Confused Impression E-Book

Angel Rupert

• Herausgeber: Bentockiz
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

His heart raced and his hand shook. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, holding it in his lungs. He was glad for the silence and the close and familiar space of the truck, the broad prairie and the infinite sky locked outside. He slowly exhaled into that familiar stillness, felt his heart calm and his hand steady. He opened his eyes. He left the money sealed in its envelope and locked it in the glovebox.

Leseprobe

Title Page

Confused Impression

Unjustified Changes

Angel Rupert

Confused Impression / 5th of series: Unjustified Changes / By Angel Rupert

Published 2023 by Bentockiz

e-book Imprint: Uniochlors

e-book Registration: Stockholm, Sweden

e-book ISBN: 9789198847048

e-book editing: Athens, Greece

Cover Images created via AI art generators

Table of Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Introduction

Through books we come into contact with everything important that has happened in the past, analyzing also current events and putting our thoughts together to predict the future. The book is a window to the world, acquiring valuable knowledge and sparking our vivid imagination. It is a means of entertainment and is generally seen as a best friend, or as a slave that carries together all valuable information for us. The book is a friend who stays together without demands, a friend you call upon at every moment and abandon when you want.

It accompanies us in the hours of boredom and loneliness, while at the same time it entertains us. In general, a book does not ask anything from us, while it waits patiently on a dusty shelf to give us its information, to get us out of dead ends and to travel us to magical worlds.

This may be the travel mission of our books. Abstract narration, weird or unconscious thoughts difficult to be understood, but always genuine and full of life experiences, these are stories of life that can’t be overlooked easily.

This may be the start of something amazing.

Chapter One

Allison passed directly below him—not that far away: he could’ve shouted and she would’ve heard, she could’ve glanced up and she would’ve seen. But she passed without seeing him, on around a bend in the trail and out of sight. And all the rest passed below, none looking up and he silent. Then the last came, the one with the bundle and the hood. She paused directly below and looked up with a featureless face shadowed within the hood, held the bundle up to him, the crying baby.

Zach woke in a terrified sweat. He recalled Allison’s words the night before he left: “My period’s late.” And his annoyed response, “Your period’s always late.” He’d figured she was either trying to delay his departure or, more likely, bequeathing him with a parting worry to carry with him on his journey. Well, he’d have none of it. He’d sweated out previous delays in the onset of her period countless times, only to have that delayed and prayed for period arrive each time at the moment of its choosing or hers. Then, last fall, after his own hormones and life’s needs had planted in him a longing for a child—a longing that her period not arrive, be replaced by a pregnancy—she’d rejected that request without discussion—her body, her choice.

So her news the night before his leaving—casually presented over a dinner of baked chicken and rice—seemed to him weighted with all sorts of nuances beyond the obvious. Or not—maybe Allison was just saying something to pass the time, offering a scrap of idle information to bring him up to date: the checkbook is balanced, the rent’s paid, the cats got their shots, my period’s late. Whatever her reasons—and even she probably couldn’t say why—he’d dismissed it then (perhaps with more insensitivity than he intended) and suppressed it since—not worth worrying about now, with all his other challenges and changes looming.

Clearly his unconscious hadn’t let it go. But was the dream really about the delayed onset of Allison’s period, or about wanting a child, or about leaving Allison (he wouldn’t label it abandonment or separation—didn’t see it as such, just a little time apart for him to clear his head and get his bearings), or about the larger questions of contingency and obligation versus independence and isolation. These thoughts swirled about in his mind in the aftermath of the dream, doubled back on themselves, settled into an entangled jumble, no answer apparent. But he already knew that—had visited these and similar life questions so often in recent months that he knew enough not to expect an answer, doubted one would ever come. But these disjointed musings had at least served one purpose—they’d slowed his heart that had been racing in the wake of the vivid dream.

He took a few deep breaths then sat up on the truck’s mattress. He pulled the three blankets (every one he had packed) more tightly around his shoulders against the cold. He slid one hand out of that cocoon of warmth and wiped a small opening in the dense condensation on the side window. The sage prairie stretched away into the absolute dark, the only separation between sky and land the twinkling of those infinite stars above, the land black below. The stars shared just enough light for him to make out the sheepwagon about ten feet away, its curved tin roof glowing darkly in that starlight. He’d hoped to find some consolation in that one man-made structure in all this divinely shaped eternity and infinity. But the sheepwagon seemed a frail and shaky mooring for his ego under assault by the dream and now all this open space and indifferent dark, was a reminder of all the failures of human endeavor on this vast stage—sheepherders long since departed and probably dead, hunters and hikers passing by on their way to somewhere better, he and Allison chased away just last year: everybody gone on to their lives or hopes, leaving him to fight this war alone.

He lay back down on the mattress, pulled the blankets over his head (to preserve his heat, he told himself), and was glad his few days alone out here on the Sweetwater River would be over tomorrow when he went to sheepcamp to help Pete with docking the twenty-five hundred newborn lambs.

The one ewe found a gap in their line and ran toward it, trailed by her bleating lamb.

Through the dust and the noise and the chaos of the furiously milling swarm of five hundred ewes and their five hundred two-month-old lambs trying to resist the five men on foot and the two on horses and the one in the pick-up and their four dogs all striving to move this unruly formless mass toward the funnel-shaped corral of slatted snow fence they’d set up at the end of the shallow draw the day before, Zach spotted this escapee and left his place in the perimeter to head her off. Despite the ewe’s short legs and round body, she flew across the sandy and uneven terrain, weaving through clumps of sagebrush and shallow gullies with startling speed, her lamb close behind. By contrast, Zach kept stumbling over brush and branches and rocks, barely able to keep upright and losing ground to the speedy ewe. He changed direction in mid-stride and ran fast as he could toward a point of interception at the crest of the hill. If he couldn’t stop her there, she’d be gone for good. Just as he began to get ahead of her, had almost reached the point where he might turn her back, was running and huffing and waving his arms, a small rock gave way beneath his boot and sent him sprawling face first in the dry gravel.

He quickly rolled over, spitting out grit from his mouth and brushing the sand from his sleeves and pants. From the ground he saw first the fleeing ewe and her lamb over the crest of the hill and beyond his capture. Then he looked back over his shoulder. All five hundred ewes and their trailing lambs—the entire dust-coated, cacophonous, formerly shapeless mass—had assumed shape and direction and was pointed toward the spot in the line he’d recently vacated to chase the errant ewe. He looked on in terror as the herd streamed out of the hole he’d left, the place in the line he’d been charged with anchoring.

Suddenly Vince, the Mexican camp foreman, riding Shifty, the roan horse that ate the dogs’ food when they weren’t looking, flew past not ten feet away, Vince’s lasso rope raised high, his broad-brimmed hat flying out behind his head, bits of foam flying off the bit in Wiley’s mouth. And immediately behind Vince and Shifty came Wino, the scruffy dun-colored mutt with one blind eye, and Billy, the black and white border collie with a torn ear, running full tilt low to the ground, their tongues hanging out, their eyes (the three seeing ones, anyway) focused on turning the renegade herd.

Zach sat up on the dirt and simply watched, too startled and shaken to do anything else. Vince pointed the horse straight toward the lead ewe, and together they turned her. Without a word or signal that Zach could discern, Wino went left and Billy right of Vince, Wino racing ahead to keep the rest of the herd following behind the turned ewe, and Billy intercepting the lead ewe and completing the turn, heading her now back in the direction from which she’d come, the entire herd curling around behind her lead, pouring back through the gap in the perimeter they’d so recently exited, the re-established order of the mass belying the disorder just averted.