Max and His Imagination Dylan Platt
He wondered what it looked like before. Some ancient lake—sweeping, vast— spanned the whole of the fathoms below: Where now stood ten and twenty score of proud hickories and sycamores and brilliant bowing redbuds reached eternally up when presently tired peaks were merely fledgling islands and time was just shedding its baptismal gown. Vestiges still remained. There was the palpable thirst lingering in the relief of bones atop high hills. That garment of white — those vapors and droplets that might rise to become the mightiest of summer’s storms— dressed the mountains’ hips in a manner not unlike the way a fog grasps a nearby shore. This was a place to disappear into falsehoods and dreams: a place, that is, where he could think thoughts of absurdity and pass them for reality. The boy slipped off his shoes pressing his naked feet to the untamed ground beneath him. He slowly dropped each eyelid down. He imagined his toes gingerly slipping into the prehistoric sea; a stunning chill fell over him that stopped his pleasant musing. Had some awesome, terrible beast once haunted these woods in which he now played? He collected in his mind thoughts of the creatures, which were lucid as gravity to him. He began to walk, then to run. 49