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    Rise, then Descend
    Rise, then Descend
    Rise, then Descend
    Ebook26 pages22 minutes

    Rise, then Descend

    By Nick Stokes

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    About this ebook

    A modern dispossessed man climbs a sacred mound that an ancient native civilization builds. They descend. Rise, then Descend, a short story, was first published in Crab Orchard Review, Vol. 18 #1.

    From Rise, then Descend:
    "Did the ancients use walking sticks when climbing the mound? He’s not sure what kind of man needs a walking stick to walk. You just move your feet one front of the other. An old man might need a walking stick. But he is not old. He is old, compared to how old people used to get. Maybe are designed to get. He wishes he were old.
    Doctor said to use the hiking poles. That they’d give him a more thorough workout. Okay. That they’d save his knees on the way down that blessed mound however many times a day if that’s the way he had to do it. Okay. He didn’t need to pay for knee trouble too. That they’d ensure he doesn’t fall. He doesn’t believe in insurance and what kind of man falls climbing a hill? But okay. He does the hiking poles. Pansy, but that doesn’t stop him.
    His tremors don’t stop him.
    Thirty-five some-odd degree rain blowing horizontal in his face doesn’t stop him. Climbing in a monumental refrigerator he built back when he built refrigerators doesn’t stop him. Won’t see nobody up here today, which the opposite of stops him. Can’t see nothing from the top. Doesn’t stop him."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNick Stokes
    Release dateMar 22, 2014
    ISBN9781311036414
    Rise, then Descend
    Author

    Nick Stokes

    Nick Stokes is the author of the novel AFFAIR, first serialized by The Seattle Star, the (anti)-choose-your-own-adventure YOU CHOOSE, and the attempt to consciousness ARTIFACT COLLECTIVE. His short prose and fictions and nothings have been published by Bumf, Paper Darts, Crab Orchard Review, Mixer, Waccamaw, Prick of the Spindle, Knock, and others. His plays have been seen in various venues: DUELS in a built garden at 12th Ave Arts in Seattle and On the Boards NWNW Fest, WAS IS WILL BE MUSIC in a Seattle hotel room, and THE SOUND WE MAKE in Tacoma's Old City Hall. DUELS, produced in 2016 by amador/stokes, received reviews that said such words as "an absorbing work of agricultural absurdity" and "a vibrant, surreal production" and "DUELS presents a cornucopia of senses, languages, themes, and genres ... reminds us what it means to be human" and "Come the f*** on with this s***." He once-upon-a-time packed mules in Montana, lives in Tacoma, and is virtually sometimes at nickstokes.net.

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      Book preview

      Rise, then Descend - Nick Stokes

      Rise, then Descend

      by Nick Stokes

      Copyright 2014 Nick Stokes

      Smashwords Edition

      This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.

      Rise, then Descend was first published in Crab Orchard Review, Vol. 18 #1.

      Table of Contents

      Rise, then Descend

      About Nick Stokes

      Other Titles by Nick Stokes

      Connect with Nick Stokes

      Rise, then Descend

      HE WALKS INTO the sky. He carries a basket of earth on his back. He follows the basket on the back before him. Second trip of the day and they don’t speak. Heat rises with them. Time for ten trips today. Up and down the ramp. Back and forth across the plaza, from borrow pit to Sun’s mound, rising. At least the engineer didn’t say today was a day to carry the red clay. Or the flagstone. It’s too early to wish he were a digger in the pit filling baskets instead of bloodying his feet. Shredding his shoulders. For now before the hotter heat and the higher sun, he is strong. He is chosen, along with those before and behind and those lighter and empty, descending. They are chosen to raise earth to sky and their people to the Sun by doing what cannot be done and rising and rising and rising. He stands atop the mound where he could not stand without a basket of earth. He stands where the holiest stand and sees what the holiest see – the day expanding westward across the mighty river, the hunters hunting in the flat woods, the hot eye of morning rising over half-day bluff, and past the old low southern burial mounds and the borrow

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