Wildwood Catharsis

The air burned in his lungs, unquenched by the perspiration that darkened his shirt and made his face glisten. Once more he was small, and he could hear his mother's peals of laughter in the dining room. It was Friday, and she was drunk again, hosting yet another one of her dinner parties. The kitchen counter loomed over him, and he reached for his prize, the bag of potato chips resting on top. Wobbling on his tiptoes, Jason tripped over himself, stumbling forward. His outstretched hand closed around the handle of the sizzling frying pan that his mother had carelessly left on the stove. How long had it taken them to find him on the floor, clutching his palm, crying in pain?

The forest snapped back into focus, and Jason clenched his right fist fiercely. It was clear to him now that there was no longer any trail at all, but he still careened forward at full throttle. The spruce forest had given way to a denser array of pines and hardwoods, and the canopy above had become so tightly interwoven that he ran in near-darkness, nettles and thorns lacerating his arms and legs as he tore through the underbrush. Then the trees thinned slightly and he was slipping down the muddy brown banks of a rushing stream. He was halfway across it, the swift water up to his waist, when his soaked-through running shoes lost their purchase on the slimy rocks of the streambed, and he fell backwards, arms and legs akimbo as the water surged over him. The greedy current swept him downstream, and he closed his eyes, finding no mooring in the mad, turbulent underwater world of bubbles and stones. The reverberation in his ears was at once a hush and an unrestrained roar, and he lost all direction, inhaling liquid and rolling over and over again. Then, for a moment, Jason was young once again, and then younger still, and when he finally dragged himself, sputtering and choking, to the crumbling bank, he was unsure whether he'd yet been born at all.

It was a lengthy but uncounted number of hours before Jason struggled back on to his tender, bare feet and started on the long walk home. As he walked, he couldn't help but mouth the words:

Just solid earth beneath my feet
Restless air within my lungs
Water pouring off my skin
And a patient fire that burns within.
A patient fire that burns within.