Radioactive Prometheus
Narrative 1 1:55 min, 270 words.
I watched a black and white woodpecker with a red head peck on the telephone pole in the front-yard. It has been working diligently on that pole for a couple of weeks. I guess it is pecking out a nest. The hole is so big at this point, that to enlarge it further, the woodpecker disappears completely within the hole, followed by the muffled sound of its pecking. It sounds like some sort of woodpecker sub-woofer, reverberating out of the pole as a muffled staccato, punctuated at broken intervals by the woodpecker’s high pitched squawk. I imagine it pecking the entire way through, maybe until the entire top of the pole snaps off. Some days she runs to the very top of the pole and pecks on the metal strap that connects the telephone lines. At first I thought, “Well, birdbrain. How stupid?”. I became curious as this act was repeated daily over the weeks of my observation. My research describes this behavior as ‘drumming’ and attributes it as part of the woodpecker’s mating ritual. Apparently it is performed to attract potential mates. The article also advised putting something soft, like foam rubber, over the spot to discourage the woodpecker. I had to laugh at the image of me climbing to the top of the telephone pole to act on this advice. Besides I like the sound of that rat-a-tat-tat, tapping. It is comforting, a sound of progress being made. Maybe only the small secret progress of one small bird (I’m guessing a Downey woodpecker), but progress all the same. You have to take your reassurances where you find them. Narrative 2 2:00 min, 431 words. The peony is blooming. It reminds me of a Summer when another version of myself lived on a palatial estate with a circular drive lined in hundreds of pink and magenta peonies, framed by a row of giant purple globe thistle. A quarter mile semi-circumference of floriferous wonder. The eyes pushed out of the mulch, followed by the unfurling of scalloped leaves, and then the swelling of three fat buds. Over the next week I watched the ants crawling over the buds, eating sap, and tickling them open. My grandmother, who I called Nanny, had wonderful gardens. Not wondrous, like the opulent excess and grandeur of those on palatial estates, but wonderful with the simple elegance of a country garden, made opulent by the fact that it stood in stark contrast to the acres of tomatoes, watermelon and peas. Negotiated beauty against fields of function. One summer the watermelon withered in a drought and the farm only made it on my grandfather’s prescient decision to plant peanuts instead of peas. Nanny’s roses were beautiful that summer, blooming in masses, and thanks to the dry weather, the foliage was without a trace of black spot; a healthy glossy green. I sometimes wonder how melons wither while roses thrive. Remembering my Grandfather’s practical patterns, I can’t imagine conversations ending in favor of frivolity. Perhaps the arguments were not made with words. Negotiated beauty is one manner of love. Nanny never grew peonies that I know of and I am saddened to think that she missed such a wonderful opportunity for negotiations. Once, after my grandfather was long buried and Nanny was well into her mid-eighties I was staying with her at the farm and was awakened to the sound of gun shots. I struggled into my jeans and stumbled into the living room, confused. Nanny passed me in the moonlight moving from the porch back into the house. In passing she whispered, ’woodpecker’ by way of explanation. The next morning I walked down the drive under the archway of black walnut trees towards the mailbox down past the cattle-guard. To my surprise I found the stiffened form of a fallen woodpecker lying among the bluebonnets in the grass. It was silently sleeping with the clean wound of a 25-caliber bullet standing in sharp contrast to the splendid red plumage of its head, as though marked from birth for this final moment in passing. I asked her over breakfast if she had hit the woodpecker. She claimed she was only trying to scare it away. I didn’t tell her how well she had succeeded. |
Narrative 3 1:55 min, 265 words.
My relationship with my father has always been easy. Easy in the manner of things hardly known and never missed. It was more difficult for my younger brother John-David, who longed for the father of his imagination with no real experience of our father in real life. John was young when our parents divorced. I was young as well, but I have an old soul and no patience for fools. I occasionally see my Father in passing, and we are always polite. He has no interest in me, or at least no more than he does for any stranger, and I have no expectations for him. Actually, quite a bit less than I do for most strangers. It is an easy peace. In an odd way we understand that there simply isn’t any more, and nothing to build it with or to build it on. No more desire to spend our precious little time fashioning a foundation of trust that simply won’t be honored with love. Last time I saw him, we had a long conversation on the occasion of the death of his sister. I said, “I’m sorry”. “Thank you,” he replied. John has a long dream in which that conversation is reversed. In his dream, it is as if he were living his life backwards, back from fatherhood, to college, to high school and adolescence and ending in early childhood facing his version of our father. This oft dreamt for version he calls dad, who turns to John-David and says “I’m sorry”, to which John simultaneously replies with both “Thank” and “Fuck you.” Narrative 4 3:00 min, 391 words. The woodpecker’s ‘drumming’ must have worked. Today there were two woodpeckers, the original pounding away inside the telephone pole, and another warily watching from the telephone line. I warily eye him with suspicion- for surely this is the drummed up mate. Maybe there will be babies. What a way to begin life-blind, unaware of your predicament, precariously, perched atop a telephone pole. Tiny mouths gaping open, perpetually protesting the powerful focused need deep in the center of the boundary that is their growing awareness of themselves. A chorus of hunger, never satiated, nor satisfied. As I am cutting the grass I find one fallen, lying rigid near the base of the pole, the too soft feathers barely covering the translucent skin. The mouth still, but gaping open, still- a silent tunnel for the ants who find their way to the tender parts and of course, back out with their bounty of flesh. Soon they are thick on the tiny body, an ordered frenzy busy doing the work of feeding their own on the woodpecker’s misfortune. Watching this spectacle I think of an episode of Woody Woodpecker, too oft repeated in my youth. Ha, ha, ha, haw, ha…..ha, ha, ha, haw, ha…..haw ,haw ,haw, ha. The signature laugh, common at school but coming at any occasion and from anywhere. Around the block, at birthday parties or in grocery stores from strangers. The confusion on John-David’s face, followed by the rising blood blush, always threatening to rival his fire engine red hair. I wonder why I wouldn’t protect him. At first he would cry, but when tears failed, blows followed. Big comical round-houses, that lost all humor when they landed, exploding torrents of hot blood. Bloody plumes sprayed like red plumage across white linoleum tiles. Clean up on aisle four. They say that redheads are naturally ‘fiery’, but I have only witnessed the making of fire. I try to recall the story of Prometheus, but muddle it in the effort. Instead I remember an image that I saw in the newspaper some years ago, in the late 80’s, after Chernobyl. Across from the reactor, in a public park, there was a monolithic sculpture of Prometheus receiving fire from the gods. The most conservative estimates speculate that the area immediately surrounding the reactor will remain ‘hot’ for the next 300-900 years. Radioactive Prometheus...how apropos. |
Lost Dogs
Lost Dogs
By Collin Williams 1 My father was a sucker for a lost cause or a stray, the more desperate the circumstances the more desperately human he became, but he had a particular empathy for lost dogs. Maybe it was because he was such a dog himself, my Mother once quipped, but I believe that he saw them as reflections of his own silent desperation and through their rescue he hoped, in some small measure, to rescue and thus redeem himself. He would dismiss such statements as ‘psycho-babble’, but his dismissals would only serve as tacit affirmation. Dee Dee lay on the braided spiral rug by the sliding backdoor, bathed in the amber sunlight of late afternoon. She was slight, with wiry white fur that thinly covered her spotted pink and gray skin. Let’s just say that she wasn’t winning any ‘Bests in Show’. Possibly part Maltese or poodle and terrier of some sort; she had the tell-tale overbite of a Lasa Apso and beady pleading eyes, but a perfect black Teddy-Bear nose. At first she was just another mangy half-starved dog in a long motley cast of canines Dad was forever bringing home. Of course, us kids never seemed to tire of a new pet, at least for the first day or so, but we knew from experience not to grow too attached since Dad would soon find her a home, only to begin the cycle over again. At first, we didn’t even bother naming her, but simply called her ‘girl’. No one can say when or how Dee-Dee got her name. My older brother favors the story that she was named after Dee Dee Bridgewater Junior High, the local middle school on Lanier Street, up the block and 2 streets over from our little green cape-cod on Barkley Drive. I favor Mom’s claim that she named the dog after her CB handle ‘DD’, which was in turn short for Delta Dawn the hit single by Tanya Tucker, that was as ceaseless and unrelenting as the heat that summer of ’79. Delta Dawn, what's that flower you have on, Could it be a faded rose from days gone by? 2 “D-D. Hey, Delta Dawn. Ya gotcha ears on?” the CB radio crackled, bursts of static followed by a disembodied voice issuing forth from the soft glow of the dashboard, but originating somewhere up the line. A line of Macks and Peterbilts, stretching down the corridor of darkness that was Interstate 45, marked by a serial pattern of taillights glowing white and red, broken at intervals by the lines of orange running lights along the length of flatbed trailers. In the lingo of the era, we had ‘the hammer down’ headed north on 45 from Houston, some 130 odd miles behind us and another 80 or so to Dallas, up ahead. Our immediate destination was Buffalo, where we would turn off onto FM 79 and from there it was another 50 miles through Oakwood and into Palestine. “10-4, Lobo. Thanks for the ride. We’re getting off at Buffalo, hope to catch ya’ on the flip-side.”, said with a visible effort to conceal the tremor in her voice. Linger on, pale blue eyes. I’m goin’ through, all your alibi’s. Lou may have known you, And oh, how time flies, But, linger on, pale blue eyes. The long streamlined form of the ’87 Cadillac moaned, tires slapping by the expansion joints on the Trinity river bridge, counting out the staccato rhythm of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. The needle silhouetted in the green glow from the dashboard lights was pegged on 100 and she was the picture of calm, except for the mantra of incomprehensible babble under her breath, punctuated at intervals by a ‘sweet Jesus’ or ‘ our heavenly father’ and then just a steady stream of ‘please Jesus, please Jesus, please Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, please. Please, please….” We must have passed where it happened, but we were moving too fast and under the cover of country darkness the torn up shoulder and snapped off mile marker passed by unseen. It would never have been thought of at all, except that six months later she would receive a bill from the Texas Highway Department for $500 for one mile marker, in fact it was mile 49, though that was not mentioned in the bill. The Caddy covered the 180 or so miles from H-town to Palestine in a record 2 hours and 15 minutes, pulling into the parking lot of Memorial Mother FrancesHospital at just after 11pm Wednesday, September 27th 1989. I got out of the passenger’s side in slow motion, but she all but burst from her seat and sprinted across the parking lot to the ER entrance’, barely in control. The entire night, I sat in an eerie silence, immersed in an inner calm and listening to her oddly ordinary banter with truckers, interrupting long silences, or streams of holy tongues. “Please Jesus, please Jesus, please Jesus. Hey, Lobo! What’s your twenty? Any bears taking pictures? Sweet Jesus, please sweet Jesus, keep him safe. I plead the blood that he’s alright!” 3 I remember nothing. Nothing but the expanse of the sky. Nothing but that blue surrender. Nothing but a hope to die and be done with my fear and the daily defeat of recollection. I remember her dark bangs, hanging in her fuck me eyes. I remember my fingers pressed into her surrender and I remember nothing. She was his bastard second child. She was an embodiment of every betrayal. She was willful and wild and I remember watching as he kicked the shit out of her, right in the living room floor. She was his daily reminder that he wasn’t loved, and he’d be damned if he didn’t return the favor. I remember nothing, although I’d like to recall that I tried to save her. I remember nothing, although if asked I’d lie, and say I tried. I remember nothing, nothing but the expanse of my failure, nothing but that I loved her, nothing but that she was a child and so was I. When I was told that he had died in a thunderstorm, discovered lying in an open field under the expanse of the sky. I imagined his shocked look and his bulk landing, maybe rolling and ending facing the deluge with open eyes, bearing witness to all of the pain he brought into the world and like forced tears those fat raindrops filling up and spilling forth all night. Un-witnessed; the endless drama of Atlas chasing the sisters across the storm filled sky. Of her, I am told nothing, but I remember more. I wonder what she remembers in those moments peculiar to middle-age, where one finds a random reverie broken by a distant desire. Am I fond or foe or worst still, not ever recalled to mind? Does she lament my clumsy folly, wrapped tight by her contempt, or maybe she favors us with that same beatific smile, when, or rather if, my re-membered visage comes to mind? I remember nothing but I think of her all the time. 4 I stood and watched a scissortail flycatcher gliding on the updrafts, high above an East Texas horizon. Sweaty with the chaff from the hay field, and nursing a dull ache deep in the small of my back, from a day of tossing bales. Egrets stalked the fields, their oddly reptilian movements an eerie counterpoint to their sudden lunging strikes. Flycatchers silhouetted black against the vermillion and golden sky and cricket-catchers ghostly white, silhouetted against the bruised brown earth, as dusk settled down, to call it a night. The men called to me, but lost in my own reverie I frowned and traced the distant figure eights of the flycatchers and then closing my eyes traced an afterimage eight around and around the backs of my lids; an infinity sign slowly floating away from my focus then fading the moment I sensed the sun sliding down, to darkness, round. "Not so the wicked! They are like chaff that the wind blows away". And at first the stirring of a breeze. A welcome relief, but then shifting round and blowing full in my face, I felt the wind lifting the bits of field straw from my worn thin denim shirt and I opened my eyes and watched the stray bits of chaff lifted by the wind and blown away. And with them seemed to follow my ambitions for the day, and as Sol slipped down I followed suit, running with a final burst to catch the truck, and flopping down on the open tailgate with a groan. Work-tired men always belong, and find peace in a fraternity of sweat, and strain, and the pleasure of the limits of the body stretched towards the good works of the day. 10 acres shorn, and dried. Then raked and baled and stacked today. 800 plus bales of coastal stacked in a neat grid in the old barn, plus this final half load, of 50 odd. What a day. 5 What a day to remember. He became enraged over some silly-serious truculence she wore daily as a protection. He heaved himself up from the couch catching her under the chin with his outstretched forearm, snapping her head back. She went down landing hard and bursting thousands of tiny capillaries that would soon blossom into a fierce bruise across her left hip. He was on her, his face bloated by his own blood, swollen an equally fierce red, 160 over 100 and rising and the kicks swung out in quick staccato succession – along the calf and thighs, a well aimed rhythm from his 2 step-in’ roach stompin’ calf-skinned boots. Later she had a hard time tellin’ the dirty scuffs from the bruises. She laughed at this, counting each scuff mark as she wiped them away. I failed to see the humor. The bruises faded and so, to, the memories, but I still remember nothing of that ill-humored day. It has receded into the ambiguity of a field of dirty bruises, all total 14 as if to mark her age. 6 I have too many memories of hospital waiting rooms, all a blur of institution pastels, vended meals, and stacks of magazines. He was in surgery. The force of the flipping truck had ejected his body through the rear window, separating his shoulder and folding his left leg forward into his chest. While they were working on him, we waited and at some point I slept and had a long dream. I dreamt of a pasture of immense green, the wind drafting and drifting long sinuous sine waves through waist high coastal hay; shimmering wet and all a glimmer with the micro droplets of early morning dew. A horse lay exhausted, lacerated by a tangle of barbed wire. Dark pools glistened black around her heaving form and the silence was punctuated by deep rattling snorts. Each expulsion sprayed plumes of blood, forming a fallout pattern in an arc around her wildly flared nostrils, mirroring the wild fears chasing through her bulging eyes. |
7
I awoke, with my arms around her, shaking in rhythm with her sobs and sighs. Battered and bruised and maybe forever angry, but she would survive. 8 I remember searching the scene, and collecting bits of things scattered in a quarter mile trail, strewn as the truck and trailer skidded off the soft shoulder and then jack-knifed and flipped …best guess, half a dozen times. I walked that quarter mile of shoulder, celebrating and lamenting the debris and now I turn them over as if they all belong to me. Tracing the folly of memory and of course to search for any useful thing. Some must be artifacts and some debris, but each for the moment I take into me. Broken glass belongs and felt hat familiar known, and surely this piece of a fender and surely this twisted bit of chrome. But these bottles are too worn to be anything but pre-debris, and as surely these scraps of moldy fashion-zines. I found a crumpled map, and the ruin of his good felt hat. A little further were the broken shards of a fifth of Jack and glittering in the sun it was easy to make out a half dozen rounds of .45 shells. She found an end to all the best of times. 9 Edith turned the chicken, sputtering and spattering in that ole’ cast iron, and there was collards made with bacon, and lumpy mashed potatoes with silky smooth milk-gravy. Her Mamma always told her, “No, lumps in the gravy; first, no lumps in the rue.” Thick slices of beefeater tomatoes stacked on a saucer near his plate, the biscuits smelt ready and it was getting’ on near noon. A creature of habit, for 52 years she put it on the table at 11:45 and they said grace at noon. She glanced at the clock, as she stirred sugar into the tea. He wasn’t the first man to die in that grass, that coastal and clover that rolled and writhed with the wind, blooming a prescient blood red in spring, covering that entire hill. A pair of men, one lying prone and the other supine on opposite sides of a decade, on opposite sides of that hay-field, found by a pair of women, who where mother and daughter, who each loved her respective man and who they loved back in the months before 1980 and then 1989. She was drawn down the driveway and over the cattle-guard. She slipped on wet persimmons that littered the ground round the back pasture gate and caught herself on the fencepost to keep from going down. The sickly-sweet smell of the fruit wafted on a dry breeze that blew the sugar-sand in swirls that stung her eyes. Wasps and butterflies flew under the canopy of the persimmon tree, feeding at the split fruit, a translucent orange on the tree and marked a bruised brown, lying in piles on the ground. Pulled by gravity into the left rut of the road, half filling that tire worn void with rotting fruit. The stench was overpowering, almost overwhelming and mixed with another more primal smell that she wasn’t even aware of but that she recognized all the same, her senses stoked hyper by the adrenaline coursing through her veins. She pulled at the baling wire that closed the gate and in her urgency cut her hand. Every detail stood out, hyper-real. She watched a wasp buzz by in a long arch over her right shoulder, the buzzzzzing loud in her ear, then arcing around her head to catch momentarily in her wind blown hair, in a split second of slow motion the tiny creature righted itself by some unseen internal mechanism and flew on to disappear in the swarming canopy of the tree. Then she was through, leaving the gate slowly swinging in its own arc to bang against the fence, untended and unseen; she proceeded down the pasture road, two worn down tire tracks, deep where they passed the gate. She wasn’t one to find fear in every absent moment, but by her own unseen internal mechanism she just knew that it was more than simple broken routine. She found him lying on his face just inside the gate to the woods. He had spent the morning clearing fencerow. The back of the old Dodge truck was piled high with the evidence of his labor, and his Poulan lay next to a bottle of 2-N-1 oil on the tailgate. He had fallen hard on his face, breaking his glasses and knocking his hat from his head. Out of habit she bent down and picked up the straw fedora, absently brushing it off on her hip, only to let it drop again as she started towards his fallen form. “So this was it.”, she thought, her mind reeling out as if swinging round on the end of an uncoiling string. Her thoughts racing around one another in a cyclical frenzy of recollection and regret dispersed among flashes of the most ordinary of things. “Oh, God! We’ll have to get him new glasses.” she thought. With an effort that she didn’t even recall in the moment she managed to turn his bulk; confused and her mind aflutter she stared for long moments at his transformed face. “What….were those, marks? Bruises?” her being screamed, as she traced her aged fingers across the settled stain in the flesh of his cheeks; a death mark. Why hadn’t she seen it before? Holding his bulk against her hip she smoothed his hair back against the contours of his head and looked for evidence of this ancient mark in the pattern of memories recalled to mind and then racing on. Of course it was his heart, considering that particular organ’s history of betrayal and now another attack. 10 After months of grueling physical therapy he would recover, marked by a limp. It seemed to me, business as usual. 11 She awoke with a start, her hand encountering only empty space instead of his comforting bulk in the bed beside her. It was 2am and it sounded as though the storm had passed ….but he hadn’t returned to bed? Struggling through a fog of sleep, she shouldered on her robe and fished her slippers from under the edge of the bed. This house, where she was born was unusually cold and quiet. It occurred to her that maybe he couldn’t sleep, it happened often enough since his accident. Most days he had some pain from the pins in his leg, but especially when it was damp and cold. Maybe he was in the kitchen, or on the screened porch, reading. They were reasonable assumptions. Instead, he was lying in the field behind the house, his clothes soaked through and his heart silent. He had gone out to stable the Bay and her week old colt. Everyone’s best guess was lightening, though his body was mysteriously unscathed, except for a quarter-sized burn on one ankle. In the following days, it was often repeated that this was where the bolt exited to discharge into the earth, stopping his heart along the way. Maybe it fluttered in his chest like a fallen bird. I wonder what he thought as he fell, toppling over backwards, his fixed gaze arcing across the Milky Way spread out before him in the night sky. He had hours to contemplate the Pleiades, Electra and her sisters pursued across the heavens only to end as the blush stained eastern sky announced that Sol was on the rise. She found him lying prone, near the sucker-rod fence that separated the fields and though it only occurred to her years later, she knew exactly what her Mother had felt, from the shock of discovery and the fear and regret, down to the remorse for the necessity of leaving him alone while she went for help. She stood for long moments watching his vacant face, held in stasis by the horror of leaving him alone. It was a demarcation, as she turned from his vacant form and walked to the house, to the kitchen, to the phone. “911 state your emergency.” the disembodied voice asked from down the line, to which she answered, “I’m alone.” 12 My grandmother, who I called Nanny, was also born on that hill, though it was in the old house, now marked by a pile of hearth bricks and a cement-capped dry well. The aquifer was deep and I remember dropping black walnuts down that dark hole, counting off the Mississippi’s and listening for a thud deep below. Cousins had it that the bottom was dry and 9 Mississippi’s deep. Nanny didn’t wanna, (really, who would,) but she wasn’t beyond the kindness of drowning those mewling mouths before they could starve or suck that ole’ mama down to bones. The mewing became quite a wailing in that panic-full sack, right up till… well, it dropped through that void. Yep, every one of those long Mississippi’s till, maybe a splash. Deep down, that frenzied cacophony wail, which had always provided before, failing now and failing good. Better that it was dry and hard ground to break bones, or if there was water that it was deep enough to drown all those mewling mouths. Anything else she couldn’t think about, nor would she think about all those lean years. Walter told her that feeding them wasn’t any kindness, but turning them away was a kindness she never seemed to learn. So she turned her hand to the duty of death, and prayed over all the rest. May they rest long and hopefully soon. Now she was alone, Walter and Pet and Myra long gone. Hiram, her brother she knew had died of a tumor. And he was a doctor, too. But she also knew that he sometimes visited and they sat out in the sun, especially near a birthday of which she had counted 71. 72 years she had lived on this plot (including the womb), the last 60 in the ‘new’ house on the hill, where she had tended flowers and farm animals and family, all with an earnest equality. It was laid out around a central hall that was used as a living room; with 2 bedrooms and a bathroom on the east and 2 bedrooms and a kitchen along the western side. Wide porches stretched the length of the front and back of the house and there was an asphalt circular drive flanked by ancient black walnut trees out along FM 321. After Pa-Paw passed and was buried down at Holly Springs, Mom brought Dee-Dee up to the farm on one of her weekend visits. As a member of that silent generation, Nanny loved animals in equal measure but the more useful the better and dogs strictly belonged in the yard. Though their companionship began with an adamant “Doris-Christine, I’m not having that dog in my house!” they inevitably settled into an easy peace and in the end they were an inseparable couple. Nanny smiling that crooked smile and Dee-Dee sitting curled against her lap, not only in the house, but in the bed, ta-boot. She dropped the mail and ran back towards the crumpled white form lying in the gravel out by 321. Her mind reeled back in an arch, she was calm as the truck approached, barely noticed in her peripheral vision. With mild shock she realized that it was going to pass uncomfortably close, followed by the panicked realization that Dee-Dee wasn’t in sight, and then the shock as the driver swerved onto the shoulder, surely with intent to kill. Why, she wailed, holding the twitching broken form against her abdomen, till, the legs subsided kicking and with complete finality, drained, she lay still. She collapsed back, clutching this last comfort to her bereft, black hole of a breast and spun round her event horizon, all her pain a dark smear. She might continue, but all life stopped this year; this terrible year of turning earth and erecting stones. 13 I was told of Dee Dee’s death second hand. But I believe that my father was that man. I see his State issued truck cresting the hill, which wouldn’t be unusual – Hell; he lived over in Tennessee Colony, just after 287 crosses FM 321. Maybe he was on his way home from an errand in Palestine, or traveling between prisons, on call. Maybe, he had no good reason to be passing by at all, except for an interior draw. A draw that couldn’t resist looking back on his window of normalcy, as represented by the image of that orderly little farm. I suspect he drove by everyday, maybe with practical business paired with the ever present emotional business of deep damaging regret. I can see it clearly, as the Ford crests the hill; Jack has seen her before with that scraggly white familiar at her heels. Fuck, hadn’t he rescued her and nursed her malnourished form? He is a man built of whims. He doesn’t know himself well enough to even acknowledge what he intends, but his sub-mind recognizes the wait is gone. Mad blood rises in a warm wave up his neck, across his face and behind his eyes. He’ll swear he was surprised, and consciously he was, relying on his innocence surmised. Innocence, he so clearly knows nothing of. She never saw or heard or knew that he rolled to a stop. Looking in the mirror he was moved, as she stared down at that fragile broken form, her gesture pulled down into devastation as her knees came unhinged. Hadn’t he called her mom for awhile, hadn’t she always taken his side? And with the jerk of the wheel, devastation – “why?” he couldn’t say. He even found his hand on the handle to the door and wondered if she could be reconciled. She was squeezing the last bit of life from that scraggly terrier form, squeezing it into her. On her knees, wrapped in her apron, he watched the reflection in the mirror spasm and twitch and then lay still. Still he didn’t release the break, for long moments. That old woman kneeling on the shoulder of 321 he loved, in his way and her daughter as well, but more than that he couldn’t say. And he cried too, but nothing could have stopped him and easing off the pedal, the truck rolled away. Linger on, pale blue eyes. Life’s sortin’ through, All your petty alibis. Lou may have known you, And oh, how time flies, But, linger on, pale blue eyes. |