Gurk the Surfing Caveman's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Gurk stood in the mouth of the blue crystal cave and tried to remember a word his grandfather used to say before a hunt. Ten purple aliens watched him with wide black eyes. Two suns burned outside on the flat stone shore. Gurk had promised them the old chant, the one his tribe sang before crossing dangerous water. He wanted to give the aliens who thawed him something back. He wanted them to sing it before he paddled out to the wave no one would name. He tried the first word. It came out wrong. He tried again and a different wrong word came. The Ice Age tongue was locked somewhere behind his teeth and would not open. The aliens repeated what he said, patient and eager, and their mouths made mush of mush. Gurk slouched harder. He could feel the chant in his chest but not in his mouth. A small purple one asked if the words meant sky or fish. Gurk did not know anymore. He had been frozen too long. The sounds had cracked inside him. A girl's voice cut in from the cave entrance. "You're doing it backwards." McKenzie Brink rolled in on her skates, stopped short, and pulled a beat-up notebook from her jacket. Behind her, a strange seedling she had been carrying around, a thin green stem with a pink bloom, sat in a cup of dirt by the wall. "My grandma spoke Polish. She forgot half of it. She got it back by singing, not talking. Words hide in the tune. You're saying them like a list." She tapped her skate against the stone in a slow beat. "Try it like a song. Don't think about the words." Gurk closed his eyes. He tapped his foot to her beat. He stopped trying to remember and let his chest move first. A low sound came up from under his ribs, then another, then a string of them, rough and shaped and real. His grandfather's chant. The aliens leaned in. One by one they picked up the shape of it, their voices bending around his. The cave held the sound and gave it back doubled. When Gurk opened his eyes, the whole circle was singing with him, clean and matched. McKenzie was writing the sounds down in her notebook, fast. Gurk stood straighter than he had in a thousand years. He had given them the first chant. Now they would expect the rest, and the rest were buried deeper than this one had been.