The clack of hammers marked their arrival. Four homey wagons and three covered. A host of mules, horses, and one unruly goat. Their saws huffed away, their voices called the rise, and, in a fortnight, the stage was raised. No one in the town had a fucking clue what was going on. These people and their wagons had just showed up from the road. The guy who would normally ask for the well-mannered plain folk was away on sabbatical. So everyone in the town just sort of stared and went on with their business.
The travelers, watching these people ignore them, asked one another if it was real.
“Fucking incredible,” one said.
“Don’t say a word to them.”
The tension between the travelers and the townsfolk reached a fever pitch three nights later, when the one unruly goat broke free of her tie and went to town at the local grocer. The loss of their produce was generally believed by the townsfolk to be an unutterable sin. Jaws were dropped. Indignant gasps of air were gathered. Naturally, a mob was formed, torches were lit, and the demonic goat was paraded back to the newly-raised stage.
The structure loomed tall in the cloudy night, painted only in the flickering fire of the angry mob. Now—now these polite townspeople were ready to talk. They had found their voice in the wreckage of a local business.
“Hey!” a particularly articulate villager cried out.
Nothing.
Not a curtain moved.
“Perhaps, they’re asleep,” the mailman said, “we could storm back here tomorrow..”
“Hey!” the same one said again, “we got your filthy goat!”
Their breaths hung on the silence.
But then a flash of light made the mob flinch. Sparks flung out into the air with the smell of sulphur. The fading stars fell slowly like grasping fingers, then, in an instant, the stage lit up. The curtains drew back. The travelers were there, masked and menacing. They’d shown up for the fight, the showdown, the big battle.
Some wore flowing robes, and some wore armor; a woman who wore pants drew the townsfolk’s eyes as she strutted across the stage. What followed was a drawing of betrayal, of bloodlust and love lost, of brother slay brother, and no person was safe. The travelers threw all the tension of the past week, all the menacing glares and offended glances, the unsaid curses, and the curious looks of want into their performance. They drew on their lives, of the loneliness under the stars on the road, of cold water buckets and cooking fires. Strings were drawn and pipes produced. The women sang to the townsfolk where they sat in the grass, or stood, or drooped, lost in awe. The women’s voices held the magic of the far woods, of lands forgotten two generations ago, but remembered albeit faintly in the far recesses of the villagers’ ancestral minds. Those womens’ voices called to the townsfolk, presented them to the stage on a platter, and then the men set in, all at once, together. The men sang of the wind. The instruments fell away.
Later the travelers would smile and nod at the memory of that performance, and then each would fall silent and wonder alone, looking for the answer in the belly of their campfire. Those kind of victories never lasted long, only a flash. Only a moment.
Most of the townsfolk forgot the excitement a few weeks later, when the stage was looking raggedy and out of place. Someone should tear it down, one said. It’s a bit of an eye-sore, another agreed. But there were a couple of souls amongst the village, the mailman among them, who remembered that night fondly and dreamed. Those few souls painted the stage and dared to sing. And they hoped the people and their wagons might come back again.
She whispered to me from the bunk above, her eyes shining, reflecting the little bits of moonlight that managed to get in through the decrepit shutters. I held my breath. The empty sound of night flowed in through the missing window across the room, a rectangle of darkness that hovered there and, on normal nights, drew my eyes whenever a twig snapped, or an owl broke its silence.
But tonight was not normal. I realized my breath hadn’t returned since our eyes met. And she was still looking at me—watching me.
I blinked, and turned away, before I looked back.
She lay on her stomach with her head on her hands, her hair tossed about. I found a breath, if only to stay alive another moment. My heart beat frantically, thrumming the inside of my chest, and it was only through great concentration did I manage to move slowly. I laid my back against a stud in the exposed wall, taking my seat beside her bunk, and glanced around. The others were still snoring in their bunks.
Her voice came first. It was a raspy thing, small. It brought me relief that she wasn’t going to disappear just yet.
She told me about her favorite place to get coffee, and how there was good walking near there. She spoke to me as though we were sitting in a diner booth together, only she whispered, and the effect of us huddled there, facing the moonlit shutters and whispering to one another drew to mind two prisoners conspiring in dreams. I watched her from the corner of my eye. Of course, she was beautiful. She was all eyes and sadness, and I could see she carried something heavy, like someone who had been sad a long time. I was scared to get too close, to disturb her. I only wished for her to talk to me a little longer before the sun came up.
“Is it safe here?” she asked me.
I told her it was well-known that this old house was haunted.
“But we have dogs,” I told her, “you’re welcome to them, if you want to walk around a bit.”
She thanked me, but gestured at the others where they snored on their bunks.
“They’re good eggs,” I said.
She nodded, but I could feel her skepticism, and the dogs never crossed the threshold at the entrance of the room, and she was gone with the light.
They said a kid couldn’t fly the Millennium Falcon. That he’d crash, that it was actually part of the ride.
“It’s programmed,” the worker said as he shrugged.
The kid’s dad spat at the worker’s feet. If, for nothing else, breaking character.
“Tyler!” the little son’s mother scolded.
“Maybe I shouldn’t be the pilot,” the little lad said, looking down at the floor.
“Little lad,” the kid’s dad uncharacteristically called his son, “I need you to know something,” and he kneeled and got uncomfortably close to his son’s face.
The little son winced as the wily beard brushed the tip of his nose.
“That guy back there in the Millennium Falcon lounge,” he said, gesturing over his shoulder, where the worker watched them well within earshot, “He’s a no-good spy for the Empire.”
The little son looked up. He glared at the worker, who shrugged once more.
“That’s right,” the father said, “he’s a no-good son of a bitch.”
“Tyler!” the little son’s mother scolded.
So the father nodded, and the little son nodded back.
And the kid was good. He swerved around the asteroids, dodged the falling catwalk, got them the hell out of Dodge. When they inevitably crashed in the midst of their doomed mission, his father yelled “Get us out of here!” from his engineering seat. They escaped. And the kid was good. He could fly.
They sat at their breakfast table.
“Are they all made up?”
“What?”
“Stories and movies and the books.”
“Yeah. They’re all made up, but they’re true.”
I remember there was one other guy out there, that it felt weird because he was having some moment there, by himself, but you and I kept walking towards the edge, and he fell off the radar, must’ve turned and left. It was only us out there then. It was the second time our car had broken down that evening. Same old transmission problem we had in the mountains near the Wilson. Now that the heat was dying down, I wasn’t so pissy about it, and we’d had a nice dinner in a place that wasn’t crowded, and maybe it was all better for me to get the grumpiness out of the way so I could settle down and be with you. We stood there on the edge of the Bay Area where our world was spinning away from the Sun and looked out over the hills and the city there and the running highway with its never-ending flow of vehicles. We didn’t say much. I don’t usually in those times. But you didn’t this time either.
You took this picture of our feet, of our shoes. We’ve always talked a lot before we buy a new pair of shoes. We have to justify it to each other. It’s an ask of personality, of change.
We walked a little further, slowly now, there was still so much to see—that’s the nature of grand vistas I guess. And I felt a little flip in my stomach to be there with you. Considering it now, I wonder what our younger selves would’ve thought if they could have seen us then and known all our circumstances. How unfulfilled some dreams are, while others so realized—so good! But then, in the moment, I felt more akin to someone looking back.
My world was checkered film and then the picture started. Of course, there was the grand light—the sunlight—painting you before me. Warm tones. Yellows, oranges, the browns of the rolling hills, our homeland. Strands of your hair blew in and out of your face. You had that look. I love to see it on you. You smiled at the world, at doing something, at being. It’s some of your magic, your spirit, and arguably one of my favorite things I’ve ever seen ever.
You’ve always made me do things like this and go out and see. You showed me a whole city. Held my hand because you knew, even though I wouldn’t admit it, that I was scared, uncomfortable at plunging into it all. The new, I guess.
So I watched you smile, sunlight warm on your cheeks, wind lifting your hair. Watched you lost in the sight of the whole world. I knew I’d witnessed a memory. I watched you all the more maybe because I can’t help thinking that it would be gone. Believe me, I want to forget that part. You know we both do. That bit of sad brings quite a bit of joy to it. Now it’s my path into that memory, the dream of you standing there on the clifftop, looking down on all the bustle, on the heartland of both our dreams. And the film rolls on, to you and I walking through downtown Berkeley. To the wide bike lanes and strange parking lots, to the tennis courts and the couple having a breakdown in the middle of the street. To all the young people! “Jesus,” we said, “what are they doing out here!” We posed the question. Again and again. It was fun for us. We were aliens walking those brick paths, eyes wide at all the lives around us.
We held hands. We sat close. You were wonderful.