Wanderling❁

red

 

A wind lifts the blanket of colored earth that settled over the bodies. Lifeless, dark corpses cover the ground for miles, and even a hand raised to shield our eyes from the glaring light cannot hide the raw desolation.

Somewhere still, a voice is wailing. A ghost lingers to tell its story. But all is dead, and the battle is won.

And now we begin.

 

the silence I barely heard

 

I didn't realize I'd never heard true silence until I was two blinks and single sigh from death. The room had been so loud and suddenly the sounds started to mute ungracefully, like a chorus in chaos but the singers were being shot in the head, one by one.

When they were sure I would live and sent me on my way again, I was suddenly aware of the constant beeping and humming and grinding and thudding and crashing and screeching and roaring pressing against everything. The air has no space, no room to breathe, so it rushed into my echoing head and within two minutes it was so hard to remember what I heard just moments before - the world about to die, with nothing left in it. 

Someone whose face I cannot recall once gave me a flower, a thing I'd never seen before. He didn't even say why - they didn't tell me why I was dying, either. But I missed that pretty little thing every day, after it faded and crumbled to a fine brown mess that I scattered in the dust and dirt and wind outside. Hard as I concentrated on all the flickering visions fighting the darkness of a usually empty imagination, I couldn't picture in my mind the exact pattern of the folded petals and the exact shade of yellow. But something told me it was something worth missing, so I did. Now I find myself missing the silence with that same sad and barely existing memory of it.

 

a memory of a dream

 

I call as soon as I get home, just like you asked me to. When you answer, I can hear you smiling.

“Hey, how did it go?”

I try to reply, but the sound gets stuck in my throat.

“Hello?”

I sigh. “I’m here.” I shift the phone under my ear, pressed against my shoulder, and stretch both of my arms on the table.

“Don’t move,” you say. “Ten seconds.”

I have my head in my arms when you ease your way through the door. The familiar metallic click of the lock and the soft thud of the door and I wait to hear your shoes come off. But there’s no sound.

You stand right over me and wrap your arms around the huddled mess of my body and all I can breathe in is your earthy, faintly spice-like scent.

Nudging my neck with your nose, you ask, “Can I read you a story?”

I lift my head and look into your brown eyes. I smile back.

 

green suede shoes

 

My left foot slipped off the curb too soon and the back of my shoe grazed hard against the cement. I lifted my foot backwards, awkwardly, to check the damage. Yep, a curved cat-like scratch and a messy streak of velvet gone, rubbed away. Now there's a crooked smile on the back of my shoe. "Damn."

I knew something like a pair of dark green suede flats had to have a short-lived lease on perfection, but I got them anyway. You don't leave behind a pair of shoes when they happen to be the exact shade of green you've seen just one other time in your life, and when they are exactly a six and a half even though most shoes don't even come in half sizes, and when your eyes fall on them just as your favorite song starts to play in the store and Etta James is crooning all gooey and languid about lonely days and clovers wrapped around her heart.

This morning, I took in the powder gray-blue sky in less than an instant and knew I couldn't possibly be expected to focus on stepping around sidewalk pitfalls and patches of damp grass. My heart was elsewhere.

 

Forest walk

 

Every unexpected noise was an alarm intended to awaken the slumbering instincts of my unheeding mind. A snapping branch. A chittering animal. A rustling bush. The gentle drop of water onto the surface of a half-concealed and moonlit pond. I jumped and clung to you, my nervous excitement leading me forward in the darkness born with an open mouth meant only to swallow.

I felt the need to hold your hand and wander through the woods beyond a reasonable hour, just to find out about things that go on after sunset, afraid and amazed, with you as my witness.

Eventually, it began to rain. A fine mist, at first. We knew what was coming, yet we stayed to dare the skies to chase us. Then heavy, solemn drops scolded us for daring to peek up at the starry heavens for a glimpse of divinity between arching pines. We ran, still holding hands, with god as our witness.

 

Cajun

 

Shrimp and okra and spice, good for the soul only if yours is a sinning one, they said.

I took one bite, and felt the Cajun spirit flaming in my mouth. It was heat like a fire I saw blazing on an oil slick on the Atchafalaya, just low rising flames of red and purple on the surface of the greasy river after a spill no one could be bothered to clean up. It was broad, steady, and so warm.

I forgot to breathe through my nose, forgot to chew, forgot to wipe my watering eyes. I couldn't remember a thing except the sound of yesterday's raucous wind that whipped up my notes and polaroids and tossed them into the black dust of the previous night's fire, while the old women laughed and laughed and smoked their pipes and laughed. I had tried to clean them off, but everyone knows bonfire ash on the banks of a bayou is permanent. Three days work, gone. There's some still under my nails, and I suspect a bit got into today's shrimp Étouffée. Or was that black pepper? A speck of burnt bay leaf?

One bite and I could taste the paprika, cumin, cayenne, salt, and nameless grit from the bottom of the burning river.

One bite and I immediately decided this was the town where I would spend the rest of my summer, and where I would willingly lose my mind.

 

The beginning

For so many years we didn't know the other existed. And then there you were, the same aisle of the grocery store, staring at the same last and lonely box of dark chocolate and almond granola. You said I could have it, for the fair exchange of my phone number. I pointed out that I could easily give you a fake number. You laughed.

"And a fake name," I added.

"Go ahead, anyway."

"I'm Jenny, by the way."

"Or maybe you aren't."

Three years later, we're laying with our backs in the cool grass in the park behind the house. The air is still and our lips still feeling like each other's. It's cold and dark and perfect. You turn your head to look at me.

"I don't even like granola," you say into the quiet. 

I smile. "Neither do I."

Driving

We passed the diner and the last gas sation for miles, just a pattern of weak lights and the vague outline of slow moving people.

The road is quiet. The black sky swallows its head and tail, and we travel the long body.

Beyond the lights, there is just darkness.