Excerpt: For Want of a Fruitcake

A man walked along a beach, utterly lost. He had no recollection of how he got here, and his theory that someone was playing a prank on him was rapidly wearing thin. He wouldn’t put it past his friends to drive him out to the beach and leave him there, but the simple fact was that there were no footprints or tire tracks around him when he woke. And he had woken mere inches from the water. He got the distinct impression that a high wave had touched his nose. He had opened his eyes to utter darkness and had nearly had a panic attack, thinking he was blind. In the city where he had gone to bed, there was not total darkness; always a streetlight or tv screen.
Not it was a little lighter. He could see, in fact, there were no tracks anywhere, except the strange shapes in the sand he had seen a mile back and thought of as snake tracks.
This man’s name happened to be Daniel, and Daniel prided himself on knowing a thing or two about the natural world. But at the moment he was stumped. He couldn’t think of a place near his home that would look like this; the sand stretching back from the shore and off into the distance, as if a desert began right where the ocean ended. He had walked inland until the ocean was out of sight, and still seen nothing but a landscape of sand. Cold sand. He pulled his light jacket closer around him and stopped walking.
Was he in the Middle East somewhere? Saudi Arabia? Ideas that had seemed ridiculous to him hours ago were now making more and more sense. What was the last thing he remembered doing? Planting impatiens by the porch, washing his hands off with the hose, and then…drugs? Blow darts? A bash on the back of the head? Transported thousands of miles while unconscious to wake up…where?
The shells on this beach were widely scattered and relatively large. He sat down and picked one up—a round pinkish shell that curved up and back on itself—a mutant snail who didn’t know how to make a proper shell and probably didn’t live long. Daniel decided to wait until the sun rose completely. He looked out at the sea and concluded that it definitely wasn’t the Atlantic, at least not the one he saw when he hiked to the mouth of the river back home in Georgia. This water was so dark, and choppy, and unkind. He concluded that it was coming on high tide from the way his footprints were gradually disappearing, and turned back again in wonder to look at the vast expanse of sand behind him.
This man figured that if he did not reach a seaside town, he would at least find a river, and cities are always built along rivers so he would be fine. No matter what country he happened to be in, people generally reacted well to cheerful, polite helplessness. Tragically, he was entirely correct in his assumptions. The biggest city that he ever had a chance of seeing again sat not ten miles up the river, on a river that hit the sea just out of view from him. If he had walked in the city gate with a smile and his hands raised, he would have been fine.
When his wallet was later found, the cards inside would reveal that he was an active member of the Sierra Club, and Amnesty International, and worked for the National Botany Program, making it all the more unfortunate that his skills would never be put to work again.