The Beautiful Land

by Alan Averill

  Samira sits on a small hill overlooking the ocean. Behind her, a campfire burns next to a wooden hut. A thin brown dog lies in the flickering glow of the flames, happily chewing on a bone.

  “So I’ve been practicing,” she continues, her voice carrying out into the orange light of dusk. “Little stuff, but I’ve been working on it. I finally got Bones here, but it’s not really him. It’s just a dog. He’s a nice dog, don’t get me wrong, but he’s not the same. I just…I didn’t know Bones well enough, you know? And I think with living things, you have to remember them. I don’t know why I think that, but I do. It just feels right.”

  She stops talking for a moment and stares out at the ocean. Behind her, a set of massive windmills slowly rotate, casting long, twisting shadows on the shoreline. She turns her attention to a spot on the beach, perhaps a hundred yards away, where she has cleared a small patch of sand and surrounded it with rocks.

  “It’s funny here. Everything is so perfect, and yet it’s not like you never feel things. I still get sad. I still get scared. I still…I still get lonely. It’s just not as intense as it used to be. I can handle it. It doesn’t control me.”

  She looks at the spot on the beach and lets the sounds of the surf and the windmill blades roll over and through her. “So this is kind of it, you know? This is my one shot. And if it doesn’t work, if I’m wrong, and my memories aren’t enough, then I’m just going to turn away and wait for the tide to come in and never try again…. I hope you’re okay with that.”

  Samira closes her eyes and thinks about her friend. She remembers the way his hand hovered above her head one anonymous night years ago. She remembers exchanging a kiss in the backseat of a car the day before her life was put to ruin. She remembers his smell, and his taste, and the stupid things he used to say, and a million other details both large and inconsequential. I remember you. I remember everything about you, because I know you better than anyone or anything in my entire life. You are Tak and you are real and I miss you terribly…. I want you to come back to me.

  She hears a sound, a crunching of footsteps on sand, and suddenly finds herself afraid. The footsteps grow louder before she hears Bones begin to bark happily. Finally, at this, she decides to take the greatest risk of her life.

  She opens her eyes.

  A young man with spiky black hair is standing on the thin grass in front of her. He has a dazed expression in his eyes, as if he can’t quite figure out what’s going on.

  “…Sam?” he says finally.

  “I need to know it’s you,” she says, standing up. She finds that her entire body is shaking, and her voice is barely controlled. “I need to know it’s you. That it’s really you, and not just a bunch of memories I wished into existence because I was lonely. I need to know.”

  Tak stares at her for a long while. Then he looks to the windmills and back to the ocean, and it’s as if something finally clicks inside his mind. He shakes his head in amazement before walking to Samira and placing his hands on her face.

  “Holy crap, Sam,” he says. “You did it. You actually did it.”

  “Oh God, Tak. Is this really you? Please tell me it’s you.”

  “Banzai.”

  acknowledgments

  Thanks to Amazon, CreateSpace, and Penguin for sponsoring the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. Hat-tip to my kick-ass editor, Ginjer Buchanan, for helping a noob through the process, and to Kat Sherbo for answering many annoying questions.

  Thanks to the other ABNA finalists—Regina, Brian, Charles, Casey, and Rebecca—for continuing to be my support group. I hope you all get published and make fat stacks of cash…. Er, I mean, find artistic happiness.

  Thanks to everyone who supported the book throughout the contest—specifically Mark, John, Justin, and Hiroko at 8-4, Ltd.; all the cats in the Treehouse; and the unstoppable force of the NeoGAF army.

  Thanks to my friends Tim and Shahin for loaning me bits of your lives even if you didn’t know it at the time, Steve and Marty for providing years of support, and Tara for designing the original cover. Also, a special thanks to Jayron Finan of the Seattle-based Persian Preschool and to Dr. Ali Parsa of Cal State Fullerton.

  Thanks to The Tragically Hip, The National, and Tom Waits for being the soundtrack as I wrote. Oh, and props to Columbia City Ale House for providing the beer.

  Thanks to Mom and Dad for putting up with a really weird kid for all these years, and to my sister, Kate, for generally being awesome.

  Thanks to Sue for being the best thing in my life. The goat farm is coming, I promise.

  And finally, thanks to you for reading, because a writer without readers is just some crazy dude shouting in the dark.