Landscapes

It was a Monday. A minute among the few of his three hour break between shifts. The kitchen was a mess this morning, and the rush had left him empty. He left his hands in his pockets as he walked. 

First came the wagon, tilting with the ruts in the trail. The whole of it shimmered and dissipated and was there again. He blinked to confirm what he was seeing, but as they got closer they weren’t solid per se, but they were no longer a broken transmission. His heart climbed into his throat, or maybe it was his stomach. There was an overwhelming urge to hurl. He’d always had guts and a stubborn sense of pride. Maybe that’s all that kept him from vomiting. 

A man drove the wagon and a girl rode behind that man. It was clear that the man saw him and chose to ignore him. But the girl was different. Her eyes blazed wide as she watched him. He thought she was lovely and, but for her translucence and the cold sweat running down his arms, something akin to fancy arose in his chest alongside the sick. But the couple in the wagon passed without words. He caught his breath only to find another shade. At the sight of the shape on the hill, he looked around him for the markers of a highway, maybe a portal. And then he checked his own hands to see if they too were fading away. 

It was a deacon that passed next, wearing the fear of god in his eyes. The man of god was a squirrelly fellow—his eyes darting around as though something weighed heavy on his soul, and the punishment he had pretended to administer for so many years was just around the corner for him. For whatever fear that shadow carried with him, there was still a glint of hard hatred in his eyes. A crinkle in the lips, a sign of distaste. The deacon made the sign of the cross and glared at him one last time before he faded away in a mirage. 

And then came the boy on the horse. He wasn’t a boy exactly. Somewhere near a man. The boy was dirty and smiled from his place in the saddle. There was a gun on his hip. A hat on his head. The hat was folded and crunched but he thought it fit the young man well.

By now, he was used to the order of things, this strange passing. He looked freely at the boy on the horse and smiled, but his stomach turned again when the young cowboy spoke.

“Who-are you?” the boy on the horse asked. 

He stopped. Tried to think of what to say, but found his thinking useless.

“Just a cook,” he said. 

The boy spit, and smiled again. Despite the grime around his eyes, his ears, and his mouth, the boy did not smell. And he liked the boy’s smile. It had no hatred in it, no mockery. It was the smile of someone thrilled in life, someone who’d steal the cookies with you and split them fairly at the rendezvous. And who’d laugh a laugh unfit for polite society no matter where he found himself.

“You got any food?”

He shook his head.

 The boy on the horse stopped smiling as he looked out over the hills. The sun was going down. 

It’d be the dinner rush soon, but he’d forgotten. 

“Where are we?” the boy asked. 

“I-,” it was hard to say, but he didn’t feel like lying, “I don’t think we’re in the same place.”

The boy on his horse looked at him. In a glance he was older, weary; there were lines hidden in that grime on his face. The young man in the hat spurred his horse on. There was blood on the back of his shirt. 

He left his hands in his pockets as he walked back down the hill, down past the houses, over the crosswalk and under the overpass. Though cars roared on their way, he didn’t feel like there were any people there. When the door closed behind him, and the stainless steel  was once again under his eyes, the metal cool against his fingers, he asked himself the question the boy had posed on the hill. 

Josefina arrived. She washed her hands and turned to see him.

“Hey.”

“Hi,” she replied.

“You see me yeah?”

“…yes?”

He nodded.

The work started. The tickets came in. And he floated away in another rush, reacting to the sounds and the calls, the heat of the ovens, the knife in his hands. He forgot it all by closing. Just felt like a dream.

He can still remember what the nurse looked like. His father said that she was pretty, and that she was being nice to him, so it wasn’t so bad after all. 

He remembered the room too. A chemical smell and the lights on the ceiling shining their reflections on the floor. All the while, his dad kept saying to him, “Don’t forget.” 

“Don’t forget now.”

And then on that last day when his dad gave him a present—fancy that—Dad was the one dying and he got a present out of it. Even better when he pulled that fresh bill out of the bag. Now that was a smell. Beat the hell out of a hospital trying to stay clean. He looked up from the ball cap to see his daddy’s grin.

“Ah,” he said, “ain’t so bad now is it?”

His dad died the next morning, and he was supposed to be at school. He wanted to run away, run for the hills, for the sea—wherever—but whenever he gave that any thought, he heard his father’s words, “don’t forget now.”

With those words, his dad was back and they were walking up the hills and seeing the houses, or holding hands in the shadows of the giants, with all the busy folk wearing coats and ties and looking very serious.

“There’s magic here,” he would say, “don’t forget now.”

When his dad would say that, he felt the magic in the very ground and in the air around them. He felt a witness to majesty then. 

And even when his cousins moved out to the valley, he and his mom stayed on. He remembered the words. Even when his mom lost her way, and the hills were singing sweet lullabies drawing him from the streets that seemed so dirty now, he remembered the words. Even when life seemed to crash and burn and nothing seemed to work out at all. Three times, he’d bought the ticket.

Once for a bus, and he’d been there in the dark of early morning, waiting to board. He heard his father’s words and turned home.

Another for the train. In the crowded breath of a station on a warm afternoon, he stepped backwards from the crowd and disappeared in the city.

The third was the hardest. It was spur the moment. He stood on the pier in tears. He boarded the ferry and looked back at the city in long rays of the evening light. It was his favorite way to see the city. He cried quietly as the ferry pulled away, and he felt himself losing everything that he was. When it came time to get off, he didn’t. 

He was old now. Walked with a limp. But he wore the same hat. Walked in the shadow of giants to go to work, smiling now as he remembered his father’s words. He was the only one left here now. He had some kin somewhere in the valley but he liked it here. This city was only place where felt like the concrete was alive, as if the whole place might heave up and wash into the sea, and all the folks on the streets would go on as though it were just part of the plan. He was the only one left here now. He had some kin somewhere in the valley but he liked it here. Things were a little dark now, but he still believed. 

Now when the sea called, or the hills beckoned, he waved them off and reminded them he couldn’t walk well anymore anyways. And now when that fear crept up in him, when he wondered whether his whole life of waking days might’ve been wasted here and harder here for the troubles he’d seen and lived through, he squeezed the hat that rested on his nightstand and remembered his father’s words. 

The solar visor shielded them from most of the light, but the old star was brilliant—he smiled that he still had to shield his eyes. The crew took note of the flares they saw leaping and arching from their place on the deck. He watched it all with the measured despair of someone battling a long disease. There was nothing to do but fold his hands behind his back. His smile fell away.

With the Sun behind them, the tremors that cracked in his mind settled, and the crumbling buildings there clung on to their foundations for another flight—for one last trip. And everything but the stars around them played out in hues of violet as they passed Mercury. Then they saw it: 

He felt the collective hush as the entire crew held their breath. Many, he knew, had only stories of this place. It was harrowed in tales of horror and beauty. There were whispers of atrocities and tales of heroes told across the galaxy. What none of those tales included, he felt, were the days. The nights. They missed what it was like to breath there, to stand and walk and look around. The ship pulled closer to the little planet. No one made a sound, but he saw each of them shift in their seats or on their feet, unconsciously reaching out to it. 

Precious little marble, he thought. It was a wording, and a way of looking at things like planets and stars far too big for any human to ever grasp that he had held on to ever since he was a child pressing his face against the portholes of different star ships. The bald head of his first mate half-turned to address the landing conditions. 

They glided into the atmosphere during sunset. 

“Mike,” he said, “if you’ll indulge me.”

“Aye Captain.”

He and the first mate donned wet suits. Ancient designs. There were suits now that could push off the stinging cold, but the captain was not looking for that comfort today, and he was thankful his first mate, his old friend, was of like mind. They pulled the surfboards down from the walls of their cabins. Ran the beach in bare feet, exhaling in short little bursts of air that required no tanks, no pressurizations. They paddled out into the rolling surf.

There were other seas on other planets—closer, warmer—in violets and greens, and one even in red. But the Captain wanted one more here. 

They surfed until the sun was low. There were still sea birds above the beach, and a harbor seal that watched them, its black eyes blinking at them from here it hid in the sea. The captain sat on his board, with his legs in the water and watched them, and a question haunted him: where will they go?

He and Mike walked the beach toward the river, drinking in the hues of green as the winds and the waves played to their ears. He watched his breath. He wanted to slow down. He wanted to hang on to this, to make it last a little longer. He could feel the evening slipping away. He stopped, and out of reflex, Mike stopped beside him without a word.

“You know,” he said, and was shocked at the cracking of his voice. Emotion did not usually find its way through his throat. But as he watched the rays of light play over the cliffs, there was no helping it. 

To his credit, his first mate didn’t flinch.

“Yes captain?”

“Part of me wants to stay.”

“Could awhile, sir.”

The Captain nodded, but staying a day or two and jetting off wasn’t what he had in mind. In a romantic dream, he walked the surface of the earth in its dying days until the end. What he wouldn’t say aloud, was that he wanted to go with it. Walk until his feet bled, wanted to cross every square inch of desert and mountain. Wanted to swim in redwoods and salt and rain. Wanted to gather the whole thing up in his arms as the darkness fell. Wanted to smell every morning until the last morning—hold on to every sensory impulse until the last sunset. In his dream, he was the last apostle to the mother of them all. 

But he would fly off and leave her tonight, so he sat in the sand until the stars appeared above him, before he rose and returned to his ship. 

Beyond the doors of the North Harbor Trading Company, the world sat on shelves. Bottles of elixirs, two for every affliction, reflected light on the far walls. Squat your love or embolden it. Sip actual liquid courage. Dot your wrists with pheromones of the elusive midnight jaguar and watch your luck turn. There were walking sticks by the door that warded off thieves, and bits of garland you could tie to your belt or wear on your hat that matched the weather to your mood. And there was a girl at the desk whose eyes gave you hope, but she was the only thing you couldn’t take home. Beyond a curtain was another room, cast in shadows. Inside, lanterns threw yellow light on dull blades. The weapons were much like everything else in that store. They looked normal. Simple wooden handles, and dull metals, yet here were world cleavers. Usurper knives that toppled emperors. Saber blades for slaying generals. There were poisons and pains and shirts and axes that toppled giants. Everything carried destiny. Everything warned of it.

Folks and Flowers

She held him. Let him nestle into her shoulder to fight off the cold. The world was all wind and falls and roaring space. He dared to peek, but clung tight. And, in the span of an evening walk, she grew into his memories. Ten, twenty years could go by without them ever seeing each other, but she’d always be the one who cradled him on that frigid evening—that she was where he hid from the biting winds. He would grow, and might never dare to tell her the truth, for memories of the heart are saved and guarded. But she was there, in flashes of brilliance, bits of light at the back of his mind. 

Twenty years did pass. She and the rest of them grew old. The walk that night blended into a thousand others. The little boy was grown. He could no longer put it to words. He was too old now himself. It was just a feeling, but where ever he saw her, there were flashes of gold and wind-tossed grain. 

He was expected to cut the flowers down, but they were something new to him. He didn’t want to, and once again the pull of a manly duty collided with the nature in himself.

Seemed to his mind that decades of drunken rambling filled his days up to that point. He had never seen flowers. Never looked. He saw fields and trees, and he liked them well enough. It wasn’t until there was no more green that he finally began to open his eyes. Night after night of swabbing floors and scrubbing toilets. Sharing dreams and poetry with that outlaw of the cleaver class, laughter with the aging gangster. Earnest folk behind counters. 

After the mopping, his heart roared out at night. For this, he knew the trees by moonlight. Longing drove his legs forward, made him stare upward and stay out late, not to see anyone, but to see everyone. No one in that city was who he was looking for, but still he liked to look. He drank at the bar and listened to their words. He walked the cobblestones in the rain and inhaled their cigarette smoke. And somewhere, in one of those days, he looked down and saw it, so strange and small and—just right. It was the first flower he had ever seen. It grew in the sidewalk on his path to work. 

Years later, and hours north, flowers were everywhere. Rain and sun abounded. The people were different, but no less lovely for their ways. The mountains were the same. He found thousands of little white flowers in the forests up north, stood there in the quiet just breathing, wanting to know something about them, wanting to know about the world. Could he ask a tree? He beat his head against the walls at night trying to find some answer to it all. To the flowers and the trees and the waves that crashed against those cliffs. He thought that if he could find the answer, he might understand all those people he knew for so many years. All of it was pointing to somewhere or something or some feeling inside himself.

He didn’t cut the flowers. 

To see their bodies strong was enough. He could keep going, stay as strong as he might, if only to see their bodies strong. Their legs smashed through that sand, tore through the green river. They laughed and fell and ran on, in a way that he could only reminisce. There was pain in watching them. It was a pretty pain—beautiful, joyous. 

He had spent so long watching bodies. Big bastard on the left, tall eight with long arms on the back of the scrum. The lightning legs of that winger. Look at the way he’s walking; look at the way she is. Bodies and movement spoke a thousand words a minute to him, and now he saw them, thin and muscled, on their way to maybe finding what he had: happiness in the green waters, freedom in the barefooted trails, running until lungs no longer mattered and hitting with the abandon of someone lost at play. 

To see them now brought a thousand sunsets to his eye. Brought back old friends and brothers and sisters. Brought back fields that were bulldozed now. It brought his old legs back, and his old heart too, and the fear that panged that heart. To grin as they played was not enough. He ran too—had to, and splashed in that water with them, and lost himself as much as he could in the awe of their hearts in that sunlight. 

He takes Legos out of my hands,

not to snatch,

but because ideas strike hot.

He looks out over the world;

smiles into the wind—as though he recognizes the hills of this place.

He nods his head and says so.

They are old friends. 

I believe him, and wonder who he is.

With kids raising kids, maybe I’ll know by the end.

She hated cold water, but on their first date she dove into the sea with him. The waters were wild, and the wind threw sand at them, and still she laughed before going headfirst into the brine. She kissed him behind a rock. There was sun and salt on her skin.

“You cannot go,” he said.

She was the pragmatic one. Would always be. She made the breakfast they ate. She made better coffee too, even when the beans were the same. Food became their temple. Mountain rivers, their paradise. 

A little blue car. A little red one. Stuck in a sprawling metropolis. Stopped in a mountain pass beside a well. A tiny apartment. A bigger one.

“You cannot go.”

He had not said it for many years, but he still thought it. Thought it in the morning when she woke him up. Thought it well into the nights when she lay asleep. 

There is a song of our hearts that no one has ever played. Pieces come close, but no song has ever rang true of us. 

It’s a tune I search for, 

some melancholic tribe of strings, 

some happy folk for the road. 

I can almost sing it when I sit across from you and the coffee is good. 

Another One

 

He was surer of himself here, for whatever reason. Maybe because he had tucked in his socks. Whether it was dream or farce, he felt akin to the trees here, and safe in the shelter of their valley. Everyone else was visitors. Even the camp host. Even the ranger that lived there. If you asked him, he couldn’t explain it. He could only nod, and keep going. It’s all he wanted to do. It was like a dream that intoxicated you as stepped deeper, like sulphur or something—the closer you got the more intoxicated you got, the less you knew you were getting smashed by this poison. So what was it: dream, love, heightened awareness?  Maybe it was the socks.

 

Treetops were hard for them, but goblins were no problem. 

They slew a mob earlier that day.

In they charged, swords by their shoulders, 

But the hill here was steep, and made of sand. 

They agreed their legs were short—

A little help was not too much to ask for.

And when it came to opening an apple sauce they needed a smidgen of assistance, but before that, they rode dragons over those hills on the horizon. They’d seen the world.

But the next branch up was pretty hard to reach, and they were already so high.

A little help was not too much to ask for.

After they were held up to the branch, they knew exactly what to do:

They charged a locust swarm of evil robots, their teeth flashing alongside their blasters.

They were smiling.

All of it was real.

 

It came on in the hurricane of a leaf blower, my considerate countryman firing the warm gale directly at my face, the twangy two-stroke recalling to me darker lands,  where leaf bits and twigs climb into the folds of my eyelids, making themselves a home there. But maybe this is all more dramatic than what it really was. I know this much:

I ran through a few years just crossing the street in the glow of one orange sunset. I saw them—saw the sun and moon trading circles in a whirly-whirl. Saw the arms of the friendly trees beckon me into their like. Watched their waving limbs as they changed color.

Though I felt those years leach away with all the strength they took from me, I would not stop and watch them go, smiling with tears in my eyes like some fucking movie I’d probably love. I ran on.

As everything slowed, I ran on because that’s what you do. Someone could run up to you on a busy street in a giant city, and they could wear love in their eyes as they grab you by the shoulders and say “listen to me, the time is now, you need to live! You’re going to die!” and you’d shrug them off. Of course I am, you’d say. And you’d walk past them and be dead before you know it. Ten years, fifteen, two weeks. If you got a chance to look back, I wonder what you’d remember—that person’s love, their insanity, a great meal some place after. I look at birds a lot. I look at trees. Sometimes I think I’ll see the people that I loved played out in the dusky light the day I go. Sometimes I think I’ll be smitten with a branch, as long as there’s a little breeze and a little green and a finch to flit from it. I hope the finch is yellow. But there’s nothing to do about it. And so I shrugged off whatever this was. 

I ran on. Sunlight sparkled in the trees that were turning black. Sound moved funny; people moved slow. The shadow of night began at the horizon. Pockets of darkness by the water’s edge. I watched for coyotes. I watched for monsters. I ran on, dreaming my legs and my heart belonged to some legendary horse from some plain where history and pain became spiteful lovers. My bare feet knew the dirt paths of the South. I was Red Cloud and I was Grant. I held sorrow and power and death at the end of my arms. I stood before the buffalo and felt their breath from their nostrils and I suffered through the cold of the winter’s pass. I hunted in the unsettled coastlands of my homeland. I was it all, and I stopped.

Time was back to normal down in the green fields. Blackbirds trilled on the riverweed trees and the dogs walked slowly where they sniffed. And someone that might have seen me would have said that I walked slow too.

 

She comes across the beach, a lone figure of linen flowing in the winds, as though her hair has grown from her shoulders down to her feet. He finds her eyes, dark in that light, for only a moment before he glances down to let her go on before him. When he rises from his stupor, she is still there, meandering alone along the curve of sloping beachside, she and the sands bathed in the light of a crescent moon. Bad luck, he thinks. 

But still, he watches her. 

 She settles and sits, cross-legged, facing him. He feels as though she is watching him from her place on the far side of the world but it is too dark to tell.

If I see those eyes again, he thinks, I’ll be done for. 

But it’s too late. 

He’s walking. He is there now. They are speaking. In an overdose of time, they shoot off for the streets of a town—not the town above them but one farther still. The streets are brick and lamplit and they eat as violins play in the squares below. And everywhere people speak with one another and laugh in good company in the way people did before we all grew so connected. 

She sits across from him. He sees her eyes in the light:

 a bewitching hazel, a new weakness he’ll always carry. 

She eats a strawberry with a smirk and he falls in love with her. They collide, they fall. He sees white sheets, the curve of her back, her eyes again at dinner, the way she walks in town. He sees too where they fall, when he is no longer new and good, when he is his tired self, and he sees her try. Their love dies. 

He tries to find what was real in all of it, and he knows.

Those places don’t exist anymore.

“Have a good night,” he says.

His rowboat rode in on the swells early one morning and fell prey to the rocks. Had anyone been watching, they’d’ve seen him appear amongst the waves—dashed from the spray, born to the cliffside, clinging—but no one was watching. Even the drunks had fallen asleep. So no one saw as he clawed the grasses at the height of the cliff and rose, sopping, to eye the scattered headlights floating up the coastline. 

The string of murders began that night.

Always those who’d gone alone into the forest. Always torn to pieces.

The men took dogs and searched for bear. They searched for wolves. Both had not been seen in that country for a hundred years. But there were sightings of something. 

“Fur,” they whispered, “Black as night.” 

But they were wrong. The fur was brown. Not that it mattered. 

Isabella could not explain what made her go on a walk that night. The sea threw a frigid gale at the town. It rushed in among the buildings and swirled in the alleyways as though it were searching for something. Backlit clouds crowded the moon. Isabella held her coat tight about her neck as she walked down the main street of white houses and store fronts. The normal noises of the bar and the restaurant were drowned out in the wind. Isabella thought she heard a women crying, but it was hard to tell. At the edge of the town, she found the source of the wailing. 

It was a man, half-clothed and crying. Moonlight filtered down upon them through the clouds, through the trees. The man looked at her and Isabella saw at once that he loved her. And as he turned, she knew she would not escape.

Wilson B+W

You pose before you run. You always do.

You glance at me from the corner of your eye. You stick your little fingers straight out. One foot rises to the toes. 

You charge ahead. Straight into lion country. 

Your arms are going; you move them like you’re a super hero. 

Your little shoes squish into the trail.

And here I come, running in my boots after you. 

Your laugh trickles out like music: over the stream, dancing across the leaves, chasing chipmunks through the vines. Your sound is you, the light of you, and it drifts up into the air and jells with the light filtering down through the canopy.

When I catch you, I look up and see them: 

There are colors. Shimmering above us. 

I look down to find you blinking back at me. I can see the trees reflected in your eyes. I can see the clouds, the sunlight. 

Everything alive. Everything in you.

You smile the way you smile when I scold you, and in you I see all the wonder I’ve ever found in all the beautiful places I’ve seen. 

You pose, your little fingers stretching out, and run.

Off into lion country.

And I go after you, 

wondering how I feel, 

how I could ever tell you.



They smoked in bed together and went walking in the middle of the night. They said very little. Neither knew the other that well. In the morning, she told him she had to get ready for work and left.

“Can I see you again?” he asked.

“Sure,” she said.

“Tonight?”

“Not tonight,” she said, kissing him once on the cheek, “I’ll call.”

Safe to say he was sure he would never see her again. He wallowed in it. Made waffles for breakfast and drank dark beer while the batter stuck to the sides of the iron. His roommate came a lurking.

“Uh oh,” she said, “waffles.”

“Grab a plate.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Yeah you do.”

“She doesn’t want to see me tonight.”

“So?”

“Just wanted to.”

He pouted as the little red light on the waffle iron flipped over to green. He finagled the fresh waffle onto a plate with a fork and slid the plate across the counter to her. 

“Thank you pal,” she said, smiling. She tipped the syrup bottle and drizzled the waffle.

“Don’t be so happy.”

“Don’t be so miserable.”

He scooped more batter on.

“Hey,” his roommate said, “I’m going to a show tonight.”

“Who’s playing?”

“The usual.”

“Eh.”

“Cool. You’re going. Starts at nine. Don’t make me late.”

With that, she took her plate and disappeared into her room.

He mulled outside in the line with his roommate and her friends. He’d never heard of the band and the first place he went once he made it through the doors was to the bar. He fetched two beers for himself and finished one before he found his seat. Circles of friends spoke around him, and he was satisfied to stand and watch them all awhile. The space was small, the ceiling low, it made all of those voices hum together and rise around him. Blue and purple lights lit the stage. And then a spotlight fired on stage right and a girl emerged. 

He felt a chill soak over his toes. He glanced down to find spilled beer on his shoe. 

He shook his head, blinked his eyes, and looked back up at the stage.

It was his girl. The girl from last night. The girl he met in the city and fell in love with and who walked under the stars and who broke his heart in the morning. She wore eyeliner and dark lipstick. Her hair was up. She introduced the band and they began to play. And she began to sing. 

A peculiar thing happened to time in that hall. Every person of that pulsing crowd became part of the walls. They were still there, still around him, but they became silent. Even the sound of the instruments grew dull and distant. All were slow. And her voice, the girl’s voice, was more vibration than sound as it grew across the room the way a vine grows, reaching up and out until it touched him on the chest. Maybe he was imagining it, which meant he imagined the lights too, the ones firing off in his chest, flashes of brilliance alighting inside his ribcage. 

He should have closed his mouth, but instead he stood in awe for the first time in his life. Slack-jawed in true amazement. He saw her for what she really was, the hero at the bow of a dragon ship, plunging through violent seas. She lifted the mic stand and he saw her carrying her friends up snowy mountains, those ones from the stories all fraught with peril. He saw her in the quiet times too, singing dirges for funerals and getting everyone through the dark minutes that come with loss.  

And he didn’t know it but he was smiling when her eyes found him, and she smiled back with the grin of a hero.

He was on his way out with the crowd when a hand grabbed his arm. She pulled him forward and kissed him in the same way she had that morning.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

“Some job.”

“You like it?”

“Yea, hell yeah.”

“Cool.”

“So,” he said, “you’re touring?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“Oh, cool.”

“I’ll be back.”

“Yeah, for sure.”

“Really,” she said, punching his arm, “I will.”

Part of him was mad about it. Part of him pictured all the places she would be, the people she might know, but then she kissed him, and those same fires lit up again in his chest. He only thought about how he loved standing next to her. That he loved it when she kissed him. And he stared like a fool into her eyes until she smiled and turned. 

He cut out from the bars early that night and went a’ walking with his eyes upward. He consulted with the stars and felt as happy as he was sad. 

“She’ll come back,” he thought. 


Flames leapt up from the burners and licked the sides of the iron. Soup purred in its pot and greeted their eyes. Bread sliced. Mushrooms bathed in oil changed color. Hands reached out and jostled the treasures over the fire, finely-tuned muscles etching lines in their arms as they worked. Clouds blew on as wine climbed from its bottle and the cool heat of starfire burned above them. Hearts beat and voices resonated. Songs sang. For all they wanted, they forgot. They were happy enough to be a great host. Laughter grew from the table and mixed with the cold of the night air above them, fighting back at the stark empty of space and reaching for communion with the dots of brilliance that burned so far away from them. They took turns looking up at them, the stars, and wondering. 

The night would slip away in their memories. There was smoke over the mountains after all. But there would be more nights. They would keep toasting, all the way to when some of them would pass from this world of skies and ovens and screen doors. Then a withered finger might point to this picture and remember how it felt to be alive and together and young at that table.


From this high up, the motorcycle glides silently along the curve of the road. He can’t make out the shape of her on its back. Can’t read the emblem on the side of her helmet. It roars, he thinks, it must, for she’s going so fast but he can’t hear it. He curses the machine. It’s more of an animal in his mind. An old friend gone rogue. He closes his eyes and he can feel its controls under the curve of his fingers, under the tips of his boots. And he can feel her arms tighten around him too. The fields were empty then, long mounds of dirt with trees at the breaks, and the air was cold. It made for the best sunrises and sunsets with the winter haze gleaming all the way from the horizon to fall across her face. There’s something earned about cold sunrises, he thinks, but he’s stopped in his tracks. He sees her face now as it was then: Her quiet smile under the roar of the engine, the wind tearing at her hair—she buries her nose in his shoulder. He was stupid to look back. It was dangerous. But he had to.

He opens his eyes and the road is empty now, and he hates himself for thinking when he should’ve just watched. He waits for some kind of shift in his mind, some confirmation of his spirit that this is life now, that he’s alone. He thinks that something has to change, but he’s on the hill just as before, and the colors of the world are all still the same. The hike back down to the house is too short. He lingers on the edge of his property, watching his house as though some monster rests inside. When he opens the door, it’s even worse, it’s empty. He considers getting a dog, but the idea only racks him with guilt. His dog, their dog—thee dog—died some years ago. To get another would be an insult to a legend.

He stands in the doorway and breathes. He wonders where she is now. Tries to guess her progress. Wonders if she’s smiling. “She must be,” he thinks, “it’s a beautiful road.”

And he climbs into his house that feels like a cave now and sets a kettle on the stove and lights the burner. He sits in a chair in his quiet house and wonders if he’ll ever leave. It’s only hours before his head grows too loud, his house too full of the end of them. 

He longs for the coast and packs his bag, his heavy coat. He sets his things by the door. He’s scared she’ll come back and he’ll miss her so he leaves a note. There are a thousand words in his head and none of them will do. He settles, and grips his pen:

Gone searching for you where we met. You know the place, hiding from the winds on that wild coast. Behind that rock where you smiled and we kissed. You know the place, where we jumped into the sea and shook warm in the sun. 

He stops. He’s already rambling. He finishes without knowing how. He writes:

I love you.

He sets the pen down and anchors the note on their little table by the door. He takes one last look at the house, at his chair, at the pictures on the walls—her pictures. There is too much reflection here, and he shuts the door. He goes out on the road.