Daniel Alarcón
speaker
2,010 appearances
36 recordings
11 series
first heard Feb 2022
last heard 10 Jul
Daniel Alarcón’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 33 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 25.
Appearances
And I remember reaching him just as the bottom started to fall away under my own feet.
The gravel sloping down toward the deep.
And I got my arms around him from behind.
Around his chest.
Both arms.
And I locked my hands and I threw my whole weight backward toward the shore.
He fought me.
That's the thing I've never told anyone.
Not the way it really was.
He fought me to get into that water.
Devon, my friend, who I had known since the eighth grade, turned in my arms with his empty, smooth face and his eyes that were not his, and he fought me to keep going out into the deep, and he was strong.
He was a welder with big hands and a back like a door, and for a few seconds out there in the cold and the dark with the bottom falling away, I genuinely didn't know if I was going to be able to hold him.
The water was at my chest.
It was so cold my hands were going numb on his chest, and I could feel my grip slipping, and I could feel the bottom sliding away under my feet toward the deep, and Devon was leaning out toward the middle of the lake with all his weight, reaching, and for a second, one second, I felt the pull of it myself, the warm dark wanting that came off the water, the sense that it would be easy,
that I could just let go and let us both drift out into the cold where it was quiet and nothing hurt, and the lake would keep us, together, and we wouldn't be alone.
And then the sun came up.
I don't mean the sky brightened.
I mean the rim of the sun cleared the mountains across the lake, right then, in that exact second, and the first hard light came straight across the water into our faces, and Devin went limp in my arms, all at once."
Whatever had been holding him let go between one heartbeat and the next, the way the latch had lifted out of the eye by itself, and he sagged back against me with his full dead weight, and I hauled him back, both of us going down hard in the shallows, the rocks under us, the freezing water around us, and Cole was there then, splashing out from the shore, shouting, getting his hands under Devin's arms.
And the two of us dragged him up out of Lake Crescent and onto the beach and away from the water as the sun came up gold and indifferent over the dead blue lake.
Showing 961–980 of 2,010 · page 49 of 101
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