Raft of Stars Andrew Graff (free biff chip and kipper ebooks txt) 📖

of the tree grow white and hot as they were breathed on by a wall of wind. Other trees on other islands bent in the same gust, the cattails flattened, and with the wind came a wall of rain that obscured the land and river like a curtain dragged across the earth. The curtain swallowed the burning tree. It swallowed the island. It swallowed the river between the island and the canoe, and like a horrible wet maw, it swallowed them as well.

“Hang on!” yelled Tiffany. Her voice was lost in the downpour.

The rain filled the air with the smell of mud and water. The bow of the canoe swung violently toward the left bank, nearly swamped as it spun and pitched back upstream. The canoe pushed broadside through the water. The rain stung, and the water around the canoe erupted with it. Tiffany pulled her hood tightly around her head. Around her knees in the bottom of the canoe, little white balls the size of dimes began to gather. She studied them a moment, confused. They stung her hands and pelted her jacket. They sounded like stones hitting the canoe. The wind wailed and the stones drummed. A hailstorm. One of the stones stung her squarely on her right hand, and she drew it in quickly toward her chest.

It was as if night had come in a moment. Peering out from beneath her hood, Tiffany could no longer see the river and islands upwind. Downwind, she could still make out fifty or sixty yards of water and a bit of sky beyond it. She made up her mind to try to work with the wind, to go with it and back to the trees. It wasn’t Miranda’s choice or her own anymore. The wind decided.

“Hang on!” she yelled again. Miranda sat on her knees, folded forward, her wrist cradled against her stomach. It was hard to discern, but Miranda’s back shuddered as if she was weeping. What surprised Tiffany most was the complete lack of pity she felt at that moment. She felt anger. Anger at the storm. Anger at Miranda. Anger at being out here at all on this rotten river.

Tiffany channeled it. She rose onto her knees, grasped her paddle, and pried hard on the left side of the canoe to point it straight downwind. She then pulled against the water with forward strokes, and the canoe sprang to life. The speed surprised her. The canoe skimmed upstream with the wind. Tiffany discovered it was her job to drag her paddle more often than to paddle forward. She didn’t need to propel the canoe. She only needed to attempt to steer it, like sledding as a kid, dragging this hand or that to keep straight. The wind pushed even harder. The water boiled with hailstones. A bright crack of lightning—the flash and the report were inseparable—filled the storm’s night. As it flashed, the cattails to Tiffany’s right and left were illuminated so brightly they looked made of paper, the color bleached from the world. Tiffany squinted beneath her hood. As fully as the lightning illuminated the river, the darkness overtook it, plunging the canoe into blackness and noise, leaving only the wind to give any sense of direction.

Tiffany clenched her teeth. She knew the tree line was there somewhere ahead of them, at the end of the marsh. Just keep it straight, blow with the wind, rudder it straight, rudder again. Eventually they’d blow out of the islands and hit a shoreline blanketed in cedar. Her only fear was being blown into one of the islands first and having to weather the entirety of this storm in a cattail marsh. She feared, too, being struck by lightning, but then reasoned that given the circumstances, it was up to the lightning to strike her dead if it wished to. She had no say in it. All but her paddle was out of her hands.

Lightning filled the air again, and Tiffany noticed how the channel narrowed, which meant they were making it out of the islands and back toward the woods. She pried angrily at the river. There were only a few hundred yards of open water, if she remembered correctly, and then they’d be back in the trees. The world snapped black again. Hail pounded. When the lightning came the next time, Tiffany saw no cattails at all. They were making progress. It wasn’t far now.

Tiffany nearly gave a yell of triumph, but the yell caught in her throat when two things happened simultaneously that she could hardly comprehend. First, she saw something approaching through the wall of rain. Second, Miranda was trying to stand in the boat.

The thing in the water looked square and low. It was too angular to be natural, and she’d seen no boulders before. The river here was just silt and shoreline. Lightning flashed and she saw it again, closer now, about fifteen yards away and blurred by hail. It appeared to be moving, not that Tiffany could gauge its progress, but she could clearly see what appeared to be a wake pushed in front of its bow. It looked like a whale, wide and square-lipped and rising to meet them. And before the approaching whale rose Miranda’s slim figure. Miranda stood to her full height, lifted her arms into the hail, and began rebuking the storm, rebuking everything.

“Miranda!” Tiffany cried, prying at the water.

There was no response, at least not to her, but then in the briefest pause of thunder, the words drifted back, terrifying in the blue and white flashes of light. The lonesome screams swirled like wind, lightning, hail. Miranda screamed again and again, her back curling with effort. She was a woman up against it, against forests and storms and rivers, and dead husbands and lost sons and a whole host of other demons and devils. Miranda damned all of it. She damned cattails, and hospital beds, and deserts, and flags. She damned herself. Maybe God too. Tiffany had