Pumping gas at the filling station down the road, I stare at asphalt cracks, filled with yellow grass.
Plants grow, though colorless, in a busted vase, it seems. And, god, if these pavement scars don’t mean that starving cities form from stony fields and stand like life-clinging relics in a distinctionless desert, then no landscape ever taught me anything. So, it’s just another day, waiting for a sand storm to bring the ash outta clay.
I hum “Oh me oh my how the time does fly” and my shirt, in fading black and blue, reads “Pixies,” violently. I certainly wasn’t meant for this time, although, I can’t see any other place I could have possibly been meant to go.
An ugly, sheetz styrofoam cup burns my hands and tongue, but still I feel my arm habitually lift, as if to quell a fallflavored, shitplastic itch. At least when made illegally and cheaply irishwarm, it licks such sordid lips and numbs feelings sunk in a restless gut.
Oh, and the highway and it’s neverending noise, (how could there ever have been a time when the icy river ran, rhythmic with beating red hearts, and formations of so-silent birds crisscrossed each other in a darkened sky, forming shadows of great, god-like hawks) the neverending-noise swells in my mind, a pitchblack coda of artless metal music (oh, dead lou, if I was someone like you, I could convince myself there was at least feeling in this strange place), it matches the swelling of the neverending inward screams to me. (they disgustedly declare: you’re born to be a worse version of a drunken, better grandfather. you, more angry and bitter, go waste life away in your many well-thought ways. at least he had a realer pain.) But, everything eventually subsides to a throb in my gut. This goddamn throb in my gut. What unseen organ in us pumps pointless self-loathing?
I look up in the air; I’d very much like to scream. In two hours or so, some wisps and lines of unforgiving gas’ll poke holes in what’ll be certain black; all given names, and prayed that their indiscriminate light contains long longed for mercy and mystery. Pegasus, will you stand guard up there? I’m not sure I should ask this; my memory’s foggy, and I feel like you might be the one who feasts on human liver.
Actually, now I see that a clear-plastic overhang meant to protect pumps is blotting out the true sky. I guess starlight can’t ever hit here. And, well, with the distant lights of the city bellow us, night barely still exists.
Lowering my neck, I see straight-ahead, where the station, given a cheery coat of red, bends smoothly at its edges, blotting out the hill behind, where on a sickened pine, a mangy squirrel sits among the orange needles, nibbling on a thing halfrotten, though deeply scented and well defined.
In the silence of his voice and untrippable movement of legs, I hear a song of praise to those who live on the roads beside the hill, where trees, scarred by rusted barbwire, drop dead freely and with indifference. The strong, defiant things fall beaten, with such indifference. (is there any place where things feel alright)
I know his position overlooks an inclined, straight- yellowlined road. Gravel paths drift into depressions, where you’ll find fine folk living in their long-rotting homes. I pass them each day, as I go home on my dreary way, to hang, nails a’blisterin, on the cliffside poverty line, which itself is ill-defined, and something that I skirt with ease, though, always below governmental technicalities.
Behind this blank-chain-station, I can sense the shapeless shanties and sunned-silent apartments, with their caved in basements and fallen foundations. Homes where the weight of discontent and repressed longing is felt even by walls, warping wood and flesh alike to weary bends. At least tired sighs bear proof of life lived, whether or not it’s well, cannot be said. (was there every any anything; where did it come from, where did it go; is drifting in the same place I’ve ever known)
damn this pissy, disjointed monologue in my head.
And with the warmth of the drinking mixing with the hazy, late-day sun, I feel my body a solitary torch poised against the wind, which bites the edges of uncovered skin. I wanna move forever. No station will ever hold me at opposite edges and pull again. I’m gonna burn the gray, the clouds, down. Fire fill the earth and bring only columns and walls to ash, since I don’t know what else to do with these orange licks sporadically lifting inside.
I know, though, I’m truly no furnace, just a flickering thing, trying to keep warm when I can, and burning out, quicker than pen ink dries.
I pull out the nozzle, and a stream of gasoline laps on my shredded sneakers; squish, as I uncaringly open the door and peel away, from this calm and bleeding place.
If I’m ever predictable, I say, it’s at the end of the week, when I pump this truck and buy a dollar drink. And just as the golden dawn’s creases start sneaking in, I start searching for something in the brilliant light, and follow its shadow, with wavering, crystalline eyes, well into blacknight.
My feet can’t ever seem to find the strength to quit when they start, so they just move and kick up frightful, devious, death-hinting dust. Above all else, they fear the road that leads to flat, algae lake, luminous and strange along the bottom of the hill; which at night, appears as an indifferent, dark mass of endless decay (Is there rebirth in contaminated water, does moonlight reveal a savior in my skin? I don’t know, but after drifting there, as I slink home, I don’t believe so)
Today, though, I know I must go home.
I pull out onto the highway and turn up the mountain a hundred yards down, slipping wildly between now-empty lanes.
Frozen air rips at my face, but I leave the window down, since I need to feel the bitter roar of the world in order to earnestly sniff for chimney smoke and hope to hear the last sweet chirping of birds. Regardless, little more than cold is felt, and everything taken is taken in preparation of a drought.
My heart skips a beat as I see a glimpse of a scene, though the boundaries and lines are lost on me. An unknown, tired face nods, to which my neck instinctively agrees. And behind her the fading colors slipping from trees. Grey of crumbling pavement that leads to gravel, weed-eaten roads. A ramshackle beauty in tarnished white, guiding a shorter twin. The dirty painted side panels of a slanted house. Admiration and love, memories about barefooted girls in old country songs.
Passed in another pushing moment.
As, I leave, I try to decide what I’ve seen.
Was it a dream? Of someone strong rising out of this perpetual muck.
A girl about my age, I decide, walking with a younger sister, or possibly daughter, down the town’s most life-claiming, steep street; the one that us losers call home. Probably going to sheetz to buy a two dollar dinner (since where the f*** is there to go other than the gas station: your local playground, outdoor bar, and place to hear bad radio music).
I’ll never know who she is, but, noone seems to know each other, especially not me, so maybe I pass her everyday in a busy, sterile hall,
For all I know she’s ignorant and mean, spoiled or even weaker than me. But, I saw something in darkened and deep eyes, and I won’t deny it, like I do all other things.
I know I’ll love her for the rest of my life, just for the gift of the scene of her holding the hand of someone she loves and her pale, great face beside barren bark. Now, that thought doesn’t sound odd; it’s as true as the thought that I live on a cracked, gilded rock.
With a start, I see that I’m still driving, and she’s only just behind me. In the rearview mirror, they’re only distant dots against the land, against the grey land. But I can see them as clearly as if they’re walking through the thin film of my eyeball.
Backs turned and gait steady and strolling. On either end of the road the high branches spill over, lifting from of clumps of surviving foliage, reaching out to run their bony fingers against rosy cheeks that cannot be scarred or touched. Beside them, the limbs look like skeletal hands, ancient and weak, some of which can be broken, if not by me, by them.