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So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.


The Profile


Zanzibar
Age. 39
Gender. Female
Ethnicity. that of my father and his father before him
Location Altadena, CA
School. Other
» More info.
The World









The Link To Zanzibar's Past
This is my page in the beloved art community that my sister got me into:

Samarinda

Extra points for people who know what Samarinda is.
The Phases of the Moon Module
CURRENT MOON
Croc Hunter/Combat Wombat
My hero(s)
Only My Favorite Baseball Player EVER


Aw, Larry Walker, how I loved thee.
The Schedule
M: Science and Exploration
T: Cook a nice dinner
W: PARKOUR!
Th: Parties, movies, dinners
F: Picnics, the Louvre
S: Read books, go for walks, PARKOUR
Su: Philosophy, Religion
The Reading List
This list starts Summer 2006
A Crocodile on the Sandbank
Looking Backwards
Wild Swans
Exodus
1984
Tales of the Alhambra (in progress)
Dark Lord of Derkholm
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The Lost Years of Merlin
Harry Potter a l'ecole des sorciers (in progress)
Atlas Shrugged (in progress)
Uglies
Pretties
Specials
A Long Way Gone (story of a boy soldier in Sierra Leone- met the author! w00t!)
The Eye of the World: Book One of the Wheel of Time
From Magma to Tephra (in progress)
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Harry Potter 7
The No. 1 Lady's Detective Agency
Introduction to Planetary Volcanism
A Child Called "It"
Pompeii
Is Multi-Culturalism Bad for Women?
Americans in Southeast Asia: Roots of Commitment (in progress)
What's So Great About Christianity?
Aeolian Geomorphology
Aeolian Dust and Dust Deposits
The City of Ember
The People of Sparks
Cube Route
When I was in Cuba, I was a German Shepard
Bound
The Golden Compass
Clan of the Cave Bear
The 9/11 Commission Report (2nd time through, graphic novel format this time, ip)
The Incredible Shrinking Man
Twilight
Eclipse
New Moon
Breaking Dawn
Armageddon's Children
The Elves of Cintra
The Gypsy Morph
Animorphs #23: The Pretender
Animorphs #25: The Extreme
Animorphs #26: The Attack
Crucial Conversations
A Journey to the Center of the Earth
A Great and Terrible Beauty
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Dandelion Wine
To Sir, With Love
London Calling
Watership Down
The Invisible
Alice in Wonderland
Through the Looking Glass
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
The Host
The Hunger Games
Catching Fire
Shadows and Strongholds
The Jungle Book
Beatrice and Virgil
Infidel
Neuromancer
The Help
Flip
Zion Andrews
The Unit
Princess
Quantum Brain
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
No One Ever Told Us We Were Defeated
Delirium
Memento Nora
Robopocalypse
The Name of the Wind
The Terror
Sister
Tao Te Ching
What Paul Meant
Lao Tzu and Taoism
Libyan Sands
Sand and Sandstones
Lost Christianites: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
The Science of God
Calculating God
Great Contemporaries, by Winston Churchill
City of Bones
Around the World in 80 Days, by Jules Verne
Divergent
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Old Man and the Sea
Flowers for Algernon
Au Bonheur des Ogres
The Martian
The Road to Serfdom
De La Terre � la Lune (ip)
In the Light of What We Know
Devil in the White City
2312
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
Red Mars
How to Be a Good Wife
A Mote in God's Eye
A Gentleman in Russia
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism
Seneca: Letters from a Stoic
The Juanes Module


Juanes just needed his own mod. Who can disagree.
The Rising Tide
Saturday. 11.3.12 4:32 am
We were in the beach house when we heard the shouting. I opened the side door and stepped out onto the little spit of sand that connected our door mat to the beach. The water was coming in. Much faster than any tide. People with barbecues and beach umbrellas and little children were running up the beach.

"Oh shit," I called back into the condo, "It's a tsunami." My mother looked up from where she was sorting kitchen items behind the counter. "Oh shit," she said. She came to the door and we both looked out at the beach as the water continued to rise. The people with picnics and barbecues reached our door and asked us to let them in. We did, and in their rush they spilled grilled onions and curry sauces on our white carpet. Mom was beginning to get unhappy. Through the glass door we could see that the water had reached about a foot in height. Still the thick rubber laid around the doorframe kept it out. The tide receded. I opened the door again and looked out at the beach. The light was so bright it was blinding me. My little sister jinyu came in from the beach. She had run up to the next highest level, but she had been outside. The whites of her eyes were badly burned. One of them had turned partially black. Mom was worried, but jinyu said she could't feel anything. For a moment I could see an arrangement of bizarre sea creatures, exposed by the retreat of the tide.

Within a couple of hours, people were back on the beach. We had dodged a bullet there, everyone agreed. The beach looked new and clean. My dad said he was going to go pick up a movie. My mom told him that he certainly wasn't as long as this apartment was in the state that it was in. He sighed heavily and came back to help her sort through the junk behind the counter. I went outside. I can't remember what I was going out to get, though I would try to remember many times, later. I was too far away from the house to go back when the water returned. I couldn't get into any house--- all I could do was run.

I ran blindly for high ground. All I could think of was to go up, up, up. I headed for the cliffs behind the beach. On this side of the cliffs was civilization, on the other side was the high desert. The sandy incline leading up to them was steep but I flew up it like I was running down a hill. I mounted the cliffs by an artificial staircase. At the top I paused and looked back. The scene was surreal. The bright sunshine shone down upon the glittering low-rise beach houses, and the sparkling blue water coursed between them and rose. Rose, rose, always it rose.

"Higher ground!" Somebody yelled. We watched with stupefied amazement as the water kept rising. Surely it couldn't reach us on the cliffs... surely... we started running. The cliffs petered out into sand dunes. My fear of heights was forgotten completely. It seemed like a relict fear, forced into complete obsolescence by my new, overwhelming fear of the rising tide: I could remember having it but it no longer meant anything. I helped some others across a precarious stone bridge and into the desert.

We saw the landscape differently now. Every feature was only important for its topographic relief. When we looked at the sand dunes we only saw troughs that would be filled with death, and tiny crests that could be bridges to life. The dunes were lower than the cliffs. We needed to get higher. Higher. Higher. The cliffs were buying us time. I was holding two girls by the hand and nearly pulling them through the sand. Suddenly I was face to face with my own older sister, Rachel. After that, nothing else was important, only Rachel. We clung to each other like morning glory vines and we ran.

Finally we came to a rise and a human installation. It was one of those strange, run-down desert places that had been built with great hope and then nearly abandoned to decay. It was supposed to be a fun-house, with rooms full of mirrors, a miniature golf course, a generous deck and a small snack bar. Heaped into the same installation were some large buildings filled with technical equipment and two giant radio towers. We descended upon it, a wave of humanity preceding the wave that was chasing us. "High ground!" we shouted at the people at the entry. "High ground!" I screamed at the people playing croquet. They looked at us like we were crazy. The only thing we could stop running long enough to say was "High ground! High ground! High ground!"

And then the wave breached the cliffs. It flowed spectacularly down into the desert, filling up and then wiping out the sand dunes; carrying off every tiny living creature that still ran upon their crests. The croquet players were listening now. Rachel and I ducked into the fun house. There was a staircase where the stairs moved in and out of the wall. I ran up it with frenzied energy but I tripped two thirds of the way up and slid all the way back to the bottom. The operator appeared to ask us to buy our ticket. "We need to get to high ground," I said. He pointed around the corner to an ordinary staircase, and we were gone.

We emerged on the deck. There were people trying to break into the radio towers, but they were locked. The radio towers, our salvation, and they were locked. We stood on the deck and watched the water coming in. It seeped over the croquet pitch, it crept into the fun house. How could it keep coming? The ocean must be empty! We didn't want to think about all of the precious people we had left at the beach. Anything could happen. Many of the people who were on the beaches in Thailand in 2004 survived the tsunami despite being washed miles out to sea. The water rose and rose. We ran across a metal bridge to some of the technical buildings. They were a maze of metal grates and panes of glass. We heard some voices shouting. They had found a boat. A boat! A boat in the desert! Nobody knew if it would float, but we all piled aboard anyway. The water was now flowing beneath the metal grated bridges. We waited.

And then I woke up. THE END.
1 Comments.


That's... a pretty epic dream. I don't mean in the modern slang sense, but in the like, classical poem sense. In the way that the Odyssey is an epic.

The part about your sister's burned eye creeped me out though.
» randomjunk on 2012-11-04 12:38:44

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