Storage

Driving my car up to Wichita, one of those blue-gold perfect days out on the edge of a faraway time. 

Waylaid by beauty, breath driven out, hearing all the slow parts. Memories. Scrawled on a stoop with my legs pulled in. Day drunk on a street of brass and gauze and floating motes, amazed. Defang me and nobody knows we’re here. 

You, telling me again about that time you met Angelina.

Me, feverheaded, recalling a dirty tile floor, pale sickly green and up close and impersonal like a blindside gut punch.

We can barely get out of our heads. When we say the sun came out, we actually mean the clouds parted. We’re lake trout puzzled by air.

Here on the side of a road listening to residual wisps of tent revival songcraft hovering over the fields. Ready for this? The sweep of traffic brushing our calves. The quiet then the full throat. Your raw voice, its every rasp, meant as an escape hatch but like Amy’s becomes a trap. 

Maybe don’t sing for now.

Padlock in hand, ever think about how sorrowful a place this is? Featureless rows housing unremembered stuff, abandonments? Long unseen. Yet somehow paid for? If I were God, the first things I’d eliminate from this earth would be storage units. Pallid grey worlds lost beside land borders, anemic and interstitial.

Placeholders for better times that don’t ever come.

We ought not mortgage hope.

Pray for us, my sour candy atheist. My heathen henchwoman. May we scour the margins for sufficient grains of beauty or joy to help balance the psychocosmic scales against the cold adamantine indifference and harrowing cruelties that beset and burden the opposing plate.

There is no storing such things. 

_____________

Image © Todd Hido

Third Place at Mash Stories Contest

Excellent news. I entered the seventh Mash Stories quarterly flash fiction contest with a post-apocalyptic story called "Wichita," received valuable feedback from them, and was shortlisted along with fifty-four other great stories from hundreds of entries. Today I heard my story had won Third Place, which made me very happy. Thanks to everyone who helped spotlight my dark little tale by voting, rating, and commenting. I truly value the online writing community and have thoroughly enjoyed my experience with the excellent Mash Stories and their supportive staff.

To explain in a little more detail: the competition itself has few rules. They ask that you keep your story to no more than five hundred words and that you incorporate three random keywords in your entry. On this particular occasion, the words were congress, art, and jealousy.

Anyway, here is my story.

Wichita

Nothing more lives in the fields of dead corn. Unless ash itself is alive.

A doomsday synod of shivering crows gathers on the wires, funereal linemen eulogizing lines long abandoned by the thrum of life. All pointless, everything ashen with the eradication of hope.

“Well, heck, I never expected to see you here, honey.”

On the cracked and silent blacktop, a compact woman in a smeared and outsized Abercrombie & Fitch hoodie and streaked black leggings adopts a greeting stance, outstretched arms, a twist of smile, a fierce and knowing eye.

She feigns the art of sanity with great finesse, since there is no one here to greet or be greeted by. Unless she wishes some grim new congress with soot, stubble, and starving corvids.

Unless. Unless is the great dead word of the world. There is no unless anymore, only terminus. All words are more sound than meaning, now, cessation the long hushed echo of ceased.

“We should head for the coast, child. See what’s up. Might be more of us.”

In response, a small gust skitters something light and dry over the ruined asphalt, the curtain-call ghosts of nature cooperating with this theater.

“Mmm-hmmm. Sure, child. We got ourselves a deal.”

Another cold blast from the north; she pulls her mangy fur-lined hood over her head and leans into the weather. Up ahead is a three-way intersection; turn right in the direction of the distant ocean, and she won’t have to battle the wind head-on.

“Feels like the right call. … What’s that you say, hon? Yeah, me neither. We got a trek ahead of us, for sure.”

She begins to sing, her voice a drop of shimmering blue in a monochrome vignette. Un petit piaf noir. Singing about Wichita. Singing about the sea.

But haunted theater aside, a living companion would notice the trail of dark blood behind the woman, and feel pity. Knowing she won’t reach sand and salt before insatiable death with its bitter jealousy seizes her as it’s seized all others these last chill months. And ceases her.