To Q. and Michaela and Sila? To the fucking mountain they’d slammed into at a hundred miles an hour?
    He remembered the impact. The unique sound of metal tearing like tissue when you blow into it too hard. And then silence. A breathtaking silence, as if he’d been thrown from the car all the way to the bottom of the Hudson. And then those voices. Those…thoughts. Other people’s thoughts, in his head. And then—
    A chuckle pulled him back to the real world.
    “Confused?”
    Jasper looked up. Again he felt the weird sensation of having to concentrate, as if his mind had disconnected from his body, had tobe refastened to it one synapse at a time. Danny was standing up, brushing the dirt off her ass with a fastidiousness that had nothing to do with the girl who’d just asked what time Jasper wanted to go home, let alone the hot tomboy who’d wiped worm guts on her pants earlier in the day.
    “You beat me here,” this new Danny was saying. “I’m impressed. I guess you really did want to get home.”
    For a moment Jasper stared at Danny in confusion, then turned and saw the lights of the little house at the top of the hill, a shadow moving around inside it.
    His house.
    His dad’s shadow.
    Home .
    Jasper turned back to Danny, who was walking toward him with her hand outstretched. For someone who’d been drinking all day, her steps were steady and strong.
    “I knew you were the right one,” Danny was saying, almost to herself. “I could tell you weren’t done with this world yet. That you would run back here like a chicken looking for its mother’s wing. Death is a big, cold, dark place, no? Plenty of