All Faculty Excerpts
Blood Mountain
This is an excerpt from James Preller's middle-grade novel, Blood Mountain.
Carter keeps fighting, keeps moving forward.
Bog all around him.
He longs for firm footing, a dry fire.
Twilight drops down like a quivering leaf. The bugs gather in swarms. For the first half hour, Carter slaps at them, waves his hands, rubs his arms and legs, scratches furiously, even howls out loud; mosquitoes, gorged with his blood, explode when slapped on his forearms and legs. Reinforcements come to take their place. In desperation, Carter smears black ooze all over his skin and face, gets it in his mouth and ears. Eventually, he surrenders. His tender face reduced to a swollen welt, blistered and raw. Black flies take turns tormenting him. They dive and bite and veer away. His eyelids swell, his left eye nearly shut.
He weaves, falls, despairs, rises again.
He cannot stop here.
He cannot die.
Carter Taylor is eleven years old and he feels his life wavering on some great precipice.
Grace, his feverish mind recalls.
In the relative openness of the bog, he easily sees the stars in the velvet sky. When did it become night? When in the world have there ever been so many pinpricks of light?
He feels cold to the core.
Shivering, wet, bone-tired.
He keeps walking, staggering, reeling through the reeds, bumping into dead, bare, nutrient-starved trees.
His boots fill with water. He finds himself leaning against a dead tree. He pauses to rest for a moment, a minute, an hour. He doesn’t remember. His mind blank, a void. Fear slaps him awake. Instinct yanks at his collar, shakes him. If he stays in this grievous bog, he won’t live to see the morning. It is the one clear thought in his muddled mind. Can’t stay here.
The temperature drops.
He blunders into the black.
He steps and his foot does not sink.
Another step. The ground holds.
Another, and another.
Carter hangs his head, drops to his knees, begins to crawl, feels the firm earth under his hands.
He’s made it through.
So tired, so tired.
Carter stumbles another 75 yards, losing his hat in the process. He collapses, curls into a ball beneath a weeping willow that has taken root in the rot. He does not wonder at the way the graceful giant’s branches sweep downward, or how its long, slender leaves resemble tears of tree-sorrow and tree-remorse. How did it come to grow so sad? He does not wonder at all. Just knows in his bones. The cold presses against him. He shivers in anguish. His body begins to shake convulsively. He rolls and looks to the sky.
I am not lost, he thinks. The world is lost.
I am right here. I am right here. And there is the moon, right where it is supposed to be.
***
Reprinted with permission from Square Fish. You can learn more about James and his work here.
