LOST MATERIAL

(Continued)

It killed him. It just absolutely killed him. He couldn't even sleep he was so angry.

The discovery happened after he returned from his time away for those few days. It's what unfolded and how things went throughout the weekend that held the key, he now believed, for solving the great mystery.

Upon arriving home he opened the apartment door, put some bags down on the floor and through his keys down onto the end table.

Zoe was already disappearing into the far reaches and becoming reoriented to the home space. From Jerry's all the way home she had much to say about what it's like to try to have a retreat in close proximity to an uncivilized potbellied pig.

Yes Zoe, I hear you but please…

What on earth had happened to those pages!? It was absolutely ridiculous.

The pages were gone. Completely missing. Not a shred or trailing chad or crinkled tear in evidence after they had clearly been torn directly and completely free from the steel spiral binding. But by who? And when?

Shortly after settling in to the apartment that night, simply at random, flipping back in the spiral notebook had revealed the clear and present absence of a handful of pages precisely where he knew he had written at length of a specific experience, a story that had come to life in the midst of his epiphanal adventure that night upon first unveiling the Poppy. The visions, the dreams in red unfurling ornately all around him, how they felt so revelatory, these spiritual encounters that had poured forth such an ineffable loving lifeblood, filling him with such profound divine turbulence and passion and beauty.  

Somehow it had come out of him, yet he did not know how.

Right now, however, it was a certainty.

One of them. One very specific and dear to his heart was gone.

Locating the missing piece could only happen by reassembling the events of the few previous days. They had been good ones, indeed.

As he had planned, he would spend the first night out on his own. He needed the solitude and would look forward to recharging before having to "show up" as fully as he could for his old friend, the artist who had given him the photograph of the Poppy.

Her invitation, though it still seemed out of the blue and perhaps mildly fraught with possible tensions, was something he had accepted. So after a day to himself he would make his way over and spend time catching up with her and hiking the deep wilds of the pristine forests shouldering the western slopes of the Kitaroo range, an edenic environment she was lucky enough to call home.

But for the first night out he had booked a room at Shender 's fishing lodge just outside of Beaumont and pulled the Subaru Forrester into the gravel parking lot there just after midnight.

As Martha, the camp host, had mentioned on the phone, his key could be found in a small box just outside the door and he could feel free to let himself in at any time as the front desk and restaurant closed at 10. Breakfast was served from 6 to 9 and included a full buffet and an unending stack of hotcakes no matter what else you liked best.

At the cashiers register they sold Shender's T-shirts and blueberry syrup and hats, some limited fishing tackle, night crawlers, bug spray and essential canned goods and milk by the court from the dairy down the street.

He didn't want to leave the breakfast table as he sat there for a long while simply enjoying his coffee, watching some of the other folks walk through the entryway to discover the stuffed bear above the broad fireplace where hickory smoke lingered blithely into the room giving the whole sun shone space a spirit of welcome. The image he sketched into his notebook was entitled MORNING BLESSING.  As he finished the quick sketch, he smiled and craved an outside cigarette to complete the worship.

The air was crisp on the water.

It took only a few moments to breathe deeply and find his center and fall softly into conscious embodiment, an indwelling right there in his own warm skin and bones, inside one of the finest kayaks he'd ever rented in his life.

The ducks were flying free above him. He thought for sure they knew it as he pushed away with a crisp clatter of his paddle. A bright yellow fin of light sharply prattling at the edges of the cold and burbling waters of Fall Lake.

And then, amidst late morning fog… the loons.

The silence.