Into Nowhere
Moisture tinsel.
They drive into nowhere, what it feels like anyway.
There’s been a murder – shotgun blast that slashed holes in the night’s fabric and the poor guy’s face that bore the buckshot’s brunt.
She buried him in a trash pit and covered him with wet, smelling bags and covered that with dirt. The crows found it; then the cops.
They’re supposed to find out why this happened days later – visit this void on the side of the hills. Truman Capote would have called it “out there.”
Blonde teenage girls would call it boring. Some might even call it home.
They call it work. They feel like reporters today, the Woodward and Bernstein kind; the kind that ask questions on why 2+2 has to equal 4 when most would just shrug and say, “Because.”
They watch the fence posts flash past on this two-lane stretch of ancient varicose cracks. The sun stutters in their eyes, makes the passenger a little queasy. He closes them and sleeps, drifts to a place of answers.
In the dream, he asks a phantom barkeep, “What makes someone do something like this? Out here especially?”
The barkeep only smiles, shrugs and offers him a beer. He reaches out to grasp it when a pothole jolts him out of the dark and back into that same stuttering sunlight that put him there.
He keeps watching the bent posts. They hypnotize him, and for a moment he doesn’t care why he’s there.
There’s been a murder – shotgun blast that slashed holes in the night’s fabric and the poor guy’s face that bore the buckshot’s brunt.
She buried him in a trash pit and covered him with wet, smelling bags and covered that with dirt. The crows found it; then the cops.
They’re supposed to find out why this happened days later – visit this void on the side of the hills. Truman Capote would have called it “out there.”
Blonde teenage girls would call it boring. Some might even call it home.
They call it work. They feel like reporters today, the Woodward and Bernstein kind; the kind that ask questions on why 2+2 has to equal 4 when most would just shrug and say, “Because.”
They watch the fence posts flash past on this two-lane stretch of ancient varicose cracks. The sun stutters in their eyes, makes the passenger a little queasy. He closes them and sleeps, drifts to a place of answers.
In the dream, he asks a phantom barkeep, “What makes someone do something like this? Out here especially?”
The barkeep only smiles, shrugs and offers him a beer. He reaches out to grasp it when a pothole jolts him out of the dark and back into that same stuttering sunlight that put him there.
He keeps watching the bent posts. They hypnotize him, and for a moment he doesn’t care why he’s there.
