(no subject)
Look up. You awake in a field at dawn, long grass against your face, packed dirt beneath your shoulder blades. The creek is a short walk south, soft worn banks and clear shallow pools. You wash your face, scrub the dirt caked between your fingers. You take a long drink and there is a cold ache in your throat as you swallow it.
You have slept in this field for two nights. The first you killed a rabbit. The second day you searched for berries and roots in the stand of trees to the north and east. The west is open fields and pasture land, tumbling into what would seem to be infinity, except you know of crowded cities that rattle up out of the ground and hurtle into the sky, that are never quiet.
You’ve been wandering now for four months. You talk to animals as you sight them and aim your bow, as you skin them. In the mornings and in the evenings you sing parts of songs to yourself, what you remember, hum simple melodies, practice the names of old friends. They sound foreign to you, as if hearing them for the first time. Your teeth struggle with the sounds. Your tongue feels clumsy.
The whole world seems empty to you now. You try not to think about it, but sometimes you do, and you are always surprised, dumbstruck, with how easy it had been to walk away from what was left. Some days a word like mourning comes into your head and stays there all day, like a stone in a cow’s stomach.
You set out in a small car toward the end of summer. It struggled through the mountain passes, and then died on a small twilight highway. You slept in the backseat, curled up with a buckle biting into your back. In the morning you left it there, easily, and walked into dense rolling prairie land, a small backpack on one shoulder.
Some days you see farmers at a distance, encased in shiny green farm equipment. They wave with one finger, sometimes two, tip their ballcaps slightly, nod. You cross roads and small highways, crawl through drainage tunnels beneath humming interstates. People honk sometimes, pull over and ask if you need a lift. You shake your head, look down, slip down muddy embankments and disappear into dark woods.
A week ago you came across a rest stop at dusk, foraged for food in a dumpster near some picnic tables. A trucker appeared at your side, offered you a cigarette, wanted to talk to you about Jesus Christ. You were quiet. He thought you were listening to what he was telling you about repentance. He told you he used to be strung out on drugs, drunk in the mornings, that he’d been fired from every job he’d ever held. He asked you how you’d become homeless. You whispered, My wife died. You whispered so quietly he didn’t hear you, but the words surprised you and you turned away and walked into the woods nearby.
That night you dreamt her, still young, on the front porch of her childhood home. You woke with warm tears on your face.
You are no longer young. Autumn is ending and you are heading steadily south. The prairie falls away to flatter plains, scrub grass. Two more months pass. Your beard is thick, gray. Your face is darker and the lines deeper. Winter pushes in around the edges, climbs down your throat at night and into your bones. You build fires to stay warm and begin dreaming her again.
The license plates say you’re in Texas now and the winter nights are warmer. She now comes to you nightly, younger than you ever knew her. She is in high school and lives with her mother, a small house in a small town, simple and unconfused. The porch is white, the house painted a deep yellow. Some nights you drink iced tea on the porch, tell her what life in a big city in California is like. Some nights it’s chilly and she curls against you on the porch steps, a quilt on your knees, sipping warm cups of coffee.
She shows you the ravine where the cattle sleep at night, their heads resting against each other’s hindquarters. You can feel their steam and hear their dreaming as you walk past them and touch your fingers to their sides.
Some nights you walk to the diner in town. You worry that maybe people will stare at you. She is barefoot and wearing a yellow nightgown and you are so much older, weather-worn and dirty, but no one looks, no one stares. You share a milkshake and she tells you she wants to move to California once she graduates. She asks you if you’ll ever go back there and you shake your head, look down. When you look up she is gone.
The morning air is cold and dew has soaked your clothes and covers the small tarp you sleep on. All day you carry around the feeling that something has always been almost there, on the cusp of emerging. It is not unlike phantom limbs, or trying to describe a color to a blind person. You travel further, cut strips of meat from a still-warm deer carcass on a roadside. You walk through dry creekbeds and wade waist-deep rivers, scare raccoons from dumpsters, share an abandoned pick-up truck with a family of possums.
You stand in the yard and wait for her to appear on the porch. She is a long time in coming, and she is happy to find you there. She washes your hair with warm water from a tea kettle, rubs soap into your beard and trims it. She invites you into her bedroom and reads to you in lamplight. You fall asleep in her bed, wake in a stand of cedars.
You feel a pull, walk longer distances each day. There is something that keeps you awake at night and when sleep finally pulls you under it is brief and silent. You watch her yellow window from the road, sleep on the porch. You wake on the concrete slab of a pump-house above a lake. It is still night and the lights from a town flicker and extinguish on the water, re-light themselves. The lake is lined by small evergreens and you thread through them toward the town, hungry and still tired.
There is a football stadium at the other end of the lake, the bleachers casting even darker shadows in the night. You gather newspapers and popcorn boxes, still-sticky soda cups, and build a fire beneath the bleachers. You try reading scraps of paper in the firelight and certain words act like small tools inside your stomach. Before the fire burns down you are asleep again. Your eyelids flicker and your jaw grinds steadily.
She is on the porch steps, her knees drawn up, crying into a dress. You walk toward her and put your hands on her shoulders. She puts a hand on one of yours and looks up at you. She pulls herself up slowly and leads you into the house. The house is dark, but you can hear and feel its emptiness. Her room is empty too. There are no curtains even to keep out the new light in the east. She kneels with you in the corner, dust covering your knees and hands. She is whispering and you cannot hear her. You move the hair from her face, but the room is filling with light.
There are whistles and the sounds of boys yelling, the collision of pads and helmets. It is just after dawn and you leave the football stadium and pass into the main street. The town is waking too, the streets slowly filling with people. You feel their eyes on you. Schoolchildren whisper to each other as you pass, and the world feels crowded and too loud. You smell the diner before you see it, the strong smell of coffee and of sweet sausage frying.
You turn the corner and there it is, and your feet betray you. They pull you down the block before you can remind them you are hungry. You are running beneath bare trees on a neighborhood street, and people stop to point. A boy across the street yells at you. The neighborhood falls away and beneath you now is a gravel road, the yellow grass high on each side.
The house is in front of you and you go to work prying at the new wood over the windows, at the weeds that have upset the porch.
You have slept in this field for two nights. The first you killed a rabbit. The second day you searched for berries and roots in the stand of trees to the north and east. The west is open fields and pasture land, tumbling into what would seem to be infinity, except you know of crowded cities that rattle up out of the ground and hurtle into the sky, that are never quiet.
You’ve been wandering now for four months. You talk to animals as you sight them and aim your bow, as you skin them. In the mornings and in the evenings you sing parts of songs to yourself, what you remember, hum simple melodies, practice the names of old friends. They sound foreign to you, as if hearing them for the first time. Your teeth struggle with the sounds. Your tongue feels clumsy.
The whole world seems empty to you now. You try not to think about it, but sometimes you do, and you are always surprised, dumbstruck, with how easy it had been to walk away from what was left. Some days a word like mourning comes into your head and stays there all day, like a stone in a cow’s stomach.
You set out in a small car toward the end of summer. It struggled through the mountain passes, and then died on a small twilight highway. You slept in the backseat, curled up with a buckle biting into your back. In the morning you left it there, easily, and walked into dense rolling prairie land, a small backpack on one shoulder.
Some days you see farmers at a distance, encased in shiny green farm equipment. They wave with one finger, sometimes two, tip their ballcaps slightly, nod. You cross roads and small highways, crawl through drainage tunnels beneath humming interstates. People honk sometimes, pull over and ask if you need a lift. You shake your head, look down, slip down muddy embankments and disappear into dark woods.
A week ago you came across a rest stop at dusk, foraged for food in a dumpster near some picnic tables. A trucker appeared at your side, offered you a cigarette, wanted to talk to you about Jesus Christ. You were quiet. He thought you were listening to what he was telling you about repentance. He told you he used to be strung out on drugs, drunk in the mornings, that he’d been fired from every job he’d ever held. He asked you how you’d become homeless. You whispered, My wife died. You whispered so quietly he didn’t hear you, but the words surprised you and you turned away and walked into the woods nearby.
That night you dreamt her, still young, on the front porch of her childhood home. You woke with warm tears on your face.
You are no longer young. Autumn is ending and you are heading steadily south. The prairie falls away to flatter plains, scrub grass. Two more months pass. Your beard is thick, gray. Your face is darker and the lines deeper. Winter pushes in around the edges, climbs down your throat at night and into your bones. You build fires to stay warm and begin dreaming her again.
The license plates say you’re in Texas now and the winter nights are warmer. She now comes to you nightly, younger than you ever knew her. She is in high school and lives with her mother, a small house in a small town, simple and unconfused. The porch is white, the house painted a deep yellow. Some nights you drink iced tea on the porch, tell her what life in a big city in California is like. Some nights it’s chilly and she curls against you on the porch steps, a quilt on your knees, sipping warm cups of coffee.
She shows you the ravine where the cattle sleep at night, their heads resting against each other’s hindquarters. You can feel their steam and hear their dreaming as you walk past them and touch your fingers to their sides.
Some nights you walk to the diner in town. You worry that maybe people will stare at you. She is barefoot and wearing a yellow nightgown and you are so much older, weather-worn and dirty, but no one looks, no one stares. You share a milkshake and she tells you she wants to move to California once she graduates. She asks you if you’ll ever go back there and you shake your head, look down. When you look up she is gone.
The morning air is cold and dew has soaked your clothes and covers the small tarp you sleep on. All day you carry around the feeling that something has always been almost there, on the cusp of emerging. It is not unlike phantom limbs, or trying to describe a color to a blind person. You travel further, cut strips of meat from a still-warm deer carcass on a roadside. You walk through dry creekbeds and wade waist-deep rivers, scare raccoons from dumpsters, share an abandoned pick-up truck with a family of possums.
You stand in the yard and wait for her to appear on the porch. She is a long time in coming, and she is happy to find you there. She washes your hair with warm water from a tea kettle, rubs soap into your beard and trims it. She invites you into her bedroom and reads to you in lamplight. You fall asleep in her bed, wake in a stand of cedars.
You feel a pull, walk longer distances each day. There is something that keeps you awake at night and when sleep finally pulls you under it is brief and silent. You watch her yellow window from the road, sleep on the porch. You wake on the concrete slab of a pump-house above a lake. It is still night and the lights from a town flicker and extinguish on the water, re-light themselves. The lake is lined by small evergreens and you thread through them toward the town, hungry and still tired.
There is a football stadium at the other end of the lake, the bleachers casting even darker shadows in the night. You gather newspapers and popcorn boxes, still-sticky soda cups, and build a fire beneath the bleachers. You try reading scraps of paper in the firelight and certain words act like small tools inside your stomach. Before the fire burns down you are asleep again. Your eyelids flicker and your jaw grinds steadily.
She is on the porch steps, her knees drawn up, crying into a dress. You walk toward her and put your hands on her shoulders. She puts a hand on one of yours and looks up at you. She pulls herself up slowly and leads you into the house. The house is dark, but you can hear and feel its emptiness. Her room is empty too. There are no curtains even to keep out the new light in the east. She kneels with you in the corner, dust covering your knees and hands. She is whispering and you cannot hear her. You move the hair from her face, but the room is filling with light.
There are whistles and the sounds of boys yelling, the collision of pads and helmets. It is just after dawn and you leave the football stadium and pass into the main street. The town is waking too, the streets slowly filling with people. You feel their eyes on you. Schoolchildren whisper to each other as you pass, and the world feels crowded and too loud. You smell the diner before you see it, the strong smell of coffee and of sweet sausage frying.
You turn the corner and there it is, and your feet betray you. They pull you down the block before you can remind them you are hungry. You are running beneath bare trees on a neighborhood street, and people stop to point. A boy across the street yells at you. The neighborhood falls away and beneath you now is a gravel road, the yellow grass high on each side.
The house is in front of you and you go to work prying at the new wood over the windows, at the weeds that have upset the porch.