“Just like a cartoon,” thought Per as he fell backwards off the cliff. Jungle, sky, and river kaleidoscoped around his astonished irises, and then . . . nothing.
The sensation of blood drying on his skin woke him. Stumbling to the nearby steam, he felt a gash above his left eyebrow as he washed the wound. Tying his shirt around the gash didn’t seem to help much, so he put it back on, bloodstains and all.
At the top of the cliff was the path back home. At least, that’s what he had hoped when he’d started climbing the 14-foot high rise in the Bolivian jungle. He’d climbed about 10 feet up before the sandstone crumbled out from underneath him, condemning him for his youthful . . . he balked as the word “stupidity” almost slipped into his thoughts. His youthful adventurousness.
And adventurousness is what had led him off the path in the first place. But now, dense jungle cut off his hope of finding the path he’d left. The easiest thing to do was to follow the stream, though he was by no means certain that it would lead him back to the village.
He must have gone in and out of consciousness as he walked. At times he seemed to be dreaming, for he thought he saw a dark-haired girl in white walking in front of him sometimes. She looked familiar, but she didn’t look like a native Chiquitano. Maybe she was a student at the Catholic school. Their uniforms were white . . . but something didn’t seem quite right to him about that.
“Anyway, she’s really pretty,” he thought. “And that probably means she’s not a native. Those village girls are uglier than sin!”
A few weeks ago, Per had graduated from high school in Clovis, California. He’d left a pretty, blonde girlfriend behind, and boy did he miss her! Not only were the girls here ugly, he couldn’t even talk to them. Or to anyone else, for that matter. He didn’t speak much Spanish, and the Mennonite Central Committee, who had sent him to the remote village of Santiago de Chiquitos as a missionary, hadn’t required him to learn it either. Since his assignment was to teach English to the school children, it hadn’t seemed that urgent.
But as his isolation grew more profound, he realized he’d made a mistake. And now that mistake had led to this: Hiking without a friend, getting hurt, and wandering half-dazed through the jungle in one of the most remote places on earth.
The girl in the white dress disappeared suddenly behind a tree, and Per came out of his daze. Where was he? He passed the tree where the girl had disappeared, but he still didn’t see her. A short way ahead, however, was the path back to the village.
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Half a world away, Gabriella’s head bobbed, and she started guiltily. The piano recital wasn’t even half over and she was already falling asleep!
“Whose idea was it to get a bunch of people together in a dark room, sitting on soft chairs, and listening to nocturnes for hours at a time?” she thought. Gabi loved to play the piano, but sitting still and listening while someone else played was another matter. Even when the someone else was her devastatingly talented boyfriend, Rich. She loved to watch his hands on the keyboard, so ordinary looking, with chewed off nails and various scars. But when they played a nocturne, they became elegant dancers, each finger curved like the neck of a swan, sweeping and dipping over a black and white river.
Her neck bobbed again and the dream images faded. The swans had become white-clothed children with black faces, and the music was from the church bells above them. A stranger had just interrupted the children’s play, his clothes marked with red, making Gabriella start and causing the head bob that had woken her.
“What strange harmonies inspired those images?” she wondered. She tried to remember how the stranger’s clothes had looked, so chaotically colorful next to the crisp cleanness of the school uniforms. She held onto the memory, wishing she could make the red stains resolve into some sort of pattern, so that the seeming disorder of the unkempt stranger would be embedded with a secret organization.
And then Rich was standing, the recital hall filled with applause. Gabriella waited until people began to move away from their chairs and then she snuck a kiss on Rich’s cheek.
“Delicious,” she murmured in his ear.
“What, my ear wax?” he joked, and she butted his shoulder lightly with her head. It was only recently that he had started making jokes when she was trying to be affectionate, and she was unsure how to respond. It had started when she’d returned from a dance tour to Spain. She and Rich had only been dating a few months when she had gone, and when she came back, gushing about the Romanian dancers, Rich had gotten jealous.
Romanian dancing was her favorite, she’d tried to explain to him. So naturally she was drawn to the dancers. And the military dances were the most impressive, and traditionally only performed by men. How else could she learn the dance but to have one of them show it to her? And his accent was so interesting! She wished Rich could have heard it.
But the more she had talked, the more jealous Rich had gotten. And the more she wished that she had been romantically interested in the Romanian. Rich’s jealousy was a major turn-off to her. She didn’t want a conflict between her boyfriend and her dancing. And if Rich had such low esteem as to make him that jealous of someone she wasn’t even really interested in, then she would probably be better off without him.
But she really wanted this relationship to work. Gabriella was a Mormon, and Rich wasn’t. A big motivation for sticking with it was so that she could prove to everyone that it could work. She also did genuinely like Rich, and they had so many things in common. It just seemed a shame to let religion get in the way.
So they had been dating for a little over a year. Both of them were holding on, trying to ignore the differences they saw more clearly in each other.
“You have to be a little blind when you’re in a relationship,” Gabriella had rationalized. But she knew it was just a matter of time before it ended. She just needed a way out that would cause the least amount of pain possible for both of them.
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