Rootless Read Online Free PDF

you got to think positive. That’s what Pop would have said.
    I fired up the CD player on the dash and gave it the half dozen thumps it took to play the disc jammed inside. The music made me feel a bit better. I clicked to this track near the end, a song about dead flowers and some girl called Susie. My dad used to drum the steering wheel and we’d holler the chorus at each other.
    “And I won’t forget to put roses on your grave.”
    Better build heavy roses, Pop used to joke. Otherwise folk would steal them.
    I stared at the bag at Zee’s feet — the bag full of pictures. And I thought about that photograph in my back pocket. The photograph of my old man bound up in chains.
    I cranked down on the accelerator.
     
    It wasn’t two hours and I knew we were almost there. I could tell by the way the spray reached up and blocked out the stars. I turned down the music and started to get worried the cliffs had worked their way inland. But when I pulled up, I could see the same stretch of fence, the old lot full of cars like corpses, the trash that gripped at the earth. Pop had taken me out here once. Back when I’d asked about Zion.
    “Here we are,” I said. “My half of the deal.”
    Feeble metal signs hung on the fence, warning you from getting too close. But when I cut the engine, Zee hopped out of the wagon wearing a wild-ass grin. I had to run out after her, tackle her down in the dirt before she got too near the edge.
    “What are you doing?” She blinked at me with angry eyes, her body coiled tight.
    “You got to be careful,” I said, getting to my feet and helping her up. “Let me see how stable it looks.”
    I brushed her off and she wheezed and cussed and hid her face like she was ashamed of something. Like she hated me seeing her all choked up and weak. I had her wait as I stepped to the edge, surrounded by that great rush of noise, moaning and howling like the baddest wind you ever known.
    I’ve heard it said people used to come to the coast for fun. The beach, people called it. They’d play around in the water and the ocean was just tame as could be. Breaks rolling in just a few feet tall.
    Few feet tall?
    I stared down at the waves clawing at the cliffs. Higher than any building in Vega. Spinning around like liquid twisters, a thousand stories high. Huge walls of water, pounding and breaking and making my ears hurt. The spray rose up and stuck in my nose, and out there past the breakers I could see the whole world rising and falling, carving in on itself like someone had just pulled the plug.
    Something about the moon, people said. Something happened to the moon and brought it closer. I guess it didn’t used to fill up such a big chunk of sky. But it wound up close at the end of the Darkness. There was twenty years of night and when the sun came back, that moon was so close it made the ocean go crazy as hell.
    I almost drowned once. Tying chains for a river willow and I slipped off the bank, and no matter how hard I thrashed I kept sinking. Everything muted. Ready to burst. Pop pulled me out of the yellow slime, but I never could face the water after that. Never could learn how to swim. I mean, the Surge would fill you with dread if you could somehow breathe underwater. But for me it waseven worse. Even high up as I was, it made my heart hammer at my bones.
    I gestured to Zee, had her step closer. Some days you’d not get to the fence, the spray was so bad.
    But today was Zee’s lucky day.
    She peered down through the wires, and her eyes grew as wide as the waves were tall. The spray beaded up on her skin, and her mouth hung as she stared down at that frothy stampede, the rise and fall of that giant swell.
    “I don’t believe it,” she shouted above the noise of the water. “It’s all like this?”
    “They say the west coast’s even worse.”
    Her face was wet from the spray hitting her, but I was pretty sure she was crying, too. Her face wasn’t all crumpled or anything, but her lips were